project image
Melanie Boisvert
NEVERTHELESS

first performed on March 20, 2011
Political Performance Symposium, Belgrade, Serbia
performed four times in 2011

JESSICA HIRST

Barcelona, Spain
palmerfishman@gmail.com
jessicafhirst.com

NEVERTHELESS
JESSICA HIRST

What physically embodied metaphor aptly expresses, simultaneously, our fragility, both as individual bodies and as societies, and our resilience? A field of raw eggs. My body, curled into a tight ball at one end of the field. I start to quiver as an unseen energy builds inside me until I unfurl. As I unfold perhaps my head, perhaps my hip, perhaps my knee falls upon and breaks the first egg. The sound of the crack travels and occupies the full attention of the public. The field of eggs did not appear out of nowhere. I have distributed eggs among members of the public, asking them to take care of their particular egg for a few minutes. I have asked them to cradle their egg, to feel its temperature, its weight, its texture. Then I have asked them to place their eggs somewhere in the field. Once the field was bright green, twice it was the color of concrete, and twice it was a saturated fuchsia. Usually the eggs were placed at random, but once the public and I laid them in a collective abstract design of lines and dots. I move my body slowly through the field. The first three times I wore brown, white or black clothes, and the last two times I was naked except for turquoise undershorts. Gravity appears heavier than usual, and directed toward the opposite end of the field. My feet, thighs, skull, knees, hips, shoulders, stomach sometimes caress and sometimes land square on the eggs. Sometimes, many times the egg crunches and crumples, yellow yolks spreading, and other times the egg remains whole. I finally reach the other end of the field. I stop, turn and survey what has transpired, implicitly asking the audience to do the same. We all see how many eggs have broken, but we also notice how many eggs are still whole, surprisingly many. Eggs were designed by natural selection to protect their contents, and they are structurally stronger than most of us think. I gather up a surviving egg or two in my hands, contemplating and appreciating. Then I start to collect the rest of the survivors, placing each carefully back into its carton. I present each carton of surviving whole eggs to a member of the public. Audience members in Serbia, Spain, the United States, and France all had different interpretations of my performance, on levels macro-political to very personal. For me the genesis of the piece grew out of a tragic accident, but as image and metaphor it grew to encompass not only the randomness and shock I experienced, but also the inevitable pull of world events.