Never Ending Story is a performance proposal that memorializes the many people that our children leave behind as they become who they are.

Designed to be performed in the windows of a Tattoo studio, Never Ending Story is a performance, installation, and audio walk performed by me and my daughters.

It is a memorial that makes visible the many iterations of a child that a parent meets, knows intimately, and says goodbye to as the child becomes themself anew. It centres the embodied, repetitive acts of mothering, specifically how the body stores memory, the intimacy of touch, and the many rituals and work involving water. The memorial makes space for the void that is left when the person we knew becomes another person. It asks how we might memorialize a loss that is necessary, a loss that makes space for growth. It measures time in the everyday encounter, in the daily ceremonies that express the ways we grow together.

The performance will unfold in stages to an audience of passersby. In the shop window, audiences will see Calla and Geneva applying temporary tattoos to my skin. Each tattoo will feature a word or short phrase, signifying something they used to say, a game they used to play, a way they used to be, or something they do now that I know won’t last for much longer. They can choose to apply the tattoos wherever they’d like on my skin. The performance features participatory offerings and an installation.