The Yarn
Installation and Performance, 2016
Composition, electronics, performance: Lemon Guo
Costume design: Jing Li
Video: Ethan Edwards, Mengtai Zhang
The piece is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where life is only lived through the imagination from the yarns of the ancestors. The tale spoke of a beautiful past, and a darker and older past that resembled the present. The visual projection is digitally processed videos of the artist's documentation of a Chinese ethnic minority village. The performer starts singing while struggling to unravel an intensely tangled pile of yarn that is connected to her sweater. The other ends of the yarns are wrapped around four tactile transducers, which she will later hand to the audiences. In the process of sharing sound objects, the audience curates each other’s aural and haptic experience. This gesture will also be read by the sensors embedded in the yarns and change the parameters of sound and visuals in real time.
“The Yarn” was performed at Columbia University (2016) and Ambient Church (2018). The installation version was exhibited at the Fridman Gallery (2017).