“Sowers” is the first part of the performance-diptych devoted to the topic of physical and mental work.
The world as we know it and we are today is the result of our actions in the past. Both personal development and global world processes imply a continuous energy exchange and require its participants the greater impact the more they seek to achieve. In what “field” do we work, what “sow” and what result can we expect? These issues are particularly relevant in conditions of isolation and limited social contacts, at a time when many processes have slowed down or broken down and mankind is in a state of uncertainty about the future.
The first part of the project was created in spring of 2020 during the pandemic is an artistic reflection of the process of creation and informed development of the individual in which the act of sowing is represented as a ritual action. Sowing as a kind of peasant labor causes historical associations with heavy, ungrateful, “slave” work. Weld Queen offers to look at the process of work as such from the different side to assess its effectiveness at the moment and to track the results after a while. Sowers scatter the invisible “nothing” or “something” that gives the viewer the opportunity for personal interpretation: what meanings, ideas, trends were “sown” during the “catastrophe”? Were they or “nothing” will remain nothing?
The performance took place on the roof of Weld Queen’s workshop the endless factory fields reflecting the main vector of the artist’s attention: broadcasting through art social issues of interest to her. The performance is accompanied by the recorded sounds of a functioning workshop on the same roof, in the same act of sowing, interspersed with the cries of birds, the rustle of leaves and the sound of rain containing a symbiosis of industrial and natural principles.
This project is a kind of experiment that allows us to analyze the interdependence of “the moment now” and “the moment after”, the present and the future. The future is not always obvious but it will certainly come giving us the opportunity to reap the fruits of our labor. What will they be? “Mowers” is the second part of the performance will take place in autumn of 2020 and will capture the “present moment” in which we will find ourselves as a result of today’s action or inaction.
Weld Queen
“Sowers”
May 2020