June 20th – Guest Journal: Kata Győrfi (Day 12): I tell it to everyone

The day begins with an exhibition by Jiří Y. Suchánek at the Kibla Gallery, where the first work initially reminds me of ant farms: a cross-section, an artificial layering of soil, with soundtracks assigned to its different layers, as if an ant with a microphone strapped to its back were rustling through a given stratum and we were listening to its recordings.

Then, if I allow my attention to arrive and soften my gaze, I begin to imagine that those particular layers are stacked upon one another in time, and I listen to how each layer is practically being formed, settling, accumulating, depositing, and so on. The person guiding me through the gallery says that he is more analog than this, and I find myself wondering what could possibly be more analog than this. Suchánek’s Geophony (2004) works, for example, read, measure, and amplify stone surfaces; they work with geological frequencies, memories, sedimentation, friction, with spans of time that I am incapable of comprehending. And everything has a sound, which is especially meaningful to me because, as I wrote in my June 13 entry, sound, noise, and music dissolve the linearity of time within me.

And how could one time a visit to this exhibition more perfectly than on the day of the performance Nafta? A performance in which, somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, time is discussed from the perspective of dinosaurs, and in which the sentence is spoken: “The desert is the hand of God.” And I think of sand, endless sand, which remembers; which is data, memory, memory of movement, of water, friction, erosion, proximity and distance, tectonic shifts, embraces; the desert that remembers warmth and cold, scarcity and abundance.

The performance directed by Jan Krmelj begins from a supposedly real exhibition in Amsterdam featuring the works of a supposedly real activist-art collective. According to the exhibition’s concept, each activist-artist was given a room arranged according to their principles, and visitors were meant to walk through them. I write “supposedly” because although the performance belongs partly to the documentary genre, we are still in a theatre, where everything is just as true as it is untrue.

In one of the rooms, for example, the artists make their own “tracking” public, and through a programming language every one of their digital activities, every digital gesture, becomes accessible, readable, and traceable. If these records were printed on paper—and they considered this as well—the pages filled with data would occupy a small room. This exhibition is the point of departure for the performance.

It brings to mind a line from the twentieth-century Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy’s poem Foreword:

“I cannot tell it to anyone,
so I tell it to everyone.”

By the end of the performance, however, we learn that the entire exhibition archive has been erased, and the artists themselves have disappeared as well. And indeed, they have.

The performance’s concept is to bring these artists to life, to fictionalize them in one way or another, and to guide the audience through the exhibition, so to speak. Its language is deeply poetic, filled with moving personal stories connected to oil refineries, wealth, privilege, exploitation, class struggle, capitalism, and neoliberalism. We come into contact with places, sounds, money, snow, and oil; they make us itch. It is an enormous associative landscape. Perhaps I am already tired, but I find it difficult to follow at times, and there are sections that pass me by completely.

My own poetic interests have also turned in recent years toward posthuman and non-anthropocentric perspectives. In my poems I practice empathizing with elements and living beings that are exposed to the catastrophes produced by human senses of privilege. My poetry is preceded by a great deal of research, and I experiment – in Hungarian – with writing verbs, movements, displacements, and vibrations that do not evoke anything human, even indirectly.

And last night, as the festival slowly approaches its end, I found myself thinking that I will share one of my apocalypse poems, to add something of my own to the world created by yesterday’s exhibition of Jiří Y. Suchánek and the performance by Rrose Sélavy–Jan Krmelj.

the end

the end is darkness, in which

the glitter, the fluff and the outline

are dark, in which there are no

boundaries, no depth and

no less dark. the end

is where everything is absent,

and at the same time, it is not absent, not

absence that makes room for nothing,

but absence and completeness.

the end is probably irresistible

search for glitter, for fluff,

and finding the reassuring

dark outlines with nothing

inside and nothing outside.

the end is the warmth in which

the glitter, the fluff and the outline

are warm, in which everything overflows,

there is no basin, and there is not too warm. the

end is in the warmth that promises no

endurance and is at once desirable,

not a living worth waiting for,

but an eerie lingering.

the end is probably to let

the glow burns into my eyes

as an unforgettable memory,

to let it blind me.

the end is stillness, in which

the glitter, the fluff and the outline

are still, in which there is no intention,

no need to breathe, and no shortness of breath.

the end is the last movement of everything, not

a lack of movement that anticipates the embrace,

but an unflinching breathlessness.

the end is likely to be motionless

struggle with the will to fluff,

and squeezing fist

in exhaustion for eternity.