PLAY WALK LISTEN YES

For ASDR Zine 012, in response to Chamber Made’s Hi-Viz Practice Exchange 2020

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The first thing we do is mute ourselves. We are acclimatised to a world lived via Zoom. Silence has become our natural state of being. There is a sense, though, of the gathering of thoughts. Of readiness. In previous years, the Hi-Viz exchange has thrummed with noise: chatter, footsteps, the scraping of chairs—and laughter, the joy of being in the physical presence of like minds, like practices and like experiences. This year, our gathering has the qualities of sound: it is intangible, atomised, and full of potential.

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Eleven years ago, I fell in love with Janet Cardiff. It was Opera for a Small Room that did it, installed at ACCA. A tiny chipboard shack, filled to the brim with record players. A disembodied voice uttered gruff stage directions as the needles dropped, as if by invisible hands. Shadows passed on the walls. A train rocketed behind us, the lights swinging in the room. A sudden explosion of colour and music. There was a longing to this work, a sense of profound isolation. It was achingly tender, full of sublime beauty and quiet devastation. I think of it often, this year.

Janet flickers onscreen. She is in her ‘play studio,’ in the home she shares with partner and collaborator George Bures Miller. White canted walls are covered in pinned images. Every surface is heavy with stuff. There is an old landline phone. This is the dreaming space. In the big production studio, she says, they are working on a reproduction of Storm Room for a gallery in Denmark.

On the tiny Japanese island of Teshima is the Storm House, an expanded version of the original Storm Room. In 2018, my partner and I caught a plane, a train, a bus, a ferry and an electric bike and stood in front of the wooden building. We only stood in front of it. It was supposed to be open, the day we went. Perhaps we read the pamphlet wrong. I pressed my fingers against the glass and tried to will the installation to come to life. There was no sound but the wind.

Full piece online at ASDR Zine.