ToP phase two - restructured to be a text - Tesse

text only - layout and images not preserved.

TEXT ON PRACTISING

Collect

transitive verb

to bring together into one body or place

to gather or exact from a number of persons or sources

to gather an accumulation of (objects) especially as a hobby

(Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collect)

I have been going to the beach and watching the waves. Listening to them breaking, touching the foam that they spit out. I have been drawing lines on their highest point, the point they reach in the sand before they return to join the rest of the sea. The waves didn’t care about these lines. They washed away the drawings and crept nearer with each hour.

I have been walking through forests on sunny days. My steps crunching on the leaves in shades of green, red, yellow, brown. I have been tying them back to the trees they fell off of, like the girl in Alice’s film taught me: stop the autumn, stop the passing of time. I have also let them go again, set them free to fall to the ground and become the compost for next spring’s blossom. I have been looking at the sky, see the sun rise and set, but not the same each time. Each day a different minute and different place, each season a different length. Never mind all the times it is hidden by the clouds. The moon is more predictable. Round each month, empty each month, always coming back.

I have been walking around these linear paths and found nothing but circles. I thought I was going forward but kept breathing in and out, sleep and wake, eat, repeat. My body keeps making hormones in spans of 28 days - or does it? My body does not want to make the cycle equally big each time, so a daily pill will have to keep it in line.

I have been digging up past voices. Tried to make friends with them, but wasn’t sure if they were meant to be reawakened. I have shaken the walls of a tower to find the histories they hold and how they feel about their future. I have learned that those voices need certain ears. Or that these voices can become melodies to the ears in which they don’t carry meaning.

I have been reading words of repetition, stories retold, reheard, passed through. Each retelling carries the weight of the previous ones and the next. We should be aware of the lips that spoke them before us, the ears that will hear them after we are gone. We should find comfort in the continuation.

‘It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus — that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made my life was more of it?’

(p? On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong)

‘Every woman partakes in the chain of guardianship and of transmission.[…] In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure obtained through the process of transferring. Pleasure in the copy, pleasure in the reproduction.No repetition can ever be identical, but my story carries with it their stories, their history […] Every gesture, every word involves our past, present, and future. The body never stops accumulating’

(p. 121-123 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Trinh T. Minh-ha)

I have been fighting time. I have been finding time. Time has found its way back to me.

I have been feeling the need to always go forward, to grow, become more successful, to follow the structure that society tells you to follow in your life. And yet each day is mostly a repetition of the previous one, and the only way to grow and learn is usually by doing things over and over again. I am trying to find some peace in this. To not feel like I have to either fight or weaponise time, but simply let it flow through me.

Collage

noun

an artistic composition made of various materials (such as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface

a creative work that resembles such a composition in incorporating various materials or elements

hodgepodge

(Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collage)

My practice has never been one of unity. I have always found joy in composing and juxtaposing the different layers of the audiovisual medium to find new meanings in their combinations. For the pre-EYE thematic, I combined “real-life” footage of the beach and the sea with screen recordings of their online representation in data or live-cams. For Chère Alice, the project I started working on after that before I abandoned it forever, I combined archive material of Alice Guy’s films with shots of my research into her and with stop motion or life-action scenes in which I imitate her techniques or her films. In Little Tower, the film I showed in the EYE, I used contrast between the layers of image and sound to make new things come alive.

I think I can go further in these explorations of incorporating differences between the layers. But also in stepping into other media for a bit. In Nan’s thematic, we saw many examples of experimental and hand-made film. What stuck with me most were the chemigrams, where the the image is not created by exposing the negative, but by how you develop it, what materials are used in the developing, and which parts are left undeveloped before they are fixed. There is something organic in this process that really appeals to me. The film Geographies of Solitude by Jacquelyn Mills shows great examples of how something like these chemigrams can be incorporated in a larger film to have moments where the landscape comes alive.

Nan also introduced us to TouchDesigner. Although I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it, I think it is interesting how the software is not made for a linear timeline, such as is the case in Premiere. Instead, you have to think in loops, and each element can have a different looping time. I am curious to see what things can sprout from learning new ways of experiencing time through the tools you use.

Montage

noun

the technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole.

the technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text, or music.

Origin: 1930s: French, from monter ‘to mount’.

(Oxford languages dictionary box on google)

To edit or to mount? Film or installation?

I will always want to chase the magic of the many screens of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s exhibition Oriana as it was at argos in Brussels. The installation shows ritualistic scenes of a group of militant feminists in the forest bathing, washing, relaxing, playing, dancing in increasing degrees of mythical-ness. There is something about how the many scenes were edited and shown without really have beginnings and endings, but simply building and building the more you see of it. It created a completely different experience of time and causality — or lack thereof.

But what I saw in Eva Giolo’s The Demands of Ordinary Devotion, which shows repeating (and many of them circular in shape) motions that come with certain jobs/crafts/motherhood, is that I found it actually works better when shown in a linear, cinematic setting than in a looped, installation one. There is something about making the audience sit down for the entire duration of a film that seems to be doing the same thing each time. Only in this incapacity to move do you notice that it is actually changing and growing and taking you somewhere.

And what to hang it up to?

It could be ecology. How we go against nature’s cyclical time and cut down trees before they are dead. How we go against ourselves as well, as we are made of nature. But also how our presence is not circular enough, we waste non-renewable sources and our “waste” does not actually rot away anymore but only pile up on plastic mountains.

Or imperialism and industrialisation, and the idea that this linear, productive, progressive consideration of time has everything to do with our contemporary and western forms of capitalism, forced down everyone’s throats.

Or it could be mental health. The stress we experience from trying to be only ever linearly productive. The comfort we can find in our routines. The influence our hormonal cycles have on our mental health. The fact that time becomes such a strange thing when the mind is in trouble.

Either way, I need to read, hear, see and learn much more about these possible thematic links. I don’t want to just think about these topics, but also have the actual information. And I think that in the end, I need to choose one of these themes to focus on, at least within one outcome, or else it will all be too blurry.

To Be Determined. To Be Continued.

References

dictionary entries

Alice Guy - Falling Leaves

Trinh T. Minh-ha - Grandma’s Story

Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Jacquelyn Mills - Geographies of Solitude

Eva Giolo’s - The Demands of Ordinary Devotion

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's - Oriana