echoes of the unknown
Trembling Aspen | Series 04_My Life Here | Issue_18
We are both on our knees, facing the audience. Evamaria is wrapping black masking tape around her head. Over and over. It’s going on way longer than I thought it might. We’re in KocoGarden, the audience is outside in the laneway. Everyone is silent, watching Evamaria. A man on a bicycle rides by, between us and the audience. Yet another unscripted encounter. He looks at the goings on in KocoGarden as he glides by. If he was surprised, it doesn’t register. He goes out of sight, I continue to look directly at the audience. I can hear Evamaria breathing, heavily. She’s wrapped the tape tightly around her nose and mouth. She finishes wrapping. I’m relieved. We’re almost done.
Not that I was nervous, and not that you can’t make just about anything part of a performance art piece. If it happens, it happens. Also, I was oddly relaxed when we started. All the same, nothing unexpectedly catastrophic has happened and I’m glad. Glad it went well and we’re almost done.
And then, right at the end, a self imposed mini-crisis. Evamaria finishes. The nascent performance artist in me wants to defer to Evamaria’s experience and expertise, do the safe thing. End right here. Get up. Bow. But human me just can’t leave her like that. All wrapped up, in distress, gasping for breath. A memory flashes by. Feather Bag Man, on Granville Street in Vancouver. I can’t let it happen again. I don’t want to regret not responding. But I don’t know Evamaria’s intentions for her final action. I can guess, but there’s no way to confirm it. Not in the middle of the performance with an audience outside. Self imposed Mini-crisis.
Human me wins. I turn to Evamaria and start unwrapping the tape. My back is to the audience, which I know isn’t great, but, at this point I’m totally making it up on the fly. I continue to unwrap. Evamaria stands up, we shift positions, both standing side on to the audience. I keep unwrapping, and unwrapping, and unwrapping. Dear lord, it’s taking forever. Is she angry? Did I ruin the whole thing? Well, there’s no going back now. Suddenly, it feels strangely similar to a meditation a while back. I had unwrapped my heart in almost exactly the same way. Strand by strand, unwinding and unwinding. With that memory, I know it was the right thing to do. This action means something to me, so that gives it its best chance of meaning something to the audience. Finally, I can see the end. The end that had been the beginning. The tape pulls away from her mouth, where she started. A voice returned, yet silent. We turn to the audience and bow.
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Below is a brief description of the perfomance along with ancillary material—including the poem I read. I’ll also include Feather Bag Man, so you understand that reference, if you don’t know it. It’s writing I did way back in 2014, ten years ago. How strange that the memory of someone I’ve never met would surface all these years later, in the middle of a performance art piece, in a little studio in Yokohama. Life is nothing, if not a mystery unfolding—or unwrapping, as the case may be.
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Event Promotion
We are thrilled to announce the multisensory performance installation ECHOES OF THE UNKNOWN, by Canadian artist Steve Frost @br0ken_w1ng and Austrian/German artist Evamaria Schaller @evamariaschaller. Born from their shared time at Koganecho AIR @koganechoamc, their conversations have explored themes of gift, offering, hospitality, proximity, resonance, and the profound concept of zettai mu (absolute nothingness).
In their first collaboration as part of the Kocogarden Project @kocogarden_project, Steve and Evamaria invite you to join them in a space of open experimentation, where boundaries dissolve and new connections emerge.
Event Poster
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Actions
01_ Evamaria begins the video she created. There are crows.
02_ I pour water from a pitcher into a glass. I bring a glass of water to an audience member. I repeat this action until there is one glass left.
03_ Evamaria brings members of the audience into the space. Using tape, she draws outlines of shadows on the walls of the space
04_ Evamaria finishes drawing. She kneels next to me, facing me
05_ I pour and serve Evamaria a glass of water.
06_ Evamaria begins wrapping herself with tape
07_ I read The Poem
08_ Evamaria stops wrapping herself
09_ I unwrap Evamaria.
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Photos
Liu Shujia | @liushujiaaa
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The Poem
After taking off the cold gloves of fear
And feeling the warmth of brids singing
The warmth became
The fearlessness of wild things
What do you desire?
To create, with curious and open-hearted folks
Generous, graceful conversations
To enact, across thresholds and through table culture
The sensuous beauty of the fearlessness of wild things
To be bewildered
Brought to the wilderness, lost in the first look
At places unknown
~ Steve Frost, 2022
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Feather Bag Man (Vancouver, Canada. 2014)
I'm standing on Granville waiting for the #17. He was at Georgia and heading down toward me. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on at first. Student film project? College prank? Some kids trying to get on Jackass?
Nope. He was alone.
He was tall, maybe 6'2", and skinny. Like the awkward teen years, but he appeared to be older. It was hard to tell. He had a farmers tan. His arms were dark dark brown up to midway between his elbow and shoulder and then shockingly white. Anemically white. He had on a dress, a rather nice dress judging by the way the material flowed. It was a simple sleeveless sun dress. Pleated. Mid calf length. Neutral browns. Neutral browns with his gawky farmer tan arms sticking out. On his feet he had a beat up pair of running shoes and dirty white socks. Nothing exceptional. Except, looking closer, he had a delicate piece of twine tied around each ankle. Just a little piece of twine, each with about 8 cm trailing behind, both exactly the same length. Like one of those motion sickness things people would dangle from the bumper of the their car. Two little pieces of twine connecting him to the earth. You wouldn't notice if you weren't looking closely.
He had a sprig about a meter long in his right hand. It was too wispy to be called a branch. About as thick as a thumb. It wasn't dead and dry, it was green. It still had the bark on. It had just been cut off a tree. He didn't hold it vertically, perpendicular to his open palm, passing through his closed fist, like a walking stick. It would have been too thin and frail for that anyway. He held it with his hand around the end, palm down, like a blind person using a white cane.
That didn't seem so unusual because he couldn't really see. He had a white plastic shopping bag pulled over his head. The handles just touching his shoulders. Like ear holes that were too big, so the thing just slid down over his head. It was in there pretty tight. You could see the plastic stretched across the widest part of his head. At the top of the bag, the two corners each had a feather tied to it. One feather on each side. Black. The quill of each neatly lashed to the bag with the same kind of twine that was around his ankles. Both feathers pointed straight up. The bag and feather combination moved him beyond oddly dressed to, I don't know what. Something else. Performance art? He looked like a creature from a Sendak story.
From a purely visual stand point it was quite arresting. His appearance strayed so far beyond accepted social norms it seemed the product of a lost mind. On the other hand, his appearance was planned, constructed, thought out. It seemed the product of a careful mind.
His behavior didn't clarify the matter. He didn't seem to be going anywhere, neither did he seem aimless. He tapped the ground ahead of him with the sprig as white cane. Sometimes poking and scraping. He moved slowly, but he didn't shuffle. He walked with an exaggerated heel to toe motion, bobbing slightly side to side, his weight back. Like a cartoon character. Ichabod Crane maybe. At one point, it was when I first noticed him, he wandered onto Granville street. A bus was coming toward him and honked it's horn. He jumped and hopped off the street, his feet wide, bouncing side to side, like Jack Black does, except the Feather Bag Man was moving forward as he did it, back to the sidewalk.
He moved by me slowly, poking scraping. His chin up as though he were trying to see through the plastic. As though he couldn't just remove it. It had to be there. Some kids up the street where delighted by his scamper off the street. Not in a malicious way, just enjoying the bizarreness of it. Some people watched him intently. Some refused to look. Some scowled. I just smiled. I couldn't help it. It was just so weird, so delightfully weird.
Afterwards I was riding on the #17. I was thinking my encounter with Feather Bag Man through. He seemed so in control. Not really bothering anyone, just doing his thing. I had no idea what his thing was, maybe it made sense in his world. And then I realized, he and I had to have some point of connection. He might be imbalanced but he isn't from Mars. He's human. His world is my world. To think anything else would be to deny our shared humanity. Then I saw him as someone who might need help.
Sitting on the #17, in my mind I walked up to him and said, "Do you need someone to take that bag off for you?"
Breathlessly he said, "Yes." Like a disoriented child. Lost.
I pulled the bag off and he had tears in his eyes. He looked at me and I looked at him. And then I gave him a hug. And he cried. I just stood there hugging him in my stupid polyester uniform that I still had on because I was heading home from work, and he cried. In my mind I didn't go any further than that. No need, really.
But it didn't happen, it was just in my mind. The Feather Bag Man was real, but me taking the bag off, that was just in my mind. I just thought of it afterwards, riding the bus on the way home and by then I couldn’t do anything. And I’ll never know if there were tears in his eyes.
Hey, I’m Steve, an artist-in-residence in Yokohama, Japan. I make art that helps people imagine a hopeful future. I explore themes of home, identity, belonging and how to live your life like a work of art. I write about it all in this very newsletter, Trembling Aspen.
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My work
KocoGarden My studio has become an ongoing community engaged art project. KocoGarden is a conversation garden (会話の庭) in which we use the invisible materials of conversation and encounter to create social sculpture. Social sculpture expands the definition of art to include all of society as a work of art. Everyone has the capacity and right to creatively contribute to an equitable, and ecologically sustainable society.
Emergent_Lab. I am exploring art, design and community action for urban transformation as I and my collegues travel and research how neighbourhoods, towns and regions are responding to post-growth realities Japan. What works and why? How might we create the conditions for more of what works? We're looking for patterns and connecting the dots, as we help develop and promote a distinctly Japanese inflection of bioregional urban design (It's going to save the world).
Solarpunk Playground Art that helps people imagine a hopeful future. Operating out of KocoGarden, I am creating a portfolio of intimate art installations (in Koganecho, the neighbourhood in which I live) the purpose of which is catalyzing the ecological, social and economic regeneration of the Ooka River watershed (the bioregion in which I live). At the same time, I am writing solarpunk fiction about a hopeful future set in Koganecho 2050. KocoGarden, the art installations and the urban design work, are all research for the solarpunk writing. I am living the hopeful future I am writing about.