Knowledge is a problem(2024)

performance with installation

Knowledge is A Problem is a performance with installation, exploring how to deconstruct the intellectual hierarchies produced by language and how to move the understanding of the body outside from the Western anatomical system and find more possibility.

This work is based on a piece of VOC's colonial history in Indonesia - how moxibustion as indigenous medical knowledge was exploited, translated, and imported into Europe as a life-saving cure for the persistent disease of gout, and under the to the exploitative structures of anatomical medical technology of the time.

(Moxibustion is a treatment burning the dried mugwort and heat the points on body, it is popular in Asian countries, and it is also my family practice, and I learned it from my mother and her community.)

This performance develops the role of the Dutch missionary through the performer's own body as non-white and non-male, placing it in the perspective of being observed by the audience, to achive reversing the historical power relations. Through different strategies of articulation dissolve the meaning of sentences and grammar, thus gradually transforming them into purely somatic sounds.