A study for performance
Sri Lanka, 2015.
Picture credit: Igor Afrikyan, Lavoisier Clemente.
Executive producer: Arun Welandawe-Permatilleke
Studio management: Anna Shpilko
Production assistant: Naleem
Every morning around 6 o’clock, I'm disturbed by terrifying music, a very simple analog version of Beethoven's Für Elise — played hundreds of times on loop, coming and going, playing a few meters away from me and then again on the other side of the village. One day, I became furious and jumped out of my bed to track down the source of this sonic evil. It was actually a bread truck, a transparent mobile bakery that annoys everyone in the village from 6am onwards. Then the same day in early evening, I found a local Muslim funeral shop and asked them to wrap me up like a dead body. Then they put me inside of that very same truck, with only leftover bread crumbs strewn around the truck to remind us of its original mission. Lavoisier helped the funeral specialist affix the head covering, Igor attached my feet to the bench with rope so I don't fall along the way, Arun fought with dozens of local kids as they tried to get inside the truck and join me on this journey. Then we started driving, playing the same music as before. People came out to the street, attracted by the familiar melody they are so used to hearing every morning as they buy their fresh bread. But what they saw was a dead body, silently offered to them like the Holy Communion, like something they could probably own (but would never want to) — or something that they themselves will become one day.
Less than an hour later our bread truck has to escape to another village, the Buddhist one (where people neither buy bread from the truck nor know this music), some 20 km away: the Muslim authorities became furious and wanted to take action, both against the funeral shop and the owner of the truck.
Next morning, a few henna-colored bearded men came to the guesthouse where our photographer Igor was staying and requested that he surrender the memory card with all of the images on it—otherwise, they swore to burn down the guesthouse.
Igor says he needed a couple of hours to put all the raw material on a hard drive. In the meantime, he quickly packed his bags and we jumped into a waiting getaway car on the other side of the house and drove for a good 6 hours, all the way to the airport.
