Project After S : Being Twice

2010-09-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

Archaeology, like photography, allows us two times. There is the miniature time of the aretfact and the time of its context, the here and now. I am allowed to be in two places at once. I am allowed to be, twice.

Similarly we have both been here, at separate times. My longing is for closeness, we are distant. The object of my longing is, then, embedded in another object - a mediator between the two of us. At this time it is a place, my desire to be a body here and now; for a connection to be made.

Whilst away I send you a message - to let you know that I am here. You reply, I send another, no reply. Feeling stung I think of the variables.
It is warm here, but you, elsewhere, are cold.

A list:
On returning from China I will tell you about: Buildings, century eggs, the lack of history, the impossible length of history. We have seen that the city of Shenzen presents a field of history that is, was actually, flattened, compacted, developed [at great speed] and somehow made miniature. Like the archeological artefact the city has a duration quite different from the here and now - a disruption occurred, a geographical and temporal flaw.

Did you notice how the buildings are: the colour of duck eggs [grey blue, pastel green, pink, light terracotta and beige]. Similar to the colours of the colonial architecture we saw in Hong-Kong and Guangzhou. Each grand facade is a mirror, reflecting Mao Zedong's China - tracings of Soviet Russia's neo-classical cities and these each in turn a ghost of Etienne-Louis Boullee's imagined mausoleums. In the gardens there was for a time a fashion for ruins to be placed, each a replica with a grand accumulated history.

How peculiar it is here that we are jolted at one time back and then forward at such spectacular speed.

There is an idea of time being a continuous flow, like the river. Yet we experience time as a number of conflations, ruptures, interruptions, moments of being.

The female protagonist of Marguerite Duras' ‘The Lover’ begins by recounting to the reader, as beginning to a story of her life, one single image. This image is one of herself, some fifty years previous, as a fifteen-year-old girl crossing the Mekong River on a ferry headed in the direction of Saigon. We are given a number of details in her delineation, perhaps most notably--at least for a reader interested in photographs--is the information that the image never actually existed, was never ‘taken’ by a camera or ‘captured’ on film. This image then, at least until the moment it was transformed into an account of words, is one existing entirely in the realms of memory. Not only that but it is also a moment that was seemingly insignificant as it played out in real time, at least not significant enough to be photographed As such it is an image that has become important with hindsight; in knowing all that our narrator does in the now the ‘has been’ of this moment is realised to her as a junction, a significant moment joining two parts of her life. She notes that the weight this image carries is in its failure to have been created. In the present she chooses to create it, to render it photographically, as one might narrate any snapshot found of a younger self. As many have written before me whatever the significance an image might have been allowed at the moment of its creation does tend, over time, to gather metaphorical weight until the moment when one image can often come to stand for a, sometimes substantial, period of ones life. The ultimate conclusion being that in later life one tends to turn toward the ‘things’ amassed along they way, these objects helping to resurrect, and indeed construct, our past. As such the most symbolic subject that has managed to find its way into Duras’ ‘shot’ is perhaps the Mekong River, at this geographic location having nearly completed its route from source to mouth and carrying on its surface all the various debris it has collected on the way.
So this is time: a grouping of incongruous matter; driven together, falling apart.
The meeting of various durations / my body, crossing.

In her text, 'Project for a trip to China', Sontag...

The bridge at Lowu was dissembled a few years ago, and moved elesewhere. It was re-erected as an archeological monument, this in between place now as destination. In the record office of Hong Kong a film repeats: an American soldier crossing the Lo Wu bridge over and over, caught between two places in none. Whilst in other images, bridges between Hong Kong and Chinese territories from topographic surveys of the area by the British during the 1950s, there is shown a falsehood of space--a movement across false borders by bicycle.
A survey of what is seen from one side, and what is not visible from the other position.

Once we cross the bridge the Lo Wu bridge into the city of Shenzen the tops of buildings are: alike to scholar's rocks, viewed from one side as a cultural form and from the other a natural one.
The scholar buys rocks from the true collector.
The rocks become subject to the usual systems of exchange and value, as we so often discussed on our travels.
Surely then if I am the purchaser of rocks, I am neither collector nor scholar.
In this thing I/you see a history/possibility and I/you do not.
I cannot truly see anything.

Colonialists like to collect.

Old eggs: Alike to finds from archeological digs.
Do you know the process? By which they're gathered, wrapped in rice, lime, soft ash and tea, and then buried in the ground - practically archeology in reverse.
The possibility of an accumulated history, the century egg gathers one year every day.

In Ireland a tree bought back from China by a Victorian botanist this year flowered for the first time in a century.
A garden that flowers only one Spring in every one-hundred. The possibility that the time elapsed between each bloom is as though no time at all. The space between touching, intrathin. A point between which it is possible to travel - connected to two places at once, and through this I am able to be close despite being seperated by the long duration.

I am a vessel, you are a vessel, I have weighed you down, the weight of history, the lightness of film.

Laura Guy

Project After S : Being Twice