Dreaming of Atlantis ¹ : setting asphalt into motion.
During the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police started a wave of global protests against racism and police brutality. Subsequently, statues of individuals linked to the Transatlantic slave trade as well as to the modern history of European colonialism have slowly started to be taken down, both lawfully and unlawfully. At the base of each monument that was collectively pulled down, markings, ruins and dents in the pavement remain. Slowly the wind disperses the rubble, forming concentric circles around the square. This reminds me of a dance, which in turn recalls the memory of the crowd heaving and lurching under a singular effort. The electric energy amassed by that momentum has settled and, as if in an invisible but viscid web, everyone who comes here becomes entangled with its field of potential.
The defaced ground waits for us to bend over and reach towards it, half expecting for our hands to sink into thick tar. This young and unstable ground becomes an interface. The asphalt - molten and liquid - gives beneath those that have come to peer into its entrails.
The expectation of transcendental or linear change, such as it exists in Western Idealist thought, is misleading at best and disempowering at worst. These systems of thought have attempted to justify change by looking to external forces as opposed to immanent processes. The reference in the title to a search for Atlantis is foul play: cartography and hidden treasures suggest cartesian coordinate systems and hermeneutics. However, in my own research, Atlantis is shape-shifting and inspired by Deleuze’s concept of the “encounter”. The Deleuzian encounter is defined in opposition to representation, which lulls us into “common sense” and “habit.” On the contrary, the Deleuzian encounter is an interaction with something that leads us to deeply reconfigure the way in which we perceive - creating an entanglement of belongings between moments, localities and matter.
My Atlantis functions as a placeholder for sites of both memory and change. A topography of encounters; it is expansive, fluid and often imperceptible within conventional methods of inquiry. Entities become permeable and multidimensional. Continuity in being ( “I” or the identity of a historical event, for example ) becomes the product of a sustained, but constantly fluctuating assemblage of interactions and processes. Culture, narratives and other such intangible events - down to the aura of a crowd or the porous surface of a specific monument - interact with other embedded agents in order to bring about change in the world.
My current project, extracts of which are shared below, not only seeks to understand this field of relationships but also participates in its continuous production.
¹ Here my use of the term “Dreaming” directly refers to an event that the postgraduate research group “Entanglement”, led by Professor Johnny Golding at the RCA, held on the 27th of May 2020. It was called “ENTANGLEMENT: just dreaming (the worlds)”.
² In my work the crowd fulfils the role of a narrative dislocation and does not respond to conventional binary designations. It does not exist as the disembodied yet delineated other. All the contrary, the crowd is as much a part of us as we are of it.
