Ripples of a Portable Home, 2025, Live Performance Stills

Ripples of a Portable Home investigates clothing as a traveling archive and the children's play parachute, an object that through its games alludes to borders, oceans, and the communities that provide comfort across displacement. The series emerges from a live performance where participants ripple a parachute weighted with clothing from three generations: the artist's own wardrobe, and her mother and grandmother's archive, who were both immigrants that carried their home across borders and rebuilt it in unfamiliar territory. In the performance, the artist crawls under the parachute and enters through its center, building upon the childhood game of "sharks and lifeguards", where someone pulls players under the parachute as ocean. Here, no one is pulled. The artist is the only one who goes under, crossing this border and emerging in its center, surrounded by portable homes while the community holds the weight. After the participants release the parachute and leave, the artist experiments with it as a second skin—as bed, as clothes, as something to drag behind them, as seat.

The parachute becomes multiple borders simultaneously: an ocean between childhood innocence and adult displacement, and a threshold crossed by multiple generations. As the clothing weighs it down, the light border becomes heavy, requiring collective effort to sustain. This fatigue matters. Home isn't the parachute itself, but the circle of hands keeping it aloft. This original performance was later transformed into a 360-degree bird's-eye-view video projection, remade into a second live performance titled Ripples on the Line. and installed alongside the performance objects themselves to create an immersive room installation,

Childhood games contain embodied knowledge that adults often dismiss as nostalgia. Parachute play requires cooperation, trust, and unified rhythm: social fabrics for holding each other up. By bringing this game to adult bodies and weighing it with literal archives, play becomes a form of resistance. In times of pain, harm, and apathy, play insists on shared joy and vulnerability.

What does this circle of hands reveal about what it takes to make a home portable? How does clothing function as archives of memory across homes and generations? How can childhood play, reframed for adults, offer healing and resistance?

RIPPLES OF A PORTABLE HOME

In Ripples on the Line, the parachute is suspended vertically, becoming multiple borders: a threshold between childhood innocence and adult displacement, a membrane crossed by multiple generations, a boundary that both separates and connects.

In this iteration, the parachute becomes a portal between three bodies: projected (past), shadow (present), and physical (emerging). A layered video projection of the original performance plays across the parachute's surface: the artist crawling, sleeping, cleaning, looking skyward, moving in endless circles. From this 360 omniscient point of view, the parachute becomes something a clock, an orb, and a globe. In the video, the layers don't match up perfectly. They slip and overlap like traces of home that coexist but never fully align.

Through the projection switching on and off at times, the artist's playful silhouette shifts in and out. The projection and shadows distort with each movement, breathing and warping like a dreamlike lung, a curtain that wants to be crossed. After this private ritual, the artist breaks the border, wearing it as a blanket, and ties a line of clothes onto the parachute, creating a new clothesline. The threshold that was crossed is now carried again, with the three generations of clothing trailing behind it.

Home is both what we hang up to remember and what we must keep carrying with us.

RIPPLES ON THE LINE

Ripples on the Line, 2025, Live Performance/Film Installation Documentation, sound, 13 min 32 sec