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© Vera Schelkina. All rights reserved. Made by whalenessis.
2024
Berlin
Skin to dust
Performative ritual during "Stardust" – the project of Ming Poon

Cover image: Olivia Kwok

Production
Concept, performance, voice
Vera Shchelkina
Sound processing
Haesoo Jung
Video projection
Harshini J. Karunaratne
Props and dust
Tin Wang
Light designer
Raquel Rosildete
Scenography
Sangyeon Lee
Technical director
Frieder Miller
Outside eye
Ming Poon, Nora Tormann, Polina Fenko
Production
Mifrush Production
Venue
Uferstudios
This ritual was part of
Project "Stardust"
My death ritual is born out of key questions in my death research: can we experience dying as a living body?
Can we really foresee this turning point that we all have to take at some point? Can we touch the moment of dying that is always lying in wait for every one of us? Can we sense the living and the dead cells in our body all at once? Through our common dying, can we feel connected to everything and everyone around us?

In my ritual, I want the light to be so bright that we can see with our own eyes how death is happening right now, in the present moment. I want us to actually see ourselves dying, at the rate of forty thousand cells per minute. To see the edge of our skin – the border between us and the rest of the world – disappear into dust. When the body becomes space.
✴︎ Dedicated to my grandfather, Felix, and everyone involved in the SMRTЪ dance piece and Death Lab.

  • Language: English
  • Content note: This ritual involves bright light and dust.

Photos by Olivia Kwok

reviews
Jasmine Grace Wenzel
dance journalist
Skin to Dust by Vera Shchelkina was a meditation on dust and the cyclical, participatory practice of sweeping dust on the floor that could be taken up by anyone in the space. A person started to sweep the dust on the floor, painting rhythmical circles with the brush. From off-space, the voice of the person sweeping the space led us into the performance, telling us that they were recorded 12 days before the performance, having lost 700 million skin cells since then. They would guide us through the journey of the ritual, the routine of shedding skin, creating more dust, and simply the sweeping. Skin is a membrane that faces the exterior world as a medium. While I was meditating on skin as an interface through touch, to loved ones, the narrator would carry on, the sweeper would continue to sweep the dust in cyclical forms, making and destroying the circles. Skin cells, the narrator would disclose, are born by multiplying, dead by shedding and dissolving. We, the visitors were invited to touch our hands, feel the ridges of our own or another hand while being reminded that we are a never-ending source of dust in the process of constantly letting go and dissolving into particles ourselves that will be swept away.

Read full text
Jasmine Grace Wenzel
dance journalist
Skin to Dust by Vera Shchelkina was a meditation on dust and the cyclical, participatory practice of sweeping dust on the floor that could be taken up by anyone in the space. A person started to sweep the dust on the floor, painting rhythmical circles with the brush. From off-space, the voice of the person sweeping the space led us into the performance, telling us that they were recorded 12 days before the performance, having lost 700 million skin cells since then. They would guide us through the journey of the ritual, the routine of shedding skin, creating more dust, and simply the sweeping. Skin is a membrane that faces the exterior world as a medium. While I was meditating on skin as an interface through touch, to loved ones, the narrator would carry on, the sweeper would continue to sweep the dust in cyclical forms, making and destroying the circles. Skin cells, the narrator would disclose, are born by multiplying, dead by shedding and dissolving. We, the visitors were invited to touch our hands, feel the ridges of our own or another hand while being reminded that we are a never-ending source of dust in the process of constantly letting go and dissolving into particles ourselves that will be swept away.

Read full text
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