Some things will have been unravelling
Another collection of openings and loose ends for Mette Edvardsen
In front of me on my desk sits a postcard with a black and white photograph of a woman covering up her face with her hands. The background is blurry, like a curtain of drops scintillating softly in the daylight. Only a few twigs and leaves betray that the woman is in nature, somewhere outside. At the same time she appears to occupy a space of retreat, behind her hands, away from me and from nature, somewhere inside. But then again, perhaps she inhabits an imaginary space, a space of imagination and things unfurling – somewhere outside. It’s a subtle retreat to provide space for my imagination, for retreating inside to then venture outside again.
More books and papers are stacked or spread on my desk. Normally they live on my bookshelves with many other books, in my archive among many other papers, and in my mind and body, intertwined with yet more memories, thoughts and stories. Now they form a small collection together with the postcard, all of them connected through the work of Mette Edvardsen – at least, that’s what brought them together on my desk. It strikes me as a familiar situation, and not just familiar to my writing process. It’s as if I’ve been here before. And yet it’s a different story I want to tell. I imagine these materials to be a set of thresholds to my memory, or springboards into an imaginary realm to be discovered – something holding a text. Something to hold onto. some things that will be holding texture. Some things that will have been unravelling.
*
A flyer and a catalogue. The first announces performances that will take place in Ghent in the future, one week from now. Reaching for it, I read: “It all happens in your head.” No, too narrow a space – if this is the future, it makes me wary. I leave the flyer unread and put it aside.
The catalogue is of a retrospective that took place in Oslo half a year ago, a retrospective of Mette Edvardsen’s work. I open it and am again facing the picture of the woman covering her face with her hands, this time in close-up. Turning the pages, I find descriptions of performance works, and on the last page a chronology – one of many lists. The introduction also mentions “small films, writings, books and publications made from the other works, and some objects,” as well as “a collection of traces, details and artefacts.”
Three more publications on my desk belong to this hard-to-grasp category of traces, by-products and ephemera. They are all by Mette Edvardsen. They are all white with black lines and lettering. The first one is a small book with three curly lines on the cover – not quite writing, they’re reminiscent of a child practicing a steady hand on the empty page, out in the open, eager to discover and explore the promise of writing. It holds the text of the play We to be. The second one is a large format atlas with drawings of the ten spaces where the in situ performances of Time will show (detail) took place over the years. The third is a booklet that reads Objects 2002-2015. It contains a list of objects, or better of words denoting a series of numerated objects, starting with “1 plant” and ending nine and a half pages further on with “no shoes”. In between are the names of all the objects used by Mette Edvardsen in her performance works from Private collection to We to be.
These publications are all white with black lines and lettering, and yet they are not just textual traces or representations of performance works that have had a fleeting and embodied life elsewhere. As autonomous works they have an unclear status, yet they invite me to invent my readership, or better my way of relating to them. Perhaps the texture of their imaginary lingers in between the lines, letters and words, beyond the signs, the names and the lists – but what does that mean exactly?
*
I start with the text of the play We to be, which comes perhaps closest to a book and the familiar place of literary imagination. And already in the first scene do I meet a familiar character indeed, the director, who appears to be seated in the audience and concerned with the imagination and events to come.
“I will write everything, I mean everything. There will be the whole and its parts. There will be one thing made up of parts: a partless whole made up of parts that are also partless. We will be lucky with the weather. (pause) This world will have everything our world has, and also all the things that are not possible in our world.”
The director projects events and wonders how they can be written – in words and for the stage. What tempts him are not so much the words and the actions, but those minor events that make performance alive, make it unfurl in the moment time and again, like awkward silences that set a tone and tune the attention, events that cannot be foreseen, and if they are foreseen, they’re already part of the narrative so the actual minor events are bound to take place elsewhere. Perhaps, writing this text, this is my temptation and problem as well: how to write such minor events into the text, minor events that can be discovered or witnessed by a reader?
“Only with time will we be able to perceive the space, how it will change and how it will remain the same,” remarks the director in We to be. In a rather whimsical manner, he goes on talking in the future tense throughout the play, as if his very speech embodies the impossibility to inhabit that sense of the moment which eludes his writing. It is also the temptation and problem of the writer and director of We to be, Mette Edvardsen, who observes, belatedly, in the retrospective catalogue: “You can write the past, and you can write the future, but you cannot write the present.”
*
There are a few more books on my desk to support me in my quest for that world beyond the signs. One has a green leaf clipped out of felt on its cover. The book next to it carries a black and white photograph on its front: a man walking in a vast, rocky landscape, his image reflected in troubled water. A third book has a white cover with sober black lettering that reads Grain vapor ray. Curiously, sitting there side by side on my desk, these covers now appear to me as an object lesson in semiotics: icon, index and symbol, three times signifying nature – from the formal similarity of the green leaf, to the photographic paper tracing light tracing a man tracing a landscape tracing layer upon layer upon layer of sedimented dirt and dust, to the abstraction of words reaching for the invisible textures of the particular, the volatile, the radiant.
Looking at the books and papers stacked or spread on my desk, it strikes me as a familiar situation, and not just familiar to my writing process. It’s as if I’ve been here before. And yet it’s a different story I want to tell. I pick up the postcard to take another glance at the picture of the woman covering her face with her hands. A small caption reads “No Title a piece by Mette Edvardsen”, which makes me realize this is yet another publication that accompanies a performance work, but without holding its text – the words are gone. I turn the postcard around and discover a colour photograph of a forest bathing in sunlight.
*
I open the booklet Objects 2002-2015 and start reading. “1 plant / 2 chairs / 3 lines making 1 corner on 1 back wall.” It strikes me as a familiar situation, and yet my mind doesn’t travel back to the performance Private collection. It’s a situation familiar to my writing process. It’s as if I’ve been here before. I remember sitting in the same room five years ago browsing through books and papers, something to hold onto whilst writing a text on Mette Edvardsen’s work. And yet it’s a different story I want to tell.
A bit further on I read: “2 walls meeting 1 corner / 2 perspectives / 1 dog / 1 water bottle.” I look up, take a sip of tea and glance around. I’m in the same room and the situation strikes me as familiar, and yet it must be different as five years ago. A different perspective. The bookshelves have expanded, the accumulation of books must be slowly encroaching upon my breathing space. The plant next to it must have grown as well, and it will continue to do so, as four fresh sprouts indicate. There is the red carpet with a thin layer of dust on top and some stories swept under. I look out of the window and am stunned by the amount of dirt caked onto the pane – it scintillates in the spring sunlight and blurs the view. Sometimes, like today, there is a clothes rack behind me. As the laundry dries, the room will gradually turn damp without my noticing it. My private collection of postcards and images on the mantelpiece gets rearranged all the time, so it must be different as well. There are images of objects and windows, of a Moroccan rug and of a plant. The latter shows a Zamioculcas zamiifolia, just like the plant next to my bookshelves, even though it has long lost its label and outgrown its name. I remember clipping that photograph from a magazine a while ago as it could have been a portrait of the plant in my room. When I’m travelling and find myself in yet another hotel room, these images of the plant and the rug are practical and compact companions that make the place somewhat familiar – how would I be able to work without a plant and a carpet in the room?
I find I’m more familiar now with that familiar situation I’m in, yet not sure what exactly I’m looking for, so I continue reading. “1 plant / 2 chairs / 3 lines making 1 corner on 1 back wall / 2 walls meeting 1 corner / 1 diagonal / 2 perspectives.” I picture the performance of Private collection now, with the real and the drawn corner and the travelling perspective of the chair, then of two chairs; with Mette Edvardsen’s body handling and arranging the objects, bending and stretching them in and out of illusion, teasing the gravity out of their visual presence, or abstracting them again in a constellation of lines and shapes; with Mette Edvardsen’s body becoming an object amid the stuff and with the plant having a life of its own in these multiple environments, these heterogeneous ecologies of attention that are all activated in a single room.
“collected dust balls in 1 paper cup / 1 beginning and 1 end / 1 thing after 1 other / 1 red turtle neck, 1 yellow hoodie, 1 white T-shirt, 1 blue knitted vest.” That sounds familiar! Although I can conjure up Private collection, I can’t say I remember many details of the performance I’ve seen over a decade ago, the many details that matter in performance and in composing the attention of everyone present. I don’t remember the collected dust balls, nor the yellow hoodie. Yet I do remember Mette Edvardsen putting on the sleeveless blue knitted vest near the end of the performance, looking at the constellation, tidying everything up in the corner – moving all the stuff from the drawn to the real corner – before leaving the scene. Or should it be plural – leaving the scenes?
*
“the performer makes her entrance in the dark.” In the second scene of We to be we meet the second character of the play, the performer – and while writing this sentence I start wondering about this shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’, from me, the reader, to we, spectators – is it because of the stage direction and the entrance of a performer that I immediately imagine a theatre and a community, a ‘we to be’? For I’m not actually in the theatre watching a play, I’m still at my desk reading it.
Near the end of the scene I read: “the performer has a strong sensation that the situation that is currently being experienced has been experienced in the past, regardless of whether it has actually taken place.” The performer is not just haunted by déjà-vu or a sense of the familiar, but profoundly marked by repetition, by reciting lines and re-enacting directions written before, night after night in the theatre, and before that during the rehearsals. Everything appears like a memory, or a memory of a memory of a memory. The performer speaks in the past tense throughout the play and is also, or at least seems to be, just like the director, tempted by those minor events that make performance alive, make it unfurl in the moment time and again, like that memory of a shoe that dropped on the floor when someone left the theatre – no, that moment is yet another memory bound to become a memory of a memory, and it was written into the play by the director in the first place. The performer is perhaps tempted by the illusion of those minor events that make theatre alive, like that other memory recounted later on when the performer, or better the character ‘the performer’ indulges in the joy of discovering a small hole on stage at the end of the day when everyone had left the building – also that moment got written into the play and is bound to become a memory of a memory, regardless of whether it has actually taken place.
*
Now I remember a moment when watching We to be in the theatre, a moment when the lights in the theatre gradually faded out, first on stage and then also in the house where a single bulb accompanied Mette Edvardsen reading the play in front of the empty stage, and I remember that light bulb also gradually fading and wondering at that very moment of that light bulb fading whether it would go all the way to black so that a change of scene might occur, a scene in which Edvardsen would no longer be able to read her papers, a scene which perhaps contained that promise of the director: “There will be darkness. We will be fumbling in the dark.”
*
At that moment near the end of Private collection when Mette Edvardsen left the scene, I remember thinking: “Yes, it’s true, one cannot leave the house without a débardeur!” I might very well have been wearing such a sleeveless blue knitted vest myself, one that I don’t own any longer, that might have ended up in a container or unravelled to a heap of thread. Now it appears to me as a superficial truth, rather too private, even in this collection.
Flicking through the book with the green leaf on the cover, a copy of Henry D. Thoreau’s Walden, already after a few pages I rediscover some marked passages about clothing and the shirt as our most familiar of places: “We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man.” No, one cannot leave the house without language and the textures it holds, without that true bark surrounding us, without that record book (liber) containing our memories and losses, the sediment supporting future projections.
Did she leave the scene or the scenes? “1 beginning and 1 end,” states the list. Recently I spoke to Mette Edvardsen about her plan to make a book with photos of Private collection taken with regular intervals from a central viewpoint, a publication that exists as a dummy but was never realized. It appeared that the beginning and the ending are missing, because the photographer had taken the first picture when Edvardsen had already entered the space and the last one during her exit. She wrote to me: “The end is when I have piled up all the objects in the ‘real’ corner of the room. In the two-dimensional tape-drawn corner I leave some dust balls… and then I exit. So the last picture I have is me on my way out, but not the space with the dust alone. For me this felt important, to see what is left – after the body there were clothes (a yellow hoodie), and then after the objects, dust.”
*
I pick up the booklet again and move on to the second set of objects, or better to the words denoting them. I don’t read them exactly, I rather scan the list quickly, noticing “2 beginnings and 2 endings / 2 reversed chronologies / 2 opposite directions.” It ends with “curtains moving by themselves / things falling upwards / slow sliding up and down / 1 small opening speech in the end.” These are the ‘objects’ – objects indeed, including the details, actions and impossible things – that populate Time will show (detail), with its reversed chronologies and opposite directions, with its incongruous spaces infused with time, made tangible by Mette Edvardsen in irreversible actions and small dosages of entropy that feature among other things “1 pebble stone in 1 shoe”, “1 thread or string” and “1 sponge filled with 1 amount of water.”
In the performances these objects are intertwined with small events that clash with a linear unfolding of time, or better with our expectation of it. As far as I could gather, from memory and from the events themselves, in Time will show (detail) Edvardsen re-enacts a reversed video recording of a choreography with objects she performed earlier in the same space, a recording that is simultaneously played back on a TV monitor. It’s puzzling enough an experience for everyone present to lose the thread, yet the recalcitrance of the objects does not only exceed the grasp of Edvardsen’s handling and the scope of the spectators’ memories and expectations. The objects have a life of their own and embody a time and history inaccessible to us, even though this gap is made palpable by Edvardsen’s careful embroidering of actions around it.
I open the atlas with ten drawings of spaces in which Time will show (detail) was performed over the years. Some of these theatres I don’t know, some of them I know as a spectator, some of them as a performer, but only at the Kaaitheaterstudio’s in Brussels have I seen Time will show (detail) – twice, on 5 November 2004 and on 16 January 2007. They’re beautiful drawings, yet this atlas, this list of spaces, cannot do much for me – its abstraction seems to clash in a somewhat absurd manner with the multiple temporalities of the work performed there, of the people and the objects inhabiting those spaces. I remember writing about Mette Edvardsen’s piece Opening as a semiotics of the traditional theatre space, in which the narratives, people, ghosts and objects that populate them are brought to life as signs. By contrast, Time will show (detail) was never performed in typical, generic black box theatres, but always created in situ, treating the theatre space as a site. It’s a space in which things matter.
*
In the second scene of We to be, the performer muses: “I was not dreaming. I was listening. Something was always starting and stopping. (stops, continues) Moist air was cooled down and water condensed. Droplets formed, and subsequently joined. When they were big enough, they fell under gravitational force, to the surface of the earth.”
*
Site and entropy seem to be related realities as well as concepts. Eager to find out more about the relation between them, I delve into the book with the rocky landscape on the cover – the collected writings of the artist Robert Smithson. On Saturday 30 September 1967 he bought a newspaper and boarded a bus out of town to visit the “many minor monuments” along the Passaic River in New Jersey. In a somewhat ironic style reminiscent of the tourist guide, Smithson reports of his visit to this suburban industrial landscape, taking snapshot after snapshot, baptising a bridge the “Monument of Dislocated Directions” and projecting sexual fantasies upon exhaust pipes. Then he breaks the spell, erases his anthropomorphic conclusions to state that all these things are “merely there.” And yet he is fascinated by the many construction sites and other “holes” in the landscape, “holes that are in a sense the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” He goes on fantasizing about future ruins that will lack grandeur and only exude the banality of suburbia and endless parking lots. “Time turns metaphors into things,” he comments. His last monument is a sand box – a model desert. He proposes to imagine it is divided in half, with black sand on one side and white sand on the other, which gets mixed up by a child running clockwise and turns grey; then the child is asked to run counter-clockwise, which results in “a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.” Eternity is irreversible, and if we were to film such an experiment to then show it backwards, “sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibility.”
*
On my desk I notice a piece of paper I had overlooked earlier on when making my inventory. On it I’ve scribbled two lists of words, as a guideline of sorts during my writing: “knitting / thread / chalk / curls” and “detail / dust / particles / trace / erasure.” I add the word “erosion”.
*
When I return from a break, the room is damp. I open the window to let the moist air out. A few hours earlier, in the metro that took me to the library downtown, I was pondering the “2 beginnings and 2 endings / 2 reversed chronologies / 2 opposite directions.” The construction of Time will show (detail) remains unclear to me, but it had suddenly sparked in me the idea to reverse the writing of this text – how to reverse a story? Tell the end first and then hark back to all the events leading up to it? Or write it from beginning till end, then reverse the order and work with the inconsistencies that would occur? What narrative would I need to keep track of the irreversible events in the first place, and would that need to be reversed as well? All of this puzzled me even more, so I sought refuge in the Metro newspaper of 15 March 2016 that I had snatched just before boarding the metro. It’s always a joy to browse through the faits divers of the day and there were plenty of narratives that could perhaps help me: reversal of the terror threat level in Vilvoorde, exponential increase of the population growth, obesity in teenagers, global warming baffling meteorological records month after month – all complex, temporal phenomena straight from the world outside. Yet it was another article that drew my attention: ‘Walking prohibited on London escalators’. It concerns an experiment in the Holborn tube station that seeks to improve the circulation of the commuters – 36 million each year. “Scientific study shows: if everyone were to stand still on the escalators, the space would be used more efficiently.” But what about the passengers and their ingrained habits? They certainly wouldn’t want to stand too close to one another, have their freedom be impinged upon, or, for that matter, get lectured – “Mind the gap”! Reading in the metro I was reminded of a story by Julio Cortázar, ‘The Pursuer’, in which a jazz musician speaks about the complicated character of time business, the expansion of thought when riding the metro, where things that look solid seem to have a certain elasticity, a sort of “delayed stretch”, while the steady rhythm of station after station functions like a clock that paces the conventional time we share. I got off at De Brouckère, headed for the library and looked up the story to fill out some of the gaps in my memory. “I’m beginning to notice, little by little, that time is not like a bag that keeps filling up. What I mean is, even though the contents change, in the bag there’s never more than a certain amount, and that’s it. You see my suitcase? It holds two suits and two pairs of shoes. Now, imagine that you empty it, okay? And afterwards you’re going to put back the two suits and the two pairs of shoes, and then you realize that only one suit and one pair of shoes fit in there. But that’s not the best of it. The best is when you realize you can put a whole store full of suits and shoes in there, in that suitcase, hundreds and hundreds of suits, like I get into the music when I’m blowing sometimes. Music, and what I’m thinking about when I ride the metro.” Several books I was looking for in the library appeared to be misplaced and are now reported missing in the catalogue. And now that I’m back home I’m wondering whether in my frenzy I might have forgotten something else – but what? A shiver runs up my back, so I close the window and return to my desk, where the books and papers stacked or spread there bring me back to the reality of writing, of writing that impossible moment. I abandon the idea of reversing the story – I’m not even sure yet what the punch line will be – was – will have been.
*
“I will have fallen asleep.” The third character of We to be is the prompter, who operates from a small box at the front of the stage, a box just large enough to contain a single body, “a small, dark, dusty place.” The prompter speaks in the future perfect tense, as a mediator between the writing and the performance, between the director and the performer, a mediator that knows in advance and observes the deviations, perhaps ponders their eventful quality but more often dozes off and can’t be bothered by another flaw of memory of the performer. And yet, even though these words are written into the play: “Every evening I will have been listening, especially for the silences, the silences between the speaking. (…) The spaces of doubt, the small shifts in attention, changes of intonation, delays, hesitations,… The darkness will not have meant much for me. The silences will have been decisive.”
*
Sometimes a change of medium can afford a rich yet simple form unattainable in another medium, like in Mette Edvardsen’s video work Stills, in which several people appropriate technical editing tools with their bodies, I remember for instance two people holding still for about one minute whilst leaving the sauna, amplifying through their still posture tiny movements and jerks in their limbs, while the outside atmosphere draws vapour clouds from their naked skins and the water of the lake in the background continues to ripple softly.
*
I have a hard time concentrating on the writing. The neighbours have been hammering for hours, with intervals now and then, as if there is a poltergeist wandering through the house. I take out the vacuum cleaner and launch a counteroffensive.
*
“Good evening and thank you for coming. Nice to see that so many of you have made it here, in these weather conditions. Tonight, the performance will be broadcast on the radio, live, here from the theatre. Radio listeners out there will join us any time now. Please make yourself comfortable. It looks like we are about ready to go. We will soon begin.”
I have been reading We to be as a text, I have seen it as a performance, but I haven’t heard it as a radio play. As the play is being broadcast with each performance, that imaginary community of listeners is being addressed and in a sense present. But I haven’t had the chance yet to discover it by staying at home and listening to the radio. For now, the listener remains an absent character.
*
I pick up the postcard with the forest view and turn it around to face the woman covering up her face with her hands. I close my eyes. I remember Mette Edvardsen entering the stage and closing her eyes at the beginning of No Title. “The beginning… is gone.” I remember her speech acts wiping out the many realities in the theatre, physical and imaginary, their preconditions, the performer and the audience, the building and the art form, the actions and the fantasies, the observations, the feelings, the thoughts and the words, the Dadaist poetry, the loitering, the illusion and the mimetic gestures, the doubt and the not-knowing, the visible and the invisible, things and their negation – all of it gone. I remember finding it difficult to imagine this. I remember the resistance of my imagination, of my memory, of the layer upon layer of sedimented dirt and dust and cultural history. I remember the resistance of the walls. I remember laughing when Edvardsen said “The wall is gone” and there was indeed no side wall in the theatre at the USF Verftet in Bergen, which literally left her groping in the void. I remember the resistance of a chalk line on the floor that got traced but not quite erased. I remember the word ‘line’ written in chalk on the floor then erased. I don’t remember many other things. I don’t remember my forgetting them. I remember thinking about yet many other things, about remote worlds and ecosystems, about the Anthropocene and things too small or too big to grasp that surround us in our daily reality, outside the theatre and now also inside of it. I remember finding it difficult to imagine them. I remember finding it also difficult to imagine their being gone. “Things we do not see are gone. Things we must not see are gone… will be gone… will have been gone.” I remember wondering: where do these realities go? I open my eyes and pick up the postcard once more and turn it around to look at the forest bathing in sunlight and allow myself to be blinded by it.
*
Closing the book that holds the text of the play We to be, I take another look at the curly lines on the cover, these loose ends that promise the writing of an ever elusive present. It occurs to me that the conceptual and perhaps somewhat ethereal nature of the play has never made me consider this book itself as an object, even though it appears in the performance and is also listed in Objects 2002-2015: “1 book”. With these curls and the words in their wake, the play is perhaps bound to hold on to narrative threads and the paradoxical unfurling of illusion, not so much its unravelling – just like the list doesn’t mention “dust”.
*
What happens to all these signs, these lines, letters and words? I remember traces – the chalk line and the word ‘line’ written in chalk, both traced on the floor and not quite erased. I remember wondering: where do these particles go? The book on my desk with the word Grain on the cover contains an excerpt of ‘On the Nature of Things’, written by Lucretius in the first century BCE, stating: “Remember that the whole universe has no bottom and thus no place where the ultimate particles could settle (…) the ultimate particles are allowed no rest anywhere in the unfathomable void.”
*
Does it all matter – not out there but in the theatre? In We to be, the performer in the dark says: “I closed my eyes for a moment. (closes her eyes, then opens them again) The view never changed.”
*
And then after? At the beginning of We to be, the director claims to know what will happen after the audience has left: “Nothing will happen. Nothing will ever be the same.”