Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
*Verses written collectively in ‘An Anabolic Poetry Workshop’, led by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, from the work ‘Mary (God is an asphyxiating black sauce)’ by Johanna Hedva, 15 March, 2021. The workshop pointed at ideas of authorship and collaboration to consider how language could be used as a counter-hegemonic technology.
Mmmmmm Mercurial ~ ~ ~ ~ mist I started by typing the words Mercurial Mist in a document. Where the hell did that come from? Something about the words ‘mercurial’ and ‘mist’. What do they mean? And what do they mean together? Merriam-webster’s dictionary was a good starting point. My words know what I’m trying to say better than I do. So I let the words speak for me.
Proposal for an ever changing online publication for CAP fest 2021 – Everything Forever Working title: Mercurial Mist
Fingernails jagged Glottis Bull-forth regulates Rage paused, soft-tissue
stop-sound fuck fuck fuck shimmeringly sublime cut void manufacture*
The half-life of us Pulsate to the other side as flesh entropic
2: something that obscures understanding
soft shell, occupy sucking, on a wounded soul an absence hollow
1: water in the form of particles floating or falling in the atmosphere at or near the surface of the earth and approaching the form of rain
Silent grrr dump leak Growth exhausting, now making Interact in gum
a mercurial temper
Everything Forever
2: characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood
It all started from a foggy idea of an ever changing collection of writing, ripe with idiosyncrasies, stating the crystal clear on one page, folding over it mumbles unutterable words of gibberish.
1: having qualities of eloquence, ingenuity, or thievishness attributed to the god Mercury or to the influence of the planet Mercury
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist was developed as part of Everything Forever, a 3-week online festival organized in 2021. This publication was created to be freely distributed and easy to print-at-home. Reflecting on the nature of the festival, this is a collective object to change individually. It will mutate according to the paper, inkwell, the quality of reproduction one has available, but also by the internal propositions of the artists who challenge each user to transform it. Containing fragments of temporary gestures, this is partially a documentation, but mostly one more thread of a series of generative events that standed for togetherness, dissolution of authorship and collaborative spirit. Within all of its interactions Mercurial Mist has always remained a collaborative bringing together of text, images and language. The works were first piled into an online space (mercurialmist.tumblr.com) that keeps expanding, unfolding in this printable format, possibly becoming material. This print-at-home iteration acts as a de-hierarchised collection, with each work occupying the same conceptual space. In this format the works sit next to each other ready to be folded, scratched, ripped, torn and rearranged. We hope that now it is in your hands, it invites a sense of usership that takes the act of reading further towards the act of manipulation of language. Hence, continuing the possibilities of collaboration beyond the making and editing of the publication. The organisation is defined and grows by the internal relations between works— once again, hopefully mixed and repeated, and mixed again, like particles floating, re-forming, bonding, and disintegrating. Editors: Anita Marante, Georgina Watson and Effy Harle Designer: Louise Gholam Everything Forever 8 March–26 March 2021 everythingforever.net A 3-week online exhibition featuring 90+ artists from around the globe who met on the RCA Contemporary Art Practice course.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Cows, chaos, a general feeling of abandonment.
KEI.AS/KAU’
Alessandro Moroni
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Anita Marante
SOLARIA
Mercurial Mist
Say “cows” when you want to say “chaos”. Speechless. Do not know how to express it, this bubbling cows inside keeps getting entangled. Scream cows when you mean chaos. When you mean chaos, there will be cows. A diction problem. Repeat after me: cows, cows, cows. Chaos, chaos, chaos. The more people the more to explain. The same does not happen with cows. Or chaos. I can barely understand what a cow is, how am I supposed to replace it with chaos, the word where everything could fit? How can everything fit in a word, including the mouth that projects it? How can you translate cows to chaos and keep the meaning of the sentence? I have been looking for you to deliver a message, if you are ever able to try to translate it. Sometimes you just have to switch it, stretch it, make an effort, look beyond your poor cow-optic eyes asking for answers in your stomach. Transmute into another being. Language is a tool, but that is not enough. This will persist when cows and chaos merge, and when someone believes they never merged them. I think I could spend the rest of my life talking to cows if I learned the language. And that only means that if I looked into their ridiculous eyes, they would understand mine.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Eye sockets were carved out in the back of the house’s mustard yellow nape. My father’s head nestles in one of these holes like a stone dove. The attic homes the house’s own consciousness; a mass of grey dust, resting atop the innards bellow. Holding on to particles form an age before the house was lived in, with ferocious defiance, long clawed aggression. The air inside these rooms is thick with dust and baroque sensibility to contain the hate that is congealed love, guts and mother’s milk. A burning heat that could erupt through my mouth like a plume of rage. Like sticky and itchy and heavy, breathing the air out of my lungs.
💧
The house hosts my father as a parasitic earworm When I arrive the house breaks into a requiem Through the cracks in its voice, I hear the long hiatus it has taken from practising scales. I make my presence known by stomping loudly on the doormat to wipe the mud off my shoes. A warning to the spirited soprano greeting me with her false accord. I trace the length of the house like a caged wolf; pacing back and forth anxiously. Rummaging through the draws of a nightsand, I find a shrivelled piece of my little-sister’s umbilical cord. I stroke the carpet against the direction of the rich pile, changing it from dusty pink to sore mauve.
⌛
My father’s head casts a guardian spell over the long garden stretching out towards the nearby hills. Exiled from inside but still tethered to the house. At the foot of the hill lies buried Pityuka the 8th – rest in peace – my grandmother’s pet parrot. My sister standing in the wind in her grey plush pyjamas, bow strung, her waist-long hair to one side as she fires arrows into the cardboard box stuck over a tree stump for target. Every hit beats a satisfying drum in my ears. Every missed hit sends arrows rushing to burrow their heads into the ground in shame, biting into thick blades of grass. The small black cat wakes from her afternoon nap. Pines shiver below the house’s blind gaze. Cool air hangs sweet and round with spring’s promise.
🕯
A severed head bearing an eerie resemblance to my father, stares ahead with glazed over eyes from his niche in the back wall In this long house rooms line up one after the other like pearls on an antique necklace. I pause in front of the threshold Staring at the kitchen floor made entirely of perfectly square pieces of rib-eye steak. I approach in the dark leaving muddy footsteps in my wake. The wall clock rings twelve in a low baritone, reverberating through the current in the electric fence. The whinny of a horse in the neighbouring farm shakes the dust. The attic hangs. The garden stretches.
♾
✂
My father’s head stares ahead with glazed over eyes. I step over flesh coloured faux marble tiles veined with white streaks. Eager to impress with wicked liveliness. Machine lace dulls the light and age old burgundy drapes cast a drunken glow over the yellowish walls. Elemental wilderness. Not for comfort nor for pleasure. In one bedroom I discover my sister’s long, cut-off dark blonde braid coiled up in an ornate silver plate. Above, the attic hangs. Outside, the garden stretches.
Effy Harle
FATHER’S HEAD
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Effy Harle
Protest SONG TO HUNGARIAN MELODY
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
BLUE KISMET
Eline Tsvetkova
High gloss wooden floor boards accompanied with colourful outdated tiles, evidently leftovers and brass taps entangled and connected to impracticality. This assemblage of found material consists of various objects and photography, mingling the artist’s own Bulgarian family archive with photographs retrieved in Istanbul. What is presented is a collection of group photographs that recall sun-faded advertisements, though one is not quite sure whether these photographs derive from the same source or same communal consciousness. Behind the glass window the visitor is welcomed by multiple grins celebrating togetherness in a playful intimate manner, side to side, dusk to dawn, ashes to ashes, captured (by) the shadow photographer.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Hanna Margetson-Rushmore
text/works/puzzles
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
When I was little, I was a rocking horse, aiding children to turn into monsters, I was saddled up to rock. Lulling little ones with handlebars and reins – they had total control, but I could not advance or turn, I was stationary. Station abiding and the ranks of hierarchy were accepted as fixed, distracted by a quick step rhythm defined by gravity… Rock back and forth back and forth, tick and tock, tick tock, tick tock. And when I grew up, I became a merry go round horse. Thought it so exhilarating, but the children still largely make up my audience. The men take me when they need me; remove me from one merry go round to another: one stable to another stable, too stable to collapse but not stable enough to hide every fracture. “Get off your high horse, you are our dark horse now,” they say. “Neigh,” I say. ‘A ghost, a dream, a distraction, a witness, a warmness, a weapon, you are what we say you are,’ they say. “[Horse snorting],” I say. ‘Are you ready for your close up?’ they say. “Neigh,” I say. A language barrier extinguishes my protests. I imagine I am back on the merry go round, “You think you came for a show?” I ask all the little children. “You’re in it”. You are the show because men call war a show to make light of it.
BLUE’s WaR
This is how the argument started: It is easier to change bodies than change worlds, so why even try to change the world?
The horses weep. Our war is against the men and the dependence we have become conditioned to. The men fight against other men. The show must go on even though men will lose. Wars fluctuate between battles, arguments, fashion, nationalism, education, brainwashing… and the men end up in merry go rounds of their own too, temporarily escaping to ride the merry go rounds of horses.
Jennifer McMillan
Horse One’s War.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Sometimes I think I am a real horse, but my ears are plastic. Yes, I pass for a horse but, I am the oldest horse on this merry go round. I await my replacement. Yes, replacement because expanding the merry go round is too dangerous - that could lead to the creation of an army - reducing it too risky in exposing the illusion of a straight journey. God forbid anyone discover we run in circles. We are a troop of dancers really, being watched, admired, fighting for the limelight… And, truly, I am not a horse. I am a woman, but no one can know. I imagine it be frowned upon. I think of the cigarette I smoked actually rolled from fragments of female skin and hair and eyelashes. How I smoked it faster than my lips could extract anything. I think of what it would have been like to extract the pleasure and power from another woman and I think of the danger of pitting woman against woman to distract me from escaping the merry go round.
The world is in flames and we run round and round and round thinking we will escape the fire. A wicked show. A wicked show. What will beauty be then? When we are all scolded? When we are all scarred and melting? When our show gets bad reviews? Worn and rusty from the exploits of the war against… well something, we slump.
Hold on tight. We’re going round again but, where is the space between riding and being ridden because I want neither burden nor inability - but I want the advantage, but I don’t want the possession. It’s like unpicking a cobweb, but a cobweb made from the shadows of spiders. The cast of shadows are different depending on where you stand. Catch a spider and you have your own cobweb, but remember the sculptor of the cobweb may rest its legs in your back like hooks of a fishing line you’re going to be reeled, but you’re going to believe you’re chasing dreams…
A man gives me what I think is a cigarette, but it is a joint rolled from fragments of horsehide and hair. I smoke it, but it burns too fast, faster than my lips can extract the pleasure held inside these remains of my own kind. What little delight can be gained from survival of the fittest.
You’ve got to fit the mould, or you break the machine. You’ve got to fit the mould, or you break the machine. I march with the bit between my lips, my words stuck behind my teeth and my jaw clenched - I’m ready. But do I deserve it?
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
I must abandon my vessel. The whole body is affected. The part of the body affected is Pulse rate is rising. The part of the body affected is right . . . The part of the body affected is left . . . He is delirious. He is restless. He is unable to sleep. He has dislocation . . . He has swallowed a foreign body. He has hoarseness of voice. He is unable to speak properly. He has delusions.
MLC… He is depressed. MQU… I am not sure about your diagnosis. N O… No. MVA… I consider the case serious and urgent. PP… Keep well clear of me. PP1… Do not overtake me. PP6… Do not pass too close to me. PP7… You should give way to me. N O… No. PR… You should keep closer to me PR1… You should come as near as possible. PS… You should not come any closer. PS1… You should keep away from me QD3… I will go ahead QF… I cannot go ahead. QG… You should go ahead. QR1… Can I come alongside? QP… I will come alongside.
CODE AE… MBE… MBF… MBZ… MBG… MBH… MCX… MDC… MDD… MGA… MGL… MHT… MKU… MLB…
Kevin Siwoff
I MUST ABANDON MY VESSEL (After Hannah Weiner)
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Laura Moreton Griffiths
MANY BREASTED WOMAN
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
A place of change of anger or sadness where it goes on a voyage of change getting big getting small a place of acceptance of yoga or namaste where we hold tight and accept the changes learning to love again the belly but belly is hard to love it goes in and out and changes like time and medicine and poking do others think this much about their belly? Do they worry about the stretching and the size and the time as it goes in and out and what’s going on inside the belly in the caverns of the flesh the parts inside that are protected by muscle and skin and the belly? Like a cave medical equipment finds out regular appointments to view the underneath of the belly and the parts that make up the soup of intestines
tight goes in hurts Cave like protruding button visible protruding from tight sallow skin above not breasts anymore Tight and thin and skinny that needs nourishment but can’t take nourishment that inside has intestines that hurt and weep Can’t take in the nutrients that bloats even though there’s nothing inside Hungry and yet not really feeling of emptiness is good Doesn’t hurt That piece of toast hurt Scratching in the insides that are pustule and creamy and pinky showing the hurts inside belly
Amy Wright
BELLY
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
I am the beast and the rider Montaña arriba En perpendicular al viento Contra el viento A favor del viento Dust in the eyes Hips swinging up and down up and down up and down I am the beast and the rider Bestia soberana imbued In a mediated body Trained body Up and down In and out
I am the beauty and the rider
Ása K. Jónsdóttir
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Catalina Correa
‘Blue’ and ‘Quiet’
Mercurial Mist
Wet, shiny fur Pelaje húmedo y brillante Pasos pesados Heavily walking El peso del cuerpo Against the ground Jadeando Puffing and snorting I am the beast and the rider Cuerpo híbrido Cartografiado por sus afectos Toward near and distant bodies The dirty ones The savage, harmful ones The untouchables The ones That I need Territorial longing Of a teleported body Which is my true location? Up and down In and out I am the beast and the rider
Febrero 2021 Santiago / Coyhaique
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Anagen refers to the growth phase of the hair cycle.
Jesse May Fisher, Rieko Whitfield, Treeney Harkin
ANAGEN
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Katrine Skovsgaard
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
I’m crouched on a wooden pallet in the gutter, tears streaming down my face as a large, warm hand touches my shoulder. “How are you?” a towering body over me asks. I’m reluctant to respond and surprised by the presence: where I come from, the tearful stranger is best avoided. You don’t approach someone crying in the street – much less touch them. I’m flustered by this approach. “I can’t really fool you with ‘I’m fine’, can I?” I shrug as she sits down beside me in a sideways hug, her strong arm wrapped around my shoulder. I tell her about my worries, and about my employee’s incompetence – spit flying; how my health is declining, how I will have to fire him – tears flooding my face; I am in critical need of care myself, and I need to find and hire his stand-in within hours – the tissue in my hand is soaked. I disappear into her embrace, limbs protruding either side of her large body as it envelops mine and her hands softly but insistently hold me to her chest. My sobs intensify, then gently subside into sniffles, in turn becoming slow, deep breaths to the drum of her heart. Seconds become minutes in the warm embrace of this stranger.
“I want to pray for you before we go inside. If that’s something you would like,” she whispers. I think to decline her offer, but I am inspired to meet her way of being in the world like she now meets me in my sadness and irritation, so I say yes. Her warm face lights up as she places the palms of her hands to the uneven ground and pushes herself to stand. She takes an extended, calm breath in, and a deep voice intonates expertly from the depths of her stomach. Her hands flutter upwards, full of passion. Hips sway as her voice vividly evokes my troubles in a scintillating use of intonation. She expresses her love and sings for the lord to be my guide: to send me health and strength in this life. I find power as my words reverberate from her vocal cords and into her wildly frustrated dancing hands; my heart passes through her being. Her song lingers with me as I walk inside, and she joins me; she is my new employee. Today is her first day. I’m embarrassed that I haven’t even asked her about her worries – reciprocated her caring presence.
Everything Forever
PR AY
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Do I possess you? Can we desire our selves? Our Selves I write as in being with multiple selves, who interact within, who talk to each other; a body, a mind of us and our. Us/we are partners in crime. We share our physicality, our corporeality; sounds, visions and lived experiences.
the long unending murmur
Paola Estrella
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Patrick O’Neill
NOTES on self-desire
Mercurial Mist
Some layers that constitute us remain disguised to the exterior and blurred to our multiple selves. I want to find out what might turn us on about us/we.
We desire others knowing we can´t own them in flesh. I wonder if it is possible to desire you since I already have you; we already have each other. And after all, we only desire what we don´t possess.
Could it be that we desire to be desired by others to compensate for the impossibility of possessing our multiple selves? We don´t perceive our biological condition, we sense our body in relation to the ideas we have about what it means to be us, what we think it means to exist, what we believe it is to be a human being. By playing with our flesh and masturbating as we picture ourselves, we can recognize the entangled layers which constitute our transitional being. It grows a desire to discover what is constantly changing within, and fantasize about what we are and what we could be. I want get to know us more so that I can touch you deeper, embrace our deepest fears, be disgusted by you, feel embarrassed to be us, distance from us, and after, desire to be you/us again.
One day a ship left port in the north of Europe. Sailors on board had said that a long unending murmur boarded with them that day. It began as soft but grew so imperceptibly that it was soon extended throughout the entirety of the ship, to be heard in every material crevice and mind of each sailor alike. Unable to ignore this strange habitation any longer, the ship’s captain took it upon himself to discover the source of its emanation. He searched the ship from first light till dawn until eventually his explorations took him to a small and oft-forgotten room. It was the quarters of a mathematician and his young daughter. Two passengers seldom if ever seen. He sat there each night and could hear the man talking to her, telling long tales of fantastical whirling machinery and complex assemblages. The ship’s captain listened to story after story, growing ever enthralled before finally learning that inside this room was a case. And it was this case that was the source of the long unending murmur.
Everything Forever
My curiosity grows over our capability to possess our own body, our thoughts, our vulnerability and our fragility. It seems that even though these are supposed to be ours, they respond mainly to expectations and conditions created by others.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
the long unending murmur
days afterward, the captain could think of nothing else except the case. He turned it over endlessly in his mind, feeling the brass lock and smoothed wood casing. He wondered who his daughter might be that could receive such a gift as these stories. He came, eventually, to believe that inside was housed all manner of instruments of life. That the immanent presence of a divine spirit was contained in there, and it was due to his being in such close proximity that it rendered itself an incomprehensible murmur. Every object on the ship was soon suffused with this strange energy and his every interaction with the crew turned quickly into dense impenetrable meditations of philosophy and life.
Patrick O’Neill
He returned to his cabin and for
It wasn’t long before the ship’s captain found himself utterly enchanted and hung precipitously on the edge of enlightenment. It was then that he finally went to confront this strange pair and their case. He left at nightfall and stood by the door. But when he opened it, he found the mathematician fast asleep; his daughter nowhere in sight. And so, slowly he crept forward. The room lay ominously still and the case loomed large before him. He stood there transfixed and swaying gently with the boat. His ears grew dim, and his vision went slack. When he blinked, suddenly he found himself over the case. His fingers pressing gently at the lid. It sprung open and inside was something so utterly bizarre that the night snapped into perfect stillness, as if all the world was pinched for him. It was the girl and she was just as he imagined, but overwhelmingly stranger. She bolted upright and her eyes fixed themselves directly upon him. Suddenly, he could see her for exactly what she was: an automaton. He wretched with horror, convinced she was a work of black magic and devilry. He stole her from the case and brought her out onto the careening deck of the ship. And there, he tore her apart limb by limb, smashing each one to infinite pieces before casting her wholesale into the sea.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Putri Taufik
Bali 2005
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
I do not remember what time and what day it was when I woke up that day, but I will always remember the year 2005.
day turns into night night turns into day will it ever go away? I long for peaceful nights where I can stay awake and breathe normally as the wind brushes my hair my thoughts are gone in thin air do you see what I see? I imagine being in the sea dreaming of being happy though I knew it was crazy am / daydreaming... will it ever go away? am I breathing... or am I not?
please guide us help us make us feel safe the day is here the long awaited day has finally come true
it turned out Mama’s cake wasn’t the only surprise the surprise shocked our dearest friends and family everyone in Jimbaran the entire island Indonesia and the world
what is this feeling? am I complete? am I dreaming? Mama, I can’t hear anything! I am alone! Mama, Dad, where are you? what is time? I am losing my own sense of time the bombing hurts it hurts physically, but most of all, mentally not knowing how to heal, not knowing how to feel, not knowing how to act like a person - hurts I want to feel safe I don’t want to remember it I want to forget it will time wash away my memory of it?
the attack does not define me but it made me realise that ..sometimes it is easier to dream
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Bea Grant
‘The Weird, Weird as opposed to the real, real’
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Bea Grant
‘The Weird, Weird as opposed to the real, real’
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Georgina Watson
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Moment in Landscape no.1
Revisiting Moment in Landscape no.1
I do not remember this photograph being taken, yet I am in it. Sitting in a chair strapped to my Dad’s back I look just over a year old.
For this past week something about the first photograph has been troubling me. In looking at it I’ve become attuned to it, In my looking I’ve seen less of myself and more of my sister. So I asked my Mother, Revealing that in fact it was my sister who sat upon my Dad’s back that day. She wore a facial expression typical of me but as we look at it together her head shape seems more and more like her own, So we revisit the album once more.
It must be the first photograph I have of myself in a place that is not my home. Well home as in the house that I sleep in – maybe this is the first photograph of me in my home. In what I now call my home – the rural landscape. My Dad stands in the middle wearing his Asics trainers, Always Asics, I’ve never known him wear anything else. This pair is just one of the many that I’ve seen him wear since this photograph.
The track he, or should I say we, stand on is narrow, dusty and coloured like hay, but among the green verges, what stands out to me is the willow herb on the right side. As I believe this is likely to be the first day walk my parents took my sister and I on, I am now looking at it, observing the landscape with the knowledge that I have since been taught. But I can’t help but think about and question what the younger me with her confused face as she is strapped to her Dad’s back and told by her Mother to look at the camera thought, and how did I think of the landscape then? And how did this moment play a role in what I think about the landscape we are in now? The willow herb and the bridge in the background tell me it is likely we were walking along a disused railway. But did I know it then? Did this information frame my interaction with that place then as it does now? For me, looking at this photograph from 1998 is both odd and familiar, the track I assume is somewhere near Cambridge as we had recently moved there but it could in fact be anywhere. I have since been to many places that look similar to the photograph’s setting, but I don’t think any were actually this place. I have so many questions, Ones that for now I do not seek to answer. Instead, I continue to look with wonder.
Finding the key clue, Another photograph of my sister in the same jumper. Alongside it, a photograph of my Mother and I from the same day. I am sat on her back just like my sister is sat on my Dad’s. We stand in front of a river, a place I instantly remember. For even though I live so far from this place, I revisited in 2017. Seeing this second photograph, the one of my Mother and I, changes deeply how I see the image of my Dad and sister. Changes I cannot undo. The previously mystery image is solved. Whereas before it was without this category Now this has been restored. There, clear and seemingly obvious. Why didn’t I see it before? My instincts told me, I had not visited this place a second time But now I know that to be false. My relationship with this image, place and landscape has changed. I applied a structure, One that is based on knowing. I think back to the first position I initially took, I miss that place, That place of thought. I was enjoying the mystery, the unknowing, the freedom and flow that the photograph had. Now lost in the structure I gave it. No longer lost in my thoughts around this photograph, Instead I am blocked by the knowledge I gained. It is a task finished, A mystery solved. I wish this were not so.
Everything Forever
Moments in landscape
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Moment in Landscape no.2
I miss this unknowing; It is not present in the photograph I now know to be me. I know too much about that photograph too. Frustrated, Lost, I do not know what to do next. So back in the photograph album they both go. On another day I’ll come back to them, Revisit them, perhaps after some distance, Once again, I’ll be able to ask myself about What I did not and do not know.
I am a photograph that if you hadn’t seen me yesterday you may not remember today that I exist. Not just as an object, a trapping of time or a memory of your Mother’s but also there are certain things within me you would have said are wrong. As you know the number 1 thing never said by your mother is that twins should dress in matching clothes. I and you both know she despises seeing twins in matching clothes. Yet were you to look at me you would see you and your sister in matching hats and wellington boots, both the same colour – reproductions of the same object. And, your coats, now these are different colours, but they are also that same apart from that one detail. On that day you somewhat matched. Not fully as she would never allow you both to fully match but on that day partly.
Everything Forever
I have restricted myself, An unknowing, which unearthed elements about my relationship to that place, has since gone, It vanished before my eyes.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Heyse-Ip
A snowball instruction sheet
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Iona Mitchell
A short text about a rock which I quite like
Over there is a nice rock. A big rock, several meters up, down and across. 256 millimetres is the official minimum size for a boulder, so it could easily be categorised as such. In the summer, when it is less icy, people must try to scramble up its sides. Bouldering. Do they get a sense of satisfaction when at the summit? The field stretching for a solid 20 meters below them, before rising to a dwarfing cliff face? This boulder isn’t majestic in size. Unimpressive while also not being exactly pathetic. It lives in the awkward borderland, between monolithic and meholithic. Online it says that common language treats a boulder as ‘a rock which is too large to move’. It doesn’t specify whether this means ‘too large to move by hand’, which is frankly a pretty large oversight. Could this rock be moved by a machine thereby losing its status of ‘boulder’? By quick guestimation, it probably weighs 80,850 lbs, which is more than a tower crane can carry but no fear! A mobile crane could feasibly do the job. So, this boulder is a boulder in terms of the space it occupies, but also, could be lifted into the sky at the flick of a wrist, provided you have enough expertise in the world of cranes to know not to use a tower crane for the job and so, is a mere pebble in other respects. It looks a little like a marmot. Or possibly a bear, depending on the angle. Both animals are native to this region, although bears only in the historic sense. There are plenty of bears on flags and shields, though. The old population evolved into two dimensional simulacra of fur and claws, survival of the flattest for an age of images. At dawn animal prints are visible in the snow. A marmot print is eerily similar to a humans handprint. A gene splicing disaster, a small child confused with a rodent, left to wander the frozen forests. A hare print is laughably phallic. Some mornings the hillsides are dotted with desire-lines made entirely of cartoonish cocks. You don’t see many of the culprits though. Their activities are clandestine. We did see a hare barreling into the piste one night, nearly pancaked by an infant speeding in a toboggan. It would’ve made a horrifying image, a set of penisy-prints emerging from a corpse. But no marmot, nor, of course a bear, has been spotted since the summer. Except for this rock. Because of its placing, there is a possibility that this rock was deposited here by a receding glacier.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
A quick glance from the only geologist in the village could tell you, but she’s too stone faced to approach. When glaciers carry and deposit rock they also erode it. So, perhaps the depositing glacier purposely formed this rock in its animal shape? Was it inspired by continental pre-holocene cave paintings? Animals leaping across rock walls, charging and in flight. If people elsewhere were creating depictions of lions and tigers and bears, what’s to stop the glacier engaging in the contemporary visual arts discourse of its time? Its comforting, perhaps, to think of the glacier as a socially engaged artist. Carving honest portraits of the quotidian inhabitants of its community. But, one must wonder how anonymous the stone-creature really is. Perhaps, as with our own history of portraiture, it was a portrait specifically of a marmot king. Or a bear politician. Or a war hero rodent. How much was the sculptor-glacier paid to produce this portrait? Did it sell out in the process? Perhaps it was a labour of literal love. Perhaps the softhearted glacier merely meant it as a gift, perhaps for the mountain to which it clung so tightly? Rocky deposits are termed drift. The name of the movement of the ice, and its detritus. It’s a good word. It conveys a sense of being pulled along. A lifeboat tied to a bobbing ship, a firm hand tugging you through a swaying crowd, a wilful loss of control. Can you see the trajectory of this rock as it glided with the speed of decades, and the firm hand of the glacier which dragged it along? It might’ve travelled miles and miles in the cocoon of an icy tongue. It must be so restless now. Stuck motionless, in its flat field. As Africa shuffles closer, rubbing rocky shoulders with the eurasian plate, greeting each other with bubbling volcanoes and rumbling earthquakes, the rock rises. Year by year and centimetre by year, until, maybe, if it’s lucky, the topography of this place will rumble and it will roll again.
Everything Forever
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Kathryn Attrill
Feed the reel, It’s HUngry.
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Mathilda Oosthuizen
To be something else (excerpt)
‘Overlying the endocuticle there is a second fairly thick laminated region, the exocuticle. This is compassed of chitin and sclerotin … an intermediate waterproofing layer of wax and a surface layer of cement.’5
Not much good could be said for humankind from the experiences I had had so far as a nonhuman. Was I not human anymore? The only thing that hadn’t changed was my thoughts. But these too, how I thought about myself, seemed to be changing. Did I want to be human? Could I now choose? “Addison is looking through a microscope. George enters) George: You paged me? Addison: Yeah, have a look at this. It’s Bex’s biopsy. (Addison moves away from the microscope and George steps up to have a look) George: Biopsied ovary? Addison: Not exactly. I’ve arranged a meeting with Bex’s parents, George. Oh and find out who the on-call psychiatrist is and if they’re available to join us. George (looks up): Does she have cancer? Addison: No, it’s not an ovary. It’s a testis. George: A testis? (He looks back into the microscope) Are you sure? Addison: Yes. I’m sure. George (amazed): Bex is a hermaphrodite? Addison: Yes. … Bex: I’m having surgery to remove a tumor that’s compressing my ovary, right George? (George is silent) Addison: Dr. O’Malley. (She gives a slight shake of her head for him to be quiet) Bex: George? (George looks sick and remains silent) George? George: What am I just supposed to lie to her? Addison: Ok, that’s enough. Dr. O’Malley, please leave the room. (George puts down the chart and starts heading out) Bex: No wait! Tell me what’s wrong with me. What is wrong with me? (George just looks at the parents who give each other glances) Mr. Singleton: Bex ... (his wife nods) we learned that your tumor ... it’s not compressing an ovary. Bex: Then where is it? Mrs. Singleton: It’s on a testis. Bex: Like a testicle? (Everyone is silent) I have testicles? Addison: Yes one. Bex this is a tremendous amount of information for you... Bex (interrupts): And I’ve had it my whole life? ... Oh my god. Does this mean...does this mean I could be a boy? (Addison gives George a disapproving look as do both the parents) Bex (whispers to herself): Yes.” 4
6 Katrina Palmer, End Matter, (London: Artangel and Book Works, 2015), p.5, L. 11.
5 Ewen Cameron, The Cockroach, (London: William Heinemann, Medical Books, ltd., 1961), p.14, L.29.
4 ’Begin and Begin’, Grey’s Anatomy, ABC, 15 January 2006. Written by: Kip Koenig Directed by: Jessica Yu.
3 Katrina Palmer, End Matter, (London: Artangel and Book Works, 2015), p.5.
2 Ewen Cameron, The Cockroach, (London, William Heinemann, Medical Books, ltd., 1961), p.14.
1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p.28.
There was no way I would be getting anything if I appeared at the front. The road was busy. I hastened under a parked car.
‘This stone has absorbed an enamours quantity of death, a sense of which may be transmitted to those who are close to it, if they are vigilant.’6
‘The Loss Adjusters are at all times woeful: an inherent disposition confirmed by their close proximity to Portland stone.’3
I had found a way of travelling around almost unnoticed. I had to, it was better to be invisible.
Probably pulled from this same bin. I needed some decent food. Some Halušky for example. Forced to make my way out of a bin for commercial waste, my ego was squashed to the size of my broken antenna.
It is within this paragraph that the protagonist refers directly to Jane Bennett and the very same book that is referenced in this text, Vibrant Matter. This came about from the writer’s desire to incorporate directly the concerns of Bennett’s book into the storyline.
‘…being of a somewhat elastic nature, provides a certain amount of flexibility…’2
… and I ended up here wallowing in the fatty acids and squalid thoughts of getting what I deserved. It was meant to be, I was finally where I had always belonged, animal or not, I recalled the urgency of finding answers. It wasn’t just my life at stake.
There’s lots of points at which things move. We do not exist in the same way that electricity The directness of this placement, forcing the protagonist to utter the words from which they does. Jane Bennett gives examples of such events in Vibrant Matter whereby an intended were birthed from, situates the framework as a character. path was set for the electricity to follow, but it did not1. Thus presenting us humans with a A moving on, let’s go elsewhere please. Please take me somewhere else. I know you can as view to its agency. that’s what you were made to do. That was the reason you were created, To invoke change, to allow those of us interacting with you to open you, to rustle you with care, to think about I had finally found a use for them, even the shortened one and pushed up with all my what it might be like to be another form. How might we feel to be something else? legs. Holding the lip of the lid with my front legs, I kicked and wiggled my way out of the dumpster. And so they had squabbled. What should they do with such an animal?
Mounting the pile I had created over the last few hours, I used my entire body, starting with the antennae.
The lid began to lift and a thin strip of daylight blinded me. The antennae were stronger than they looked. I’ll give them that. It was time to leave this shit behind. Literally.
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Meghan Murphy
Orts (excerpt)
Mercurial Mist
When coral and poppy lipsticks melt into waxy pools they are scraped away. Yet the empty tubes remain, rimmed with colorful remnants of time. The residue of laughing painted lips cling to hollow silver shells. The stifled air, moist with trapped memories, turns acidic, tarnishing the silver bullets in blues and greens. The weaker metals succumb to corrosion and the smooth geometric objects of the vanity descend into the mirrored surface…an infinite reflected universe of pock-marked moons and rust-cratered pits. Glass perfume bottles, whose contents have long-since evaporated, reveal droplets of gooey condensation on the inside. Every time I turn on a faucet the water splutters in mud brown streams before finally fading to a pale yellow trickle. Inside this house there is no letting go.
The house gasps, groans, wheezes and secretes … There are birds of all materials here. Porcelain eagles, taxidermy ducks and pheasants, delicate glass swans, a bronze peacock figurine….. On the wall of the den is the mounted head of an indeterminant creature. Its mouth is open to reveal pointed white teeth and I see my brother and I reflected in the protruding marble eyes. “It’s a fox,” I say. “No,” my brother responds resolutely. “It’s an opossum.” The toy box, an excavation site where the heavy wooden blocks of my mother’s childhood lay at the bottom and my own plastic toys float towards the top, all webbed together by the roots of tangled doll hair. We prefer to play with the bronzes—a collection of dog-sized statues line a room, an infinite circular migration. We climb on to ungiving saddles, little hands grasping cold buffalo horns and clutching at the faces of stoic Mohican chiefs.
I am all too aware of the constant surveillance that follows my padded footsteps. The walls are covered in heavy oil paintings, depicting dramatic scenes of nature—a ship caught in the throes of an angry sea, horses (so many herds of horses) in various landscapes—galloping, grazing, leaping into the air with rolling white eyes—and two large portraits of them, stationed in the heart of the house. The grand piano sits below their looming faces—a glossy sacrificial altar. The ebony surface is covered in a clutter of picture frames, the many factions of a tangled family tree. The newest faces and unions vie for the front, dangerously close to the edge, while past, ended marriages and children long grown linger in the back.…. It’s the photos that don’t make it in the frames that matter—those candid moments that break through the glossy sheen. I enter rooms on tip-toe, and hold my breath, always waiting for…what? To see the statues scramble back into place? The portraits conversing? I can’t even find peace in the bathroom, where a framed,larger-than-life nude woman bathes in the moonlight, glancing accusatorially over her shoulder at me.
Everything Forever
We can’t even replace the carpets, until the carpets speak for themselves—abruptly unraveling to trip us up. Failing plumbing stains the walls in murky teardrops, rivulets cascading down, down into the earth—and the same shade of paint is used to cover up the blooming mold. The wallpaper-ed rooms are less lucky—if the wallpaper is no longer in production then it stays, doomed to gradually be absorbed by the sweating house. A bathroom with walls of vibrantly colored, life-sized birds has faded from ornate detail to abstract shapes. The yellow finch that used to watch me with a discerning eye, has been reduced to the silhouette for a toddler’s puzzle.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Meghan Murphy
Orts
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
And when it all becomes unbearable, all that empty, heavy space, all the unblinking eyes, I defy the house the only way a child can. I open the home stereo system, installed under the old record player, and press play on the album ‘Now That’s What I Call Music. 9.’ There is something immensely satisfying about filling the space with the pulsating base of Missy Elliot and dancing spastically around the house. Pausing in front of china cabinets and display cases to flail my limbs wildly. I am both defying the on-looking artefacts and also moving, running, prancing, and crawling for them. I scream the obscene lyrics, and when I don’t know the words I fill the void with howls, yelps and guttural cries. In the summer, we collect dozens of inky black tadpoles from the pond and bring them inside to observe their evolution into frogs. With transfixed satisfaction we watch the wiggling amphibians absorb their tails and gills, to sprout webbed feet, gradually preferring the floating branches to the depths of the tank. By the time the frogs are leaping and croaking, their startling ruckus is too erratic and I can feel the house expelling their presence. When I release the frogs, I think of the mounted fox, collecting dust in his perpetual snarl, glass stags frozen in flight, the bronze boar in everlasting terror and the hounds always tensed to lunge. We have granted these things a power and their stillness now vibrates with a tension that will surely crack if the white porcelain arms of ballerinas, extended high over heads, don’t finally rest. Every closet and drawer is filled with them. Racks of dresses hang in a shocking burst of color that even years of mothballs can’t subdue. Stacked boxes of white leather gloves, waiting to either mold itself to my skin in a permanent grasp or disintegrate from the shock of warm, pulsating flesh. His imposing army of suits, the outgrown shells of a larger-than-life man. Over the years, we grow bolder and shift through her dresses, fingering the stiff fabrics and choosing our favorites. “Try them on girls,” they whisper. We are all silent as the rigid materials swallow our pre-pubescent bodies, but there is no warm encasing or folding of fabric over our slight frames. The dresses stubbornly maintain their womanly shapes, and we are just sticks propping up the figure of her. It’s when we start to move that the ritual commences. There is something intimate and precious, and thrilling, because we know it is wrong to be wearing her clothes. In these gowns we feel elegant and graceful and hold our heads high as we twirl and pirouette through the house like a coronation—a sense of importance and birth-right. We baptize the stiff dresses in our sweat and the dusty-dry fabric greedily soaks in youthful beads of perspiration…a secretion of inheritance.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Elena Lo Presti
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
My kitchen has been my bedroom. I would sleep on the floor listening to the soft buzzing of the fridge for the entire night, and in the morning I only had to stretch my arm to open it and pour myself a glass of milk. That was my ecosystem, I used to store my body the same way I would put away a frying pan in the cupboard, folding my legs and my arms until they would interlock perfectly. I used to cook food for you there every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes they would all be the same dish because I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed so I would cook from there (usually a bowl of rice and fermented soybeans, sometimes with egg, sometimes with fermented cabbage). I would confuse my bed and my kitchen a lot; I guess when they are so close it can’t really be helped. I was also alone for most of the time, and no one ever told me it was wrong. So my dreams started merging with my food. When I closed my eyes, people had the shape of bread and butter, cakes, pizza pies; sometimes of long, transparent noodles. I told you about my dreams one morning over the phone; you said: “Wait fifteen minutes, and please get dressed”. The cab you sent for me arrived as I was shaving my armpits, bent on the sink. The driver didn’t look at me for the whole journey, he brought me to Yau Ma Tei and left me in front of a skyscraper, where you are waiting for me wearing a blue dress that fits tightly over your body and hips, and grazes the pavement when you walk. You brought me to your favourite hot pot joint, on the eleventh floor of the building, and you ordered all the meat on the menu: you ate vivaciously, your mouth moved faster as you chewed. You were so beautiful, you were breath-taking. I left my kitchen-bed and I started to eat out all the time. When you were with me, you would wait for a big pot of boiling tea to arrive, and you would wash every single plate and glass with it before we started eating.
After your cleaning ritual, everything was warm: it was your way of blessing the table and the dinner. My fridge was always empty, and the kitchen stopped interfering with my dreams, which now were just regular, perfectly normal dreams. What really excites me, is that I am using different cutlery and dishes and glasses every day, every time I look around, I am somewhere new, and my ecosystem has expanded into a large, city-shaped house. It’s too hot these days. I wake up at 5AM opening my eyes very slowly, my hair is sticking to the back of my neck: before I can focus on distinguishing the shapes around me, you call my cell phone and you tell me: “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I made onion curry. Do you want to eat it with me?” When my eyes adjust to the darkness, I am in my kitchenbed again. You have put a cardboard box on the floor, with a plate of curry and soe iced tea. It’s getting lighter and lighter, like the day sped up as I ate with you. You started crying, and the food became tasteless as I kissed your tears off your cheeks, and the sun started setting. At sundown, looking at the laundry hanging from my window, I felt like the whole world was coming onto me, pressing hard on the top of my head like a crown made of pitch-black darkness and the occasional star. I fold my body again, like I would fold a napkin on the table. When I wake up, I stretch my arm to reach for milk.
Everything Forever
kitchen-bed
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
COOK HOW YOU LIKE MY FRIEND Elena Lo Presti, Kate Morgan, Benedetta Locatelli
Everything Forever
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Friederike Steinert
ABout Togetherness, about forgetting
I still remember Claudette’s voice. That’s all. No matter how long I try to evoke an image of her face, my mind draws a blank. I know that an image of her must still be stored somewhere in my brain but it is buried under layers of faces and anecdotes which have left a far less important mark on me. It’s funny how one’s brain is going through the memories that constitute our life, randomly trashing things that have made us the person who we are, or wanted to become, while keeping an endless array of side notes, song lyrics and embarrassing incidents we’d rather forget. On an especially boring afternoon in the early 90s I learned the lyrics to It’s my life by Dr. Alban. I didn’t even like the song, the lyrics were on the back of a magazine and I memorised them because I didn’t have anything else to do. I still know these lyrics. I also know that Dr. Alban was a Swedish dentist. But no matter how long I think about it, I cannot remember what Claudette did for a living. That’s not everything that is lost. I can’t remember most of my childhood either. I can still remember that I told everyone in kindergarten that Elvis Presley was my father. I can remember this, because my lie was met with total and complete indifference. Nobody even knew who Elvis was; my lie had met the wrong target group. Maybe because of this accident, I have become a terrible liar. I nearly never try to do it, instead I am blurting truths out. I wonder if my truth telling has become a weapon. And if so, if it’s a weapon for or against myself.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Claudette loved beating up people. While I have always been scared of violence her eyes sparkled when there was a fight. She was also really good at beating up people. Everyone had heard about that one time when she got angry with her boyfriend because he tried to come to her rescue while she was in a fight with a guy. Claudette was very feminine, just not in the way I had been brought up to think about femininity. She was fun and violent and caring. Once, when I was kissed by a man that I only kissed back because I, and all men in my group, were scared of him, Claudette was the only one who asked if she needed to do anything about it. I was too ashamed to admit that I needed help. To this day, I still regret not taking her up on her offer. It might have been the first time in a line of moments in which I needed and accepted help. As it is, I would still need Claudette, but even if she passed me on the street, I would not recognise her. I hope that she is okay. I still remember how tall R was before he got ill. That one night, when we were slow dancing in a Karaoke bar in Kreuzberg, everything was perfect. Someone made a photo of us that night. I am wearing brown tracksuit bottoms and a Moldy Peaches t-shirt and I look up at R like I’ve found paradise. On the same evening F, J, R and I decided that we would never die. Thinking of this night, I sometimes wonder if paradise is not a place but a state. I also wonder if this state can last longer than a day or a night. I don’t remember any other time I met R during that time in my life and I’m not sure if this is because any encounter was so pale in comparison to our Kreuzberg slow dance or if these meetings were drowned by a sea of non-events. Like Atlantis. Dr. Alban had another hit. No coke. The song was forbidden in my boarding school, as teachers felt that the pupils had reversed the drug critical lyrics and sung along ironically enough to turn the whole song into a pro drug anthem. I hated going to school and I stopped participating sometime in fifth grade. Even if I wanted, I cannot access the patience, the ability to sit through endless school days without participating. I have forgotten how I did it. What I still know is how I longed for the weekends, when I would leave for the city and go to Soul Allnighters and dance for hours on end. (I don’t go out anymore but) This longing is still part of me - now it often leads nowhere. Around two am, I would go and eat a vegetable kebab and some fries. I would meet Claudette on my way there and for the rest of the way to the kebab place I would imagine her life as mine. And then another cheap beer on the street, another song, another scuffle. Bobby Hebb would sing about a slow dance and a kiss, Sam Dees about his loneliness post break-up and the Tempos about the forcefulness of their love. There was no need for patience, there was not even a need for paradise. At least this is what I make myself believe. The truth is, I cannot remember.
Everything Forever
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Hannah-Charlotte
charlotte, Hannah
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Dear Charlotte, best wishes, hannah Hannah-Charlotte
Everything Forever
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Jooyeon Lee First of all, J, who stayed with me every day in the tent - you still didn’t pay me for the book.
You asked me to borrow one of Haruki Murakami’s novels for you because you were overdue at the university library. So I lent a book from my school library. Do you remember that you lost that book? You said it was gone in the tent. Still, I didn’t get angry, and asked you to pay me off for that book. But as soon as you asked for it, you disappeared. I didn’t have any money - still, I walked to the Kyobo Bookstore and bought the same Haruki Murakami from my pocket and took it to the school library. It was Haruki Murakami. Once you were very angry with me, when we used to live together. I think it was because I could unlock your phone, rather than being angry at me, you were a little scared. I found out your password by looking at your fingermarks on the phone’s screen. I wanted to mess with you. I hope you understand now that it wasn’t a mysterious superpower or a plot. At that time, I hated you a little bit, just because you had a smartphone. Also, you frequented Sungkyunkwan University or Seongkonghoe University - I hated boys from those universities. I am so sorry about that. I have another one who feels sorry - returning student, H, who attended the same lecture. Do you remember that we participated in the same class and befriended each other? I’m sorry for being so grumpy. Still, honestly, you also have your problems. Do you think it makes any sense to keep talking about your father in class - when you’re twenty-six? Did your father make you starve or tell you to leave the house? Didn’t your father support you in everything to study architecture? But if I think about it again, you also wore damn old sneakers like me. Even when I returned to school, when I became twenty-six, I hated everyone in the world. So I understand that you always talked about how much you hate your father and not about your assignments. You must have been surprised that I told you that I was living at Seoul City Hall Square. The way you get back home and how I go back to Seoul City Hall Square was the same - so we talked every day at Shinimun Station, remember? I used to ask your opinion on how the Seoul City Hall looks.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
We all thought that Seoul City Hall, Dongdaemun Design park, and Chonggyecheon were in incomprehensible shapes at the time. But now that I see it, it looks like they have their brutality - sometimes they look stunning. Then, you didn’t answer anything, but I want to ask you once more about what Seoul City Hall looks like now. M, who was then a senior in her final year at school - I once called you near Shinimun Station and asked you if you could come pick me up. Someone was stalking me. I was scared, so I asked you to come out to meet me. A foreigner kept talking to me from City Hall Station, and I was scared if he’d get off at Shinimun Station with me. You came to pick me up right away. Thank you so much for taking care of me. There were times when you gave me some clothes because I didn’t have anything to wear. The size was not right. At the end of the first semester, I was surprised that you had so much acne on your face. When time passed, and I was at the end of the first semester of my senior year, I got a lot of acne just like you. So only then did I realise the hard time you had. As soon as you graduated, you went back to your hometown to get a job and get married. At that time, I thought it was such a waste for you. Now, I don’t ever think someone’s choice is a waste. A university lecturer, W, came to see me staying in the tent - I’m sorry for just bullshitting and not doing any assignments at that time. I told you that I had no plans after graduation - I got a job just after graduation, and I live my best. An unknown mister I didn’t know his name from Jaeneung Education Strike Camp - he often came to our tent. Thank you for helping me with my assignments. I received a C plus for the patternmaking assignment. S, who set up a tent in Seoul City Hall Square first - I don’t have any gratitude or anger for you. Still, since you’d let me stay in a tent, I had a place to sleep with my eyes closed during the first semester of college. I thought I wouldn’t get a good sleep in a tent, but I fell asleep at 11 pm and woke up at 8 am. I slept because it was cold at night, and I woke up because it was hot in the morning - now that I think about it, I’ve never slept that regularly ever after. Do you remember McDonald’s wrapping paper rolling over in our tent every day? You and J and other people bought them, right? Doesn’t it seem nonsense to you to take a McDonald’s to a tent, in a strike zone? If you still want to wander around demonstrating, don’t take a McDonald’s anywhere. If I think personality. It rather than
about it now, you have a flawed seems like you had a character, having flaws.
Everything Forever
The square
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Jooyeon Lee
The square
Mercurial Mist
I
hope you’d make use of that character to become a member of society - to get a job and live well. I imagine you to still be living the same way as then. At that time, when I sat in a tent and looked around, I could see the signs like President Jaeneung Kyongdong University, and there was Hwangudan on each side. A strike zone next to Daehanmun - it felt like the old Seoul City Hall might be swept away by the new Seoul City Hall’s waves. In 2020, all the strike zones disappeared, but what was left behind remains. Every time I see the end of the waves over my office, I feel weird. Still, the ice rink comes in every winter where the tents were located. I’d be better for citizens. You’d probably think so too. J, who stayed with me every day in the tent, do you remember an alcoholic homeless person who often came to the tent to sleep? ‘I’m not a person who wants to live like this. I go out every morning to find work. I used to have my own business, and I’ll fix it again. I have a good home with my wife and my daughter for now. I live on my own not to cause any trouble to them, but I will fix my business again. Let’s see how it goes. Even if I look like this, there’s nothing I can’t do.’ - do you remember that he used to insist with us like that every day? Do you remember that the tent was right next to the new Seoul City Hall construction site, and we could smell the toilet? The police used to come and look at our tents from time to time. I wonder if you still remember them. When I think about it now, I understand that Haruki Murakami writes good reportages, and you must’ve not been able to pay for the book because you had no money. Also, books and many things have disappeared in those tents - water bottles, a laptop, clothes - so it is not your fault that the book has disappeared. Sometimes you’d be silent and crying; now I understand that you must have had your issues.
Everything Forever
Drawing series for The Ermines
Initially, this writing was supposed to be a novel described from the eyes of returning student H, who has to take lectures from W and fight with me and the senior M - with the background of Seoul City Hall Square. However, all of these people mentioned here are too weak and have their issues to be in a novel. The tents in front of Seoul City Hall, where we stayed, were also too wet and had their problems. Holes were everywhere - whenever rain poured, it flooded utterly. So I wouldn’t write a crappy novel - instead of it, I write a letter of apology and many thanks. I wonder who will remember that people used to live in a tent in front of Seoul City Hall Square. If I get in touch with J again, I want to get paid for the book - because the book I had to buy with my money was Haruki Murakami.
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
The square Jooyeon Lee
Drawing series for The Ermines
Everything Forever
Drawing series for The Ermines
Contemporary Art Practice 2021 Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
JungEun Yang
This may or may not be flash fiction
Mercurial Mist
I doubt in myself, doubt in the air, doubt in people, doubt in dreams and doubt in my senses.
It is possible that all the established norms humans know to be true are actually false; human beings are subjective and the standards of all actions we think to be objective are ambiguous. However, we mistake ourselves for being objective rather than subjective. If I am in doubt, I want to continually be in doubt and ponder in thought.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Luis Tapia
Recurred recollection
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
The world is still asleep, or yet the witness hasn’t woken, how could it exist, if we weren’t there to have noticed? We gather our sense of selves upon waking every morning, like gathering the ingredients to feed our family once they wake. We roll up our tobacco in the cutting morning frost, exhaling in the doorway, half a self and half a ghost.
We devise these meagre rituals to help us understand. We do not yet remember the peculiarities of existence: the bitterness of the coffee, the creaking of the chair, the reflection in the mirror. We must have woken up too soon and left our minds in a dream. Devoid of articulation, we reconstruct its language by a window. Here we rewrite the story of the first mind to become aware of itself thinking.
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Everything Forever
You are too fragile to touch
We can meet just once or twice a year
I would like to touch you but… You are too fragile to touch Because you appear as a stretch of only 10-21m between 1 m
I would like to meet you more frequently but… We can meet just once or twice a year Because the chance to observe you as far as the Hercules cluster, 700 million light-years away, is several times a year Also, the possibility of observing you as far as the Virgo Galaxy cluster, 10 million light-years away, is about once every 1000 years
I would like to feel you close but… You were so far away from here Because I know you came from 400 billion times distance between Earth and Sun
I would like to see you physically but… You are too tiny to be visible Because your size on Earth is 1/1 trillionths of a hundred thousandth of a millimeter for 3 km
I would like to talk with you more but… We have had conversations only six times still Like GW150914/ GW151226/ GW170104/ GW170608/GW170814/GW170817
I would like to hear your voice but… There is always noise in-between us Because the sound of the universe exists between you and me
I would like to touch you but…
I would like to meet you more frequently but…
You were so far away from here
You are too tiny to be visible
I would like to see you physically but… I would like to feel you close but…
We have had conversations only six times still
There is always noise in-between us
Yukako Tanaka
Naughtiness
I would like to talk with you more but…
I would like to hear your voice but…
I would like to touch you but…
I would like to meet you more frequently but…
I would like to feel you close but…
I would like to see you physically but…
I would like to talk with you more but…
I would like to hear your voice but…
Mercurial Mist Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Reference KAGRA Observatory (2020). About the gravitational-wave. https://gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/plan/aboutu-gw (accessed 11th Mar, 2020).
Kimio Hirano(2002). The measurement of the gravitational-wave. https://www.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ja/story/newsletter/takumi/02.html (accessed 11th Mar, 2020).
Everything Forever
Contemporary Art Practice 2021
Mercurial Mist
Contemporary Art Practice 2021