Background
This performance was created for the Pop-Up Migrants exhibition, curated by Matteo Rubettino for the United Nation's International Migrants Day on December 18th 2011.
One Step to Caracol City was born from thinking about the process of migration that I have been through personally and the one that a loved man is going through at the moment for us to be together. After researching, reading and filling out so many forms and applications, the first idea was to make the audience fill out a questionnaire with challenging or nonsense questions, to portray that annoyance that the process brings.
Nonetheless, thinking about how hard it has been for us and millions of other migrants, I decided to change the annoying questions to nice and inspiring ones, to turn around the pain into something that others could appreciate.
The idea was to embody a snail (caracol in Spanish): an animal that carries its home wherever it goes. In this case, I would have to 'walk' 44 steps in the form of questions or requests that the audience had to respond to in order to form a spiralling trail on the ground. Each question was written on a cut-out paper footprint of my own feet.
Making this a continuation from my past performance Until They Were Together (see previous 2 posts), 44 steps is a representative number, being the days until Víctor should set foot in Australia, counting from the day of the exhibition.
From the beginning I sensed gold would be the colour for this piece. It talked to me about the sun, the light at the end of a tunnel of hardship, and magic.
My friend Rain Fisher Wolf crafted the magnificent bamboo shell in which I could curl in perfectly as well as carry it on my back.
I started curled inside the shell with my eyes closed, and slowly awakened to look around the space. The footprints were hung on the shell showing the black side, representing burden and heaviness; a road yet to begin.
I put my hands out and started signalling people to approach me, and asked them to take one of the footprints and answer the question. At first people were shy, but slowly they started to come closer, asked what it was about and responded with enthusiasm. The overall feeling balanced between mysterious, introspective and fun.
I like the idea of giving participants something in return, even if it's something small or symbolic. In this case, I gave each person a little golden stick-on 'jewel' (like the ones I had on my eyes). I told them that it was to remind them of what they had responded on the footprint.
*Matteo Rubettino who invited me to participate in the exhibition,
*the venue Tinder Box Studio,
*Víctor Sandoval Ayala for being my artistic and life accomplice,
*Rain Fisher Wolf for sculpting the amazing bamboo shell,
*Andrew Bott for taking amazing pictures,
*The 44 people who answered 44 questions or requests to make sense of this performance.
