“The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.”
Judith Butler
The work of language to describe Meander will inevitably be reductive and yet within language there is a will to evolve beyond its instructions and communicative frequencies - often through the poetic: an affective desire to channel our embodied vibrations through our senses, beyond the sheet of paper that contains it.
And yet, this is not in defence of the poetic as it needs none - it stands as it does within the lived experience of all of us, it’s in support of trying to put to paper what happened in the flow of 10 hours, whilst we the audience sat at the bottom of a river bed.
As a river landform gets to the middle of its course, the water has more energy and volume, the banks are wide due to erosion and the gradient is gentle and lateral. Here we can feel the swinging pendulum of the water’s flow, of a time that runs deep and fast enacting change through a landscape of oxbow lakes and soil deposition.
This is an attempt to uncover some of the traces and deposits of performative energy and images created during Meander.
Dolanbay hangs by his neck on the hazard tape casting an eerie shadow of a flaccid body displaced, in the parking lot.
His stuffed, laden kaki green backpack acts as a reservoir of materials that empties into a holding of space and actions.
He changes clothes, and whilst his trousers hang pinned to the tape in exchange for his neck, he holds a mallet to his head through a slingshot aimed at his forehead: his shaking muscles are fatigued by this impossible stance.
The hard gritted tarmac is populated with folded paper boats. Sharp white-cliffed chalk, water and ink are poured onto them: some of the black flecked boats fall onto their sides, some manage to stay upright.
The white overlaps with the cycling next to him: the chalk travels and John Court steadies himself on the black BMX stunt bike.
We are also constituted through language - called into being - interpellated (according to Althusser) into the self fulfilling prophecy of adhering to a ‘label ‘given.
When the body resists its own interpellation and labelling, could time be an accessory to the violence that befalls it through its resistance to language?
Stretched, twisting, the skin folds on John’s neck turn with him and he marks his circular permanence in black. Assuming a childhood stance in a body of bones now fused and rigid, his arched back coerces him to lean in gradually, closer and closer to the ground.
Is this the surface where, once the spinning stops, we find ourselves as prostrate bodies that point towards the looped repetition of history?
The wooden sticks wrapped in black act as the first and second hands of two clocks running in opposing directions and as they cancel each other out, time stands still between them.
Four sticks, where are the seconds? Did they disappear like the poured water tyre-tracked traces he cycled through?
John whirls between spaces, inner and outer thresholds, onto and into materials, traces and actions, taking them with him into the journeying of repetition and continuity.
‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alli- ance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and. . . and.. . and. . .”’
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari And in this middle the turbulent river fractures into eddies that travel at different velocities, these splinter into further eddies within the initial one - finer allies. Here the fluidity of the water is broken into discrete parts, all interacting and moving in their own way.
The birch tree is felled at night, leafy and splintered it lies on the ground, strip lit with a fluorescence that gets brighter as the day draws to an end but in a converse manner is stripped of its leaves and smaller branches.
Its movement is curtailed, stumped.
A skeleton de-arborised, a weight de-skinned.
Máiréad Delaney spins entangled in it: feet to branch, leg to bark, torso to trunk, her fingers caress, pluck, snap, cradle the loitered leaves and torn twigs that accumulate on the concrete floor. Her body rolls into jagged edges and interrupted rhythms, caught in the branches trying to get back to their former position.
Alastair MacLennan’s score is executed with intention and a stoic presence. The sand demarcates trembling boundaries, long over-trodden. The vases, glassed water vessels, are waiting, prepared, anticipating the white spiked rose stems that Frank Homeyer cradles in his arm.
Bare-footed, Frank’s tricolour ribbons hang and drag from his one lensed spectacles.
He walks the rectangular perimeter pacing himself, standing, looking, facing, us, the wall, the others.
The footprints in the sand are erased with ease, but the marks continue to hold the pressure, the tyre tracks, the dragged branches, the echo of a paced military stance. Frank’s silent vacant stare holds distance, looking onto known abandoned territories.
Joëlle Valterio writes, crumples, throws from the bricked window-shaped opening in the wall, strips of torn paper onto which there is a language unspoken, un-uttered, felt through the stillness of her thoughts.
The paper acts as a vehicle to deliver it to the ground, into more paper differing in colour, thickness and texture. The paper is curled, stretched, cradled, it covers and folds around her body and the space. Language now becomes emptied and sits as potential waiting for the right surface.
Red wool, from brick to pillar, lines and acts as a holding-space for a body suspended mid fall, mid thought, a head wrapped up in formless visions.
The wooden chair moves positions, from wall to wall, accommodating Joëlle’s body as it sheds a papyric exoskeleton of its poiesis.
We’re running out of time, as if it could run out of itself. But it can’t. It won’t. It doesn’t conceive and generate a limit unless we do so for it - and yet it seems to burn through us as images passing, layering, flowing, eddying, forming alliances between memories and memorials.
And its deposits and erosions change us, indelibly.