crack crack

Preparing Terra Incognita et cetera for the Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

Chris sent me this photo that he has taken for me before I went to the site at Centraal Museum, Utrecht. From previous correspondence with Meta Knol I did imagine that the wall would be quite big and that excited me.

When I came to the site I tested things out with projections to decide how big the mural would be. I came up with a size which sits comfortably on the wall in relation to the space.

Then I thought of the shelf to put the props on as part of the installation after the opening.

The shelf will accommodate all the props used in my performance during the opening – the trays of remaining cocktail flags and cocktail umbrellas, the wine glasses, a TV monitor for the video. Perhaps I should use cocktail glasses instead?

I also surveyed some colours for the work. The morning before I started this test I went to a local market and found these party assortments at the Blokker supermarket. It was wonderful to discover that they use mostly the same colour as the flags that I used for the Melbourne version.

In this Utrecht version I will use cocktail umbrellas as well. What a novelty they are! Mega-fun. The good thing is that during the exhibition, the umbrellas’ shadows cast on the wall would add to the whole composition – in Melbourne there were only square-ish shadows cast by the cocktail flags.

And this time I will make the flags with long matchsticks. I was so happy to find out that the Dutch word for matchstick is Lucifer. The bringer of light. The morning star. Satan himself, before he fell. The matchstick was also bought in a local supermarket – a Swedish Match product. When I flew back to London, I had to light them one by one before I went in the gate, so that they would be non-flammable and I could bring them with me in the airplane.

A sketch of how the installation might look like during the exhibition – except that the map will be territorialised according to the local audience during the performance, like the one in Melbourne:

This Utrecht version of the territorialised map will certainly be different from the Melbourne version pictured above. I am curious to find out, as the nature of the venues are quite different as well.

For the opening performance I will use a podium. The podium then will be taken away after the opening, leaving just the shelf. This time, a video piece will help to put the work in context, especially because I would not come again at the end of the exhibition to paint the wall back to white.

Thanks to Jet Vermaning and Camiel van Lenteren (Centraal Museum), Petra Kuipers and Chris Bestebreurtje (Motive Gallery) for making this sketching possible. Would you like to claim a land at Terra Incognita? Come and participate! Beyond the Dutch: Indonesia, the Netherlands and the visual arts from 1900 until now will open on 15 October 2009 at Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

Turbulence. Nothing new. The roughest one I’ve had so far, though. The woman sitting next to me held on tightly to her seat. She closed her eyes tightly, and mumbled something. A prayer, maybe, obviously. Or perhaps promises? Her heart beat faster, by the look of it. I thought of Kiki, her recently-developed, self-grown fear of flight and what I would tell her when we landed. Someone chuckled. There was no announcement from the pilot. A guy at the back row next to mine looked around excitedly. I could understand very well what he felt — to me it felt a bit like a fun ride on a roller coaster. I thought of how small we must have looked already from Schiphol down below. How meaningless.

Cotton-like clouds. How could they generate such violent bumps? I wondered whether that would be how my life ended — that the very plane would go down and crash. Losing its wings on the way down, perhaps. C-r-a-c-k. Then the other, c-r-a-c-k. Somehow, I was somewhat exhilarated. Kiki told me that in the process of a plane crash, an aeroplane could break in two. A usual spot would be around the wings, which, oh, right where I was sitting. How thrilling. Then it came: almost an audible thump. For a second I felt my bum flying in the air and sensed the seatbelt pulling me back down. Whoa, I exclaimed. Whoa? It didn’t seem too appropriate of a response.

The thump, however, seemed to be a thump out of the troubled zone. I looked out the window again and could only saw blue sky. The deceiving clouds were gone. Everything was suddenly calmer, like a fish out of the stormy sea taking a breath of fresh air. People mumbled their relief and a few of them giggled. The woman sitting next to me stroked her belly with the remaining last bits of her anxiety, looking lovingly at it, almost cooing. That was when I first realised she might have been pregnant.

I thought of Ola Pehrson. I met Ola during the Istanbul Biennial. We hung out with Johanna Billing and a few others, a brief introduction, a brief chat, a brief lunch and some cups of apple tea, on a brief day. He was one of the greatest person to be around, however, and I felt a nice enthusiasm growing in me to visit him in Sweden soon. I had no idea that that was never going to happen: a few short weeks after leaving Istanbul, he and his family had a car accident. A brief life. All of them, except for their youngest child, died in the accident.

I thought of my father and how he smiled in his death. What is it like on that other side? If there is an other side. I thought of that woman’s unborn baby. I thought of Dan and I thought of death. I thought of not being able to say goodbye before my death — or rather, whether it is necessary to say goodbye. After all, it’s death, and we will all have it when the time comes — it’s the only certain thing in life. If life is about experiencing after all, what difference does death make?

Living, however, is about relating as well, and that’s where death makes a difference. My plane landed smoothly in Gatwick. The next day, a stream of emails from my S-Express friends shocked me: Alexis and his girlfriend Nika were shot dead in their house in Quezon City three hours before my rough flight back to London. Until the moment I read those emails, catching up with Alexis was still a possibility lingering in the back of my mind. I didn’t even know he got together with Nika. My grieving of my father’s sudden death seemed to have clouded my knowledge of his grieving of his. That’s how long we haven’t caught up. That many things we could have updated each other with. But the news of his death wiped off the potential of ever relating again with him.

Right at this moment I could die. What would it be like for me? Immediate limbo? Or would there be a moment, or a day, or a few weeks of adjusting to the fact that time, in my body, doesn’t tick anymore? I know how it feels on our living side — to be stripped off the privilege of relating, and of experiencing life in relations with our beloved dead. That feeling of loss. This very moment, should I die, would I feel the same loss?