The Seed

2008

performed at the St. Jacobi Church, Zoom Festival, Hildesheim, 2008                            Photo Reinhard Lutz

“Melati Suryodarmo is remembering some moments of salvation, the power of life, truth and love and their destructions of illusions as deaths.”
I remember the moment when this body is swollen
I remember the moment when the time becomes slow
I remember the moment when the leaves are falling from the tree in autum
I remember the moment when a drop of rain water fell on my face
I remember the taste of a rainwater
I remember the moment when my heart beat stops for a while during my sleep
I remember when I was 5 years old
I remember when I was starving
…
Sometimes, I feel like the seeds that cannot be planted ...

Duration: 20 minutes

Performed at:

“Friktioner”, at City Gallery, Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, Sweden

“Asiatopia 10 – international performance art festival” Bangkok

“ZOOM” performance Art Festival, IPAH, St. Jacobi Kirsche, Hildesheim

“Asiatopia 10 – international performance art festival” Bangkok

“Pathological Aesthetic” symposium at HAN, Nijmegen, Holland

performed at Friktioner, Gallery Theatre Uppsala, Sweden 2008       Photo: Anna Berndtson

                                              performed at the Zoom Festival, Hildesheim, 2008            Photo Reinhard Lutz

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The Seed, by Melati Suryodarmo

She walks slowly forward on the gallery pavement, carrying a white plastic sac over her shoulder, now and then she cries out phrases like: ”I remember when I was five”. She is wearing light-coloured pantyhose patterned with islands of dark grey, as it occurs to me. Eventually she stops her walk and pours out the black sesame seed content of the sac on the floor. She also starts tearing her pantyhose apart, and the pattern turns out to have been formed by the same black sesame seed. From the remains of the pantyhose sesame seed runs to the floor. The performance closes with a drum roll on a bass drum. The skin of the drum cracks. The show is over.
In this work no story is told, and the internal logic of the work is conceptual rather than narrational. The act has a intensity. It catches the attention of audience and guides it to focus on some hardly understandable visual puns. All over Asia the black sesame seed is common, but in Western Europe it is almost impossible to purchase. The patterns formed inside the pantyhose reminds the artist of lepra victims she met in her childhood. This is Performance Art by the rule book. Intuitively, as well as by judging the reaction of the audience, I can state that it is high quality.

written by Kurt Wolmar Nyberg
Ph.D. in aesthetics 2001,and since then I have been working with knowledge management, documentation, presentation and other subjects related to art and cultural heritage.

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                            performed for the “Pathological Aesthetic” symposium at HAN, Nijmegen, Holland 2009   Photo: Yingmei DUan