The Egg performance
photos by Abraham Perez
I built a big Egg it and lived in it for a week spending 23 hours a day inside. Inhabiting the Egg was a durational performance, it started when I first climbed into the Egg to inhabit it and ended when I hatched myself out in April 2024. When hatching, I destroyed the Egg making it impossible for me to change my mind, come back and start living there again at some point.
The Egg was made of plaster, chicken wire and wood. It was around 12 feet tall.
Here are a few basic rules of the Egg performance:
the performer could step out from the Egg as needed but total of all minutes spent outside could not exceed 1 hour out-of-the-Egg limit a day;
the Egg could host more than one inhabitant at a time if the audience wanted to temporarily inhabit it too;
the Egg could never ask for anything — but it could gratefully receive offerings of food, beverages or warmer clothes if the intention to offer originally came from the audience;
the performer was not allowed to use any gadgets, music, books or other distracting things for entertainment;
the performer was allowed to talk and interact with the audience.
Because the idea of artist’s transformation over the duration of the performance is crucial for this specific piece, I am sharing more thoughts and insights from my experience of living in the Egg:
[click on it to open this page on CalArts website]
The piece took place in California Institute of the Arts, where artists like Chris Burden, Faith Wilding, Jack Goldstein, Alison Knowles and others presented conceptual performances from the 1970s onward.
Since starting at CalArts, I always wanted to bring the crazy artistic spirit of that time back to campus. This was my intuitive understanding of how I want it to be in CalArts and how I want CalArts to feel and to look like, despite all the challenges of the modern mentality, safety regulations and required policies of a higher education institution.
‘The CalArts way’ page of the art school’s website explains what CalArts is and emphasizes on that ‘we do things a bit differently’. One of the examples of what sets CalArts apart is ‘a durational performance art piece in a giant-sized egg.’