DONGLAI
MENG

The inspiration of the project I did at Witte Rook came from Marco Polo. Actually, no one knows if he had really been to eastern Asia or not, for me the truth is not relevant, but his book, ‘the travels of Marco Polo’ indeed evoked western people the first idea of a far mysterious world. In order to realize this status of fantasy, I constructed a new worldview where there are some Hairy-Legs creatures living together with us, they can be human beings, animals, plants, they are everywhere, and I am an agent of the Hairy-Legs organization who came to Breda to collect the information of local hairy-legs. In the text ‘The Travels of Marta Polo’ (Marta is my Western name), I recorded what ‘I’ (the agent) saw and experienced in Breda. The elements I collected in the streets of Breda - the red ants, the chickens in the park, the carpets in the shops, or the urban legends, etc., were restructured to create an atmosphere of combining emptiness and reality. Hairy-Legs is regarded by me as a bridge to connect to my subconscious. It is a symbol, an absurdity built on rationality, and a conflict that is difficult to coordinate eternally between inner and outer self. And in the context of Breda, it becomes a representative of entering a state of fantasy, designed to evoke the sensitivity of everyday situations. As I wrote at the end of the story:

“In Breda, there are so many interesting things that the people of the city may never know or care about or simply ignore. Maybe they don’t believe in the existence of hairy-legs, maybe they’ve seen it before; it doesn’t matter, just next time when they walk over the red ants on the road in front of the station, when they are attacked by a rooster in park, when they decide to try a special menu, or when they are standing on Hoge Brug and overlooking the beautiful scenery of the river, or they walk through all corners of the city again, there may be something new that will sprout in their hearts.”