Seeing Through Care
I keep thinking about my strange relationship with the veil—and with the places where I choose to move.
Before a performance begins, there is already a series of decisions.
Which colour should the veil be?
What should I wear?
How much of my body should be visible?
Where can I move?
And perhaps the most important question:
Am I allowed to be here?
When I choose a temple, a museum, a heritage site, or another culturally significant place, I cannot simply enter it as a neutral stage. The place already has its own history, rituals, memories, rules, and meanings.
So what happens when I bring my body, my veil, and my movement into that space?
Is it an artistic intervention?
Is it an intrusion?
Or can it become a form of listening?
I have become increasingly interested in this uncertain space between permission and intrusion.
For me, asking permission is not only an administrative step before making a performance. It changes the performance itself.
Sometimes the answer is no.
Sometimes the place allows me to enter, but with conditions.
Sometimes I realise that the movement I imagined in the studio does not belong in that particular place.
And sometimes the space itself makes me change the colour of the veil, the costume, the speed of my movement, or even the decision to move at all.
This is where my research begins.
I am not interested in using culturally significant places as beautiful backgrounds for my work. I am interested in what happens to my artistic practice when I allow the place to interrupt my intentions.
I think of this through three words:
Care. Craft. Curiosity.
Care means paying attention—to history, cultural protocols, materials, architecture, silence, and the limits of what I am allowed to do.
Craft happens through repetition and adjustment. The veil changes. The costume changes. My gestures change. The movement is tested, abandoned, returned to, and transformed.
Curiosity allows me not to know in advance what the work should become.
The veil, therefore, is not simply a costume.
It becomes a way of seeing.
And perhaps also a way of not seeing.
It covers, reveals, filters, slows down, and changes the relationship between my body and the place.
The more I work with it, the more I realise that the performance does not begin when I start moving.
It begins much earlier.
It begins when I stand outside a place and ask:
Can I enter?
And then:
How should I enter?
Perhaps artistic research is sometimes about learning to accept that the place has the right to change the artwork.
To me, this is what seeing through care means.
Not simply looking at a place—
but allowing the place to look back at my practice.