familial entanglement, 2022, bali, indonesia
three 5’ weather balloons filled with hydrogen gas (condensed on site from aluminum, baking soda, and water), cheese cloth, familial participation.
Familial Entanglement took place in the rice fields close to where I grew up, as a performance, experiment, and ephemeral installation. My parents and siblings wrestled with the balloons on the precipitous rice terraces, while their grandchildren anchored them from the silky mud below.
Weather balloons are fragile gaseous bodies that rise toward the edge of the atmosphere, the invisible line between ‘us’ and the great beyond. Then they burst and fall in fragments back to earth. They harvest meteorological data, their ascent demonstrating invisible physical forces and molecules: density, pressure, humidity, gravity. A balloon is a container where interior and exterior worlds meet, strain, and collide.
A different form of data collection occurs when I enlist my family, using the balloons and fabric as relational instruments, drawing out in real space-time the web of pressures, forces, and dynamics existing between us. The balloon pulls our bodies upwards, teasing a fantasy of flight and escape, a temporary refrain from the insistence of gravity.
I dream of flight in a world where so many threats loom from above: ‘under climate change’, ‘the cloud’, and surveillance — flight teases fantasies of escape. Suspension, buoyancy, the space between earth and sky is the field in which my inquiry takes place. The invisible waves of radio, connection with the spirits of the unseen and physical worlds, and reconnection with an ever fleeting present, the body, and the other.
“Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.”
— Louise Bourgeois