Story Hole
Are you inside a story? And which story? When do you enter? When do you exit? Are there others? Can you hear the narratives all in once? Can you collapse them, choose new ones?
Story hole was an invitation to experience discrete stories and the worlds they emanate. In each of over a dozen tents set up throughout the Brooklyn Peace Center, we read aloud texts that were selected to be in conversation with the concept of stoma—mouths, wounds, and holes we tear in the saturation of contemporary experience. From Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to Lu Xun’s 呐喊, we illuminated ideas as physical, ephemeral worlds, and passed through them together.
The term stoma, from the Greek στόμα (“aperture”), is our guiding metaphor. Stomas are openings, holes, mouths, wounds, and sometimes a deliberate stab into the saturation of contemporary experience.
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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
By Jelaluddin Rumi
Translated from Persian by Coleman Barks and John Moyne