Krewe du soleil

This project was motivated by the conversations and discussions during the residency about the present social climate and movements in this country. It also is a response to the challenges of the global pandemic, especially how it has changed patterns of interpersonal relationships.

I have been working on “How We Connect” since the residency in summer 2020. However, the initial idea for this project was already born several years before when I had found a large handmade wooden salad bowl in a thrift store.

This bowl was characterized by lots of imperfections, including a large crack on the side that had been fixed with glue (didn’t work), an uneven bottom, and many small cracks, chips, scratches, and stains at the rim and on the inside.

To me, this bowl was a visual metaphor for the framework of a society created by laws, rules, morals, habits, common sense and other expressions of power that define social stratification, and I wanted to fill this bowl with groups of people to conjure up the possibilities and limitations of social and systemic movements within this framework.

This interactive 3-D object is about the way how people connect in general. It is about the social groups they form, the ways of how these groups interact with and depend on each other, and about the dynamics of these groups within a changing society.