I am the virus

Supine and breathless a young boy looks for reprieve in the streaks of chipped blue paint revealing the white primer of his bedroom wall: a tiny nook to disappear into - a line of flight from his parents arguing. The white was the bobbing of a buoy in vast blue ocean, a part of the blue but still separate. Some kind of mystery. And then there were those large moments of silence between their heated words. And it was like the air in the apartment was holding its breath. 

There is so much that I love in art that I found originally in my parents arguing. The mystery of why, of where I fit in, and how the moments of silence in between what was loud and evident would fill me with wondrous dread.

Good art should obviously be provocative and aspire to inspire great deeds; but truly good art leaves a vapor trail across the mind when it whispers and pleads its case for subtlety. Truly good art should be mysterious and refuse to answer its own questions. If I am ever to make good art, then I hope to remain silent and without response.

I am the Virus was an attempt not so much to come to terms with my mother’s suicide during the initial first wave of covid, but instead to pose myself a series of questions about the nature of her world and how she intuited the forms of her reality. Using four photos across four stages of her life as representative the four different stages of viral replication (Stasis, Attachment/Penetration, Replication/Assembly, Release), I looked to combine film, music and abstract performance to deepen the question that was my mother’s undiagnosed schizophrenia, and how her increasing sense of alienation from language and the world outside of her related to the process of viral replication in particular/covid’s decentering of quotidian life in general. 

What was conclusive in this process was that my mother’s question mark found its answer in two wonderful collaborators, Kyungseo Min and Rick Coates. Their ability to respectively choreograph and score my mother’s story with such depth and care made the process of sharing personal details of my life with them a truly beautiful experience. This is their project as much as it is mine.