Duration - 2hours 14minutes
Who is allowed to belong, and at what cost? In this endurance-based performance, Aparna continues her inquiry into the quiet weight of expectation and the conditional nature of presence. Across generations, women have been the unseen architects of home—its foundation, its memory, its rhythm—yet rarely its owners. Their belonging is provisional, measured through labor, not agency; through care, not claim.
Set in a wild field, Belonging Is A Debt unfolds as Aparna moves between two chairs placed at a distance—an action repeated until exhaustion. This physical traversal echoes the emotional and social distances embedded in domestic roles: to remain in motion, to serve without pause, to never quite arrive.
Her endurance is exposed yet unanswered, her fatigue visible but unrelieved. The audience is scattered across the meadow—silent, watching, or perhaps not. From different vantages, they witness fragments: a figure moving, a breath caught, a collapse delayed. Are they watching? Judging? Indifferent? Do they see her?
In the days leading to this performance, two abandoned mountain dogs arrived on the land—lost, dependent, searching. Their presence unsettles the piece in quiet, haunting ways. They too hover between inclusion and estrangement, seeking connection but unable to name it, tethered to the land by necessity rather than choice. They didn’t consent to be left behind. Their bodies—hopeful, loyal, bewildered—ask another question: What does it mean to be bound to a place by need, not welcome? To survive in the margins of someone else’s belonging? The performance becomes not just a meditation on human roles, but a broader contemplation of care, abandonment, and the price we place on presence. In this open space, Aparna’s isolation is mirrored in theirs. Her running mirrors their circling. Her breath, their panting. Her unanswered exhaustion, their quiet waiting. Belonging Is A Debt suggests that belonging, far from being a given, is a transaction—one that demands proof, performance, and sacrifice. Whether human or animal, to be present is not always to be accepted. And in that distance, something is lost.