The Invisible Elephant
2023
performance
Photo and news credit:
Tiu Leis, Alar Raudoja
2023
performance
Photo and news credit:
Tiu Leis, Alar Raudoja
The Invisible Elephant is a participatory performance work that revolves around the themes of rumor, misrecognition and collective imagination. The Invisible Elephant is rooted in a local narrative in Estonia of an elephant that showed up on a beach. The work deals with this event as it exists in traces, narration, and speculation.
For The Invisible Elephant, I created a pair of shoes with elephant footprint-shaped soles. In the performance, participants are invited to wear these shoes and walk on the beach, while their tracks suggest the presence of an elephant. The traces that are left behind are untraceable and produce a disjunction in scale and plausibility. These are things that are obviously impossible, but materially convincing.
Instead of generating a visible spectacle, The Invisible Elephant offers subtle intervention and collective action in a public space. Through humor and playfulness, the work scatters clues and opens the possibility for the meaning to be produced through confusion, inference and deferred recognition, thus pointing to the ways narratives, fears, and imaginaries are produced and circulated through absence.
For The Invisible Elephant, I created a pair of shoes with elephant footprint-shaped soles. In the performance, participants are invited to wear these shoes and walk on the beach, while their tracks suggest the presence of an elephant. The traces that are left behind are untraceable and produce a disjunction in scale and plausibility. These are things that are obviously impossible, but materially convincing.
Instead of generating a visible spectacle, The Invisible Elephant offers subtle intervention and collective action in a public space. Through humor and playfulness, the work scatters clues and opens the possibility for the meaning to be produced through confusion, inference and deferred recognition, thus pointing to the ways narratives, fears, and imaginaries are produced and circulated through absence.