Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee

Beginning with the innate choice of walking to and from, or not walking to and from, the cemetery, my performance work mediates the separation between experience inside and outside the cemetery walls over a sustained six months; a practice conjoined with rabbinic laws that place a boundary of ritual and ways of thinking between everyday life and burial space. I formed my own laws from nervousness, lethargy, fear, and intense concentration: The Weight of My Body Inside Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee; The Unstable Perpetuation of Daily Law; Empty Heat; and Spleen. I rapidly envisioned, dramatically committed to, and then forgot ritual actions and corollary constraints. I collected hundreds and hundreds of stones in the streets of Berlin while singing and hauled them in great numbers to the cemetery to place on individual graves or entire fields of graves. I sent people I met into the cemetery, or accompanied them, and afterward presented them with a series of questions to answer in writing in their mothertongue. I tracked a recurring pain in my spine and searched for its representation in recurring gravestone images. I found a rusted off car exhaust pipe while walking to the cemetery and archived and lived with it. I collected trash in the cemetery and recorded the names of the person buried nearest each piece and archived and lived with it. I kept the hair that fell from my face and head into books I was reading and archived it. I wrote inside the cemetery upon specific paper sheets, using the words and names from graves to induce statements, lists, poems, public actions.