"After you" Installation project
Short version :
Being a foreigner in my very first month here in Germany, I found it quite hard to get in a society. Although I tried to open up my self to others around me, I still felt like I was not belong to any of groups here. Moreover, I also had a felling of having noting in common and not connect to others.
One day I traveled by myself to Berlin. And experienced to a warmhearted situation which told me that people can connect to each other just by yawning.
After did a consulting session with my mentor, I came back to do some research about yawning contagious and found that some credible scientists said that it is a primitive social behaviour of human when we would like to share empathy and emotion to a group and yawning contagious can also pass across species as well.
To express this felling of my own, to show invisible chain that can connect people together and also to express my wonder that why can't people just connect to others so easily just like the yawning contagious does? I would like to create an installation art containing 1 screen showing VDO looping of people and animal yawning with sound. It would be a close installation that allow one person visit at a time. And if a visiter happen to yawn after the VDO, they will get recorded and put into the VDO loop in order to continue the invisible chain which connect people by yawning.
Story in Berlin ;
One day I traveled by myself to Berlin. I took a S Bahn and sat on the seat that 4 people have to face each other; One read a book, one was busy with his phone, one looked outside a window and me just sat and looked around.
Suddenly, a guy who read a book started to yawn, the the guy sat opposite him yawned, then the other woman and then me. We all unconsciously yawned after others who sat there. And then at the end of the yawning contagious finished, we all put every activities that we were doing away and looked to each other, then from out of nowhere everyone started to laugh.
At that short moment, I felt like there was something connect we all together. Just like we were connected by an invisible chain of yawning contagious.
Although it was a very short moment, it made me felt so warm-hearted and also felt like I belong to the society. This short moment means a lot to me because it was the turning point that made me want to still carry on.