Being Keepers is the name I give to a practice of protecting the life force from institutional erasure. The title first emerged as a vague intuition in 2020, during a year when I had consciously decided to slow down. It grew out of my earlier series Just Keep Going, which began during my Master’s research in 2017. The shift in title is not mere wordplay: it marks a move from an activism of doing, the drive to achieve something, to an activism of being, the act of simply remaining present.
The works are made through Line Language, my first language, a pre-verbal way of sensing and connecting that comes before speech. It moves in three ways. Yarn, red hemp yarn stretched through space, calibrates distance and creates Ma, the intervals where things can breathe. Thread gathers fragments of daily life over time: photographs, notes, logs, the traces of my children’s play. Batabata honours the body when it falls down.
Together they form a Kekkai, an autonomous, porous boundary. It is not a wall but a membrane, where everyday life can remain honest and present. Being Keepers is a quiet refusal of the demand that survival be proved, explained or performed as resilience. Laundry, gardening, tidying the living room at night became acts of care and of world-making. Simply continuing to exist within this boundary, without being erased, is the work itself.
Batabata Practice emerged from within this series — see Batabata Practice.