Isaac Azzopardi Dissertation of MA Contemporary Art Practice by rca-issuu

Isaac Azzopardi Royal College of Arts Contemporary Arts Practice: Critical Practice

There is an island, a speck of scorched land; the centre of Pangea, the dawn of geological history; the centre of the Mediterranean, the dawn of western history. The haze stills the land. Heat humidity light vibrate into a heady lull on the dusty golden brown fields.

London

Back in London Mother called me. We spoke about her blood tests. Everything is fine but the doctor said it seems you have a deficiency in vitamin D. The levels came out low in both tests. Has anyone ever told you about this? No. It is probably genetic, and you have always had it. I laugh. It’s definitely genetic then. She laughs. It’s funny because no wonder the deficiency. No wonder it’s her. The light at home is something else.

I moved to London recently. I like the distance. An escape-distance; away from home, away from everything I knew and holds me together. My together is looser now, I can wriggle the pieces and attempt an improved assembly. That is, until everything I know and holds me together shifts to here. It is an easier life, somehow. More leaned down, more focused, straighter to the point. A less is more of sorts applied to a day-to-day life, a todaytoday mindset, one step at a time. I get places here too. Walking, cycling, the odd bus, it feels fulfilling. Getting somewhere feels like a big check on the to-do list, it is a task. I like it. At home I drive. Everyone drives. Getting about is not as easy; walking and cycling and the odd bus are not efficient. It sounds lazy, until the winter ebbs, spring blooms and the six-month torching, scathing heat of summer starts in May until the last heat is washed away by the October rains. Sort of. The mother of the torching, scathing heat is the sun.

The light in London is easy on the eye; heavily filtered, makes for a gentler shadow. Even on sunny days, it is pleasant it draws people out. At home the light is pervasive, it is strong, heady, pulsating. It pierces through; shadow is slashed out, thick as if it were matter. I remember following the lightshadow line across a wall, one hand on the hot stone and one hand on the cold stone as the shadow shifted with the moving sun, stretching up across the wall and then retreating. At home the light is overpowering. The light is painful. It hurts my eyes. The land is lit, soaking up and radiating heat, the houses the streets the walls the trees etched out in detail, as the sun slashes shadows as angular dimensions of coolness that shift through the day. Everything is dried up, the surface is dead. The landscape is saturated, shot-through with pulsating light. As I drive, as I get about, you can see for yourself the touch of the sun on me, my interactions with the light. My skin gets darker, and darker. You will see the right arm darker, from driving right hand-side, closer to the window. You will see my face darker despite the hat and the lotion, the tshirt and waist line deepen, the feet. By the end of summer you will see the story of sun on my body, until it slowly fades away under colder weather clothes.

And so I laughed. And so my mother laughed. The doctor laughed too. He said you can sunbathe all you want, at your age these levels are a clear indication that the body can’t produce it as it should. It’s not a big deal though, I will write you up some strong supplements to get your levels up. My mother says you should get checked too. I have to tell your brother to check it out as well. I wonder if I have it too, I say, it might explain why I have trouble waking up, and feeling tired more than I feel I should. After all these years, it’s possible the sun wasn’t helping me at all.

Sun Ra King of Helios Apollo Chariot of Fire Ascendent Eos; all those desert sands rushing and billowing overhead as a golden brown sky, imagining the travelling sand cloud as a reenactment swing of western history crossing the atlas from Mesopotamia across Egypt and the Aeolian isles and the Mediterranean lip of Africa and the sea and then north north north, from the lands of the sun to nourish the lands beyond; but no nourishment from sun god for me. Only scathing, torching heat. But the sun, its light, pervasive, exacting, defines the island.

I am writing to remember the landscape that has been the background to my life. It’s a place proffered to be steeped in turquoise waters, populated by limestone baroque and remnants of ancient civilisation. The reality is a little more dystopic than this, a little more corrupted. The deformity of a history weaving in and out of the shapes of collective memory, documents and official narratives has powered a society to move beyond its colonial past, into post-colonial amnesia and claim an identity on par with the colonisers, eradicating all hierarchies. The landscape seethes with accumulation of history, of touch. I am writing to remember the landscape that made me, the landscape of my island-country-home. With a population approaching the half million and a more or less continuous human habitation dating back at least to 5200BC, the 316 square kilometre island is very much lived-in. It used to be a peak, a summit along the passage between northern Africa and southern Europe during the Pleistocene. Megafauna has been found here common across both continents, sabre-tooth cats, and reindeer and dwarf elephants. And apparently humans too. From cave-dwellers to Neolithic to Bronze Age, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, the island has been a haven for many ancient civilisations. A progressive list of people have inhabited the island, but with the emergence of ‘local’ populations, the people inhabiting have to be differentiated from the people who owned or controlled the island. Sultans, rulers, kings, lords, colonisers have left their mark: since the beginning of the Gregorian calendar Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, the Kingdom of Sicily, feudal lords and barons from Swabia, Anjou, Aragon, Castile and Spain, the Knights Hospitaller, Napoleon and the British have held control, owned, or colonised the island.

Post-colonial runs in the blood. Nonetheless, I spent my childhood unaware of notions of layered history, politics or colonialism; my understanding of my varied, ‘melting pot’ inheritance was limited to the homogenous histories I was handed down: a white-tinted Europeanised version of historical events that positioned my supposed ancestors as invariably participant in and even held heroic for feats accomplished during times of war and hardship, fellow European brothers and sisters. Despite the continuous rule of European entities, the language, although latinised and greatly inflected, is still an Arabic language. Much of the architecture has had an eastern tilt even under European colonists, and nowadays the concrete blocks have an uncanny resemblance to building styles in the pre-dominantly Arab East. Most of the surnames existing today have been latinised during the 16th century when all the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were forced to convert to Christianity. I have been handed down a society that has been constantly historically shamed, traumatised into class-climbing through appropriation of language, dress, customs and history, further consolidated by officially joining the European Union in 2000. A beautiful, sad analogy for this is one of the many racist comments uttered on the national noticeboard that is Facebook, on a post by a Miss Malta contestant who happens to be black, stating NT A MALTESE BREED. Despite the superbly racist connotations of ‘breed’, it highlights an obsession with the idea of there being homogenous lineages of locals with the distinct trait of being white. One might ask what does this have to do with the landscape? I believe, a lot. Today this conflicting duality of history and identity is entrenched in the psyche, informing everything from national politics to how people relate to the world outside.

The world outside. The landscape is an island. Where I am standing is important because it shapes my understanding of the world around me. I am standing on an island. It is a natural fortress, an isolated, isolating piece of land from where, looking outward, one beholds the sea stretching into the vastness of the horizon all around, and subliminally teaches that one is apart. Also, I am standing on an island in between Europe and Africa, both pulling, both affecting. The island might look to the north for cultural solace, but the sand storms, African immigrants and the uprisings, like the killing of Gaddafi, say otherwise. This ‘apart-ness’ is a trait of the islander, channeled, informing his or her psyche, identity and politics. My own experiences of the island are subjective to my upbringing, and after reading history, literature and art history I was left me with an understanding of the world as a cosmically complex and precarious web of connections and entanglements, a Mortonian dark-depressing dark-uncanny dark-sweet weirding. I have had the depressing, uncanny, sweet feeling of weirding about my island since childhood. When I set foot in the landscape, playing in the fields, I always had sensed that there was an ‘other-ness’ to fields and garigues. It was not necessarily a natural otherness, but also a historical otherness. It might have to do with the culture and popularity of ghost stories, but there was always tangible evidence of people, a sense of a lived-in, rugged landscape: the trash, the discarded shotgun shells, the carved graffiti, the hunter’s hovels, the rubble walls, metal wire. A spillage of the urban, a spillage of the domestic into wilderness. But the history along with the lived-in landscape begs the real question of: when was this landscape last wild?

The humming of nature is cut-through, the wild has been tamed, amended, by a long line of generations into a human habitat, for human consumption: fields made, woods cut, fauna minced, ecosystems interrupted, habitats buried, but. Despite its domestication however, the landscape still seethes with an jane bennet

underlying instability: ‘what Henry David Thoreau called the Wild or that uncanny presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mount Ktaadn’—you would be waylaid into thinking that this quaint island microcosm of insects and lizards and mice and shrubs and flowers is, in fact, tamed, a paradise, a tourist haven. But the landscape seethes; the sea rages moodily, consuming lives, the deadening heat sparks fires, wind funnels raze the waters, sea storms pull down caves and trees and cliff faces, brick-sized hail pelts and breaks cars and heads, the streets flood with flash rain damaging property, disrupting; rats pilfer, cockroaches fly and terrorise, crayfish invaded the little freshwater ecosystems and asian hornets are nesting in increasing numbers. The uncanny Wild, the Wild uncanny, dark-depressing dark-uncanny darksweet weirding; a fish-spewing sea storm; a wind-funnel murder; a peopleswallowing sea cave. The island is alive, beyond its people, despite of the people. From a young age I have had an affinity with this otherness, the Wild. Maybe it was from an instinct to escape, or from spending so much time playing the garigue fields by the house I grew up in. Through this text I would like to find a voice for this landscape. Memories are a good place to start.

I turned to the directions of the wind rose, the compass, and every step is a place I know, a place I have been to, lived in, remember. All these places

are imprinted with a memory, yet the memory itself is informed by being in these places. Landscapes tend to be an agent of mnemonics, a device by which we remember. Memories of actions are often accompanied by the place they happen in. It might explain why stories need a place for them to happen in —because humans are entrenched in space: space defines our reality, our lives, because everything is somewhere and in place. Place is an important concept. Landscape and place can be interchangeable, they are both defined by the accumulated actions, both yi-fu tuan

individual and collective, that build throughout time. It is when space feels thoroughly familiar to us, that it has become place: people anchor themselves to places, spaces that have become defined by cultural, social and historical aggregate. Maybe, the difference between landscape and place is in the containment and the relationship to one another. If landscape is seen as a mnemonic device, place is its accent, its defining intonation, a landmark. Place carries memory; landscape contain place, it’s a vessel catching a wider collection of memories. The ancestor of the word landscape, landschaft, originally meant a collection of dwellings built within an area of cultivated land that, in turn, is surrounded by an unknown—and unknowable—wilderness.

tacita dean

Landschaft became landschap, an area of land that could be represented by a surveyor or an artist. In England, landschap became landskip, and with the change, the meaning became looser, broader, often elevated and wide vista of rural scenes; not a natural feature of the land but rather something manmade—its organisation…a landscape, then, is the land transformed. Landscape, then, is the land tamed.

ralph waldo emerson

Landscape, then, is not inherently ‘nature’; nature is still elsewhere. Landscape is the domesticated site of our life, other lives, previous lives, history, our wishes for the future.

We remember landscape through our own memory, but also through anecdotes, stories, photographs, documents, historical narratives, the names of places, comments, associations, hearsay attached to them. For example, the number of towns and places with names related to water springs are numerous (Wied il-Għajn, Għajn Tuffieħa, Għajnsielem, Għajn Dwieli, Torri ta’ Għajn Ħadid, etc.). On top of this each place has a history of generational anecdotes, buildings, oral history, folktales and so on, that go back hundreds of years. On top of this I have been to all these places, I have my own stories to tell of being there, not to mention those of family, friends and others whom I have contact with. Place and landscape contain all of this and more, a human aggregate of touch, kept alive through remembrance, through memory. Place is space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the tacita dean

past as something which, to quote the philosopher Henri Bergson is ‘lived and acted, rather than represented’ If place is to landscape as identity is to portraiture, what is memory to place? But there is something else. How does the otherness of this place live with the memory of it? How can it be indifferent if touch changes the landscape? And how does being in the landscape, as a person, create touch? There is an action I have recently begun thinking about. I grab a stone and throw it. I have changed the landscape. Like a painter with his marks on a canvas, I throw stone down a rocky slope into the valley below, making a composition of the valley, changing the constellation of stone, shrubs, insects, soil, litter, scrapes, furrows, cracks. A composition only I know about. Imagine all the stones thrown—if they could talk, and the valley can talk, could they tell me their history of being touched?

Memory Remember the fields? They were thick with thistles, and we could only walk on the narrow paths remember? They stung and scratched your legs because we wore shorts in the summer. We picked sticks to beat them down and them walk over them to get to strewn prizes: more sticks, wood, metal pipes, particularly shaped stones, yellow English flowers, the sour one. We picked them up, but into the stem, our mothers in our ears reciting the litany of sicknesses, sour yet somehow cool. They didn’t survive the depths of summer, but it was there most of the year. The fields, remember the little hillocks that only later when I grew up came to assume what they were? Remember the games we made from the discarded trash? Only it wasn’t trash then but prizes. The hunter’s hovels so close to the houses where we picked empty shells shot at high heaven in the blinding sun to tear through some unassuming bird. Not some, any. We could hear them popping off in the distance. Any good islander can distinguish the air rifles from distant fireworks. It never crossed my mind to look for feathers as I picked up the pellet casings, do you remember any? We learned how to lift heavy stuff and move it around with sticks and short rope. The washing machine and the stove we found were starting to rust, as we slowly dragged them into position. Some indecipherable time later, there was a sofa, and then a mattress. I remember furniture, remember? Once we delved deeper into the garigue fields, and we found more in another field there were cars, and in early spring before the water drained off, we found tadpoles but only frogs in the abandoned reservoir, farther still at the back of the next town over. Our parents didn’t allow us that far. I was alone too, especially in the deadening heat of summer, when no one played out, scraped the shadows along the street, cutting canes with a flimsy blade to sword against trees, tall-stemmed plants. Climbing and straddling carob trees, bored and alone, bitten by red ants, killing them

indifferently, throwing rocks at the carob seeds low hanging fruits, the gnarled bark and branches of trees abused by litter and hunters and farmers, the dome of the tree, a haven of shade and quiet. I thought I was invisible in them, sometimes I was. There were times we kicked ball, or thrown it. Sometimes we clambered the thick rubble walls older children told us had dead bodies in them. I remember climbing them, feeling high up above the land, do you? I could see the glistening sea, and the cranes. Digging worms for fishing I never did. The dogs, my friends when I had none. The little bend around a carob tree.

London - Malta

As I approach Heathrow, I feel a built-up anxiety, coiled, winding tighter. The airport is bustling but there is an air of wariness, a collective anxiety. People with masked faces hurrying; mine sits uncertainly in the bag. I board and in my seat, closing the buckle snapped the coiling loose. Flying home. I arrive late. My parents wave to me from a distance. I drive to an apartment, where I am quarantined for two weeks. Fourteen days of hazed-out limbo, waiting; a lethargic time-sludging whirlwind of slow depression. In the midst of this I remember sleeping in the sun on the couch at the windowed front end of the apartment; I start to feel home seeping in. Coming out, I happily re-unite with my parents, my dog, my room, my bed. Slowly some friends, slowly the island.

After all, the anxiety does not dissipate; it thins to stretch over more of life as if becoming the sky, perfectly hidden where everyone can see it. It feels as if I am living again, a semblance of summer life, a simulation of previous summers—friends, drink, swims, late night drives, a vague melancholy. Driving through the night, the dark fields, the dark sea, the new buildings, the old buildings now older, the new streets, the changed intersections; I can close my eyes and find my way; the back of my hand; familiarity. There is an eerie sense of dark-uncanny, dark-sweet, the vague melancholy of change past and change future, change expected. The distance is closed. No more London; no more 2,083km away. Here old wounds are scratched open. Wounds of spaces lost, the erasure of places, the erasure of history, but also my history, my memories. These places contained me, and if it the place is erased, will it cease to exist?

These are wounds of nostalgia, for places that I have imprinted— Melancholy for what has been lost; melancholy also for what has to and will be, lost. Nostalgia is found in the expected inevitable too. As the land changes, as the views of the cream coloured urbanity is contaminated and replaced by whitewashed blocks of concrete, I turn to the comfort of the trees, the fields, the sea, the long summer twilight.

Memory

We saw the cave from across the street, across the valley. It is a dark hole in the valley slope-wall, where the fields round downward into becoming a cliff; a becoming-space. We decided to go there. We ran back to find it. A dusty road, a peeking horse, plastic trash in the field, old trapper’s hut in a trapper’s paradise. Climbing down, and walking along, we found the dark hole—a tunnel with light at the end. Walking down, the cave, like a horn, curves and opens to a window in the cliff, opens to sea sky. Looking up and along the wall, you can see the history of the water, the ancient runnel eating eating eating the crack into this horn-cave, the walls curved and curving from the smoothing of the water. A revelation cave—revealing the sea sky, revealing itself, revealing its history. A valley cave—the running water, the dripping water, washing out and down the cliff into the sea. A wind cave—a funnel cave; I imagined the wind heaving through it back and forth, like a lung, circulating, picking up the historical water, the runnel spirit, the crystallised drip blackening the wall, like a horn blown expels it to the world. If the cave is the lung, then its end is a mouth; a body of land, the whalefish island; its mouth speaks; what if you can hear it? what if you can understand it? what is it saying? its memories? no, the history of this rock, and the rock made of this rock and the rocks on it;

what if it says

day and night are flickers of light to the racing millennia a mass slowly breaks, shattered heat, cold, vibration, pressure; shaken, pushed and pushes up, ever so slowly exposed until it emerges to sun moon wind rain life

then in a blink of a blink of a blink lifted hit shaped carried placed in a blink tumbles rests

then sun moon wind rain life swirl around it flicker, in a blink of a blink of a blink day and night are flickers of light to the racing millennia as the wheel of time churns out epochs bones to dust, bones to dust sun-moon-wind-rain-life-shaped: touched, etched, coloured, marked.

day and night are flickers of light to the racing millennia

meaningless to the stone, as it rests on the high garigues sloping down to slip beneath the sea, where I sit, opposite the other island

Memory

I remember along a walk in the garigues, before they sloped and angled precariously downward, I sat on a stone. It’s not very comfortable. Opposite, in the distance across a stretch of water is a small island. It is a solitary island; no one is allowed there. Only lizards, birds, insects and fish in the water. From this elevation the horizon cuts through the island in the middles, balanced between sea and sky. I imagine myself standing there, looking back at myself. From the island looking back at the island. It reminds me of summers in my childhood with my grandfather. Grandfather, nannu. A man of routine; the same beach, 8am, two swims, a tomato paste lettuce capers sandwich and packet of snacks in between, icecream at the end, in the same 1959 navy blue car with no seatbelts, his namesake saint glued to the dashboard. These are my first memories of the sea, of being in the sea. Summer meant the same beach with nannu, and along the years I learnt the beach, like a house, domesticating it. Eyes above water, feet below. The architecture and topography of the beach; its texture, its nooks, its holes and stones and slippery seagrass, the steps and the ladders into the water, the wall of the promenade and garden above, the soft, muddy limestone ground; underwater the stones, where the algae begins and where the pockets of sand in it are, the holes where pebbles and rocks collect and crabs live, the biting fish always moving darting away. But this memory comes to me because of the two big rocks a little out from shore. They are underwater, just beneath the surface, so you can stand on them ankle-deep, and we would play around them. From these two rocks, I often turned to look ‘back’ at the shore and wave at my grandfather and mother and brother.

From my seat, the little island in front of me is just a rock. Still and unmoving for millennia. I wonder what memory the place holds, how and when it was touched by humans, a history of it. Like my memory of touching and standing on the rocks at nannu’s bay, do the stones remember my touch, all of their being touched? The accumulated histories of human touch; I imagine each touch piling up on the stones on that little island like an epidemiology exercise, watching a fingerprint in a petri-dish sprout and flourish with bacteria, a budding life print. I make up a history in my head, the people who built the temples opposite, in their curiosity built a raft too and went to picks rocks, herbs. Later, a less ancient boat mooring by it, fishing boats, fishermen, pirates, merchants, swimmers, slavers, the escaped and the exiled, and the dead. I imagine all these interactions, all these touchings piling up on the island ballooning progressively until it is changed, reshaped-deformed-swallowed up. I grab a stone and throw it. Below the cave there is a valley, its sides smoothing curvatures of old waterways, the ground choked with plants and litter and stones. The land here is crumbled and crumbling, beaten with rain and wind and sun and sea spray, all trickling in infinite cracks of uncountable rocks and breaking apart the landscape. This is a geological cycle. The valley is coming apart and all the pieces that make it up are on their way somewhere else. All the weathered landscape will shed stone, sand, dust; they will all move. They will go be a beach or a sea floor or a mountain top when the sea dries up. They will move to another continent, like how the sand from the Sahara comes here every year.

The vegetation is going too, to be eaten or die or multiply; nurture the soil, the insects, the animals. Birds and insects and others will trail the pollen and the seeds and the eaten pieces and take them somewhere else. As for the litter, we all know where it goes. All these pieces have made their own journeys. The valley is a basin, a passageway, a constellation of accrued materials, aggregate, an accumulation of matter. I grab a stone and throw it. In the valley, there is a drop, right in the middle. Imagine, during rainy seasons, this becomes a like a waterfall, a small one, like a model waterfall. From the waterfall to the cliff, the second half of the valley there is an accumulation of stones. No quite pebbles; like scree carried away in flash floods, flushed down the waterfall and lumped in this rock limbo. The rock limbo is like a spatial pause, between the first half of the valley with its shrubs and cane and plants and broken off stone sides and old smoothed waterways, and the blackened, salt-crusted sea rock, and cliff side. I grab the stone and throw it, from the valley side, over the rock limbo, bouncing on the edge and after tap tap tap against the cliff falls in the sea. It is a repetitive action, not because it is satisfying to throw, to swing your hand, but rather it is satisfying to see the trajectory, where the stone lands, how much it has bounced, how many other things it has hit. What is satisfying is the the change, the new landscape, the thrown stone in relation to all the other pieces of the assemblage, the vibrancy created with this gesture, with the consideration of myself as part of the valley assemblage. The thrown stone has hit other stones and moved matter around and sparked off more matter when it collided and broken off a little of itself and others.

The trajectory sparking off more trajectories. I have made a new landscape, only I know about. It is my story. Flashes of previous stones I threw in my life come to me. All the different landscapes, all the different places I threw stones at; the seas, the ponds, the lakes, the fields, the woods, the forests, the mountains, the valley, the roads, the gardens. I have a story in each and every place. Then other people throwing stones; friends, family, strangers. Then the vastness of all thrown stones, everywhere and all-time in the history of stone throwing. The land is laden with the movements of its pieces. I, the human, am undoubtedly one of those pieces; I am part of the assemblage, equal to the rain and the wind and the seaspray and everything else that affects the landscape and inflects its life cycle.

did you know the story of speranza valley? the valley of hope what about it? the ottomans raided the island for slaves, and passed through burmarrad and as the farmers escaped to the village a girl who got lost sought shelter in a cave in the valley is this a holy cave story? yup she prayed to the Madonna and the entrance magically filled with cobwebs so the raiders couldn’t go in you mean miraculously cobwebbed what if it was the goodness of a spider? what if it was the spirit of the cave? well that is the origin story for the church to St Mary of Hope in the valley I guess, having a church dedicated to spiders or cave spirits is not very 18th century the cave of hope, the speranza spider the land that saved the girl; a conspiracy of valley-caves

The valley is active, lively, vibrant; it is an assemblage of all the pieces that make it up, ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts, not governed by any central head: every distinct piece of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to jane bennet

the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. The valley is an assemblage of matter; dust, stones, rock, soil, vegetation, insects, animals, plastic, metal, water, seaspray, wind, sun. I am in it, therefore I am a piece of the valley too. Does that mean that the valley becomes piece of the assemblage that is the island, and I too am a piece of the island? Is it possible for humans to be considered, objectively, as matter within an assemblage, their vital force made part of or absorbed in the grouping, made part of a greater agency?

jane bennet

If every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature, given that conatus names a power present in every body, does it mean that the human body and the human product (footprint, habitat, pollution) is equal to the rock, the plant, the valley, the mountain? Does the assemblage account for memory, for the cosmic web of touch and movement of remembered histories, the constellation of stories? Is the landscape like Funes, all-remembering but inconceivable to us, its pieces?

Malta By midsummer life has returned to a semblance of before. For the first time we drink on the steps of the city, like previous summers. The steps are the streets of the city and they all lead down to the sea. The city itself is old, not too old, but old enough to be restored, reinvigorated; a UNESCO-approved monument to colonialism, named after a French knight. Since I started understanding concepts of history and archaeology I often wondered what lies beneath it, lies as in under/beneath and lies as in untold/omitted. As this island is the peak of a mass of land, a mountain with its feet hidden in the sea, its lived spaces are built on older lived places. The new has the old for feet. Or maybe think of it like an archaeological cake, if you will; layered history and in order to expose its layers you must break the surface or break the whole. You can never really put it back together. We may have the recipe for today’s collection of stepped streets and creamcoloured limestone buildings and people and gardens that the city is, a recipe comprising the libraries of documents, stories, tallies, ledgers, letters and missives, and the stories told, passed down, hearsay, anecdotes, myths and remembrances. The lies; maybe the wrong word for the omitted histories of this promontory of land the city was built on. I imagine this city was built over something older, like others were A medieval disregard for past peoples, or an ignorance of archaeology, or an indifference, a dislike, for the local people (you cannot call these islanders indigenous)—it is not certain what is to be blamed. These might also be ingredients for the cake of the built, of human intervention, made over thousands of years. A recipe for touch on landscapes, the land ‘owned’.

Another analogy is the drinks we socialise with in this city, the city of culture, whose streets all lead to the sea, where we look at the art and listen to the music. Like our histories, our memories are made of this. Memory is the drink I drink on the steps of the city. It is mixed together by hands we disregard or are indifferent to in our obliviousness to the past lived. It is made of disparate ingredients poured in to create something else altogether but still retains the flavours of its composure. By the umpteenth drink, we may forget what we are drinking, only remember that we are drinking. What’s more, the drink is not the point altogether; the life we live around it is. Memory is the sea water lapping at the bottom of the steps of the city. An abyss defined by its edges at the rocks and the vast waves and that which lurk within its liquid mass, and the distances and directions to another island or shore, a negative space. You may fall into it and look and touch and swim through, but truly most of it is made up of our imagination. Memory is the bird that flies swiftly by, in spring, the swallow, swinging low in circles, never to be seen again. Or the bat flying by at night, flystumbling precariously as if always on the verge of losing balance, always about to hit you, glanced as a shadow in the dark. But the swallow is all swallows and all birds, and the bat is all bats and all flying things in the dark and both are all walks in the same street where I’ve always seen them. Memory is all the little things tied together by what’s left after we’ve forgotten. Memory, too, is an assemblage, a constellation of moments and the places they happened in and the people they happened with, a constantly rearranging constellation, an always-mixing, always added-to water,

mixing mixing mixing until it becomes something else altogether, again and again. Memory reminds me of the story of Ireneo Funes, the youth whom Borges fictitiously met in his story Funes the Memorious. Ireneo Funes falls from a horse, and the consequent head injury induces Funes to see and remember everything; when he came to, the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories. Borges remarks that Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it—Borges sees him as monumental and old, solitary for fear of the overwhelming minuteness of the world washing over him, a melancholic figure alone in Locke’s impossible idiom. He is incapable of thought; only of cataloguing minute details of remembering. Funes becomes the computer, unable to catch up with the interminable and unavoidable onslaught of changing seconds. If Funes is a totality unto himself, an assemblage of memorial stuff inconceivable to humans, maybe the landscape is the totality of itself, and we are its pieces, unable to access its remembrances. I, in the valley, can access some of its memories from my understanding of the geological history of the island, how the valley formed and is shaped; I can decipher its curving sides, place its strewn rocks from where they fell, see some of the movements of the pieces of the valley; I can imagine where the litter came from and who threw it, how the plants proliferate and how, like me, someone might have made their marks on the valley: an inserted metal rod, a piece of concrete, a graffiti, a scratched stone, an old story or anecdote about the place. But I am locked out of its totality of remembrance, the totality, like Funes’s of all of the minute change within its assemblage. But like Funes, maybe the totality of memory should not be a human endeavour, maybe it is good to forget; maybe memory is forgetting or choosing what to remember.

Memory I bob on the water. I dream of being a fish, as my head dips in and out of the surface. The waves push me around, but I let them and move with the flow. The more time I spend in the water, the more I am able to sink in. I have learned how to simply dive in headfirst with little effort and push myself down into the depths. I also learnt how to go deeper and deeper, eventually stretching my hand out to rest my palms on the sea floor. Then my human lungs call and I kick off to slowly rise to the surface Along the southern coast, the wilder seas, the land climbs and slopes upward out of the sea to reach further cliffs inland; from the water, looking up, the landscape looks monumental. Across the sea, level with my bobbing head is the other island. I dip in again, pushing gently down. Suspended upside down I look towards the other island through the bluegreen gloom of underwater faraway. The underwater landscape is like that above: strewn fallen boulders and pieces of land eaten up and swallowed. Seagrass, corals and algae stick to the shore, black algae blooms in deeper water. Fish swim by, the colourful wrasse and damselfish and salemas, the scintillating spider crabs darting shadows. My fun is in seeking the underwater geography, the nooks and crevices, the potholes, the underneaths, the arches, the juts and overhangs. I swim across a plateau that stops suddenly as a cliff, overlooking a sea floor metres away, gradual darkness and beyond; I swim over a ridged floor, as if scraped by a giant rake; I swim through hoop cut into the shore. I started diving to find. Initially other people’s personal effects, but gradually other objects; human debris, coralled rocks, hooped and holed and twisted stones, hermit crabs in their coralled shells, crab skulls, shells and old metal, clay balls, anemones, sand beds and slowly the geography of the underwater, landscapes of the underwater, the under-seascape.

As I dive here, I dive elsewhere, soft dives, like sightseeing, like a tourist. There are a few things I would like to find: a gold item; the rarest of the mundane human debris as opposed to the beer cans and bottles, the most common; a fantastically hooped holed twisted stone; one to out-hoopholetwist all others; diving gear, ideally a knife to use; this attests to others who are engaging in the same activity as mine, to seek underwater; a conch; the art-nature object, organic architecture, to add to the ones I already have, and because I have never seen one, in the water, but some have been given to me to hold to my ear and listen to. The conch hums. Hackneyed, to listen to the sea through the conch as if the conch speaks or carries within a magical connection to the sea. But what if the conch does speak? or rather is spoken through? or rather amplifies something, a spirit? What if sea speaks? What would it say? If these bluegreen swathes of seawater; If these ancient polluted suffocated waters; these brutal soothing waves, could talk? I put the conch to my ear and

low-rumble hum a constant movement in all directions of the wind rose swirling forth, swirling froth carrier of life low-rumble hum flowing, undulating, circling, beating at the rock

carrier of life low-rumble hum a carpet for the land immeasurable blue, the light filters a birther, a hummer, a soother (the shusher) a carver, a hammer, a swallower (the shaper creator) a drifter, a snatcher, a belcher (the container) a bed, a cradle, a hugger (the mother) alive, ferocious, the devil, angelic, nurturing, indifferent

all-water marks the earth all-water gaia

low-rumble hum beneath the surface in the shallows of the island push pulled to the throbbing of the sea heart the flowing undulating circling beating current,

says the conch. I bob on the water and I dream of being a fish.

I think, therefore I am; but I’d rather believe I remember, therefore I am. To remember is to have an identity, to retain a self made by your bodily experiences. and whether aware of it or not, that self is made by the background against which you have grown up, by the remembrances— stories, anecdotes, narratives of the land and those inhabiting it. By the lizard and the stray cat and the crabs as much as by the childhood friends, bus drivers and the chickpea street vendor. Through the writing of this text, I have sought to assemble vague ideas about landscape by accessing my memories. By understanding the land as a repository of memory, memory in turn becomes a viable source through which to access place. I don’t consider this writing ‘finished’, but rather a step into a direction, which is really many directions; perhaps, hopefully, it becomes part of a process within my practice, to further open doors or windows of understanding, seeing, placing, inhabiting and co-existing with, this island. During the writing of much of this text I have held back from working on my practice (unless I consider the writing to be my practice); perhaps I am to view this time of writing as a thinking-time and the text as something I can ‘mine’, something I can use as material for my work. And while I started writing this London, I have ‘finished’ it in Malta, where I have been swimming, diving and roaming the island. One of the steps this dissertation has helped me take is to consider documenting these physical forays into the landscape, some of which pictures you can see further down. Let us find meaning in the land. Let us be considerate of all the small things. john muir

Let us care for all life, for all vibrancies, because when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

the valley

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (London, UK: Vintage Publishing, 2002). Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter (North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press, 2010). Tacita Dean & Jeremy Miller, Place (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2005). Richard R. Flores, ‘Memory-place, Meaning and the Alamo’ American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 428-445. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Tristes Tropiques (New York, USA: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2012). Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood, ness (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2019). Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 2018). Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (New York, USA: Graywolf Press, 2016). Edward Said, ‘Invention, Memory, and Place’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 175-192. Peter Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, UK: HarperCollins Publisher, 1996). David Shields, ‘Memory’ Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, No. 46 (2009), pp. 32-36 Ali Smith, How to be Both (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2015). Ali Smith, Autumn (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2016). Ali Smith, Winter (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2017).

“It is when space feels thoroughly familiar to us, that it has become place: people anchor themselves to places, spaces that have become defined by cultural, social and historical aggregate.” —from Tacita Dean & Jeremy Miller. Place (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2005) p 14. —from Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). “The ancestor of the word landscape, landschaft, originally meant a collection of dwellings built within an area of cultivated land that, in turn, is surrounded by an unknown—and unknowable—wilderness. Landschaft became landschap, an area of land that could be represented by a surveyor or an artist. In England, landschap became landskip, and with the change, the meaning became looser, broader, often elevated and wide vista of rural scenes; not a natural feature of the land but rather something man-made—its organisation…a landscape, then, is the land transformed.” —from Tacita Dean & Jeremy Miller. Place (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2005) p 13. “Landscape, then, is not inherently ‘nature’; nature is still elsewhere.” —from Tacita Dean & Jeremy Miller. Place (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2005) p 14. —from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Essays: Second Series’, in The Complete Essays and other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Brooke Atkinson (USA, Atkinson House, 1950), p.419 “Place is space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which, to quote the philosopher Henri Bergson is ‘lived and acted, rather than represented’” —from Tacita Dean & Jeremy Miller. Place (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2005) p 14. “The valley is active, lively, vibrant; it is an assemblage of all the pieces that make it up, ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts, not governed by any central head: every distinct piece of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage.” —from Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter (North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press, 2010) p 23-24 If every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature, given that conatus names a power present in every body, does it mean that

the human body and the human product (footprint, habitat, pollution) is equal to the rock, the plant, the valley, the mountain? —from Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter (North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press, 2010) p 2 Despite its domestication however, the landscape still seethes with an underlying instability: ‘what Henry David Thoreau called the Wild or that uncanny presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mount Ktaadn’—you would be waylaid into thinking that this quaint island microcosm of insects and lizards and mice and shrubs and flowers is, in fact, tamed, a paradise, a tourist haven. —from Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter (North Carolina, USA: Duke University Press, 2010) p 2 My own experiences of the island are subjective to my upbringing, and after reading history, literature and art history I was left me with an understanding of the world as a cosmically complex and precarious web of connections and entanglements, a Mortonian dark-depressing darkuncanny dark-sweet weirding. —from Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 2018) p5-6 Let us care for all life, for all vibrancies, because when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. — from John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p 110