Top, left to right: Faisal Karadsheh, Fan Wu, Sarah Jihae Kaye, Yaniya Lee. Bottom, left to right: Jung-Ah Kim, Elizabeth Peprah-Asare, Anjalee Nadarajan and Faisal Karadsheh
Dust Printing Agnes Etherington's House, 2023
Archival dust (im)printing workshop. (Led as part of the Living Intuition residency at the Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston, ON)
“...I dip my index finger into my mouth until it is damp with saliva and trace it along the floor, collecting minuscule tributes of dust from the obsessively swept unpolished concrete, which I place on the crinkled cover of the ancient exercise book, adding my own waters to the story.” (Taken from speculative fabulations: enter the archive, or ‘beneath Yaba’s Garden’, by Ama Josephine B. Johnstone)
PART I: PRINTING
The first part of the workshop was based on the Center's new mission of re-imagining the space by 'honoring the origins of the art center as a home.' In keeping with this idea, I proposed exploring 'performativity' in relation to the home. What actions constitute home? Beyond mere social definitions, domestic cleaning can be understood as a transformative act of gathering and collecting material traces. Taking inspiration from Ama Josephine B. Johnstone's quasi-fictional text, I suggested we recreate this scene of "collecting miniscule tributes of dust." What could intuitive cleaning look like? What fragments of the past can we collect to help us imagine, and preserve, stories that took place in this home? I asked the residents and facilitators to intuitively move towards one area in the home, and create a monoprint with dust as the primary medium. The result was a coming together of bodies across time within the space—a trace of the residency, Agnes Etherington, the house, and the context in which it exists in.
PART II: IMPRINTING
The second part of the workshop drew inspiration from our morning movement exercises, facilitated by Fan Wu. The first part was rooted in communication within one's self, a channel for intuition to rise to the surface. The second part was an experiment into transferring intuition into other bodies. Residents were grouped together and asked to envision the corner or space they had gravitated towards while creating their dust print, while imagining its possible histories. With only finger-to-finger contact, we attempted to play with translating that imagination into movement. The result was similar to a dance, where residents would have to both lead and follow, learning to intuitively listen and speak to one another. Through only the touch of our fingers, the house became a catalyst for an embodied, collective experience—one that imprinted us into the space, and vice versa.
Left to right: Fan Wu, Sarah Jihae Kaye, Faisal Karadsheh
Left to right: Anjalee Nadarajan, Elizabeth Peprah-Asare and Jung-Ah Kim,