Collapse is a performance and installation that explores the instability and tension between coexisting identities—specifically, the artist and the mother—and interrogates the possibility of inhabiting both fully at once. The work unfolds in a single space that begins as an empty room: undefined, unclaimed, unmarked by identity. Over time, the performer enters and begins to construct the identity of “the artist,” physically shaping the space into a studio—unfolding easels, arranging canvases, lining up brushes, tubes of paint, jars of water, rags. There is care, purpose, and increasing authority as the artist gradually fills the space with intention and presence. She puts on a smock: a quiet declaration of self, of commitment, of return. This moment is the apex of the artist’s identity. She stands in the room as its creator and inhabitant. The room, once empty, now fully contains her.

     But then: the ring of a phone. The artist answers—and as she is on the call moves offscreen, her voice shifts. It’s gentle, familiar, filled caregiving. Prior she had been in the space, the identity of an artist, alone and in silence. Her words reveal she is speaking to her child. Her voice lingers even as her presence from the room is gone. 

     Then, the collapse. Easels topple to the ground with bangs. Canvases fall. Brushes scatter. The constructed identity of the artist unravels. Not by choice, not even by conflict, but by absence—by the pull of another identity asserting itself offstage.

     Collapse confronts the fragility of constructed identities, and how they are often threatened not by external antagonism but by the possibly  internal impossibility of occupying more than one role at once. It poses a difficult and intimate question: Can one fully be an artist and a mother at the same time? Or does the embodiment of one inevitably dismantle the other? This performance is not a rejection of either role but an acknowledgment of the lived tension between them. The space becomes a stage for identity as both performance and possession—a place where selfhood must be physically assembled, and can just as easily be undone.

     The piece resists resolution. There is no return to the studio. No repair. The artist’s tools are not picked back up. What remains is the echo of both roles: the silence of the empty room, the trace of artistic ambition, the memory of a phone call, the aftermath of trying to be two things at once.

     By staging the collapse as a consequence of shifting identity, the work invites viewers to question whether certain identities are inherently incompatible, or whether society, labor, and gendered expectation simply refuse to make space for both. It is a bout the limits of space, time, and self—and the emotional and structural cost of trying to inhabit simultaneously more than one identity.