White Fur｜A Site-Responsive Performance by a Finnish Lake
Creation and Performance｜Yu-Hsuan Wu
In early spring 2026, I took part in a six-day, five-night body workshop in a Finnish national park. While walking through Sámi traditional lands, I kept seeing what looked like white flowers. They were scattered in small round clusters on branches, along the riverbank, and in the marsh.
I thought they were very beautiful, like some kind of blooming white feathery flower. Later, as I walked deeper into the landscape, I realized they were not flowers, but fur from the body of a dead animal.
The fur had fallen away from its body, carried by the wind, taken by the water, caught by the branches. I was startled: death was still scattering beauty. Or perhaps the source of those scattered forms of beauty was, in fact, death. I could not even identify what kind of animal it had once been.
The next day, each of us was asked to make a small performance. I wanted to respond to those white tufts of fur.
Beside the marsh and the lake, I put on a piece of animal fur I had found in the cabin, covering my back with it, and began to crawl on all fours.
Like a real animal, I moved through the grass, branches, and damp ground. I felt unexpectedly joyful. It was not an imitation of an animal, but more like suddenly returning to a home that belonged to the animal. With the fur on my back, my body could move naturally, smoothly, close to the ground.
After crawling to the opposite bank, I slowly lowered myself to the earth and stopped. My breathing became slower and slower, as if my body had safely fallen asleep there. But when I woke and slowly stood upright, the fur naturally slipped from my back.
I had lost it.
I walked into the water. I was no longer the animal covered in fur. I moved forward very slowly, looking back again and again at the fur left on the shore. There was reluctance in that gaze, and also a desire to hide inside it again. The fur was a layer of protection, an old identity, a familiar shell. And I was slowly leaving it behind.
There were many aquatic plants in the water. They formed my path, and they also blocked it. Every step was unstable. I was really sinking, being tangled, tripping. My body had to renegotiate with the marsh, the water plants, the depth of the water, and the mud. The farther I moved forward, the closer I came to the other shore, and the less I needed to rely on that old layer of fur.
When I reached deeper water and was almost submerged, I suddenly began to swim. In that moment, I was no longer the body that could barely move after losing its fur. I had adapted to the water and become another kind of animal, regaining the ability to immerse myself in a new place.
Finally, I climbed onto the shore and ended the performance. One of my classmates later said that when I submerged and surfaced again, she could no longer see my face clearly. She only saw my hair floating on the surface of the water. In that instant, the shape of my hair reminded her of those scattered white tufts of fur, the things I had once mistaken for flowers.
I was indeed not that dead animal, but those white tufts of fur that had already left the body. Perhaps those white tufts still longed to return to their original body, believing that only then could they be whole. But perhaps, after leaving, they were still complete beings in themselves. They were no longer attached to the animal they had come from, nor were they merely remains. They had become another form of life, scattered in the wind, in the water, on the trees, and across the marsh.