A two-room installation exploring what I might recover when I refuse the logics of productivity and relearn how to pay attention.
2024
I tried to identify the ingrained Protestant-colonizer-capitalist beliefs and work to undo them. Naming helps to see what I've inherited versus what I claim.
To work is the will of God.
Nobody cares, work harder.
Don't waste your potential.
Winning never gets old.
I spent an hour each day bound to a desk with ankles tied and wrist weighted by a radio and a pile of bones while unraveling months of knitting. I thought I could unravel those beliefs too.
But they don't actually unravel. They're still stuck to me. The yarn piled up in the room for visitors to take. The tapestry disappeared. The mantras kept repeating.
I learned that the practice isn't erasing them. It's recognizing them when they operate: which turns out to be most of the time.
2024
If the Labor Room was trying to undo something stuck in me, the Sensory Room was asking: what's underneath?
What happens when we move slowly enough to notice? Not as productivity's opposite, I'm suspicious of binaries like that but as a refusal. An experiment in being present without purpose.
Stations for attending: crushing leaves between fingers, watching light shift through windows, breathing in unfamiliar scents. Small acts my body already knows how to do.
I wanted to find ways of being that capitalism hasn't colonized yet. But I'm not sure they exist purely or that I can access them cleanly.
Maybe it’s practicing the refusal and noticing when the voice says "what's this for?" and staying anyway.
This room held the question, not the answer.