Letter P, 2018

“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.”

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations”

– Milan Kundera, Immotality

      This video simulates the shooting of a still ID-photo, which strips off everything but the minimum bodily presence (the enclosed body and the outfit). The minimalist setting of the subject highlights how eloquently our “ordinary” presence talks about who we are and how we’d like to present. The consecutive verbs juxtaposed with the image of the subject indicate that the subject, seemingly doing nothing but sitting, is in fact doing so much by presenting herself in that ordinary but particular way that she’s learned from the society.