You pause just outside the door of the 15' x 20' black box room, to listen
to the quiet, whispered
soundtrack. The floor of the room is strewn with suitcases filled with
papers and objects. The performer, dressed in white and sucking on a candy ring,
is riffling through the suitcase contents, searching for something. A video
projection of a family snapshot collage shows up brightly on the performer but hardly at
all on the surrounding black walls. You enter.
The performer approaches you and asks for help in
her search. You ask what it is exactly that she's trying to find,
but she hedges, and struggles for the words. She can't quite describe the missing
item, so she picks up a piece of paper and says "it's kinda like this, only
bigger. You'll know it if you see it." On the paper is a short description of a
remembered event or experience. As you help her search, you
discover that all the pages contain similar remembered experiences, many of them
embarrassing, or painful, some comic or just simply memorable. You
hand her a sheet of paper and ask "is this is?" She looks at it for a moment,
seems slightly disturbed by the memory, crumples it up and throws it down, "no,
that's not it, that's not it at all" she says. Or else she becomes lost in it for a
moment, and smiles. "Do you remember this?" she asks;
"yes," you say, or maybe "no". "I remember this," she says.
Although it is never said explicitly, it becomes obvious that what she is looking
for is herself, some quantifiable, objective measurement of her own identity. Of
course she never finds it; she can't see the forest for the trees.