The Egg that I inhabited was a space in between existence and non-existence, public and private, vulnerability and safety, freedom and confinement, homelessness and home, parenthood and son/daughterhood, creation and destruction, natural and man-made, focus and mind wandering, giving and taking, connection and isolation, calm and despair.
It blended these concepts into each other and made it hard to figure out where one ends and another one begins. Would it be fair to say that one is existing yet when they’re still in their pre-born, egg phase of pre-life? And how can we even distinguish between public and private if I was living in my little shelter in the middle of a public space. If many little windows and the door on the Egg were never closed and anybody passing by was encouraged to look inside.
//You can also peak inside below:
I was both exposed to the world and people and nature around me — and secluded. I was sleeping in the Egg every night and anyone — including even wild animals if extra hungry — could hurt me if they wanted to as I had no locks or self-defense strategies. It was a trust game where I chose to be vulnerable.
The sculpture might have been protecting me from immediate potential dangers but more so from overwhelming human reality with routine, urgent and not-so-urgent tasks, deadlines, conversations, trying to explain myself and communicate effectively, trying to be more productive, smarter, stronger, more successful, trying to use my time for good, trying to plan my day right, trying to look nice enough, trying to be well-balanced, polite, honest, attentive, trying to be myself, trying to be a part of something and fit in. I was free from most of these daily pressures and that was how the Egg was keeping me safe. I was not participating in normal human life, I wasn’t a part of it, therefore, it couldn’t exhaust me or hurt me.
//Below are my own photos of different parts of the day, on different days, from my Egg habitat that was keeping me safe even from bigger visible changes. During that week, there was always the Egg. Its walls were the first thing I saw after waking up and the last thing I saw before falling asleep. Since I wasn’t allowed to distract myself with books or gadgets, one of my favorite activities actually was staring at the green tree in front of the Egg, observing its leaves in the sun and in the wind.
One of the hard parts of the performance was the bond that I established with the Egg. It was my creation, my beautiful baby, I made it with my own hands out of wood, screws, chicken wire and plaster, I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve been planning it, all of this took a while. Yet the Egg was also my womb where I was the forming baby and I had to be born eventually. I was so connected with the Egg on this parent-kid, creator-creation level (where I was first a creator and then a creation; and the Egg was first a creation and then a creator of new me) that it was hard to separate myself from it.
And of course, it felt crazy hard to destroy the Egg from the inside when the time came to hatch. Because it was my baby and my womb, the almost living thing I put my energy, time and love into. But that’s how you hatch — you break your egg from inside, and you start your big, separate, out-of-the-egg life.
//Here is a little process video from one of the nights of creating my baby Egg that outgrew me and hosted me in itself later:
The Egg ended up being one of those weird, transitional spaces where you can perhaps only find yourself once in your life because it transforms your human experience and doesn’t promise you a safe way back in, leaving you alone with your reborn, different, alien self. Temporarily, it was a safe enough space but then I had to hatch myself out of it and the Egg became uninhabitable: it completed its task and the big yolk inside of it became a new human.
Still, sometimes when I feel very sad or overwhelmed, these feelings sound in my mind as ‘I want to go back to the Egg’. Because it was a safe space that didn't expect anything from me, that just accepted me the way I was and gave room to reflect and grow while providing shelter and comfort. But living in the Egg couldn’t sustainably last forever: nobody can stay in space in between for a long time. Spaces in between carry time limits that are deeply set in those spaces themselves.
After I hatched, there were only my big cracked Egg, rainy days, new me and feathers.
All of it was sad and liberating.
I left a little note at the place where the Egg was.
Although during my time in the Egg I was not allowed to use any distracting things for entertainment or just to fill time, one thing I was allowed to do was to journal about my transformation experience. This journal was a form of Egg performance documentation where I kept record of my experiences, observations and thoughts. I call it the Egg diary, I started it on the third day of inhabiting the Egg, documenting both my in-the-Egg reality and the first week after hatching. This writing was meant to be hyper honest, vulnerable, personal and public, just like the Egg performance itself.
In a different section of the same journal, whoever stopped by the Egg could ‘check in’ with it, writing down their names, current time and comments.
Here are some quotes from the Egg diary, just to give you a feel of what the diary is about:
‘escaping the Egg and moving somewhere warm, nice and cozy for the cold and rainy night would be a betrayal. <…> I’m proud of myself staying in the egg no matter what’
‘it feels like flying somewhere. or at least like going somewhere on a train. somewhere far’
‘there is life in movement. <…> I’m in between life and death right now, not moving that much in the egg. this realization is kinda SCARY!’
‘you can’t only count on other people. cause there’re rainy days when everyone just needs to survive hiding in their safe dens. you should have your own safe den with a guaranteed warm meal’
‘the thought of myself bringing an experience to people makes me happy’
‘when I realized I was actually going to live in the egg, I took it as a break from the world. <…> sometimes the world overwhelms me’
‘honestly, I feel guilty every time I step out from the egg’
‘I eat very randomly here. basically, I appreciate and consume whatever the kind world brings me’
‘a big mosquito found the way out of here [the egg] and I am so proud of it’
etc etc etc.
Below are some random pages of the Egg diary. You can contact the artist to get a fuller version of it.
