A panning soundscape as the audience entered built the temporary world(s) we would inhabit. Here we are joined, yet independent. A conditional and poetic “future,” modeling consequence, ritual, and trust—a vignette of individuals in the orbit of the other.

I, Amanda Antunes, performed “Memoryhouse,” and stepped into a muslin house onto which the artist’s memories were projected: a routine. I stitched the seams of the house as if being prohibited to leave. Photographs and footage show bodies, statues, and interior life. Rehearsing my future, I detangled hair, untied yarn, and rebuilt the house. Some actions personal and idiosyncratic, some methodical and poetic, some practical, some playful, and some meditative. The distance of stage to audience created fantasy. I knelt on the ground, facing in. I played with shadows, some Autumn’s cast from the other side of the room. I methodically demolished everything around me. I cut a pile of poems into tiny pieces, placing them into a stack. I trimmed the house and undid seams until there was nothing left. I used scissors and yarn to cut and wrap it all into rock-like artifacts. All that remained were fragments: resilience in the face of disintegration.

I, Autumn Ahn, performed “Evidence of a Signal.” A hanging metal object cast a shadow in the center of a beam of light. I entered, another dark moving shape; my collection of objects materiality. I undermined their function: to balance them on my head, wrap them on my body, each time altering my silhouette. The light’s gravity and the soundscape kept me in momentum, and orbit. Sometimes Amanda’s blue light shone on my ropes, grass, linen, and latex gloves. Sometimes mirrored on a curtain at the back of the stage. I continued to work the sculpting and disentangling, until it wove itself into a single form. The linen became my apron, became the skin of the basket atop my head, covered now with the Mexican feathergrass I harvested. The reversed sound familiar; the performance would end soon. The circle now pink, dusted with chalk I had used long before. My body growing heavier, I leaned to pick up the pieces my silhouette left behind; balanced on my head, no longer unique things—woven artifact. Hum growing, I hummed too. Linking myself finally to the weight of the unseen stories, mystery held together in my shapeshifting basket perched unnaturally atop my head.