Histories, they are powerful and they are important… where we came from, where we will go to. Working through ancestral, family, animal, and personal trauma at this old historic train station was so significant. Each of us carries histories within us. Some of these histories are ones we’d like to kill, to forget. Does this make us killers or healers? Every day we live, we move more into life, more towards death. When events of trauma end, are they really dead within us? How do we remove this dead, this dying to heal, rather than suffocate and kill? And how do we honor lights and shadows and celebrate ourselves and our ancestors while removing the dead, the dying?

The thirty-minute performance began in the animal house, a small red brick building where cows, goats, and sheep were previously housed. I remained inside while the audience outside was positioned to look at a tiny window at the bottom of the animal house. At this window, I presented small treasures (seashells, crystals, a dead bird, a Band-Aid, needles) with smeared black paint on my hands.

I sang a Korean doom skull song as I drew dripping skulls on the paper door on the other side of the animal house. Deep inside, one could find a black and white video of me with animals. The paper door ripped as I crawled out, towards the attic, a place where animals sometimes make a home. Four meters of white paper connected the animal house to the attic. On this scroll of white paper, “Mom” and “Dad” were written in Korean, in black ink.

The audience followed as I crunched and hugged the white scroll. I led them to a small room in the attic where the entire floor was covered in white paper. A small taxidermied mouse in two pieces, head detached from the body, was spinning on a record player. The soundscape was the needle hitting the soft rubber on the record player. The mouse was a gift from a local cat named Frida and I prepared the mouse for this performance. I made my way over to a white tanned mink that was hanging from the ceiling and gently brought the mink down into a bucket of black paint. I began to write “Mom” and “Dad” in Korean over and over on the attic floor.