To Knot Is to Hope
Waiting Under the Knotting Tree – Performance Still
Tension holds a quiet hope
EN:
Wood branches, knotted rope, stone with handprints — staged as a set to echo Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The artist sits, embodying the absurdity of waiting.
CN:
EN:
This photograph is part of a durational performance staged inside the installation Knotting Tree. By sitting quietly beneath the rope-net “canopy,” I consciously reference Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where waiting becomes the very content of existence.
Here, the stone bears the traces of my earlier labor (pushing the rock, leaving handprints), and yet the act of sitting suspends all action — it is a paradox of life: we labor and mark the world, yet we are also asked to wait, to pause, to endure the passing of time.
For me, this work explores existentialism not as despair but as attention — to sit and feel time stretching, to notice the dust in the air, the subtle movement of smoke, the sound of my own breathing. It is a refusal to let life be reduced to productivity or spectacle; the waiting itself becomes a form of resistance, a quiet insistence that being present is already meaningful.
CN:
