i would rather be a plant (itai itai itai)
 
2025, sound piece, 07:54 minutes
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itai (いたい) means "it hurts" in Japanese. itai itai itai – the word repeats until it becomes sound, until it loses its meaning and finds it again. The reading performance moves through five sections, weaving together anatomical language from Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1514–1564), onomatopoeia, fragments in Japanese, German and English, and a body that wants to be a plant: rooted, without nerves, without the daily exhaustion of feeling and hurting each other.
The text traces pain as something murmured, repeated, absorbed. It asks where the body ends and the ground begins – in skin, in roots, in the space between toes and earth, between inside and outside, between standing and falling.
Again and again.

Reading performance, Gruss aus dem Park 2025, Staatstheater Kassel, Kassel (GER)
Photos: Vlada Shcholkina