This work is a two-channel video installation documenting a performance of mine. It explores the intimate connection between the body and healing, between belonging and loss.
For seven days, I allowed a bean to sprout inside a cavity carved into a mass of dough. I then cut the dough open, ate the bean, and stitched the opening closed with black thread.
The gesture stems from my desire to reclaim my breast tumor after surgery. In January 2021, upon waking from anesthesia and seeing the photograph of the removed tumor, I felt the impulse to take it home with me. It had come from my body, had been part of me, had grown because of me, even though it was harmful.
The bean that grew in the darkness of the dough was like my tumor: a tangible presence, constantly expanding yet invisible. Despite knowing that the sprouted bean was toxic, I longed to bring it back into my body by eating it. As before the operation, no one could know whether or how my life would be shaped by its presence.
I believe that human beings are inherently irrational and possessive: whatever we define as “mine” becomes inseparable from us, making it difficult to detach even from what harms us, as in the case of Stockholm syndrome.
