A Funeral for My Self, 2023
Performance, photo documentation, transformed plants
First I made a remake performance based on photographic documentations of ectoplasmic séances popular in the early 1900’s, where I used the green glove of my chroma-key costume, “the ectoplasmic output of my self”. Then I filled the same glove with a special mixture of various herbs, water and green food coloring and let it freeze in the freezer. The ice hand molded in this way was removed from the glove and left to melt. The process was documented by photographs, and the remaining solid plant parts were kept for the next stage: the Ash Ritual. In the ritual, I poured some of the dried plants that remained from my “self” into the Golden Horn from the Galata Bridge, while the rest was kept to be served to the audience of my lecture performance where they were to be brewed as tea. As a performative act that explores the possibilities of considering performance and documentation, life and death, before and after, body and mind, individual and society, organism and its environment, self and other in a broader and dynamic framework, this rite of passage is designed to be repeated at certain junctures in life.
