What I wish I’d said in a conversation via zoom with a presenter who asked “what do you want the audience to feel?”
I want them to sit together in observation to feel what it is to come to one’s own determination, to draw conclusions from the brain at work after sensations are met. The material expresses the absence of borders, the interconnectedness of all things: the work you do, the condition of your body, the air around you, the water you drink, the space between yourself and others and the sensitivity of your own skins, the light in your eyes and the patterns it makes on the floor, the mood that the rhythms you encounter inspire within you and how it mingles with the beating of your heart. You and the trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, ferns, vegetables, algae, and mosses you are a pot for. There are no boundaries: we are in the mountain and the mountain is in us. We are a tower block for communities of infinitesimal colonies. We are the dust, river, air, flesh.
This sounds one way in words, but another way as an experience in real time, sculpted by the preoccupations/dispositions/conditions of a particular audience member, it becomes a self-directed, self-composed message from within as a result of sensations and observations sparked from without.
The work is an excursion for the mind. The performance slows time and then speeds it up again. The performance is a time machine. To the presenter I said it was a meditation — or rather — that it was “meditative” but that is insufficient as an explanation (and not nearly muscular enough) because that sounds as though it is a solitary experience which it is not. The experience of observing the on-going activities of Always Already (an 8-hour performance installation), for long or for short, is a communal experience and is in fact the experience of disparate elements coming together to mingle with each other and knit a reason to hope and feel that we all, whether in stillness or in motion, animate each other.
