Occultation

Live performance, 02 min 02 sec, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, 12.08.2026 Performed during the solar eclipse of 12 August 2026, Occultation brings the body into relation with extraction, consumption, and planetary scale. The artist approaches a red Mobil oil barrel, picks up a wooden staff, and plants it in the ground. She takes a red apple from her pocket and bites into it with deliberate voracity, holding the piece in her mouth without chewing. She places the bitten apple on the staff and raises it to head height. After remaining in this position, she lowers the staff, removes the apple, returns it to her pocket, and leaves the frame carrying the staff. The oil barrel remains. Birds continue to move through the surrounding landscape. The apple shifts between food, object, and planetary body, while the oil barrel brings the material history of extraction and fossil energy into the Arctic landscape. The bite becomes an act of consumption: taking into the body while simultaneously marking and diminishing. By holding the piece in her mouth without swallowing, consumption is suspended rather than completed. In astronomy, an occultation occurs when one celestial body passes in front of another, obscuring it from view. Here, the eclipse becomes both condition and structure for the work: a temporary alignment of bodies in which visibility, consumption, and consequence are held in tension. The human body appears briefly within these larger systems, while the barrel and landscape persist after it has departed.