The Weight of the Earth (2018-2024)
"Ilness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."- Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor)
"It is this very illness, the fear of its relapse and the aftermath of it, that provoked in me an inevitable necessity to feel again, an urgency to re-discover the desire to live, to maintain a diary, a diary that would become the most important fragment of life itself."
The Weight of the Earth is an autobiographical diary of fragility, loss, and desire. This long-term work is my response to the suicide of a lover, my confrontation with tuberculosis as a young adult, and my understanding of queer identity in the current socio-political climate as a brown South Asian immigrant in the politically and socially fragmented landscape of America. This work also expands the conversation on my current socioeconomic relationship with a foreign land, its connection to the people encountered, and their collective trauma, desires, and fears, hoping to find reconciliation.
It is conceived as a trilogy. The death of a lover became a point of departure that provoked me to create a diary of encounters laid out in a multilayered narrative, often documenting the growth and transition of the same people over time. It also encompasses the experience of coming out as queer at a later stage in life, the guilt and the shame associated with living a dual life, the subsequent overcoming of that, and how people express grief and desire through the image and performance. Adopted from the name of the audio journals by the author’s inspiration, gay artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who died at the age of 37 due to AIDS, The Weight of The Earth grapples with the often-complicated link between mourning and melancholia, while also raising the question of what being queer means in today’s world. I try to form a tapestry of situations and a healing space for those I have met, often survivors of personal trauma and violence, amplifying a certain sense of anonymity and ambiguity in the work.
This project constitutes self-portraits alongside portraits of strangers and friends who I met along the way and how, through this exchange, I continue to build a greater image of the self. Influenced by the idea of a rhizome, the work constitutes a multiplicity of situations and encounters. These encounters attempt to expand the often-neglected conversations on taboo issues surrounding mental health & suicide, traumas related to trans & queer experiences & human feelings of desire & longing.
By adopting the form of collaborative performance, in which the real is sometimes colored with fiction, I ultimately raise the question of self-affirmation and create a community in the “imagined homeland.”
