FIZ: Daily, I am arriving. Landing within a warm body, a hot town, arriving into the perimeters of the studio, entering into ever-expanding boundaries of relationship. Long before this arrival began, in a night-time street outside a friend’s house, Tamar and I talked about a feeling that was beginning to emerge. A feeling that perhaps all things exist in a cycle, and that within this cycle, that which lies beneath rises to the surface.
This feeling has broadened into a web of interconnected ideas.
I am thinking of a tiny pea of sediment covered over by layers, its shape accentuated with the falling of each new layer until it emerges rocky, shaped just-so due to the tiny indentations on the pea.
I am thinking of whole layers of sediment being buried by new layers of sediment. What was once the seafloor now struck up, buckling and tipped sky-ward as mountain ranges.
I am thinking of an open-pit mine: of locating, digging, uncovering, extracting. Of how this process of mining is cut off from the natural cycle, how in taking-out we ignored the fact that we also need to put-back, to return.
I am thinking of a rock of styrofoam, drifting along the sidewalk. The material providence of this object: styrofoam too comes from the earth. Styrofoam holds within it its past as petroleum, wrenched up from depths, just as petroleum holds within it its past as ancient beings scuttling along the ocean floor. The past exists within the present.
And I am thinking of what we call waste, of reclaiming and reincarnating material that we have collectively deemed as useless. Of the very concept of waste being a mindset, an ideology. And how the act of refusing to see waste as waste, of embracing the hard-to-love parts of nature can also open us to embrace the hard-to-love parts of ourselves.
This morning -sitting half-dressed at my computer- I realised that these ideas are also our method. Tamar and I went into this residency with parallel intentions to explore lovingly, experiment open-endedly, and dive into what it might mean to work together.
And each day we have watched as our particular breed of collaboration has arrived. I say it this way because despite our intentions, it doesn’t feel entirely on purpose.
Collaboration is sticky, it is a kind of mining in itself, a digging-deeper where the hard-to-love parts of each other come to the surface. A practice that is at times painful, where boundaries of ownership are challenged and mine-is-yours-is-mine-is-yours. Collaboration is a kind of waste-collecting, a form of geology. Something said pin-pricking emotions and forming a mountain. The layer-eroding closeness of two bodies in a space continually talking, sighing, crying, scribbling, revolving with and reimagining each other. Mountainous, evaporative, rumbling, abrasive, fractal, cyclical.
TAMAR: I like being out at sunrise, i like being out at sunset, daytime is stagnant, i like being outside while things are changing, shifting, moving, the presence of both grief and renewal. but also because i know i am not, and never will be, stronger than the sun.
I am going to move things around
So that when they come back in,
Things feel different
Do we hate eachother?
The collaboration has ended
We take silence
How do we return to connection?
And then you re-organise,
pushing and pulling, unloading, dumping, becoming
At the end of the conversation fiz gifts Tamar a tuning fork,
Boundaries have been blurred of intimacy and art practice, as we traverse in between, and around boundaries of intimacy. The coalescence is of communication, eroding to open a cavity of care, abundance, layers, trust, irritation, surprise, creating tunnels towards and away from eachother, an irritation out of love. We mirror eachother, and run in the opposite direction. In this cavity, we cry, and see eachother, unknowing to what is calibrating underneath, in the underlands. Who owns what when you collaborate? If we aren’t in the studio together are we still collaborating? Are these challenges normal? Is sharing a studio in itself, a collaboration?
and our back tyres puncture into themselves,
and I crouch down, bend my knees,
splitting from all my cracks
my bottom teeth falling out,
but then I come back to my bones,
And my knuckles,
My backbody,
Humming my blood flow
Fistula tracks,
Pelvis,
My pelvis,
Underlands of my body, discharging from honeycomb weathered borders
I am remembering how art is a way of remembering, learning, thinking, being, relating, feeling, eroding, grieving and transmuting…. And how writing maybe is the uncovering of a moment, the breaking, the strip-ping of dead skin, that which veils the truth, and allows us to access the underland…
Word List:
Underlands
Webs
weave/woven
Tracts
Coalesce
Connection
Decentralise
Cavity
farewell/ending
Beginning
Attune
Extraction
Erosion
Layers
Fractals
Feeling-finding
support/care
Abundance
Lucky country
Percolate
Borders
Channels
Tunnels
Promised land
Reframe
Circular
Cyclical
Citizen science
Ownership
Love
Irritation
Boundaries
Tectonic
Practices:
Tuning Up
Out - of -tuning
Body layers Meditation
Styrofoam Meditation
Silence
Radical Communication
Intervals
References:
Nien Schwarz
Pauline Oliveros
Grace Ndiritu
Ayana Young