node
node is a participatory installation created as part of a four-day project in which participants lived together.
On the third evening, each participant took a piece of fabric and wrote their name and whatever thoughts or feelings came to mind at that moment. They exchanged the pieces with several others, then wrote a message in response to the words left by someone else on a piece they had received by chance. They tied the fabric around their arms and joined in a time of singing and dancing. Afterwards, each person tied their piece of fabric to a wooden post placed at the center.
What mattered in this work was not simply that participants recorded their personal thoughts, but the entire process through which their words passed to others, received responses, were carried on the body, and were finally tied to the center of the community.
The fabric became more than a medium for recording someone's inner world. It served to connect individual words, responses from others, bodies, objects, and the center of the community. Through the acts of writing, receiving, responding, wearing, and tying, the relationships running through these gestures, and the countless ways in which people affected one another, became visible. These relationships and interactions constituted the very form of the work.
The title node comes from the sense that we exist not as isolated points, but as knots in a web of mutual support. Through the circulation of actions between people, and between people and things, participants experienced how each of them was already supported by others, while also supporting others in turn. This was not an abstract idea to be understood, but something experienced through the sequence of actions itself.
