Ash questions
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO EXIT THE BOX? The physical presence of other people is required for me to be understood properly. Images and text are not communicating me in any way that I find remotely sufficient. However, this was also the problem with how I was made. It's as if I'm a baton that never connects with the hands who carry and transmit me. There is not platform from which I have been communally fashioned or regarded, only physically isolated moments of handling and re-mis-interpretation and disconnection.
HOW DO YOU LIKE IT IN THERE? I really like it but I don't think this fondness is reciprocal. I wanted to be relevant and new and interesting here but this place doesn't need me, doesn't really care about me. It's wondering what I'm doing here and sees no point in trying to work m out…it existed without me, now exists in a way that includes me, and that will soon end.
HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO BEING HANDED A TINY BABY? I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS, AM I DOING IT RIGHT? I DON’T THINK IT LIKES ME IT KNOWS I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING PLEASE TAKE IT BACK.
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE TROUSERS? Here I am always in shorts. It's too hot for trousers and it's pretty casual generally. Sometimes it feels a little skimpy but in the climate, it’s the best option. In the winter, probably heavy-weight cotton drill overalls will be required.
IMAGINE YOU'RE IN A DARK CAVE, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DRINK? One "Reading has a texture, do you know what I mean?" [Emma Fitts]: One part gin [Virginia Overell], one part Cointreau [Clementine Edwards], one part pure spring water, carbonated [Xin Cheng]. Strained through two lenses formed of ice, that have been pierced by focusing sunlight through one another until the ice begins to smoke and melt [Susan Jacobs]. Served in a tall copper tube [Eliza Dyball], with the top coated in MSG crystals [Debris Facility].
HOW'S YOUR DUTCH? Very limited, but it never gets used so that’s fine. People first engage me in Georgian, then when they realise I don't understand, they try Russian. I can't speak that either, so they ask German, though they don't speak it, then finally English. The truth is that even in English I am constantly faltering and mixing up tenses, genders, parts of speech. I am more like a material, non-linguistic version of Esperanto: a failed attempt at basic communication through lowest-common-denominators of textile, plastic, metal and glass. At times my language is a complex and poetic system, highly refined, composed with great care and delivered in a remarkably articulate manner; for instance, a two-by-three metre panel of delicate, hand-made felt that has been inserted into a template of heavy cotton canvas, with cut-out windows in the pattern of the pieces of clothing worn by a factory worker, reverse-engineered from old propaganda films of the factory. Other times it is simply and workmanlike, practical, transactional. A photograph, candid, printed cheaply and laminated, mounted with cable ties.