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
5
an alliance
between a number of states to coordinate
their foreign policy
6
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.