Go-Eun Im

One summer day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau went into the forest, and built a small house to live for a while. In this cabin, he placed three chairs: one chair for solitude, one chair for friendship, and one chair for society. Now, 180 years later, we enter his home to stay for a while and build a shadow-forest to place three tables. Thoreau left behind his writings and drawings, observing carefully the life of diverse animals and plants in the woods. The traces he left are reimagined as a performance interwoven with various other stories and shifting shadows between light and darkness. “We may no longer know how to make fire, how to pray, or where the forest to pray in is”, but on the ruins already burned, we begin to rebuild a landscape of "a home as forest" and "a forest as home."

There were rumours of another garden hidden among trees. This forgotten garden contains cycles of harmonious conflict and perpetual negotiation of life and death. Joel, a gardener, is a protector of the defenceless and a caretaker of many creatures.

How much do we sense, speculate, and respond to the signs conveyed by the life and death of other beings? How can we open up our clandestine relationship with them? Rather than blur or abolish boundaries, can we sustain the tension that animates such alterity and not neutralize that relationship? In search of answers, whale-time and human-time dive into small circles where emptiness and fullness meet.

How can we excavate and rewrite the stories of ghostly beings, intertwined in places banished from our senses? To do this, we sift through the debris of history, scrupulously collecting and connecting stories, while distorting the time like a botanist on the asphalt, as dislocated botanists, twisting the time of a smiling garden into a stroll to reminisce – to embrace repressed, estranged kinship.