Rues de la Fraternité·e, Participatory performance and sound and visual installation
Photographed 3 June 2023, for the Nuit Blanche 2023 and the curatorial project “actes de langage” (acts of language) by simona dvorák & tadeo kohan. The project takes as its subject a place and its name: rue de la Fraternité (Street of Brotherhood) in Montreuil. The aim is to deploy, question, appropriate, update and set in motion the word ‘fraternité’ and what it inspires and evokes.
Through interviews with a group of women, I composed a polyphony of words and testimonies, questioning representations and alternatives to this symbolic and gendered term.
Find a corner on the floor and start building a house of threads.
Think about what it would be like to make a house of threads, sit with the idea for a while, think about the (im)possibilities.
Construct a house from memory, an old home, a part of a home, an imagined home or any other place that comes to mind.
I am obsessed with the texture of tree bark in the wild. Nooks, crags, and crannies constantly beckon the lens of my camera as I lag behind my family of hikers, documenting every strange shape that catches my eye. I am fascinated by the impulse to mark-making on a living thing. Yesterday, I came upon row upon row of vandalized trees in a State Forest.
The idea of tattooing a person against their will evokes images of slavery and genocide but maybe my metaphor means I am too shocked-sensitive to violence. The ritual scarification of nature is benign for many people. Cutting through cork is a form of proof: a testament of love from Robin Hood to Maid Marian, a memory engraved in a blackboard that will outgrow your body, a permanent way to state ‘I was here.”
Birch trees seem to like railways, you travel through them as you enter Glasgow, and Berlin and then east to Moscow and Siberia. An endless shuttering of birch trunks through the train window, their verticals marking the space. It isn’t monotonous, it is even reassuring. They accompany my journeys, anticipated and remembered. I look them in the eye.
Recently these tree trunks have begun to people my paintings and drawing. They sit about a dining table. A felled tree between them like a family secret, or a dead man laid out. What do they do with something that is part of them?
View from Darwin cemetery, Falklands/Malvinas, dec 2018.
Retour sur le cimetière de Darwin
Les disparus 1.
Ma chronique du 25 octobre 2022 (Crown Letter week 120) revient sur une visite au cimetière de Darwin en décembre 2018. « Argentinian cemetary / Cementero argentino », indiquait le petit panneau à l’entrée de la piste cailloutée mais aucun drapeau argentin ne flottait sur le quadrillage de croix blanches dominant le vallon de Darwin. Une centaine de tombes anonymes portaient alors l’épitaphe “Soldado argentino solo conocido por Dios“. L’armée argentine avait abandonné à l’ennemi la charge d’inhumer ses morts. Deux fois abandonnés. Deux fois trahis. Ils reposaient dans une steppe glaciale balayée par un vent féroce. Faute de normalisation des relations entre les deux pays, les premières visites venaient seulement d’être autorisées, trente-six ans après la fin de la guerre. Les fleurs et les rosaires en plastique que je photographiais étaient tout neufs. L’épitaphe avait quelque chose d’une prière. Comment ne pas en appeler à la grâce du Seigneur ?
Totem and Taboo, Paint and pencil on paper, May 2023
Letter from Glasgow: A bed of lichen, a table of moss.
It’s going to be a Bibiliotheque Imaginaire, she writes, an imaginary library, to wear on her head. Can you send me the title of a book, real or imagined? The first thing that surfaces is moss. My book would be a bed of moss, but I need another syllable. A mattress of moss? No, a mattress feels too awkward and practical, a table then. She likes it. A Table of Moss and Other Stories? Yes, it might include Un Lit de Lichen, I text back.. Something solid and permanent like moss, or lichen. But my predictive text wants to write libido, not lichen. Although it is true my devotion to lichen might have something libidinous in it. And I have long dreamed of beds of lichen and moss, and sometimes trees are asleep in these beds.
As I was day-dreaming titles I had not been thinking of the camps or of the actual, not mossy, but decidedly urban mattresses that are left behind after each clearance, the one thing that people cannot run away with. The mattresses are always the first things to be brought, dragged over pavements, and the things that remain after everyone has been moved on. The beds of moss, or lichen, indicate a world where it is safe to lie down anywhere, where nobody claims possession of the territory and where you can gently dream. A sort of permanence, old as lichen, as libido.
Barbe Espagnol (Spanish Moss), Digital Photograph, Lafayette, Louisiana, May 2023.
I flew South like a migrating bird, towards the Atlantic Ocean and the petrochemical plants. Between the storied buildings of academia and the strip malls of urban sprawl, there was a carefully curated swamp, complete with do-not-feed alligators and roving turtles.
Témoins – Nous – Persistance/ Witnesses – We – Persistence
Photography made during the long-term project Campagne de Paris, paysage triangulaire (2017-2023) on the Triangle of Gonesse (Paris region) – agricultural land in the process of artificialization.
Waiting for the boat to Orkney, Scrabster ferry terminal, Caithness, April 2018
Letter from Glasgow: Shadow Boxing
Last week in London, spring was fizzing through branches of willow and lime, leaves unfurling in brightest yellow-green. I got off the train at Kings Cross and took a bus up the hill to Angel, through the blossom and the new leaves. I met my aunt at the top of the hill and she led me to a pub with a high-ceilinged back room, out beyond the bar and the noise, where we could talk. Sunlight striped the dark wood floor and the almost empty space was a relief.
My aunt bought us drinks and we sat at a table in the corner. She sat beneath the window, a dark figure against the sun, but light fell also from a smaller window at the opposite diagonal of the room. We were talking about death and of people close to us who found themselves suddenly in its shadow.
On dit, là-bas, que l’univers est né d’une seule goutte de lait. On dit, là-bas, que les arbres sont des cornes d’abondance et qu’ils pourraient nourrir encore longtemps l’humanité.
We say there that the universe was born from a single drop of milk. It is said there that the trees are horns of plenty and that they could feed humanity for a long time to come.
If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? … I went to wander in the woods at the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring. T-shirts to snow and back again. Tiny saplings were pulling themselves out of the undergrowth, bluebells hesitantly unfurling their petals, deer footprints still fresh in the mud. We walked for a few hours with the sound of birds whistling in the air above us and the river rushing underfoot. Every 10 minutes, the air was punctuated by gun shots. Louder and louder they came in a cascade of rounds fired with deafening precision. The explosive noise of slick bullets raining on targets or beer bottles or whatever was propped up on the back porch of the house next door barricaded by pickup trucks parked on the front lawn. Wishing it would end, we walked to our car in silence.
April. It was Passover, it was Easter. Then it was Orthodox Easter.
We spent Passover week travelling, setting out on the first day and taking the long train north through Scotland, from Glasgow to Inverness and on to Thurso, the furthest point of the Scottish mainland. I had been invited to a seder but had had to say no as we would be travelling. I was curious as I have never been to a seder, although a friend once shared with me the hard boiled eggs in salt water and bitter herbs, one April in the Hebrides.
Cosmic Egg Rolling, Liza Dimbleby and Ruth Maclennan, 2023
Letter from Dunnet Head: cosmic egg rolling.
I saw a huge form, rounded and shadowy, and shaped like an egg… Its outer layer consisted of an atmosphere of bright fire with a kind of dark membrane beneath it… From the outer atmosphere of fire, a wind blew storms. And from the dark membrane beneath, another membrane raged with further storms which moved out in all directions of the globe. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias
Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval mystic and nun, had a vision of the world as a Cosmic Egg. She depicted the earth as a chaotic ball of confusion, contained within an egg-shaped universe. The four winds blow through this universe, concealing and revealing the heavenly bodies. Hildegard believed that the winds would eventually articulate a harmony with this chaotic world and the people in it, establishing calm and clarity, inside and out.
On Easter morning we painted the eggs that we had hard-boiled, then placed them in a box, and drove with our children to the nearby cliffs where the lighthouse stands, on the most northerly point of Scotland. The winds were blowing hard from all directions. The islands of Orkney were hidden by mist and the curved horizon was all sea and sky. We pushed our way through the fat and tearing gales and rolled our painted eggs at the edge of the world, through the slopes of heather, putting our hope in ritual, repetition, and the force of the winds.
Sculpture. Materials, ostrich egg, acrylic gypsum fibre glass. Size 125 x 60 x 20cm.
When I made this series of anthropomorphic hammers I saw them as weapons rather than tools. To weaponise, the weaponisation of, Easter and egg — a free association of words circling round my head and not finding any order.
THE UNTOUCHED- Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica, 2023.
A primary forest is a virgin forest, which has remained identical over the centuries without the presence of man transforming it. It has therefore never been exploited, fragmented or cleared by human hands and has remained intact over time.
Patagonia, between Puert Madryn and Rio Gallegos, March 2023
Steppe
L’intensité lumineuse augmente ou décline. La couleur et le volume des touffes d’herbe et de bruyère varient selon l’inclinaison des rayons du soleil. Le ciel se brouille parfois de nuages. Depuis vingt heures, la steppe patagonne défile sous nos yeux. Le spectacle est envoûtant. A l’avant du pont supérieur de l’autocar, il est panoramique. Un routard assis à côté de moi commente : c’est un film mais c’est mieux qu’au cinéma. Illusion d’optique : nous ne sommes pas assis dans un fauteuil immobile, c’est notre fauteuil qui se déplace dans une steppe d’une monotonie fascinante. La route coupe en ligne droite selon un axe nord-sud un plateau d’où émerge rarement un relief comme une bosse sur un crâne dégarni. L’autocar double un poids-lourd qui plafonne à 80 kilomètres-heure. On voit venir de très loin le camion qui remonte en sens inverse. Les chauffeurs se saluent peut-être comme des caravaniers. En train, il arrive qu’on se croie en mouvement alors que c’est le train voisin qui bouge. On s’en assure en regardant de l’autre côté. La pampa n’offre aucun repère.
On Easter Sunday at 7:36 am, a loud alarm sounded on the mobilephones of the residents of Hamburg. It was a warning that there was a major fire in the area. Residents were asked to avoid the city, stay at home, and keep their windows and doors closed as dangerous toxins were in the air.
It was difficult to extinguish the fire. It took days until the wind dispersed the toxic clouds that had spread.
I do not know if and how much of the invisible water under our feet, which we walk on every day, was used to extinguish the fire. I had never really paid attention to the small numbered blue ‘water’ signs until now.
Témoins – Nous / Witnesses – We
Photography made during the long-term project Campagne de Paris, paysage triangulaire (2017-2023) on the Triangle of Gonesse (Paris region) – agricultural fertile land in the process of artificialization.
The soil on my plot is rich and black. As I dug it for the first time last year I uncovered odd pieces of bone and brick, crushed metal and plastic, then long reels of exposed 35mm camera film, buried in the ground. I pulled out these crooked ribbons entangled with soil. I thought of my own cartridges of un-developed films twenty five years old, coalescing back to their original darkness. Of how I had always put off getting them developed, how I feared seeing the images that I had shot, leaving that encounter until later, and later, and too late, until the images would have quietly closed over once more. I still have those film cartridges and now I cannot develop them for the proof of disappearance would be too definite. I would have to confront the dark unreadable space of losses incurred by obstinate deferral. I like the thought that some traces of past light might still lie inside the coils of film, hidden from view, but I do not want to disrupt them. I thought of the way that sometimes things can’t be said, or depicted, for a long time. Gestation is an unknown quantity, it demands darkness, hiddenness, but this can be overdone, risking the permanent obliteration of the image, oblivion.
Vues de l’avion, la ligne droite est une courbe et la planète est un tout où tout se tient, souvent la tête en bas. Seen from an aircraft, the straight line is a curve and the planet is a whole where everything fits together, often upside down.
On avait tellement parlé, j’avais l’impression de connaître toute sa famille. Le jour d’avant, on jouait aux cartes. Quand on a l’aviation ennemie au-dessus de la tête tout ce qu’on peut faire, c’est jouer aux cartes. Si la bombe tombe à moins de 5 mètres, la tranchée s’effondre et tu meurs dessous, si elle tombe plus loin et qu’elle atterrit sur une pierre, c’est bon.
Tous les deux, on était décidés à quitter la tranchée sans attendre les ordres. Abandon de position, c’était la cour martiale mais on n’avait pas le choix, il fallait sortir de notre putain de tranchée. Finalement, on est sorti tous les cinq. A ce moment-là, on ne savait pas que la première ligne s’était déjà retirée et que les gradés nous avaient laissé tomber. On a attendu la nuit. Avec les fusées, c’était éclairé comme un stade de foot. On a emporté nos fusils même si on avait plus de munitions. C’était bête mais dans la guerre, sans fusil, tu te sens nu.
Hypothèse : si le sentiment de liberté trouvait dans la brume les moyens de s’exprimer? Pendant plusieurs journées, nous avons expérimentés ce principe, ma fille, ses amis et moi-même. Nous avons dessiné un avenir flou – libre dans le flou, et nous l’avons filmé. Nous avons dansé l’invisible, chanté dans les ombres, éprouvé la nouvelle ère trouble qui nous entoure, nous avons respiré, ensemble, dans le futur.
Photography made during the long-term project Campagne de Paris, paysage triangulaire (2017-2023) on the Triangle of Gonesse (Paris region) – agricultural land in the process of artificialization.
