Performance in Practice

Photographs and video footage by Anson Wigner, hair by Isa Goico

あ・ん (ah・nn)

Chasing the Sun: a performance festival from sunrise to sunset

5:55 am to 8:11 pm, Saturday May 6th

The Soil Factory, Ithaca NY.

 

 

A man lies in an open grave after a body is taken out of it. This practice is said to lengthen life expectancy.

The brother imagines his bed is a nest in which his body is removed.

 

There’s a story about a man galloping by another man who asks, “Where are you going?” “Ask my hearse,” says the man.

 

“I was never lost in the jungle,” says a father, “just looking for a way out.”

 

From “Ghost Of” by Diana Khoi Nguyen (2018)

 

 

 

“What are you doing in my swamp?”

 From “Shrek” (2001)

 

 

Upon sunrise, I shall become the disruptor in a lawn-turned-marsh: the Marshy Garden remediated by Ash Ferlito and Brandon Hoak. Following the lowest points of the landscape’s rolling folds, I will submerge myself in the mud and perform the caring duties of a steward. My gentle gorge will wind through a mass of invasive phragmites: common reeds who crowd out the perennials and grasses depended on to balance our environment now and before European contact. I will lay their stalks in the shape of my grave.

 

When sleep calls, I will climb within my coffin of/for/from reeds to sleep until it’s time to continue destructive creation. To make space for native plants to reclaim their swamp.

 

 

Instructions:

 

Dig, a line through the earth following the curves of the land, through the swamp of phragmites

Collect, laying all uprooted phragmites in a rectangular stack 3 feet wide

Invade, always reminded of your body on hers

Sleep, when the land makes you, within the collected reeds

From sunrise to sunset

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Isa Goico's "Salón" is also featured in the video above. They wrote:

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At sunrise at May 6th 2023 I will set up my station on the lawn of the Soil factory.

Gel, combs, brushes, scissors, picks will be laid out waiting for my loves.

For 15 hours until the sun sets I will wash and adorn the hair of my dearest friends.

Salón explores the connection between love and physical acts of service.

Hair is the start and end of connection, to the air, to the hands, to the water.

As a child I spent endless hours in Dominican hair salons in Santo Domingo.

I took the love of those salons back with me.

 

 

Instructions:

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One by one wash and cut the hair of everyone you love                                                                                                                                          

Take care, be gentle, let them tell you every story they know                                                                                     

Collect the hair from the ground. Sew the locks into a testament of your love                                     

Watching the tapestries of our lives stitch together

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