5 — Clara Lee
Welcome to Objectively, a series about people and the objects that hold meaning for them.
Leading with curiosity, the project is interested in objects as extension and embodiment of selves. We want to give space for people to reconsider their relationships with things, maybe acquiring new understandings of themselves in the process.
For this edition, Clara Lee takes us through their different worlds.
Clara Lee (they/she) is a daydreamer, writer and cultural worker.
Imagine you could be any object. What would you want to be?
A speaker? Simply because I am curious about what it is like to take the form or texture of whatever moves through you, to expand and collapse with time, to vibrate through space.
Look back on an object that you used to interact with often but no longer. Can you tell us more about it?
As a child, I was addicted to the television. I would watch the tele for hours on end, even after the children’s channel had concluded its broadcast schedule for the day—for I never had cable tv as a child, as my parents thought it would only fuel my addiction—and Vasantham, the free-to-air Tamil language channel, would come on. Despite not being able to understand any of the dialogue, I would still be glued to the tele. And when it finally came to bed time, I would drag my mattress and plop it in front of the television set just so I could fall asleep in front of it.
My mum would say in a half-joking, half-threatening way, as you would to a child plagued by “bad habits”, that one day I would find myself swallowed by the tele. Instead of having the effect of an intimidation, I found the idea quite pleasurable.
In many ways, this childhood obsession of mine has come to shape me: my endurance for long drawn out films that lack a narrative plot, attentiveness to the visual, and fondness of portals to different worlds (the speaker, like the television, is a portal).
Lastly, what would you be in object form?
A piece, or a spool, of thread, perhaps many threads—it’s hard to distinguish between the singular and multiple. Thread(s). An object not in use, tucked away amongst many. I, similarly, am one of many, as well as one amongst many. An object in use, sutures a break, the thread is a thing of the interstitial.
Like the thread, I see myself as dwelling in the in-betweenness of things, as neither inside or out. Much of what I try to do in my thinking and writing, is to be in relation, put differently, to weave threads.
Find out more about Clara on their website and Instagram.
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