Meeting with Your Boulder
Yiran Liu
Royal College of Art
If something could never guarantee any outcome, would people still choose to devote themselves to it? And if so, what sustains that commitment? Inspired by Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, the project reconsiders repetition, not as a form of punishment but as a condition through which meaning might gradually emerge. Combining a three-channel moving image installation with live performance, the work unfolds as a ritualised experience. Through conversations, value-ranking exercises, repetitive questioning, and the physical act of carrying a stone, participants are gradually invited to recognise what they continue to carry—their own Inner Boulder. Drawing upon existential philosophy, ritual theory, and phenomenology, Meeting with Your Boulder translates philosophical inquiry into embodied experience. Rather than asking audiences to contemplate existential questions from a distance, it invites them to inhabit uncertainty through their own bodies, experiencing how meaning is constructed through action, how people negotiate uncertainty, and what they continue to carry when every guarantee has been removed.