#33 April Lin 林森's 3 objects
"Whenever I slept, it would be with me, tossing and turning together through my dreams."
Welcome to #33! Living with Objects features people thinking out loud about their experiences through the objects they live with. The ways we relate to, interact with, and consume things can say a lot about us, and we hope that exploring these ideas gives us new understandings of ourselves.
Today we have a dear friend April Lin 林森, an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator, playfully reimagining our toilet experience and wondering when a part of our body becomes an object.
April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance, and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths.
They interweave moving image, performance, creative computing and installation in a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory, and interpersonal and structural trauma. Their work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Sheffield DocFest, LA Filmforum, and NOWNESS Asia.
Look back on an object that you used to interact with often but not anymore. Can you tell us more about it?
Is this a trick answer? Pictured is a braid of my own hair, a pastel green rat tail, cut off from its keratin comrades circa 2021. At what point does one part of your body become an object; is my right arm, my left eyeball, my tongue always an object? Is a body a constellation of objects, a hyperobject? Can one detach self-objectification from its associations with degradation, dissociation, automation?
I used to interact with this rat tail everyday while we were attached. Whenever I slept, it would be with me, tossing and turning together through my dreams. Wherever I travelled to or from, it accompanied me. Now, it sits on my mantelpiece. The break from my body is so clean, as if you could sew it back onto my head even now, strand by strand, years later.
How about an everyday object you still interact with, what would life be without it?
Toilet paper... At first I found it quite hard to imagine my life without it. Until I actually started imagining my life abundant with bidets or Japanese toilets — in this utopia, perhaps toilet paper could be replaced with a little towel, at least in a home setting. Maybe everyone would have their own little butt towel to wipe their washed butts with, hanging on hooks in their bathrooms right at arm's reach from the toilet seat. Wouldn't that be much eco-friendlier? Not to mention, cleaner?
When I first thought of toilet paper, I thought “wow, people don't give it enough credit” but by the end of this thought experiment, I was thinking “wow, we should move past toilet paper as a society. It is keeping us chained to the past!”
Now imagine you could be any object, what would you want to be?
I would like to be this statue of a bak choi that I bought from my local and most favourite Asian supermarket when I moved house three years ago. Oh, to be forever reclining on a podium, flesh spilling out, bringing auspicious energy at the most and a beautiful gorgeous sight at the least — it is a life I sometimes envy, one in which aesthetics and function merge.
Maybe, if we dig a little deeper, there's something about this statue being a ‘positive’ simulacra of its original — here, I am thinking about Baudrillard's understanding of the simulacra as a derivative copy, something that alienates the witness further from the thing the simulacra is meant to represent — but if anything, this bak choi statue only amplifies and grounds me in my appreciation of this leafy, potent vegetable.
It is placed in a little gathering of special objects by the entrance of my bedroom, and whenever I pass it by, my eyes soften. I would like to have that effect on people!
You can follow April on Instagram and view their work on their website.
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