Queering Documentation: Materiality / Three Broken Dolls

 For the last couple of months, I keep finding dolls on the street, in the trash, in dirty, forgotten corners. They haunt me, maybe they follow me, and I can't but look them in the eye. As they lie on the floor, their gaze is lost into nothingness, staring into the beyond, contemplating the strange fabric of this reality. Somehow, I feel this gaze also looks into me, as I have been discarded and broken so many times, and picked up my own limbs from out of trash bins, wondering whether I am meat or plastic or just some silly game. As dolls, we decide to turn our broken limbs into beauty and our pain into philosophy. Is this sublimation the most altruistic and productive way to overcome our misfortunes? Or is it just to ignore the true tragedy of our fate and to celebrate that which is our demise?

This started as a personal project to work through my own traumas, make sense of symbols in my life as well as my own identity, and prove myself I could complete this kind of work. After showing it to a few friends, Eunyoung came back to me saying she was organizing an exhibition in which this could actually fit very well. The project related to the splitting of queer identity in times of isolation, a situation in which bodies are rendered invisible not one, but many times. Default language and structures made to deny our existence, and most of the time of greatest act of queer resistance is to just be there. But what now, when presence is not an option? We share traces of objects that describe our experiences, vicarious bodies that allow us to create an indirect, common space, a long distance community.

In my case one of the base materials of my work was already such an object: a pair of broken dolls that crossed my path by mere chance and reflected my inner questions, my astonishment at hanging between the strangeness towards my own body and the strangeness of the infinite universe. The pictures of the dolls in their natural habitat - trash cans and dirty corners - were already there and fit into the project perfectly. They were condensed into a 3d model of the dolls that were thus virtually present in the exhibition in Seoul. They became one of the many exhibits, one of the many stories in this virtual show-and-tell of people from around the world, far apart but together.

The space indeed created community and discussion, which I received as very personal feedback of people resonating with my video and story. I should say this entire process helped me grow as a person.