The project is based on the idea of queering the “sculpture garden” through augmented reality performative acts.
The first iteration can be experienced through a QR code at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA.
Someone Will Remember Us is a sculptural-performative Augmented Reality (AR) project based on the idea of queering and decolonizing the Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals of the "sculpture garden". The project explores how AR can be used as a political tool to create liminal portals of queer time and space. There is something very interesting about Augmented Reality: if you put something in this technology, it almost feels like a ghost and this resonates to the feeling of queer bodies existing in a constant state of in-betweenness. Queer bodies are hyper-visible and hyper-invisible at the same time. Exploring an alternative garden through your personal device is like an intimate portal to a space cannot be visible through the naked eye. It is a parallel universe that requires an invitation, it requires consent.
The first iteration of the project is at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA. The goal is to expand it in notable sculpture gardens around the world. The audience can experience it through their mobile devices, scanning qr codes on top of sculptural pieces-traces around the garden. The project is realised with the collaboration of queer performers and artists. Their bodies are being 3D scanned and later transformed into digital sculptures accompanied by performative acts and a poetic manifesto that radically transforms the space.
“Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time" is a lyric from a poem by Sappho, the Archaic Greek poet from Lesvos island (c. 630 – c. 570 BC). Sappho was considered “the tenth muse” and resonates to the present as the quintessential lesbian ancestor. In the queer sculpture garden, everything starts with deviating the idea of “the Muse”, the source of inspiration for the creative “Man”. The queer muses emancipate themself from His gaze; they create, observe, occupy, vandalize and have agency. They transform between time and space. These bodies perpetually observe; deviant bodies challenging Eurocentric, heteronormative colonial ideals–the muse, the victor, the mother (of the nation). These bodies are not merely digital ghosts that disappear the moment you close the app; these bodies use technology to remind you of their eternal existence, they are bodies of bloody disgrace engaged in techno-deviant resistance.