To Live Ten Lives is the working title of my new project. When observing wild herbage plants often found in our area, I noticed that their appearance changes considerably in the course of growing and wilting. A young plant looks different from a blossomed one, and a blossomed plant does not look like a fruiting one, and so on in chain order until it fades away. Moreover, each species changes in its own way. Ivan tea, for example, is simply a champion in changing, and the same cannot be said about wormwood.
The first association I got was how strongly a person’s appearance changes at different stages of life, and it was not only about biological phases, but also external changes. The number of these changes is different for everyone, some person can have eight of them while for another one fifteen won’t be the limit. Sometimes it seems to me that at these moments one personality dies while another is born inside the same body.
But why do we try to see everything happening in nature as applied to the person? On the one hand, it is a natural way of understanding the world, on the other hand, it is the egocentrism of the dominant species, and it is worth moving away from it in order to understand natural laws, admit their differentiation and stop treating other species in an exploitative manner.
I am planning to observe several species of wild herbage plants in pre-selected places during the calendar year so that I can later line their portraits up and see the visual-and-temporal perspective of changes.
The exhibition project includes:
92 photos,
observation diary,
map of observation sites,
video performance for the exhibition,
installation Human/Plant,
patchwork quilt.
The planned deadline for the project work completion is spring 2023.
