I created “Evolution” within the context of Thai artist Jittima Pholsawek’s long-term collaboration with the indigenous Urak Lawoi. This year was the inaugural International Live Performance Art Festival at Koh Lanta, to which I was invited along with 23 other artists from all over Asia, plus Norway and the UK. The Urak Lawoi had been nomadic fisher-people for over five centuries before they settled on Koh Lanta, but like many indigenous peoples, their ancestral lands have been stolen by colonizers, and more recently by businesspeople from the mainland who are building a tourism industry. The festival’s goal was for artists to create work in several different sites that are important to the Urak Lawoi, and to draw attention to the threats facing them.

I performed “Evolution” in a village that is perched on stilts above muddy flats at the water’s edge. My points of departure were the Urak Lawoi’s name for themselves, “Sea People,” and their centuries-long identity as nomadic fisher-people. While walking on the beach my first day in Koh Lanta I noticed what looked to me like a sculpture, or an installation. It was long poles tied together, each with a rock tied to the bottom, a large green or yellow plastic jug in the middle, and different brightly colored flags at the top. I learned that these poles are used by the Urak Lawoi to mark the sites of their underwater fish traps. They gave me permission to use a few in my performance.

I began my piece curled up in a square wheelbarrow pushed from the houses out to the water by Xiaohan Han and Kurt Johannessen. They emptied me into the sea, from which I emerged pulling myself forward across the mud on my belly, in the manner in which I imagine the first amphibians crawling onto land. I crept forward, smearing mud on my face and exploring the objects in my path—leaves, twigs, trash. When I reached an Urak Lawoi fishing boat, made from wood and painted in the traditional style, I used it to pull myself up to standing. I grasped several poles in each hand, and set out across where the boats were tied up on the mud. I imagined that the act of fishing, with its tools, made me evolve into a human.