Thinking through the permeability of bodies alongside collective care and rest.
Paper boats hanging on wall.
At the end of a two week immersive and site-responsive workshop at the Rejmyre Art Lab, I presented my experience and thoughts in the form of text. The text was printed and folded into paper boats that then floated in the lake where we all bathed together. Once dry, the boats hung on the wall, I asked other participants to come up, pick a boat, unfold it and read its contents out loud to all.
Paper boats float on lake.
Dear Rejmyre
Like wanderers who part ways after only one moment shared, as if they were old friends, despite never having met before, this too is how I depart from Rejmyre.
Whether our paths cross again is irrelevant, we will greet one another as if no time has passed when and if we do. I will still carry this bond and its memory with me, even if we don’t.
Dear Rejmyre, I carry you with me now and I know you hold something of mine too. Something I’ve left behind, but also something of mine that was already in you.
All the microscopic particles that we’ve always shared, long before our encounter, will remain shared even when they travel.
I tried to come to you as an empty sealed vessel, so that I could take you in, and contain something of yours, untainted. I forgot once more that I leak. I’m constantly leaking, even if only small particles of myself, just as I’m constantly absorbing particles of my surroundings, in an endless exchange of matter, of life.
I’m here in Rejmyre, but here is also everywhere: everywhere I’ve been, everywhere I’m yet to be (at), everywhere I’ll never arrive at during my current manifestation of self.
As I took you in and leaked into you, I lost track of myself, as I usually do. But water is my home, and your bodies of water welcomed me in.
The lake is unique in that it is shaped by the landscape, but its waters hold everything, a collective planetary (and interstellar) memory.
Rejmyre is also a vessel, like myself, that leaks and exchanges life through its waters. Through this exchange I’ll carry with me all those whom I’ve met and all those whom I’m yet to meet, old friends whose roads haven’t yet crossed mine.
I see you, you sense me.
I hear you, you feel me.
I felt you, you heard me.
I sensed you, you saw me.
Thank you, Rejmyre.
After paper boats were opened and read out loud.
One of many bodies of water in Rejmyre.