311 E 3rd St

 

terbuka: open, openness, left open

tertutup: closed, close, enclosed

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You don’t need to know why I tear for the humid afternoon air, but I leave in this room the wind that has touched my skin.

I see Angelica’s two bodies here, the rhythm of whose breaths together weave a dazzling maze. One gently touches all its scars, and the other weaves the veils around them. Their gaze intertwines, documenting these moments when a healed wound is perceived as both the mark of traumatized memory and a piece of granulation tissue.

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Open, close, breath in, breath out, in between some emotions reveal, release, and then back to veiling, luring you to go deep into the labyrinth. But it’s not the one that needs you to find the only path in and out. Feeling how pain extends and alters the space doesn’t mean that resonating with the same vulnerability is the only option - and that’s why Angelica purposely performs encoding and layering to fabric a space where internal psyche and bodily senses are honestly documented yet difficult to be interpreted.

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But it never means that the bodily suffering has been ignored. The pain flows and hides between layers, between lines, and between the open and the close - the terbuka and the  tertutup. Situating the space at the very instant moment of constantly switching allows the pain to demonstrate all possible attributes - internal yet external, soft yet hard, jagged yet rounded, complete yet fragmented. 

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The original language for describing the pain seems to lost in translation - the stories about it have been disassembled into flowing letters that compose elegy in unknown languages, and the emotions wrapping around it have sprouted in the space and become the space’s vein, intestines, and scars, residing in an intentional unfit fashion - they are the clues the translator has left for you to take a peek at the deep and subtle trauma that everything originates from. “Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.” Jeanette Winterson said so in her book “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”. It seems an undertone in the Asian Culture to endure and internalize sufferings. Counter this culture, the brave and honest nature of Angelica’s work - the remnants and traces after that “wall” being torn down - touches on the many philosophical possibilities of how an individual's internal pain could be perceived and processed. The translator first needs to get herself lost in translation, then she would find the path.  

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Tong Wu

07.25.22 in Brooklyn