Walk Within a Slow Future
We Need to Talk (detail), watercolor and pencil on paper, 173x114cm, 2021.
Walk Within a Slow Future is a story told in images, along with a soundtrack and a poem handwritten on the gallery wall. It is a love story, about the last surviving couple on the planet, in a slow stroll along their old neighbourhood that is being erased, first by futuristic flora, and then by a white space bursting into the images “from another dimension”. Drawing on the experiences of long walks along the empty city and loss of work during the Covid pandemic, as well as a personal story of a breakup, this body of work functions as a series of visual, sonic, and poetic shots of a world during and after “the end”.
Inhabitation, watercolor and pencil on paper, 70x50cm each, 2021.
Endfruit, watercolor and pencil on paper, 75x105cm, 2022.
How come it’s you and me that survived? We have no survival skills.
Our talents are unnecessary and wasteful. Are we qualified for this work of disappearing?
We do this one thing that we know how – walk. We walk this end of the city. There is no world anymore, only ends. Every place will become an end. We walk because it’s the only skill we have that’s still applicable. Past service doesn’t count here.
We walk slowly. We walk within the slow. We have never actually experienced slow. Each step takes as long as it takes this strange vegetation to engulf us.
There is no world anymore, only the world’s edge. And it is arching upwards and hanging above our heads, like a scorpion’s tail, or a slide. We are out on a walk. Each step turns homes into strata.
Raise your hands – do you feel the wind?
We raise our hands as if to surrender to it, or summon it.
I don’t feel it. Yet everything is shifting, swaying, fluttering. I don’t hear anything. There is no sound:
the wind is blowing in some other dimension.
The wind is blowing from another dimension, and it’s erasing all dividing lines. Everything is a rainforest. Everything is an ancient city with excellent traffic connection. Everything is a street or a waterfall. Everything is hilly, or a car. We could be an egg of a new lizard species. Or an empty bus speeding into a movie theater. A market. A desert. A stolen no parking sign. We could be a lake of lilies, full of pollen that isn’t going anywhere. We could say goodbye to these bodies. To say goodbye is to say, “Thank you”.
Thank you for early rising and half-good sleep.
Thank you for the sit-ups and the push-ups, for hip-opening and movements from the elbow.
Thank you for the wetness and holding your breath.
Thank you for the ears, the music-listening.
Thank you for opening the door with your pinky and ring finger while gripping the vacuum cleaner with the rest.
Thank you for the heat, the hands that know about nerves and muscles.
Thank you for the softness, the fingers that search for chords.
Thank you for remembering everything.
Thank you for these two hearts.
Thank you for walking this far with me.
Thank you for staying here with me, until we’re erased by this whiteness.
Do You Feel the Wind, watercolor and pencil on paper, 144x114cm, 2022.
Every Place Will Become An End, watercolor and pencil on paper, 2022.
The Wind That Erases, watercolor on paper, 200x95cm each, 2022.
We Need to Talk, watercolor and pencil on paper, 173x114cm, 2022.
Soft Site, watercolor and pencil on paper, 70x100cm, 2022.
After Work / Soft Skills, watercolor and pencil on paper, 73x102cm, 2022.