There Is Water  Here
 2025 performance

 

The water once came and turned everything upside down. Now the water recedes, but what remains is not dryness, but a deeper oblivion and blockade.

Four years ago, at the subway station in my hometown, that flood swallowed the carriages, swallowed the cries for help, swallowed countless lives that cannot be counted. I narrowly escaped from the subway, but one of my friends who had been with me was forever disappeared in that torrent. After the water receded, the government filled the void with silence, falsely reported the death toll, detained mourners, and sealed off and rebuilt the subway entrance. As the submerged area was transformed into a commercial space, the order broken by the water was completely restored, and that painful collective memory evaporated with the water. Everything returned to normal, as if death had never occurred.

But we remember, our bodies remember. We stretch our bodies at the rebuilt subway entrance, creating deviations, obstructing the flow of "normal" people, swimming in the underground passage transformed into a commercial street, summoning the absent flood in a waterless place, until we are expelled by the police. Our bodies move, flip, and sprint, reenacting an absurd competition in the vanished torrent.

Muscle memory drives us forward, but what exactly are we chasing? Is it the unreachable side, or the truths that have been buried? Swimming, originally a survival skill, here becomes a futile resistance, a call to the missing, a rejection of forgetfulness.

If the water will not come again, we will become water. Let the forbidden land rise in waves once more, let the blocked history break its dam.