digitalanddead-inruins-blog

[digitalanddead-inruins-blog]

Rachel [off-site]:

B4 our WALK (Wed. Aug 29th)

This is the weird thing... I can’t stop thinking about Fascism… Esp lately, b/c my knee is busted and all I do is stay in reading AntiFa clickbait… B/c my Grandaddy was in WWII and he had stories… B/c it scares me… B/c of Mussolini and his fetishization of Ancient Rome (and larger habits of folks who author connections with a simplified notion of the past to bolster their position/ideology/nationalist identity etc.)… But I’m just some privileged white girl from Canada who never had to experience Fascism first-hand (just geographically distanced observations on the net, or historicized musings)… at least not yet… what am I even doing talking or thinking about ancient history at a time like this?

 So, back in 2008-2010, during the financial/housing crash, I made a bunch of work in Los Angeles (that was re-framed in 2015) about the weird link btwn the 2nd wave of American Neo-Classism and their banking system (it’s tangled and almost shockingly synchronic)… apparently bits and pieces of this get discussed in the more academic end of Copyright Law (a friend’s mom who’s a world renowned expert/prof/editor [she knows her shit] of a major journal on the subject told me so… so, yeah)…

So that whole thing got me to thinking about buried shit… how we take-on and dig-up this buried shit... how we shape and clean it and in doing so distinctly author it. The permeating compressed dust, dirt and nitre gets scraped off and discarded, and the remaining matter is shaped into an augmented sign; transforming the Aggregate Clump into a Sharply Formed Declaration …

It got me thinking about how this buried shit gets used (sometimes forcefully) by governments, assholes, even well-intentioned assholes...artists... it doesn’t matter… it gets cleaned up and scrubbed up and (re)shaped and hoisted back up again… and again… and again… All that repeated and meme-y and calcified Benjaminian Fossil shit (thank-u Susan Buck-Morss <3). We forget that marble and stone and terracotta was gaudy and painted and dirty and fleshy and stinky and messy... that the gods lived in the stone and they were lusty and corporeal… they fucking LIVED in them… that people shat around here… gods shat around here… literally shat… ate and shat… look around this necropolis… someone has shit and pissed here, I guarantee it. Ritual and Reverence, wtvr. There’s someone’s garbage over there (old and new and ancient and plastic)… Someone has taken a dump here! Dig it. The chaos is resistance...

I dunno, I want to talk about the fetishization and re-authoring the past and Fascism and nostalgia but I don’t know if I’m allowed to… if it makes me a real fucking asshole for even attempting it (making that association). A dumb Canadian ex-pat/migrant walks into a Roman/Italian ruin and immediately goes to ______ism… This is usually the kind of harsh narrative voice I have spoken through a surrogate when I do my performances because I’m such a fucking pussy and sometimes scared of my own words (ok, ok, there are obvs considered/conceptual reasons but this is personal/casual email format, so here’s some performative vulnerability)… But every time I want to talk about impressions and thoughts and imaginations and Imagineering and all that about a solid place, a (HARD) Place (especially one that screams HISTORY in bloc capitols), that I don’t know abso-fucking-everything about (as if panomathic knowledge can be achieved – w/o going into debates on who’s knowing is legit/cannon [speaking of fascism/colonialism/empirical thinking]) I get scared as fuck… because lets face it… Monuments = (HARD) Power and Framing =  (HARD) Power. The solid-as-a-rock, simplified, uni-lateral presentation of these (HARD) objects/architecture is about Power... Declarative, Shaped, Authored POWER (and that is kinda scary)…

But I’m post-net-y/net-y-native enuff-to-kno that the infinite refractions of opinion and speculation that bounce like imperfect fleshy radar off of these objects and spaces can potentially offer up a whole multi-verse of meanings, readings… pasts, futures, presents… the (HARD) stuff is still permeable and plastic under the right conditions… Embracing entropy and all that (I’m sorry, I spent too much time in California/@CalArts and art-bro’s in Cali spend waaaaaay to much time talk’n bout the entropic, ugh)… So, yeah, order and chaos, excavation and neglect... I’m violently ambivalent as usual.

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The WALK (Wed. Aug 30th)

How do I feel, what are my impressions?

Wikipedia tells me that the Greeks used this as a minor outpost, didn’t really care much about it. It was too far out from anything else, isolated.

I keep thinking of Ballard’s The Crystal World...

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 You (Sarah) Skyped me and the connection sucked but the images were nice. It was like back in the day when I would steal my brother’s World of Warcraft login and go fuck-about with his Orc (he didn’t like that). Whenever the connection was dropped-and-returned you loaded in slow, long lags… long fucking lags… then sped-up fast catch-ups when your voice would go all robotic. The necropolis looked like Minecraft (which was fitting, considering we used a Minecraft “grave” in our last work tgthr)…

It’s difficult for me to get a sense of the “flesh” (in the embodied theological/corporeal sense) of the place. Like I mentioned earlier… gods, people, animals shit and pissed [with]in these places and forms, and I’m trying to figure out how that embodiment shifts/relates/translates/transubstantiates to a pixel.

 At the end of our “walk”, Anthony Gormley’s dude taking up the best view in the whole park pops up, and our connection starts going haywire and I got weird feedback and its all so “slender-man” creepy, haunted shit… screeches and hiss and this black “shadow” figure…The whole landscape blurred and chunky. I wanted so badly to post this to one of those digital folklore pages on reddit but the feedback sound didn’t record and it kinda killed the spookiness.

 Still, sound or no sound… glitch-blur or no glitch-blur… bad connection…  wtvr got lost… collections of impressions... for my purpose it made good video.

-Rachel

[digitalanddead-inruins-blog]

Sarah [on-site]:

Dear Rachel, Am I being romantic if I tell you that this place (Skylletion (greek) Scolacium (latin), Squillace (norman)) is still full of people? I cannot see emptiness within the excavated perimeter of this large ancient city. I can see the forum, the theatre, the amphitheatre, the necropolis. It takes me less than an instant to imagine ancient Romans living here. We might be even be walking the same road, touching the same stone… Now, I am thinking about one Jean Cocteau’s short book, La Difficulté d’Etre/The Difficulty of Being (1947). I cannot find the exact quote (my copy of the book is at home), but reflecting on his own mortality, he writes about his hope that a part of him will never perish; that maybe someone, somewhere will smile, move or say something like he does/did. The idea that things, bodies still exist, mutate; persist both in presence and absence. Scolacium is the constant manifestation of this still-living past. You might argue that I am picturing a romanticised/fetishised landscape triggered on my love for archeology + my blatant animism. That is fair enough, but if you will deny me the postulate that people are still present in soul, I shall respond that they are still present in bones; for it is certain that bodies are still resting on this ground. As I am sat on a weird, minimalist, post-whatever sort of light (picture attached) facing the Byzantine Necropolis, I am suddenly thinking about one of the poems we harvested as a reference for Digital&Dead, Do Not Stand By My Grave And Weep - 1932. I love the oddness of its conception. This American Lady, Mary Elizabeth Frye, who never intended to be an artist/writer/poet might have apparently written this unique piece and passed it on to people. It was never published in her lifetime, but somehow, people shared it so much that it is still to this day a “go-to” eulogy (plenty of remembrance gifs and memes quote this poem). It is not Hugo’s beautiful and heart-breaking Tomorrow at Dawn dedicated to his late daughter (which, you may be impressed to hear that I still know by heart, thanks to French primary school), neither is it Baudelaire, or Rilke; but the simplicity of the language and rhymes have an undeniable power. Thinking about standardised ways of memorialising and grieving, it appears suddenly clear to me that I am surrounded with the remains of a standardised architecture: forum/theatre/amphitheatre… the staples of a Roman city: systematically built, ‘mass-produced’ across the cities forming what was once one of the largest Empire of the Ancient World. Wars definitely had an impact on the expansion of Rome, but it’s persistence lies on its ability to firstly impose, then provide a normalised culture: a process of Romanisation overtaking people’s diverse identity; heritage. Romans would have loved the world we currently live in, right ? 

On this note, I will let Sarah-bot read Do Not Stand By My Grave And Weep.