I was waiting for the quake.
2023
Lecture Performance
Director, Writer, Editor, Cinematographer, Editor
The lecture-performance, I Was Waiting for the Quake, explored themes of family, ancestry, and the local rituals surrounding death. To begin, I crafted a monologue from the perspective of a young girl reflecting on her community’s focus on death and the afterlife, rather than life itself.
To deepen the connection to these themes, I traveled to my ancestral hometown and filmed a short documentary. The documentary features interviews with survivors of a devastating earthquake that struck the region fifty years ago, destroying villages and causing numerous deaths.
The performance itself was multi-layered: a narrator read the girl's reflections, while my experimental documentary was projected in the background. Meanwhile, a live actor portrayed a mourner, interrupting the reading to correct certain words, as though conducting a eulogy.