Devised in collaboration with Alecia Neo, People/Fields: Inter-weavings (29 minutes) is a video installation that emerges from a desire to bring yarn- a material often associated with domesticity and femininity in popular imagination- into public spaces, the streets. In this film, we invite- the passers-by, women and men in the moment of taking a break from work or waiting to pick up their child from school, groups celebrating their Sunday picnics, or friends enjoying recording tik-tok dances together- to knit with us. And what we achieve as a result, are these ephemeral yarning communities, which remind us of the tenacity embedded in a material as fragile and passive as the yarn. In these acts, what also becomes tactile for us are the transitory fields of energy and compassion that get formed and unformed between us and others as we lay out the yarn and its stitches in space. We imagine that perhaps this is one way to blur borders that divide our identities into separate complexes, trouble the entitlements of maps and territories, and bring us to touch each other with some techniques of play and wonder, with no burden of promises and contracts ever made.
Concept: Meghna Bhardwaj
Site direction, Camera, Video Editing: Alecia Neo
Sound Editing: Marcel Zaes
Displayed as part of Meghna`s exhibition and artistic research titled Yarning, Supported
by Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency, Esplanade- Theatres on the Bay,
Singapore.