Paradise
Adam ManA couple of months after my father died, I travelled to the south of Spain. There, in the mountains, I found a place. Every day for one month, I lay down in a hollow in the earth. While lying there, I thought of him. He had been buried in the ground.
I had spent the last days of his life with him. I saw and felt him dying. I witnessed his final breath. I saw him dead.
During that final week, I rarely left the house. Only in the evenings did I go out — to swim in the lake near where I had grown up. In the water, I felt the softness of the surface, the warmth of the air, touched by a gentle breeze.
On the way to the lake, I passed by many people. In each of them — in each of us — I saw and felt our mortality. I sensed a vulnerability we all share, all carry, mostly unspoken, usually hidden.
That sense of shared humanity didn’t last long. Already then — just two months after his death, as I wrote this — it had become a memory. I could barely feel it anymore.
But when I lay in that hollow, close to the earth — naked, still, silent, every day for half an hour — I came closer again to the mortal expression of myself.
At the same time, I had been in transition for almost a year. I had changed my name to Adam. I had started taking hormones. My appearance had shifted. My former self was becoming fictional, and the new one still is.
A few years ago, I began writing about Adam asleep in paradise, from whose body Eve is released. I started imagining Adam in transition — carrying another self within his flesh. Before that release, he was deeply lonely. I began to feel close to him.
Paradise is the first video in which I perform as myself.
Listening to the earth, feeling the closeness of death I found the possibility to appear. And, next to the hollow, I began to raise up dead trees to make them stand again.