I don’t know
Vandana
2017
Performance
5 Minutes
Altefabrik, Switzerland
©Vandana The Artist
Courtesy Vandana The Artist & Stiftung Futur
DESCRIPTION
I appear in the space in an official outfit with my face hidden behind my hair and ask for a volunteer to join me on the stage. I ask the volunteer one simple same question again and again in different ways depending on her answers until the volunteer has no spontaneous answer anymore.
Transcript:
The purpose of this performance is not at all to offend or point to an individual, any region, faith or belief, so I request my volunteer and my audience to feel the most comfortable in this moment with me and I thank you all in advance for this! The following experiment is a representation of my own exploration about myself.
Are you ready?
I’m going to ask you some questions, the only condition is that –
you can NOT repeat your answers
Here is my first question:
- Who are you?
- Who are you…
- Who are you?
- What is your name?
- What is your father’s name?
- and who are you?
- What else are you?
- Who else
- Who else are you?
- What else?
- and ?
- What do you mean by ‘many things’?
- Who are you, who is interested in a lot of things?
- Who are you, who is this ‘I am’?
- Who is this ‘me’?
- Who else are you?
Thank you ‘…’!
I don’t know either! I don’t know either who I am!!
I had been given my name after six days of my birth and
I had been given my family name when I was first admitted in the school!
I had been called a teacher, an artist since when I started working and this list goes on and on…
I wonder who I was before all this!
I want to know..
I want to feel and realize Who I am!
I want to know what… I don’t know !
Thank you.
A very special thanks to the volunteer Ms. Dorothea Rust!
Vandana 