SURFACING

Paola Bascón, ãssia ghendir, Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway, sarah koekkoek, Jol Thoms, Silt Ensemble
12-13 October, 2024

It’s so simple, a sudden, subtle shift in the colour of daylight sets a group of sparrows, lazily warming themselves on a hot wall, into motion as they sense the gradual turning of the weather. Approaching clouds soften the contrast between the gleaming sun and the dark shadows cast by tall buildings on the pavement.

It’s so simple, the transition from the noon heat into the moist hum of evening, as the weather turns, bringing distant rumbles of thunder that fold into the the fading murmur of airplanes dissolving into the crimson clouds. There’s a smell of ozone, electricity suspended in the air, swept in by a gust of wind. It’s funny how quickly everything can fall so quiet, quiet enough to hear the gaze of a crow passing through the layers of evening, like a dim memory pressed onto the skin. Vibrational forces of drone bounce off the flaking walls and bodies suspended in shifting postures, as an old marsh, now engulfed by the ever-growing city, exhales its thick moisture into the cooling evening air.

Turning is the motion that transforms the vision of the dimming sky into the flow of water, with sudden flashes of lightning rippling across its surface. It’s the motion that blurs the boundaries between sound, the texture of brick walls, and the shadows lining streets edged by old trees. It’s the motion that turns objects into a geometry of continuous lines, shadows into the flow of rivers, as passersby disappear beneath the surface of the water, and evening slowly drops its veil of dusk.

It’s hard to bear the thick silence just before the rain. There’s a texture to it, a putridness like the darkness of a dream, something you can breathe in, something that envelops you. And then it strikes, right overhead, an explosion of thunder unleashing torrents of water that crash over the streets, sweeping down to the riverbanks and sea edges in rainbow-hued petrol clouds, pierced by wooden sticks wielded by children. The sudden currents strip away the aging city mud, revealing prehistoric riverbeds studded with extinct mollusc shells and terracotta vessels bearing fingerprints pressed by ancient hands, glimpsed only briefly before they disappear beneath the slimy surface of wet clay, as the high blow of a singer's voice pierces the vibrating thunder drums.

Like the ocean’s rhythm, where every other wave is higher and more furious than the last, fragments of last night’s dream spin on the swirling veneers of rainwater. A hand with a cigarette traces the muddled and slightly bent line of the horizon, its soft orange light illuminating the sky. It’s hard to discern the distance between yesterday and tomorrow, the surfaces of stones from those of skin, as these distances expand within the mind, a mere centimetre can represent years of memory, a slight shift in serotonin, a total change in the evening light.

Text by Urtė Janus

URTĖ JANUS

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