Expired

Exhibited at London Festival of Architecture & The Barlett Fifteen Show | Film Screening + Talk

Thesis | Design for Performance & Interaction | Master of Architecture | The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

London, United Kingdom

2024

Expired explores the female and queer spatial experience through performance and experimental film. Set in a store, it reflects on how humans serve capitalism through our actions, labor, and desires. Fruits are preserved, labeled, and wrapped—suspended in time to resist its own inherent will to decay, submitting to human will.

Born out of curiosity and resistance, Expired questions what happens when we challenge and subvert expectations—of actions, desires, values. Fruit here is still wrapped, labeled, and preserved—but in a state of rot. Fruit becomes a product of desire and transformation, a metaphor for female and queer bodies. Expired is a biotic fantasy where things seep into the rot, relish in the abject, and bleed out, only to be encased in their own liquids. The project captures this as an intentionally grotesque obsession with decay—a hazy vat of viscera, a metaphor of bio- and sociopolitical issues.

film trailer

Fruits are fleshy. They are soft, they are easily bruised, they change color, they rot. From the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden to the delicate nature of their skin to their fleshy interiors that spill out when their tough skin is torn to the breaking of taboos when bitten—these symbolisms have long been used to signify sensuality, vulnerability, care, identity, fluidity, and fertility. Fruits have an inherent nature to decay, but they are kept fresh against their will so they can function and serve at their utmost freshness. Because of this, they are stickily bitter.

documentation of biotic products across 6 months

The rot is packaged, wrapped, and contained to respond to society's desire to control and sanitize —how even things considered undesirable are commodified.

rot product packaging

vacuum sealed rot product

The final film is a short story on obsession and decay between two women. One day, a customer visits the store and develops a gradual curiosity and obsession with one of the live products. She visits the store again and again, and gets closer to the live product. Their relationship, their inner psyche, and their emotions all start to blend, blur, and mesh together.