ANA WEEK 4 AT JOSHUA TREE

24th November 2019, 7.46 am Joshua Tree

An intensive weekend finalising the video component for the installation/performance event on the 30th November.  Re-listening to the stories, trying to connect their stories of the desert and my 'story' (the score response to them) in the desert.  I am happy that each story, so far, has evolved a 'unique' final narrative.  There are some structural similarities - the 11 minutes duration, the 11-1 minute substructure within, but like the audio, each has a different nuanced balance between the elements of sounds, language(s), the two 'agents' within the story - them and me. This has also brought challenges,  the diversity needs to also support an equal level of 'appearance' in front of the other (remember, I am using this term always in the Arendtian sense).  Depending on the narratable/narrating subject I have had to take very different action, each and every time.  My dialogue (again now I am referring to the 'dialogical' component of the video)  with some of them could have lasted hours of what Cavarero refers to as the "feast of exhibition and appearance..." where there is no narcissism as "the one does not look at himself, but gives himself to be seen" (Zambrano in Cavarero, p. 86), and I add, in this, the emergence of transgressing modes of dancing with and for others can begin to take place. In other cases (and here a cooking analogy), the 'feast' may not be immediately offered, I have to beat, stir, season the material to invite the flavours come out.

Earlier last week, I said that I would begin my response to the responses.  I made an audio, I have to upload! Amber's story of moving her mom to a new house, towns that no longer exist, absorbed (annihilated?) by a present that clashed in its vision of the future, Clara's memories of the actions that took place in a shared household brings images of moving, rolling, unrolling, close proximity of bodies, Damaris' 'negative structures' as she posted last night "a meeting-up of past and present; moving time against captured time", time captured, in my case the object a projection forward.

.....it is extremely raw, but I want to capture for now and unpack later in writing....it is 13 minutes long, I love how the number of the next sequence is beginning to pop here and there...



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25th November, 2019, 10.11pm Joshua Tree

Live streamed thoughts of the day.  See the live-stream page.
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26th November 2019, 9.07 am Joshua Tree

Sunny, bright and cold.  Hard to believe that yesterday we were under sand and wind all day. This morning I read Damaris' poem of teh woman walking and listened to Clara's word/composition.  I recalled (not quite sure why?  perhaps the image of the woman walking....and her footprints), this short story written a few years ago....  my response to Damaris', the woman's story before she enterd the desert (except that now much more matters than the boy...)

There are two more stories-  so far I have written 3, there should be five. Four main stories-  with a short non-sequitur about Jonas and the Whale separating the four into two sets of two...me and numbers.....

Video editing now.
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26th November, 2019, 11.37 pm Joshua Tree

For Damaris Ferrer, fellow walker of strange lands...

Woman walking through dessert sands 

that unformed from rocks long ago....

Returned home after the dance

The state of my desert dancing boots after the event at Rubens Ranch, Coachella.

28th November 2019, 19,15pm Joshua Tree

I've lost a day somewhere. I blame technology, time loses value.  All waking hours and minutes passed on to finalising the event, in two days.  Today, final edits, paper folding a mock of the way in which tomorrow I will 'dress' the dancing princesses with the thermal blankets.

Ahh I remember,  yesterday 27th November, afternoon into early evening, all princesses were installed.  But I forgot to take a picture.... when I left the studio last night a storm was brewing...it rained all today, snow on higher ground. The ground should be softer on Saturday...

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29th November 2019

For tomorrow-  join us on site at BoxoPROJECTS or via our live stream in this blog, starting 2.30pm Joshua Tree time (PACIFIC STANDARD TIME).

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30th November

the event- see the live stream page...it will be there in full soon.

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1st December. Joshua Tree 19.41pm

Bringing the exhibition down and packing it to go to Miami.  A quiet ritual done on my own for the most part, Bernard joins me in the afternoon.  Eva steps in for breakfast, a conversation about art and women, about dialogues and mutual appearance, Eva gets me.. I have a new friend in Joshua Tree.

Each dancing princess is now carefully tucked away, vacuum packed in fact, resting inside the box for the journey East. There is something that echoes the history of this place... the history of me as well.  About to go back east.

There is so much that needs to be written, I will take time but I will do so. 

In the meantime, a very short story about returns....written 3 or maybe 4 years ago, during my voluntary exile in Athens (there is something in me,  telling me, perhaps it is once again, time to move on...).

An Interlude:  Out of the Belly of the A Whale

Into hostile territory.  The landscape around me presents itself as unfamiliar although it was a place I used to call home.

A gasp for air, water spurts out of my lungs, the new air feels insufficient; too thin and clear, no longer thick with smells, lacking sense.  Inside I could tell the time of day by the changing air:  morning, algae green and prairie grass, midday moonlight silver sardines and white bait, evening acrid death of night, as a blind prey mistakenly entered the gullet of the whale.

This new thin air is unfamiliar, an air with no smell that offers no sign posts in this vast sea of land, empty vapours suspended in time.

I miss the whale, her grey cavern, full of echoes and sounds reverberating in her chamber, rhythms short and rhythms long, 

I miss the whale, her speed, dropping and falling, in a never ending ebbing and flowing gravity-less state, a place-no-place, 

[Ecstatic]

I miss the whale, her whistles and calls that as time passed I began to understand as a mirror of her: at times something akin to happiness, others to sadness and grief,  others ...red rabid destructive rage. 

I find myself unstable although on hard, dry land, listening for a pathway into the blinding light. 

[I am both Jonas and Whale.....]