The Seventh Day
Photography, spring steel, tattooed bananas, theatrical script2013
The exhibition featured both freshly tattooed bananas and their blackened, aged counterparts, an unfinished kosher slaughter knife for pigs, and the beginnings of a theatrical script in which a character dreamed vividly of a taste they had never experienced. This script introduced speculative imagination, exploring how unfulfilled desires and the unknown intersected with our understanding of the sacred.
The use of these materials inherently engaged with themes of cultural transformation and the historical impacts of colonialism, questioning how symbols of sacredness were appropriated and reinterpreted.
AN EXCERPT FROM THE PLAY:
THE STAGE
THE ACTORS
Man- Tall and thin with dark hair, early middle age (mid 40’s) wears plain suit.A black hall, the stage a perfect square protruding from the back wall and into the centre. Congregation sits around three sides. The back wall of the stage is covered by a white screen light shines through from behind, the silhouette of actors and stage hands can be seen moving behind. Actors enter stage via stairs at both ends of the stage and pass through the centre of the white screen onto stage. On back stage left is a woman with a trumpet. Across stage right stand four chairs.
THE ACTORS
Trumpet- A female trumpet player, of roughly the same age as the man.
Weaver- Woman, who sits with embroidery in her hands.
Blacksmith- Large man who sits with a long strip of steal in his hands and wet stones at his feet.
Potter- Man who sits with a bag of clay at his side and is slowly coiling clay upward.
Butcher- Holds nothing in his hands.
ACT ONE
SCENE ONE
MAN.(moves up stage to where his shoes are lying and puts them on, whilst sitting on the floor.) I dreamt a strange dream, although it felt as though I were awake. For unlike my previous dreams, it was through my senses that I dreamt, not through my eyes. I dreamt with my mouth, with my tong and with my teeth. (man stands.) This to me would imply that I was in waking, for is it not impossible to feel in a dream, but the impossibility of what I dreamt... would prove to a sound mind that it was a dream. But how can one dream of taste, and a taste one has never tasted (man becomes more agitated.) For I know surely that was no taste I know. It was salty and sweet and... it was meat, certainly meat, but not chicken or fish or beef.
TRUMPET.(Short blast)
MAN.(in the direction of the trumpet.) Wait a moment, I am coming to something.
TRUMPET.(Blasts again)
