Pauline Cummins - Alan Boardman - Johnny Salmon
performance text photos
A Fiction in Killmainham Gaol - Pauline Cummins
To wander in unknown places, to see directions of meaning interwoven with the growth spurts of experience and memory. The anxiety of tunnel travel brings heaped internal affect until the focusing of the voyeur has blurred out unwanted stimulations. A shaman, a spiritual archeologist Enters the voyeurs eye and begins to trace the space, tracing the body of a cavity, an orphanage. An orphanage, not for the orphaned, but a space that is orphaned. An orphanage that is host to the ailment of invasion. Tracing with a branch of a tree or tracing with ramus. To trace with a division of a nerve or a blood vessel, a branch connecting nerves and arteries.
To trace over the surfaces of a concrete body of cells and iron skeleton support is to trace not the past nor the future but the traces of absence. Ascending to the upper levels on spiral nucleic acid and tracing further the present here and now, which is always already an absent present. But what does it mean to trace the space, is there some trace evidence here, is the voyeur in a crime scene, witnessing the mapping of neurons from source to termination or is this ritual of tracing always already hidden, only the mark of an absence of presence.1
Is this orphaned body of cells a trace fossil. Is the shaman sweeping away the remnants of construction to reveal the sedimentological structures, the geological records of a biological invasion. Is this sweeping act to clean away or is it to detect an elusive presence. Deep in the mine of the mind the voyeur and the shaman can feel this presence. The dampness of mould grows in urolites, the flows of evacuated liquid carry the traces that lay dormant in this mine. Some explosive capacity is waiting to be excavated. This smell of dampness is ruptured by the chemistry of detergent – a chemical attack on mind, memory and association. The shaman continues to wander to trace. As she wanders, with branches as tools of detection she also strays deeper and closer, leaving behind her own traces of ghost.
To wander in unknown places, to see directions of meaning interwoven with the growth spurts of experience and memory. The anxiety of tunnel travel brings heaped internal affect until the focusing of the voyeur has blurred out unwanted stimulations. A shaman, a spiritual archeologist Enters the voyeurs eye and begins to trace the space, tracing the body of a cavity, an orphanage. An orphanage, not for the orphaned, but a space that is orphaned. An orphanage that is host to the ailment of invasion. Tracing with a branch of a tree or tracing with ramus. To trace with a division of a nerve or a blood vessel, a branch connecting nerves and arteries.
To trace over the surfaces of a concrete body of cells and iron skeleton support is to trace not the past nor the future but the traces of absence. Ascending to the upper levels on spiral nucleic acid and tracing further the present here and now, which is always already an absent present. But what does it mean to trace the space, is there some trace evidence here, is the voyeur in a crime scene, witnessing the mapping of neurons from source to termination or is this ritual of tracing always already hidden, only the mark of an absence of presence.1
Is this orphaned body of cells a trace fossil. Is the shaman sweeping away the remnants of construction to reveal the sedimentological structures, the geological records of a biological invasion. Is this sweeping act to clean away or is it to detect an elusive presence. Deep in the mine of the mind the voyeur and the shaman can feel this presence. The dampness of mould grows in urolites, the flows of evacuated liquid carry the traces that lay dormant in this mine. Some explosive capacity is waiting to be excavated. This smell of dampness is ruptured by the chemistry of detergent – a chemical attack on mind, memory and association. The shaman continues to wander to trace. As she wanders, with branches as tools of detection she also strays deeper and closer, leaving behind her own traces of ghost.
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As the mind moves deeper and closer, the shaman’s body moves to the upper cavity of the orphanage. She is free to move but is also attached and suspended to a phylum. Connected in fluid, networked by flows of floating matter and vibrating energy. She reaches out into the body of the space with a sudden outcry, like an outcrop on an otherwise plain surface. A chant breaks through the fluid and cements a connection with another. The visual is muted and the voyeur feels waves of sound drown out optic electricity. The inner and outer body cavities are synchronized by frozen time. The shaman is jolted out of trance by the interruption presented by interactions below her. She seeks connections and fragmentary interruptions with other bodies. The state of thermodynamic equilibrium, isolation from other bodies is nudged into a working substance to create excess entropy and to leave behind the trace of its presence. The shaman performs deterritorializations2 on the rituals of
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other bodies in the cavity. Sweeping into their spaces her presence uproots the repetitive performance of a possessed nervous system. To where and to whom do these catatonic impediments find meaning. Crouched, skipping, hunching, pacing, sucking, moaning, reciting, morphing in dark corners into geometric shapes. Coils of voyeurs weave though disputed territories, paused in anticipation. These territories are in a constant flux between calm repetition and violent interjection. These violent interjections into and onto this body cavity, this orphanage of ailment, mirror within the voyeur a stuttering interjection of the mind. A confused grasping at interpretation. The voyeur’s desire is not a sexual fantasy but a desire to force performative gesture into conceptual meaning. The shaman is sitting on a chair made of branch, resting, waiting, preparing. White cloth is torn in strips. The sound of neat and violent tearing. Bundles of packed sticks form a sweeping tool. The sound of sharp scratched sweeps disrupting fragmentary particles. How the sound of branches, and all that have formed those branches, rakes against the dead concrete hint to the voyeur a chronic and unremitting erosion of meaning, a meaning that is dispersed and settled in places to be further eroded and to further form the trace fossils in hidden prison cells. The interjections become aggressive and violent, a ritual of endurance is becoming an event of spectacle. Voyeurs track towards this spectacle of sweeping and lashing. The wooden chair is a dead throne, a solitude that has been ripped from the earth and made function. The shaman thrashes at the chair, the voyeurs capture the spectacle and also their own presence in optical data, bits of information, trace fossils of the future.
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Alan Boardman, December 2010
1. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Translators Preface, p. xvii.
2. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix 1983. ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ 10th Edition Minneapolis University of Minnesotta Press
1. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Translators Preface, p. xvii.
2. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix 1983. ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ 10th Edition Minneapolis University of Minnesotta Press