P002 → I Am All Fibre
“I am alone.[1]”
“I am alone.”[2]
“I am left alone to find an answer.”[3]
“Who am I?”[4]
“I am this, that and the other.”[5]
Detail: I Am All Fibre, 2025.
In the beginning there was not nothing. I refuse to believe that there was ever nothing, but maybe there were still no witnesses. In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on the difficulty of imagining the telling and transmission of a story of daily actions. How challenging would it be to keep the attention while talking about removing “a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another” in contrast to the story of the hunter of mammoths. One of action, but more over one relying on the figure of a Hero achieving, conquering, mastering, weaponizing, claiming victories. Never does the story of stability provided by the knowledge of recollecting or cultivating the land have a place.[6] For Le Guin this story, so embedded in the imaginary of centuries of civilizations, places too much weight in the individual human as hero, and not in perhaps a more relevant one, the recipient or the container as the hero. A change that displaces the idea of humanity as an act of killing an instead claims that it is the act of putting something useful, edible or beautiful into a bag or a basket, to bring home, to share, to eat, to store… what it means to be human.
Assemblage of Douglas fir wood, aluminum perforated screen, LCD screen, hardware board, electricity, wheatgrass and quotes from Virginia Woolf's The Waves, 2025
[1] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 8.
[2] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p.10.
[3] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p. 15.
[4] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p.60.
[5] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p.63.
[6] Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 1989). Extracted from https://stillmoving.org/resources/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.
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Since I started speaking English on a daily basis, I also started noticing how many times the “I” started appearing in my sentences. Instead of the conjugation of a verb indicating who is talking as it happens in Spanish (e.g. Amo instead of Yo amo) the “I” was to be found everywhere. While looking for the “I”s in the text I was reading just a couple months after I moved to NYC, I found 306 “I am…” contained in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The monologue of the six characters defining their identity based on their relationship with each other made me question how much of me is made of the voice of others and how can I continue to exist in a laguage that is not my own.
Inspired by this I wanted create a single voice wanting to be many at the same time and unable to be at all. Here each one of the sentences extracted from the book and starting with “I am...” silently scroll on an LCD screen emulates a simple machine and a futile desire of being.