Snake Lake_Island Wilding speaks to the snakes of a land we cannot know, namely the Orta Island of the past, the one existing before St. Julius arrived.
Ru Kim’s project is a performance that takes place between water and land setting a speculative narrative about the myth of St. Julius and the removal of the snakes from the island. Through this poetics, the artist wants to rethink the world of “savage” and “civilization” painted in the common imagination by religious rhetoric. Starting from research on hydro-feminism, a feminist positioning on the study of water as a vital resource and element of body and identitarian fluidity, the performance questions the animality of the snakes involved in the legend and imagines that they were actual human beings. Colonial processes, meaning of occupation and conquest, require forms of dehumanization of the subjects to attempt justifying violence. What is there to be found in that distance between the feared unreachable island and those watching from the shore? What aquatic entities witness it all?