The Apple is Rotting, I Am Not.
Sampriti Manna
In this piece, I dissect my first heartbreak using Gilles Deleuze's concept of folds and Karen Barad's idea of experiencing multiple times at once. Deleuze interprets Baroque art as a form which “twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other.” Barad studies superposition, a physics phenomenon wherein a particle is neither here nor there, it is here-there. Given the existence of such particles, Barad asks us as humans to challenge our linear, teleological, and unidirectional perception of time.
With this in mind, I wanted to examine how I was reliving memories of being with my ex in Hong Kong despite physically being in Vancouver in the present. I explored this by superimposing videos I had taken for leisure in Hong Kong with photos of a rotting apple taken in Vancouver. I set the work to overlapping voice-overs of excerpts from a diary I was keeping at the time.
It was important for me to use mediums like video and photography as I wanted the work to document my experience as authentically as possible. Inspired by Tehching Hseih’s performance art piece Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980-1981), in which Hseih took a photo of himself after punching a time clock every hour of every day for a year, I wanted to provide a verifiable measure of time in the piece. Over the course of a month and a half I took a photograph of the same apple on sunny days when the light of golden hour was just right. This piece was extremely cathartic to make as I was able to heal with the sun-lit apple.
Film
References
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993.