A Personal Performance

The austere, gray room resembles a makeshift emergency shelter. Sparsely furnished with a lamp, round table and four old chairs, the space echoes with the whir of a rotating fan.

It’s in this setting that Dutch performance and installation artist Ingrid Jejina plays a disaster relief worker.

“I create the space, invite people to come in, offer them a drink and a seat--all the basic comforts they would find at an emergency shelter--in order to try and re-create a warm, homey atmosphere and a certain sense of intimacy,” said Jejina.

She has no makeup on. Her long, wavy hair is pulled back and she’s wearing a plain, pale blue dress with opaque black stockings and weathered sneakers.

In Jejina’s latest work, “Last Bundle/Lost Bundle,” she requests that locals meet her one-on-one, bringing their most precious personal belongings--those they would take with them if they were suddenly displaced from their homes and faced the possibility of never returning.

The possessions can range from diaries, photo albums or trinkets to loved ones or pets.

Jejina has tailored the piece to California’s reputation for earthquakes, floods and fires. The fictionalized room where uprooted disaster victims would seek refuge is actually Jejina’s artist-in-residence studio at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center.

Those who visit Jejina aren’t really victims, they’re participants challenged by her thought-provoking scenarios.

“Of Places Been and Places Seen” is another Jejina work in which she joins a driver in his or her car--a defining icon of Southern California culture--to arrive at a location with a special memory for them.

In both works, Jejina deals with memory and reality. She focuses on the forces of change and how it manifests itself in people’s lives. She helps participants reconstruct memories that serve to define revealing insights into their lives and values.

Marilyn Ellis of Corona Del Mar grabbed her most recent family photo album for “Last Bundle/Lost Bundle” and would have brought her orange tabby had she known cats were allowed to participate.

The two women discussed privately the significance of the photo album and its contents.

“Each meeting with a person is an intimate performance that may take 10 minutes or two hours, depending on the person,” Jejina said.

Interacting with perfect strangers and sharing personal memories is a profession Jejina treasures.

Her own family was displaced by the Slavic wars in the 1990s. Jejina, who speaks five languages, travels the world producing works that attempt to break down the racial, ethnic and religious barriers that have caused wars and disrupted lives.

“I really don’t like all the geographic pinpointing of where I come from or where people are from,” Jejina said. “To me, it’s a form of categorizing and that’s precisely the thing I try to escape, and that’s precisely why I do the work I do--to pull away the territorial barriers, the borders.”

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When she travels across states and nations, she takes two suitcases: a large trunk for her costumes and props and a small, personal carry-on bag.

“When I’m on a trip, I barely take anything personal, nothing that I couldn’t replace,” Jejina said, adding that her few most precious possessions are a wallet-size photograph of her grandmother and her “stones,” or crystals.

“Most of the ‘objects’ or things we think are unique to us are replaceable,” Jejina said. “But because we tend to attach a memory or project an emotion onto it, the object becomes something more.”

Using props, photos and video, Jejina constructs fragments of her interactions with people--especially the gestures of their hands, but never their faces--as a map of the memories left behind.

Hands are the most important part of the body because they are tools used to build and destroy, injure or heal, Jejina said.

Jejina enjoys the interactive element of her work and that it’s so accessible anyone can participate.

“People come in with their own set of memories that are varying and shifting all the time,” she said. “I collect or bundle these memories, including those created from our interactions, into one.”

SHOW TIME

“Last Bundle/Lost Bundle,” performance art by Ingrid Jejina, artist-in-residence studio, Cal State Fullerton Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. April 17, 7 to 10 p.m. Free. (714) 567-7234.