2018, performance (8:32 minutes)
Script:
”
Sediment of sentiment
Tap
Tap
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Tap tap tap
Who’s there?
It’s hard to tell what’s below the surface
Lose matter is the usual suspect.
I am an auger. I hide underground.
Where the worms are.
Ever wondered how they move? They spend their lives eating and defecating to move forward.
Eat and shit
Eat and shit
Eat and shit
Eat shit
Eat and shit
Eat shit
Eat and shit
Eat shit
That’s how they roam the globe.
Earthworms were described by Charles Darwin as a ‘natural plow’. He estimated that every year the entire surface layer of the globe passes through the stomach of an earthworm.
If I stick this into the ground and cut a worm in half, will they separate their ways?
Earthworms have the power to regenerate. They can replace lost parts of the body. Many specimens are cut in half at least once in their life. People think that a worm cut into two parts develops into two ‘new’ worms, but this is not correct. In practice, the earthworm usually dies in the event of a body break, because the broken part is too large to still be viable for one of the two parts.
I sometimes think of the life I didn’t live. The choices I didn’t make. The roads I didn’t walk.
I wonder if I’m viable for another walk of life.
I’m not a worm. I get to roam the earth just once.
Roll the dice, take a gamble. Choose an exact starting point.
Which direction will you go?
They told me
to let go.
Round round round round round
Round round round round round
Round round round round round
Have you ever fallen down on the floor from dizziness? Realizing the world keeps spinning while you are laying still?
How to move forward?
“He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”
Scatter your matter as one scatters earth.
Turn yourself over.
I think I can feel it now. Wet feet. I’m afraid of failing you know?
Of falling. Of failing. Of Falling.
Of falling. Of failing. Of Falling.
Of falling. Of failing. Of Falling.
I’m stacking my experiences in layers.
I’m a child of the wetlands. I can’t help it. I’m already in.
I once fell through. I was in Iceland, I was walking on a glacier. I was walking on black sands.
I didn’t know what was below the surface so I just kept walking.
Suddenly, I fell through. My leg sunk into the ground. I tried to pull myself up, only to fall through with my other leg. When I finally got out, I realized I had barely survived.
The glacier was hiding below the surface. It was a massive bubble of half-melted ice, just below the surface.
I could have drowned on the exact spot where I was standing.
I have to excavate my core. Search my centers.
Turn and turn and turn and turn and turn and turn and turn
Until it stops.
“It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam.”
Tap
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Tap tap tap
Who’s there?
It is not a joke.
Now that I’m digging from memory, I will tell you an anecdote.
I was six and I invented a game:
My mother always told me not to go beyond the end of our street. So one day, I tried to get lost on purpose. Walking past the end of that familiar street felt like freedom. As the pavement was different there. My land, but my unknown territory.
I walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.
I let my legs carry me wherever my intuition took me. Turned around corners, walked down lanes. I chose different streets this time. I chose a different road each time.
I used to be a pioneer.
But the truth is: I did not get lost at all. I remembered every step I had taken. I could only move forward, backwards had become familiar territory.
Do worms remember everything they have ever eaten? They can’t turn around.
It is hard to tell what is below the surface.
It is a sentiment of sediment.
*dig out sample*
I don’t want to overanalyze this sample, but now we’re on it, I may just as well say a thing or two about it.
I’m at a turning point now.
I will have to choose directions once again.
*Raises hand to face*
Round round round
Will I rise or fall
Broaden my horizon?
Horizontal or vertical
The only way
is down”
Josje Hattink 
