IT IS THE CLOSEST WE WILL BE
I feel a little bit uprooted. Neither here nor there, neither in the past or in the future, but in the fleeting present. I was born on the cusp, into a brand new reality that was different from that of my parents, or their parents. I was born into a country that was my own only by birth. I have not learned its language, I did not participate in its rituals, but I ate its food, played in its soil under its sun, smelled its perfume. How do I talk about that? How do I talk about the familiarity of a language I never got to learn, of the faces that aren't represented in my family? How do I speak of traditions that we didn't respect, holidays we didn't celebrate but caused my grandmother to flee? My bedtime stories are littered with Danish, German and Swedish authors. Even my mother tongue is preserved in amber, disconnected from the motherland, devoid of a local accent.
I know so little of my past and my roots. Who are those people that I saw in pictures or briefly witnessed in their last years of life? I have vague memories of my grandfather's dark rimmed glasses, his big hands and head, his slicked hair, his blurry anchor tattoo. I remember his sister, the kind woman whose head shook with Parkinson’s. I don’t remember my two grandmothers, or my other grandfather. I discovered my aunt and cousins so much later in life. I come from a nuclear family, as nuclear as it gets. Four people with explosive characters and no one else around them.
My memories are quite precious but sporadic and unlinked. Snapshots of childhood experiences undoubtedly tangled with my personal narrative. I am careful with these, trying not to overthink so as to not affect their truthfulness. The dirty fingerprints of a life lived and a life spoken, irrevocably mark the delicate memory of the blue grey kitchen floor, Nefertiti's bust gazing at me from the bookshelf, the roughness of the rug on the wall or the noise of pigeons stuck in the shaft in the bathroom.
I visit people’s homes, homes that have been inhabited by generations, that are decorated with paintings, photographs, collectibles from hundreds of years ago, and height marks on the doorframes. I feel jealous that there is that connection to the past, to who they come from. The only true things I have is my DNA and the way it has displayed itself on my face and body. I have my father’s eyes, and his are his mothers. I saw them in black and white pictures recently, slightly upturned, beautiful. I wonder if she would recognize parts of herself in me. Would she have liked me and thought that I was funny? Would we have clicked? Would she have explained to me these neuroses that I got from her son? I have my mother’s body, but her origins are a mystery to me. A question that's always on my lips but has yet to be asked. Her DNA is nondescript caucasian, but through her I am connected to the last General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Maybe it’s the trauma of moving, leaving everything behind and moving to a place so different from my hometown. I want to grow roots, have things, connect to people, own property, collect trinkets, use furniture till it falls apart. That way I can avoid throwing things away. Keep all my stuff, all my trash. We make so much trash, when I think about it, my breath gets stuck somewhere, as if I am on a roller coaster. So many things that we make just by existing in this silly over packaged society. But my trash will be special, it will rise above the menial things and enter the realm of art. How pretentious and how funny, that by stating “it is art” it actually becomes art. I make cigarette butts and apple cores and laugh at the absurdity of it all. What nonsense it is to make real looking fake trash.
Then there is the body, this body I have been in for 34 years and still can’t really get the hang of. I am a big fan of having a body, of feeling the breeze and the sun and tasting the delicious food and having massages and making love and petting soft animals and squishing baby bellies. I love all those things so much that I dislike shaving my legs or wearing nail polish. Not for some feminist stance but because you can't feel the air once the hairs on your legs have been removed and once you covered your nails with a coat of plastic. And I want to feel it all! The absurdity is still there though. Why we are the way we are, we sleep and get sick and tired and wrinkle and our skin is fragile and our organs can fail. And some of us can grow people on the inside, like some sort of fabulous indigestion. This meat machine that we inhabit is a carbon masterpiece. So I make many bodies, fibre bodies, acrylic bodies, bits and bobs of bodies, because how else can I make sense of this? It’s like I'm living with the constant state of semantic satiation. I have repeated being alive in this skin so many times that now it makes no sense.
What’s the show about? It’s about all this, this unbearable state of existing, of feeling, of pain and pleasure, of despair and joy, of profound depression and ecstatic ellation. Me trying desperately to connect, to breach all the borders, to get to what we truly are. How close can we get to understanding each other? The dichotomy paradox says we never will, we never truly will reach each other, always halfway there. Always bumping into skin and bones that we can’t melt into. And so I welcome you to my mind, I hope you can see what I see and I hope you feel a little less alone once you leave.
Photos by Katya Konioukhova