18.12.14

Looking back, I’m not quite sure why I was so strongly polarised, but as a seven year old child, growing up in the last house in the last street on the very edge of the suburbs of a small town in the South West of England, I felt that I was drawn to explore the countryside and areas of wasteland that our house backed onto instead of entering with the other kids my age into the urban environment of the town itself. For some reason there was never a question as to which appealed more. I became very interested in understanding the network of relationships between the different forms of fauna and flora that I found in the open spaces of Somerset. Moths particularly became a passion of mine and I started to breed these insects in our small garden shed. I was fascinated by the metamorphic process that they went through. I was particularly interested in the moment of pupation – where, within the chrysalis, the specific digestive, nervous, respiratory and cardio-vascular systems of the larvae dissemble and reform into the completely different configurations of the adult insect’s organs, before it hatches and continues its life. This metamorphic process was endlessly fascinating to me and I am loathe to admit that many chrysalises were carefully opened up in a vain attempt to observe this moment of transformation

I think that it is no coincidence that I grew up at the meeting point of two things – urban/rural – and that my work as an artist is focused on similar zones of liminality. I forget who it was that said that everything that one makes is a self portrait – but I believe that there is a lot of truth in that observation

I worked late into the night last night, researching Khoi San trance dance, outside under the trees, with the sounds of the night vivid around me. Even looking up such an ancient ritual on the internet – the defining tool of our current age – seems somehow incongruous and in a way I am not that surprised when I find it difficult to turn up much useful information. There are a couple of short films that document some of the movement of the dance but there is very little documentation of any moments when the participants seem to be experiencing trance states. I imagine that this is because these rituals, which are profoundly significant for the entire community, are understandably not something that they would allow to be filmed

Khoi San trance dance leg rattles

African Silk moth (Gonometa Rufobrunnea)

Then I happened across one short film which had footage of a single dancer moving at night around a fire with a group of seated participants chanting a mesmeric rhythm. The thing that immediately struck me was that the shaman wore ankle rattles made of objects that seemed surprisingly familiar to me. After some online digging it turns out that they are made from hundreds of individual moth cocoons stitched to ties, then bound round the lower legs and ankles. After further searching I discovered that the species of moth whose cocoons were commonly used were two types of African Silk moth – Gonometa Rofobrunnea and Gonometa Postica – and the African Moon Moth – Argema Mimosae. Transcribed from the documentary, the words of Tsitano Maburunyara, a shaman of the Tsaukwe clan of the San people:

‘While we dance during the night, we change. Because we are dancing, we become different. If you focus, if you concentrate on the dance, you start to change. It is supposed to happen that way. You have to follow the song and what it is saying. When I dance for a long time, the powers come to me and then . . . I start touching people, and massaging them, and healing them’

The choice of naturally available material for the rattles, is driven of course by a practical decision, the chrysalis rubs against the inside of the silken cocoon providing the susurrating rhythm that underpins the trance dance. But the decision to use moth cocoons – a potent symbol of metamorphosis – in a situation that involves an act of transformation is exquisitely poetic

I have opened up a conversation with Johannesburg-based performer/choreographers Joni Barnard and Kieron Jina with a view to developing a short performance work during my residency at NIROX. In 2013 during a residency in Athens I worked with acclaimed Athenian choreographer Iris Karayan and composer Yorgos Simeonidis on the evolution of a performance work in response to a geometric pattern known as ‘The Flower of Life’. This geometry can be created by inscribing a circle with compasses, placing the compasses on the circumference of the circle and inscribing a second circle. The compasses are then placed at the points where the arc of the second circle intersects the first and another circle inscribed. This method can be repeated indefinitely to result in an exquisitely beautiful and philosophically significant tessellating pattern

The performance opened with a sudden and overwhelmingly loud block of sound sampled from the political demonstrations happening in Athens at the time of production. Individual voices were indiscernible. The sound stopped abruptly and a new digitally generated sound could be heard. Part played and part programmed, the sound had the quality of the classical Greek double reed pipe called Avlos. The composition had a Middle Eastern quality that reflects the modal system that is used in the Arabic countries and Turkey since the 15th Century and is based on a melodic system that dates back to classical Greek music and Pythagoras. The foundation of the composition was a sound derived from the idea of circular movements through sand that echoed the physical movements in space and time of the performers

’Root’, 2013, Durational multi media performance and performance relic, 1.5 tonnes of Pentelic marble dust, digital sound composition, performers, steel frame, linoleum. 5m x 4.2m / 23 minutes. Site specific collaboration with choreographer Iris Karayan, composer Yorgos Simeonides and performers Christina Rienhardt and Nondas Damopoulis

In this work two performers – a naked man and a woman – used their bodies to describe archetypal geometric forms into the pure white marble dust that filled a 5m x 4.2 metre metal framed rectangle, revealing the black surface of the floor beneath as the line of the drawing. Standing as archetypes, the performers moved slowly and with intensity, absorbed in a meditative task – creating a form individually or in unison, then erasing the marks with a wooden level run across the surface of the dust. The work explores the relationship between the ubiquitous mathematical phenomena that exist below the surface of all things that in turn inform and define the specifics of our sensual relationship to the world

The performance occurred on the opening night of the solo exhibition that followed my residency and the ‘drawing’ remained as a ‘relic’ accompanied by a filmic document of the performance screened alongside. Rooted in the proportions and bilateral symmetry of the human body and the asymmetrical nature of its expression in the world, the work combined elements of the past, present and future in an enigmatic experience that defied a definitive reading. Developed as a site-specific project in the birthplace of modern geometry, ‘Root’ attempted to go beyond a direct reference to the extraordinary events unfolding in the social and political fabric of Greek society at the time of its conception, but instead concentrated on what unifies us as a species rather than that which divides

my schematic drawing of ‘flying posture’ (note arms pushed back with arm hair standing, blood streaming from nose, eland like head) drawn from original at Origins Centre

‘Root’ – Nondas Damapoulis (back left) in opening posture

Looking at the Khoi San movement in the trance dance footage I watched last night, and re-watching my documentation of ‘Root’, I noticed an uncanny similarity between a posture adopted by Nondas Damapoulis in in the first stages of ‘Root’ and the ‘flying posture’ that is depicted in San rock art dating from thousands of years ago and can still be seen in the movement of the dance as practised today

Continuing my research, I also came across a film made in the 1950’s that documents Bushmen hunting in the Kalahari Desert. When they track down the Gemsbok that they have brought down with poisoned arrows, they butcher the animal where it lies, efficiently using every part of the animal – even squeezing the water content out of the animal’s undigested stomach contents. As they delve into the animals innards they smear blood over their bodies. The narrator notes speculatively that this may be as a form of protection from the sun, or as a way to put moisture back into the skin after days without water. What I found most interesting was that the hunters each marked their bodies by drawing into the ground of the blood, either cross hatch or stipple/ dot marks

Bushman markings in blood from freshly killed Gemsbok

I often work with static materials, and there is certainly something about the opportunity that performance collaboration offers for me to work with form in motion to generate meaning, that provides an enticing way of thinking through making. I have invited Barnard and Jina to work in collaboration with me to develop movement material based on a conversation that we will start in January and I am beginning to focus my thinking on how this might be structured. Bearing in mind the nature of the work that I made in Athens, I think that it would be interesting to take some of the things that I have learnt from that work and reposition them in the context of the geometrical aspects of early human trance and entoptic experience