Signs of a Nest: An Installation by Susan Sentler

Concept, camera and editing: Susan Sentler
Performers: Chan Sze-Wei, Yarra Ileto and Valerie Lim
Sound: Hajsch, ‘Für Cleo 3’ from the album 1992 (1992) and At home (2016) by Zeekos Perakos

This work by Susan Sentler, lecturer in LASALLE’s School of Dance & Theatre, reflects on signs that are becoming lost in their material sense, only to be held in virtual images. These images resonate in the landscape of our bodily memory and recall material traces. Signs of a nest explores ‘nesting’ as an abstracted, repeated ritual, triggered by such images.

Referring to French historian Jules Michelet, Gaston Bachelard writes in The poetics of space (1958) that ‘the form of the nest is commanded by the inside’. An embodied imprint, the nest becoming one with the material of the place, one with the image.

Having travelled widely and lived in many cities over the past 30 years, Susan Sentler has acquired what she describes as ‘a honed somatic sense of noticing’. Through this sense, she focuses on everyday details, accumulates them through photographic and moving images, and places them into poetic assemblages. These assemblages serve as ‘buoys’, helping her to navigate and anchor from place to place.

Since arriving in Singapore, Sentler has been capturing images that connect her to its landscape. Some of her first images were of dwellings in HDB flats that will likely disappear.

Signs of a nest was created in 2016 for Abeerance 8, a performance platform in London, and The Substation, Singapore. At LASALLE, she tests the potential of the performance as a durational and evolving installation that can be viewed inside and outside the gallery. The installation includes film, photography, sound and live performance.

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View photos on Flickr

Cover image courtesy Susan Sentler, 2017