The human world is made up of respective individuals that encountered different incidents. What defined ‘you’ and ‘me’ are the uncountable incidents that developed and changed over time. Thus, it flattened my belief that an individual is just a phenomenon, shaped by outer forces and incidents which occurred in the timeline of their existence. Like a cloud that changes form according to the temperament of the Nature, we develop our characters according to what was done to us.
In this series of work, I collect images and remains of toilet paper from different public toilets that used by people from different backgrounds and incorporate them into my work. Despite of its accessibility, public toilet is a private space in a cubicle shape, and I consider that the act of consume the toilet paper in that private moment is honest and unpretentious. Thus, the traces of human activities imprinted on the toilet paper that I collected are raw and the genuine documentation of human’s consumption behavior.
At the forth and last part of the installation, I include element of audience behavior and interaction into the work. The audiences are invited to either tear the remade toilet paper into pieces and reform it, ignore it, keep it or any other possible ways they could do. Either which way they choose to react or interact with the work, their choice itself will be part of the content and statement of the work.
The worldview of my work referenced on Carl Jung’s tradition
Firstly, I would like to introduce the ‘trigger’/ ’catalyst’. It is a primitive impulse, which leads to human-to-human relationship consumption/interaction in the early stage of the human ego. The trigger will develop and evolve into different form as human grew.
The trigger causes an individual to apply ‘Force’, where the Force is present in human since they were born. The Force is the strength where human apply to tear the human ego archetype apart for use. Average human will adapt to the social rules as they slowly grew up and try to apply the ‘Force’ in a more discreet manner.
I took a roll of clean, unused toilet paper as the metaphor for the human ego archetype. It will be torn off gradually into separate pieces through the process of interaction with human. The effect of being torn develops the character/persona of that individual. The toilet paper was divided into two parts when it is torn i.e. the torn part to be used and the remains with the toilet roll. The torn part was the ego archetype/self that is used to absorb the part that human does not wish to keep; the remaining part left on the hanging roll was like the ‘persona’ that formed as the result of being torn.
The collective experience of being torn as if became the memories that remained in the psyche of the toilet roll. They were as if blended together, sank and merged gradually in the deep unconscious part of our psyche, as the process of sedimentation and merging continues, our experience develops the ego archetype from an initial ego to an ego complex body.
The ego complex body in my work is made up by recycled toilet paper collected from different public toilets. I divided the ego complex body into two parts. Firstly, the conscious part where it takes part in human interaction and secondly, the personal unconscious part that is away from conscious interaction with human.
I collected narratives from different media and articles and printed them on the recycled toilet paper, which represents the ego complex body, and the words are considered as our human’s conscious part. Audiences are requested to tear off a piece from the recycled toilet roll that they prefer as they read through the words in order to complete the work. They can choose to keep the piece that they torn off or to proceed to the next work, which requires them to put the recycled paper into a blender and blend it into paper pulp.
They are requested to make a portrait of themselves in any expression they like using the pulp, then contribute back the picture they made to become one of the part of the new roll.
Hence the new body is born, out of the physical forces by individuals that were shaped in the same manner. The new phase of forming and reforming the self began, where humans are transformed from one phase to another phase by the outer force that they encountered and it came back in a cycle.
