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
An archival dust (im)printing workshop. Led as part of the Living Intuition residency at the Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston, Ontario.
“...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
For the first part of the workshop, I was inspired by 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? I suggested to the others that we take on the domestic role of intuitive cleaning, drawing dust from forgotten corners and preserving past traces. The result was a coming together of bodies across time within this space—a trace of the residency, the house, and the context in which it exists.
PART II: IMPRINTING
For the second part of the workshop, I drew inspiration from our morning Butoh movement exercises. I encouraged the residents to envision the corner or space they had gravitated towards while creating their dust print, and then, with a partner or group, experiment with translating that connection through movement. Through 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.
