A Barefoot Residency..

New routes and dust ..

a large empty space has appeared in the centre of the church. The floor is a carpet of dust pulling the sound beneath it like a quietening sheet. New lines are revealed, all leading to the edge..

I try to resist the urge to skip around it, but may not..

dust collects on the soles of my feet…a new field today.

I am able to walk in a wider circle. Labyrinths, crop circles..tracings..

My feet become cold. I think of ice, ice shoes, ice in churches, and watching Marina Abramovic’s seated performance amongst ice blocks and snakes..

quiet boundaries, holding breath.

and in comes a fly..just me and a fly.

A space of 20 days..

Remnants of easter lillies and basement voices, and the soundscape today is ‘spoken’ in long sentences of repair..

Acts of sifting through light and images, being drawn towards circular framing, liquid screen.

I project another ‘walk’, a previous act of trespass to incite connection both there and here.

There is an echo that I try to listen to, and in order to do this I resume the walking circle for a moment, just for a moment..

And then 2 people arrive to ‘order’ the flowers. scooping and sifting through dead heads, and I listen to the pouring of water.

He tells me of a choir practice and he says ‘ there is a three second delay when we sing, from the front to the back of the church. When we sing we can hear ouselves three seconds after we stop. we can still hear our voices at the back of the church’.

and I am invited to come and listen sometime..

It is important not to ‘will’ slippage.

The building breaths differently today, just the end wall is still covered with a polythene skin. From behind it, fragments of speech, directions given in a low key, and a slow granular scraping, the occasional screech of the winch.

I have been loaned a projector. It is like picking up a musical instrument after a long time of not playing, for whatever reason.

I slip images across object, wall, floor, from pillar to post. Play, capture, dissolve, shift, miniaturise and stretch. I project another walk, a lambs heart, a bucket.. a dissolve of time and spaces, substance and solid, some illusion. ‘The order of remembering’ springs back into my mind.

I project a layer, a film of the polythene skin moving, fluid, onto a stone pillar, its opposite. It seems to dissolves the structure before inhabiting it, and becomes mesmerizing. I look around and see other polythene ‘skins’ hooked around the organ, a painting, the far wall. They hang like discarded clothes on the back of a chair. Some kind of dissaray. The beginning of an investigation into the push and pull of the interior of the space, of exploring its elasticity, its resonance perhaps.

My barefoot walking happens at the end on this day. Maybe a reverse step to propel new motion, and so I walk backwards in order to make a new move..

Women are sweeping today. I sweep too, and collect church dust, plaster dust, and one flower head.

I sit on the edge, ledge, and bind my foot, begin to wind..

‘like swaddling, or death wraps’ someone says in passing, and I note the looping, and pulling…something to explore further..

and someone else flags up Mona Hatoum’s performance ‘Roadworks’, 1985.

No such thing as a simple journey.

Workman, chains, scaffolding, churning up the space and stillness. I sit and watch poles and planks come down, to reveal again the stone skin.

I cannot hide today. I absorb myself in cutting. Long strips of paper, a ritual, like swimming lengths of a pool. Space opening up through the rhythm of the scissors. I attempt to re tune, from above to ground level. My breath plays with motion of cutting too.

A gathering, and so I walk through piles of paper strips, searching. The sound is like walking through long dry grass..white fields..

I record the sounds, it gives me another space, ambiguous shifting.

Public/private/elsewhere

I play back these fragments. I read this.

‘Life is rife with fogetting, and sound is ripe with todays’

En abime – Daniella Cascella,London 2013