13 texts written with ink on soluble paper, dissolved in water, and presented in 13 glass vials. “I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds” is a series of selected texts presented as philosophical medicines and poetic potions. Each work is exhibited as an installation of glass vials, with each vial containing the liquid residue of a text that has been transcribed with ink on soluble paper and dissolved in water. Through this process the ink stains the water, and the water converts the paper to a thin, soft pulp, allowing for the initial page of writing to become a liquid solution.
Like a lunar version of Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” this artwork’s 13 texts consider our world’s only satellite planet through a variety of literary lenses. The pieces all feature the moon in different ways; the moon as a doorway into the unknown, a symbol of the unobtainable, an object of capitalist focus, and a spiritual companion. The texts include unused speeches, poems, scientific descriptions, psychological analysis, diary entries, and lyrics.
Clockwise from the top: “On a night of the full moon” by Audre Lorde; (Extract from) “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino; “Nocturne” by Edith Södergran; (Extract from) “The Years” by Virginia Woolf; 15 September, 1976, diary entry by Andrey Tarkovsky; “I Watched the Moon Around the House” by Emily Dickinson; (Extract from) “On dreams” by Sigmund Freud; “The moon and the yew tree” by Sylvia Plath; Alternative, unused moon landing speech by Richard Nixon; (Extract from) “Total Eclipses of the Sun” by Mabel Loomis Todd; “Whitey On The Moon” by Gil Scott-Heron; (Extract from) “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki; “Moonset” by Carl Sandburg.
