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It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this | SERAFINE 1369

14th April 2022

This text & audio accompany the performance to camera commission ‘It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this’ by SERAFINE 1369. See the full commission here.


To be read aloud after watching or/and whilst watching:
Option to listen to the text here:

Forming from 

the purrs 

of the past 

a murmur 

a hum

Awkward knee bend knee angle 

holding oneself 

joint forms

It is now

Time drops time traps 

Announcements of access

(Should we believe you when you call the time?)

Stretching glutes

adductors holding and slowly drawing close

A single line 

before language

vibrating in the direction of movement

Timeless and slow

I creep towards what..? 

or maybe it is about the creeping itself

Unstable forms, seemingly unstable forms

Small child in the freshness lowness of 

(seeming) 

vulnerability of giving full attention 

to something 

Strange place for pressure

Seeing in doubles 

I am (clearly) moving forward

A few attendants  

minding their own business 

more than understanding the figure figuring it out 

between earth & sky 

lights & darks 

covering uncovering 

Body belonging to the world

body sings –

In the centre we are liquid

Neck tendons softening

Small pockets of space opening up in the base of skull

dropping back, all that is behind and below

A cavern

Extending beneath the concrete into the quickness of

soil

What am I doing rolling around in dirt?

Axle 

noun 

a bar or shaft 

on a which a wheel pair of wheels or other rotating member 

revolves

I have bought a new dictionary 

its pages are thin and easily folded 

or torn

Axil  

noun 

the angle between the upper surface 

of a branch or leaf stalk 

and the stem from which it grows

Emanating silence

Shoes on benches

Necromantic cyborg manoeuvres

Sun salutations

Becoming

Becoming grand long tall tubular a totem

Hood as god costume

Or 

I cover my eyes so that I can see

Transform my shape – simplifying edges

Structural amendments

Transformation accelerates

Arms stretch 

These are descriptions, wordless articulations

Looks slowed down

The function of costume to cloak is useful

Hermit

Ascent

Axis 

noun 

plural axes 

1 a real or imaginary line about which a body 

such as an aircraft

can rotate 

or about which an 

object form composition or geometrical construction 

is symmetrical 

2 one or two of three 

reference lines 

used in coordinate geometry to locate 

a point 

in a plane or in space 

3 anatomy 

the second cervical vertebra

4 botany 

the main central part of a plant

typically consisting of the stem and root

from which secondary branches 

and other parts 

develop 

an alliance 

between a number of states to coordinate 

their foreign policy 

also called principal axis 

optics 

the line of symmetry 

of an optical system 

such as the line passing through the centre 

of a crystal 

and used to characterise its symmetry

What is it about the hands?

My knuckles, lined by winter

Un folding

Hood off top off different energy 

feel the blood in head and fingers

touching vibrating air

finger tips gripping the bass-line 

listening, loosening, a softening of tone

in skin, in bone, in fascia..

Thinking hands

rotating around each other like a malfunctioning clock

Summoning

curving to catch

points of energetic constellation 

Where are those eyes seeing?

In through the eyes – 

I remember 

watching someone take a swig of vodka 

through their eyeball

You bleed

I bleed

fingers unfurl and throb 

Tongue – 

organic matter 

taste the air 

the air is tasting me

spreads into body all over out

resonant frequencies slice the claws

protective proteins letting their guards down 

A meeting in the matrix when the moon goes black

///

Open sky open ground

the between of things

electricity

of plants 

and bodies

vibrations loosening – what is this zone?

Against the bricks

the club is 

above ground

an alternate time zone

windows into windows

the framing of frames

This red of the brick wall 

and the red of the skirt 

and the red of this person’s phone 

Red is my soul colour I am told

Is this a ritual is this a spell

Primary colours are irreducible

Black equals holding all, absorbing all light

A welcome

I still feel the resonance 

of those other moments

movements 

of thought communication data 

invisibly

as though those gestures command time

What is the relationship between the flying body 

and the grounded one? 

Pigeons – Messengers of god

I am waiting for the message 

or 

I am just here in the garden

held in time

Caught vibrating in different patches of time

Everything under

everything under

the distance between us

brushes frontal lobes

and they slip

into an invisible stream

There is something

green spreading 

in the dip between collarbone 

and shoulder socket

shallow roots 

hooking 

into pores

tiny leaves uncurling across skin at speed

tracking the direction of light

You are melting down the inside of 

my ear canal

through the tubes and pockets

flowing over the sides 

of my ribs

Wet bone

sweet darkness moving

dripping slowly down 

through the hollows 

of my spine

Plant tips finger tips

open leaf open palm

one square amongst many

spirals 

caught 

held 

thejustbeforethejustafterthe…

Fists 

this limiting and containing 

of energetic flow 

so I feel 

like a pinball machine 

and the ball

riding

measuring 

the Justice

Hands are important

Feet too

step step

Everything

A book

pages on the floor 

I wonder what they say

Oh it is a napkin 

Spaces underneath

between ground and body – what exists here?

Play between the air and the blood

The back space

What moves behind?

I call on nothing I have ever seen before 

everything an end in itself and a beginning

Two fingers – not gun fingers but what? 

Heart to sky

heart + heart protector

The performance of gestures

signalling to who or what 

tiny movements 

organs hiding behind each other 

saliva following

heart starts to beat sideways

lung cells spinning      

high

trip underground

The bigger breath

the bigger breath needed to either 

come back from the bottom of the ocean 

or 

to jump right in into it

No words

No more words

Sometimes it is not time for words

A garden walk as a 

filtering of phenomena 

the hand seeks and comes to know 

through both sides of itself 

the gap in the ground 

fissure 

our secret crack 

from the skin to the heart 

from the skin to the organs 

from the skin to the voice

and the eyes

We see you


Accompanying text edited by SERAFINE1369 featuring contributions from Alice MacKenzie, Anouk Thériault, Antonija Livingstone, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Harun Morrison, Jamila Johnson-Small, Nissa Nishikawa, Phoebe Collings-James, Zinzi Buchanan

SERAFINE1369 (previously Last Yearz Interesting Negro) is the London based artist and choreographer, Jamila Johnson-Small. SERAFINE1369 works with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology.  This work brings an urgency around understandings of, and sensitivity to, connection, distinction, relation and context, SERAFINE1369’s approach is experiential, embodied and structural.

SERAFINE1369 works with darkness, voice, movement, overwhelm, vibration, inviting forms to emerge and mutate, interrupting the fiction of linear time; atmospheric landscapes created through the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Their raw material is messages from an oracular body, on personal/structural/symptomatic/somatic/psychic levels. Always thinking about the metabolic – impact and exchange through/in/as movement – choreography becomes a ritual decomposition process for channelling, challenging and unsettling embodied (internalised or naturalised) concepts. 

SERAFINE1369 has a relational, cumulative and often collaborative practice, gathering and transmitting information through working in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles. SERAFINE1369 makes performance, installation, sound, video and text that elaborate on their research into bodies, systems, movement and dance as a tool for divination, towards making spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory, spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable.

Recent commissions include ‘When we speak I feel myself, Opening’, Sadlers Wells, London, 2022; ‘A Continual Cry’, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2021; ‘(unarticulated architectures of) AMBIVALENT LONGING’, The Robert’s Institute of Art, London, 2022. basictension.com


Commissioned by performingborders, April 2022

With support from Necessity Fund

Image credits: Still from It is impossible to say everything here so I leave you with this, SERAFINE1369, 2022, screenshoot. Courtesy of the artist.

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