‘Dwelling’

Salvaged Roof Tiles

Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province. China 

2022 

Dwelling is a performance that unfolds as an embodied installation , a meditation on Martin Heidegger's profound philosophical concept. For the 20th-century German philosopher, "dwelling" was not merely about shelter, but the very essence of human existence. As he articulated in his 1951 essay "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," to be a human being means to be on earth as a mortal. It means to dwell." This performance takes this assertion literally, transforming the artist's body into a symbolic "site" for exploring what it means to exist, to belong, and to be grounded.

The title operates on two levels: it is both the act of inhabiting a place and a state of profound contemplation. In this work, the artist offers her own body as a foundational structure—a living, temporary ground. Created in a rural mountainous village in Jiangxi province, China, the performance is built upon a collaboration with Auntie Luo, a local village elder whose lifelong expertise lies in mending roofs with salvaged tiles. Auntie Luo is not an actor; she is a living repository of vernacular knowledge, her practice rooted in the continuity of this specific place and its traditions. Heidegger illuminates the deep connection at play here, noting that the Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell and also implies "to cherish, to protect, to care for, and to preserve.” The materials themselves—the salvaged tiles from the local village—deepen the metaphor. In a place where recycling is a practical necessity born of both resourcefulness and circumstance, the act of roofing becomes an act of making do with fragments. The displaced person, too, must construct a life from remnants, learning to live with the "spectral traces" of other homes. As the tiles are laid, they simultaneously offer shelter and impose a burden. They form the shape of a home, a temporary refuge, but their weight speaks to the immense effort of carrying one's culture and the precariousness of ever truly finding a place to dwell.