Motion Towards No Place: An Essay

‘But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of’

(Hamlet)

By Bel de Gier

1.

8pm

A vein of autonomy and mysticism pulses the audience to the ventricles of twin rooms in Safe House’s heart: the first belonging to Nikko Iino, the second to Gordon Lock.

Hanging as a spectre shivering between the veil, Iino performs with focus and gentility as she illuminates the translation of one of the finest members of her worlds in miniature (the finely melancholic ‘Room of a Writer’) into life size under a new name: ‘Sit, the Past is Already Written’. The room breathes: countless cursive-kissed cells of paper stung by a central chair; absent corners for spectators to read the artist’s verbatim diary entries; Iino herself adorning ivory pages with her emotional weather under performance.

What first strikes the audience member upon entering is the purity of brilliance that a good idea holds: the concept sings of cleverness, while also steeling itself against the pure star of creativity. What then strikes the audience (and with greater epiphany) is the profundity of emotional reservoirs delivered through Iino’s linked hand, allowing the privilege of briefly holidaying in her soul. Silver tears spring periodically under its hold, interspersed by the understood intellectual satisfaction in the full-scale recreation of one of her universes usually encased in the space of a shoebox.

It is unsurprising that Iino’s room is a home to moments that wonderfully foreshadow the experience of Lock’s hemisphere to follow. I see a friend still under the astrology of acquaintanceship and we are seized by the need to sit upon the floor and hold the experience together gently as children, forging bridges of higher affinity as Iino meanders; the witness and facilitator of new flowers of intimacy. A fair boy is alone in thought. He is found by a girl and asked to be spoken with. Iino continues her track. A youth sits central and silent for ten minutes in an undisturbed stillness, the air colonised by the depth between a single audience member and the artist. Iino grows roots in the same spot for a while as if married to heavy shoes - though her velvet back is turned. Girls are bridesmaids to the confession pages in their leather and thoughtfulness. Boys stand soft and struck in twos, nonverbal, unmoving.

I sit down for a while. Just her and I. The piece of music, also created by Iino in an unexpected turn of musical prodigy, unstrings the outside world. She does not know it is me, her hand moving through time. I remember making the connection between her form and Diana the Huntress, though I cannot explain why. But this is art, and therefore as a paragon of art’s purity this is Iino’s work: a medium to unearth inexplicable crystals of selfhood (without understanding the biology of the reaction) under the helm of a sorceress.

Image by Rachel Leslie

*

I find myself as a child in late summer at my grandmother’s home. The girl next to me is reclined by a pond. A stranger here before me is at a party during the dusk of teenagehood. This is Gordon Lock’s ‘Alchemic Rite of a Spring Peeper’, the piece that follows Iino’s, comprising three tenets: a series of black and white angular paintings under the name ‘Entrance’; and a sound composition and pyramid of LED lights coined ‘Spirit in Matter is Alive’. Each of these three working muscles correspond with the number of muscles engaged by Lock in the creation of their unified effect: the exhibition of profound technical ability in the craftsmanship of the light installation; the simultaneous deep evocation in the orchestra of crickets; the construction of an entire constellation under a ceiling in their bewitching alchemy.

I notice similar dichotomously sharp, scientific assessments coupled with soft, nostalgic sharings amongst its audience: Lock’s pristine engineering ability in the construction of the pyramid (counteracted by a memory of a cousin, shifting through midnight grasses...); how the keen-edged triangles disappear when the eye hones in on the centre of ‘Entrance’ (the remembrance of the heavy smell of duckweed... of sunburnt lavender...).

The darkness of the room embraces its audience (emphasising Lock’s careful gift as a choreographer of experience) and is deepened by its relationship to Iino’s room as its preface. In order to enter Lock’s cave, Iino first asks her audience to put down their swords so as to not slay their dragon but sit with it. The two rooms also share their choice to rhyme their pieces with threes; tercets of components to generate a greater body. Perhaps it is sensical that Diana the Huntress would come to mind: this is Phoebus’ lodging, and the twins make their cohesive magic under Safe House’s ribcage. Subject to this kinship one is never fully out of the woods - the heavy steps of Iino’s piano keys press themselves behind the curtain (a stinging nettle kiss, the pale of my ankle...).

Ultimately there is a magnificence of chemistry in Lock’s refined and mature artistry: feeling elicited via thoughtful technicality rather than the projected emotionalism often characteristic of student work. What an uncommonly evolved and magnificent trick - to be anonymous while remaining stage manager of response, scientific and yet unbraced, hard and yet utterly soft. To play artistic tennis.

I go back through Iino’s room to enter the rest of Safe House, Lock’s room has no exit of its own. The twins again - always in telekinetic cahoots.

Image by Nikko Iino

2.

8:30pm

‘This once would have been the kitchen.’ I say to a friend.

With her I devise a storyline for Safe House’s movements: if Iino and Lock are disillusioned in the island privacy of their adjoining bedrooms, Shinji Mikame’s collection of prints and paintings hold their hands in love and say: ‘All will be well’.

It is the sheer vivacity of colour that delights the eye, ensnaring even the taste buds. Periwinkle and vetiver, hectic goosebumps of new blue and canary skittering across white as a flustered migration of starlings; a pair of heads drawn with romantic curbs for lips, the sharp crisis of a nose’s point. Pages and pages of prints smile at the spectator, joy rarely effaced by moody cynicism. It is the relentlessness of the pieces in their great number and this punch of a million hues that create a profound pause from the self akin to sitting in the sun - a moment of pleasure, a permeating rest, a sudden summer. I smile (and I smile again on Mikame’s dare).

It is a fascinating phenomenon that we mirror the societies that we are enfolded into. If Mikame’s room is a country, its tourists follow its suit: warmth is the accent of the interactions of many exchanges of love (a few having not seen each other for a long while, others not since lunch); care is its culture (a girl turning each page of Mikame’s book of prints with the attention of placing an earring into newly pierced lobes); and love forms its church - an ebullient togetherness penetrates. It is important to distinguish that the presence of Joy (a capital J, the artist makes it a proper noun) in the audience does not undermine the profundity of craftsmanship: in our modern stress and dark blue being moved towards lightness is not always easily achieved - this requires the weight of a beautiful talent, and talent feathers itself throughout this great display.

My friend turns to me. She says something lovely. I take it to heart. I smile again.

Image by Nikko Iino

3.

8:45pm

Black.

A boy’s voice is drumming reams of iambic to his friend, great handlebars of multisyllables for every cortex to climb over, to trip onto the next. Ribbons of words. ‘Innately, inherently confronting’. ‘Arrestingly antagonistic’. He speaks loudly. He loves alliteration.

Nick Pang’s ‘If that’s where I am, then I am no one and I’m nowhere’ is more than a gulf and greater than a blackness. It is not a void, this implies nothingness. It is not what we instinctively reach for in calling it ‘violent’ or ‘aggressive’: this is the retort we employ to avoid the danger of a reckoning. It is not to be dressed under cleverness, bribed with philosophising, made a contemporary of through words over three syllables. It humbles these attempts to distil it. It smiles, without malice, at your intellectualism. Perceived acrimony is a refraction of your own fear. It would be easy to place blame upon it. This is a waste of Time.

I look at it now, head on. Through the veil I can hear the repetitive ‘beep’ of Aurell Salsabila’s soundscape, singing in the ear as a heart rate monitor at the altar of Pang’s piece. In order not to make a mockery of the above statements, I shall be simple in my terms: the highest symptom of an artist is the ability to create a simple object and yet mystify their audience as to how they did so. This painting adheres to this diagnosis without question. ‘If that’s where I am, then I am no one and I’m nowhere’ is black. Simply and utterly black. Black effaced by even deeper ebony, by curved coal, unbeatable jet. Black. I look away - my heart catching. Is this blackness where we are all going, the lands that turned Hamlet from his suicide song? I do not have courage to meet the pricelessness of our seconds for too long.

It is therefore a curious testament to the survivalist in all of us that this is the room where, upon entering, one may not realise there was any art in there at all. Everybody has a cup kissing their palm. Some backs are even positioned away from it. The number of voices periodically eclipse the soundscape: the hush of struggling breaths (a tyrannous pull in; a tenuous push out). The audience has taken up wine in the face of this Time Warden - perhaps we cannot make a home of fear for too long. But this reaction is a witness to its success as a work rather than a slight.

I look back to hunt the boy’s voice down to a form, following ‘orchestration’ to find him at a repeat of ‘profound’. I notice he isn’t looking at the piece for long, though he waxes lyrical. His contact is fleeting, eyes touching it for the same seconds given to a disturbed person on the tube - looking away to avoid really steeling ourselves upon Life’s other face. A drink sits in his hand. He lifts it often.

The painting smiles.

Image by Nikko Iino

*

The transition from Pang’s reckoning to Aurell Salsabila’s ‘1006 Angels Overhead’ is an act of radical optimism. This is surprising given the heavy emotional content of the two pieces.

The return of the thrill of cleverness, of a fantastic idea, echoes up from Iino’s room to hold hands with Salsabila: a poem employs pylons under the metaphor of angels to herald a video compilation of the speaker’s train journey taken to outrun melancholia’s black mark; a sensitive sculpture of an actual pylon moonbathing while the sound of a ‘beep’ undercuts all. In this transition - one room hosting the body of Time itself, the other sending awareness to every way we struggle under it - love emerges in a way that words (unfortunately) cannot take the shape of.

Though if anyone were to be able to master love with a pen, it may be Salsabila. Aurell Salsabila is a writer. The presence of this gift - which we all mark as ephemeral, inexplicable, winkingly hard to catch - finds an objectivity in her hands. She is a writer. She curbs words with other ones into the unexpected and sublime, she elicits the return of Iino’s dual satisfaction that makes the final room of Safe House its bride: intellectual satiation (clever, the mind slaps it with italics), and emotional (I am moved to the cell).

There are moments, when the words needle an untouched section of the soul, that I gasp. Few look back at me. It is understood why I might. This is not indicative of any shock-tactic (or the naivety of aforementioned projected emotionalism) provoking the audience to trip. It is rather the reckoning of the written word plucking a string undiagnosed within the private world of our own words and philosophies; to have it taken down to syntax - and by someone else in public.

My fellow audience members hold thoughtful hands to mouths. Their eyes run themselves over each word that punctuates the grey dance of the cinematography. All are silent under Salsabila’s sovereign solitude, standing a few feet apart from one another - again, we mirror our environments - as I look up (beep, beep, beep). I hold my gaze upon the singing metal of the pylon quivering silver, fine as a spider.

Salsabila herself stands close. I watch her but refute the catching of her gaze: it is a beautiful and noble martyrdom to hold your name to the incarnation of crisis, to speak to the presence of it in all of our lives under the guise of only speaking of the self. I do not need to remind her of it. But I look at her. I look at her and I send love to her.

Image by Nikko Iino

4.

The next day

Iino and I stand before Pang’s piece while it still hangs. Last night’s world is being packed up. There is only half an hour before we have to leave.

‘This is where the others were drinking last night.’ I say.
She looks at me. I look at her. We return to the painting. We say nothing for a time.

*

Eventually we level the weathered caps of the stairs. Everyone is done now, a new family of work will be moving into Safe House soon.

Standing tall and clad in black at the bottom of the stairs is Lock. His sweatshirt bears the words: ‘To look without fear’. I hold in the duality of this irony given by Pang’s preface.

But then I look around: Salsabila’s pylon awaiting an uber home after a difficult day playing archangel. Curls of Iino’s pages pressed secret and close in a bag. Edges of Mikame’s prints being carried out as sleeping children. And perhaps this is the ethic of ‘Motion Towards No Place’.

The ticking of time - and yes it does tick, it has tapped its foot to the rhythm of your reading - does not mock us. Time is the holding of death as fragile as a bird while never trivialising the sting of a bill, the returned affections of a lover. These are not distraction tactics from the black. They are not to be devalued under the realisation of a Time recession. But Time is ticking. And it shan’t stop. Not even for you.

I look down at Lock again and briefly fly to existential worry under the silence dusk fosters. It is only after a while that someone speaks.

‘Shall we go to the pub?’