MOBILITY ÷ DEATH ÷ MOBILITY
—
Ray Langenbach

Dr. Elizabeth Austin, who spent the greater part of her life studying early child development and teaching very young children, around a decade ago shifted her focus to fish conservation. She now educates her fellow humans about the life cycles of freshwater and saltwater fish. She recently emailed me her thoughts on Covid-19: “What a strange event in our lives—although certainly predictable. I have said for years the viruses would win and the earth would be saved. Just didn’t expect it to be now.”

That’s the paradox of time: it will always be “now”.

The Covid-19 pandemic reminds our species that we have feet of clay and live in permeable membranes. By stripping away our mobility and bio-exceptionalism, it lays bare class, race, nationalism, chauvinism, developmentalism and teleology. Species-awareness, planet-awareness and our responsibility for climate change now come into sharp focus. I used to hope that my generation would somehow avoid death; I now accept that no one gets out of life alive, and that our global culling is necessary and largely self-inflicted. Covid-19 is both our means and method.

My former magical thinking has been replaced by paradoxical thinking. Ancient narratives about death and our negotiations with it map the ruptures and rapture of paradoxical thinking. We have all heard variations of the Babylonian Talmudic paradox from around 500CE that visualises Solomon speaking to the Angel of Death, who had been assigned the task of “taking” two of his assistants. Solomon tries to change their fate by sending them off to another city, only to be informed that they met their “appointment” with Death there. He then mused, “A man’s feet are responsible for him; they lead him to the place where he is wanted.” In this story Death was personified, female, and embedded in human relations.

A thousand years later, the feet of this Talmudic tale led it to the 15^th century Egyptian Islamic scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūtī (d. 911/1505), and his writings on Angels. In his version, an old man sees the Angel of Death and beseeches Solomon to send him to India to change his fate. Again, Death arrives in India at the appointed hour and takes his soul.

After another 428 years, the story found its way to the pen of the orientalist writer Somerset Maugham in 1933. He wrote of a dead-man-walking who flees from Baghdad upon seeing Death, to Samarra, where he is promptly reaped. It was repeated a year later by John O’Hara, in his novel, Appointment in Samarra and most recently, surfaced again for another spasm in the first episode of Season four of Sherlock on Netflix.

Like a repressed memory, the paradoxical knot binding free will to fate and to death’s inevitability in this story still resonates today, perhaps because the conditions of life remain as contingent and ephemeral as 1500 years ago. The intervening gaps of time, when the story disappears and resurfaces, are simply jump-cuts in the film-time of this narrative… a montage of presences and absences in the midst of history’s real-time. In 1967 the director Pier Paolo Pasolini theorised that montage/death can provide terminal enlightenment:

“Cinema is identical to life, because each one of us has a virtual and invisible camera which follows us from when we’re born to when we die. In reality, cinema is an infinite film sequence-shot. Each individual film interrupts and rearranges this infinite sequence-shot and thus creates meaning, which is what happens to us when we die. It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning. Montage thus plays the same role in cinema as death does in life.”

For Pasolini, montage and death provide epiphany and meaning. Those alive now peer through our mirrored reflection on the computer or television screen each day to see shocking transmissions of sickness, despair and death during this pandemic. The superimposition of our reflections on the monitor’s mirrored surface is reassuring, convincing us we are still here, watching ourselves watching. People die in discreet stochastic membranes that our communities and cultures take great pains to rationalise, synchronise and cohere with funeral and mourning rituals, news reports and statistical analyses. It is common to hear that “time goes on” after a loved one dies, but we know full well that glib platitudes do not do justice to their incommensurable experience. The end of history finds its synecdoche in montage.

Saša RAJŠIĆ
To Un-Become (2017)
HD video
Duration: 15 minutes 20 seconds
Credits: concept, editing and postproduction by Saša Rajšić; video, editing and postproduction by Vitalis Neufeld; sound and original music by Bojan Stanković

Artist Statement: To Un-Become is a multimedia art project that explores the concept of un-becoming through revisiting Operation Storm in Yugoslavia and its consequences over two decades later. In April 2017, I retraced the journey of over 400km from my family’s first refugee shelter in Serbia back to our former home in Croatia. For over two weeks, dawn to dusk, I walked following in reverse the same route taken by over 200,000 other refugees two decades previously during Operation Storm. Homes in ruins surrounded by collapsing walls can still be found in Bosnia and in Herzegovina and Croatia. These images evoked in me a stream of suppressed memories and emotions, and inspired elaborate visions that would otherwise have remained unprovoked. This journey merged the evidence of war with my own memories, both actual and constructed; creating a “visual noise” that became my truth during the walk. I decided to walk not to test my own stamina, but rather to surrender the experience to the will of nature. I tasked myself not to merely move between two points, but to temporarily adopt a way of being in which both facts and imagination merged. In 2017, the border between Serbia and Croatia was once again a place where humanity was at its darkest. Thousands of refugees,  denied entry to the European Union, remained in temporary refugee camps in Serbia. Some of them were living alongside long-uprooted Serbian refugees facing over twenty years in exile.

Saša Rajšić was born in Karlovac, Croatia, and like hundreds of fellow Serbs from Croatia, his family fled their country during the war in Yugoslavia. They lived as refugees in Serbia before immigrating to Canada in 2005. Rajšić studied at OCAD University in Toronto and the University of the Arts Helsinki. He is an independent artist and researcher, and is also a member of Displaced Peoples, a collaborative research network of the Law and Society Association, and Art and International Justice Initiative. His work has been exhibited in Italy, Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Germany, Greece, Palestine, Spain, UK, USA, and Canada, where he currently lives and works.

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Pekka NISKANEN
Can You Hear Me? (2014)
HD video
Duration: 22 minutes
Credits: direction, camera, sound recording and editing by Pekka Niskanen; sound design by Juuso Oksala and Tay Wai Aye Chan; music by Tay Wai Aye Chan and Shailendra Bharti’s “Buddham Saranam Gacchami”; voiceover by O.P. Rathore; cast: Tay Wai Aye Chan, Markku Kurkinen, and Protacio Mabunga

Artist Statement: Can You Hear Me? is a video and sound installation filmed at the end of 2012 in Yangon, Burma, and Antarctica. I had travelled to Antarctica with the Norwegian cruise vessel Fram, which had petty officers who happened to be Filipino. During that trip, the scientist Markku T. Kurkinen and the sailor Protacio Mabunga become friends. Kurkinen, who uses a wheelchair, wanted to see the penguins and the Antarctic, while Mabunga ended up going to Antarctica in order to provide for his family back home. The men set aside the unwritten rule, which requires the ship’s petty officers to keep a respectful distance from the passengers.

The music in the video installation is made by the sound artist Tay Wai Aye Chan, whom I met in Yangon. It also bears another meaning: the passing away of Aye Chan’s mother, and the Buddhist perception of the moment of death. In the video, Aye Chan talks about his pursuit to stay in touch with his deceased mother, as well as the significance of sound in the state between life and death. In Antarctica Kurkinen and Mabunga talk about death. Mabunga’s brother and father passed away when he was working on the Fram.

Western neo-colonialism presents a challenge for Burma and the Philippines. Southeast Asians have become cheap and sought after labour for cruise ships. Tourism to the Antarctic would not be possible without Asian migrant workers on the cruise ships. The workers, flown in from Southeast Asia, live almost half of the year on board the ships. They call Antarctica the emptiness, “nowhere”. Antarctica is perhaps the last place on Earth that the Western world has conquered as its own sphere of influence. It is a continent colonised for scientific purposes, and is governed by the same Western gaze, rationality and fictive narratives that were a central instruments when orientalism defined its perceptions of the East.

Pekka Niskanen is a media artist, filmmaker, researcher, curator, and a Doctor of Fine Arts, who has been exhibiting since 1990 in Europe, North America, and Asia. Niskanen’s works are in numerous collections held by institutions such as Kiasma, Helsinki City Art Museum, Espoo City, Contemporary Arts Centre in Vilnius, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam, Netherlands), and various private collections. In 2012, Yle TV1 showed Niskanen's documentary film Virtual War, which expounds on the Chechen refugees who fled to Europe from Russia. Can You Hear Me?, a video installation depicting Antarctica and Burma, was on display at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte in 2013. Niskanen made the video work Community Terror on the terrorist attacks of November 2015 in Paris. In addition, he has written two research articles on Isis’ terrorist acts. In 2019, Niskanen directed a film about Iranian metal music, Iranian Metal Coffee.

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Noor ABED
We Both Know (2013)
HD video, no sound
Duration: 9 minutes 15 seconds
Credits: directed and performed by Noor Abed; camera by Hasan Daraghmeh; production by Yusef Abed 

We Both Know examines concepts of death and gender in relation to the landscape in the frame of time and labour. It also plays out fantasies of endurance as articulated through the space of the body; unpacking ideas of control within the political realm through the personal. The work questions concepts of camouflage and repetition through naturalised body movements, while contemplating the present moment. 

Noor Abed is a Palestinian interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her practice examines notions of choreography and the imaginary relationship of individuals, creating situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York (2015–2016), and HWP Home Works Program—Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2016–2017). She received her BA from the International Academy of Arts, Palestine, and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. A finalist and a third prize-winner in the 2014 Young Artist Award, she was awarded the March Project residency and commission from the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, 2016. Abed was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France in 2018, and a fellowship at the Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal in 2019.

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Chumpon APISUK
I HAVE DREAMS (2018)
HD Video
Duration: 10 minutes 19 seconds
Credits: Created in collaboration with the EMPOWER Foundation

The video presents 18 female and transgender sex workers who have travelled from various regions in Asia to Chiangmai for work. Chumpon states that his “mission is to try to find ways to improve their situation or at least lift up their self-pride, by using artistic engagement and self-projection”. The sex workers are presented as economic agents, dreaming and voicing their life plans. Video is deployed as a leverage system to develop self-confidence and pride, countering the structural stigmatisation of sex workers and the degrading conditions in the sex industry. The video is a collaborative project with the EMPOWER Foundation, who arranged the recordings in work sites.

Chumpon Apisuk was born in Nan Province, Thailand in 1948, and is one of the pioneer performance artists in Southeast Asia. He works with EMPOWER Foundation, founded by his partner Chantawipa Apisuk. The organisation advocates for the rights of sex workers in Thailand. Chumpon conducts art training for sex worker advocates, leaders and activists in Thailand and Southeast Asia. He is known for his activism in AIDS, Human Rights, and democracy. He is a founding member of the board of Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (BACC 2010-2018). In 1993, he founded Concrete House, an art and community space, and the first performance art venue in Thailand. He is also a founding member of “Asiatopia—an International Performance Art Festival in Thailand”. Since 1986, he has made over 300 performances all over the world: in Germany, England, Scotland, N. Ireland, Rep Ireland, Finland, Czech Rep., Spain, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Croatia, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, USA, India, Malaysia and Thailand. Chumpon is currently launching a new International Performance Residency and Exchange in Nan. 

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Lucy DAVIS
Migrant Ecologies Project (2012)
Jalan Jati, Teak Road
Hand-drawn, hand-animated film. Much of the imagery is from woodprints fragments made with a found object (bed).
Duration: 23 minutes 29 seconds
Credits: direction, animation and script by Lucy Davis; sound by Zai Tang and Zai Kuning

Jalan Jati traces the historic, material and poetic journeys of a 1950s teak bed that was found in a Singapore karang guni junk store, back to a location from where the original teak tree might have grown. The animated film brings together cross-cultural natural histories, micro- and macro-arboreal relationships in Southeast Asia and DNA timber tracking technology. The work is trans-disciplinary, straddling art, plant genetics, the histories of biological migrations, and teak exploitation in the colonial and post-colonial eras. It treats teak itself as an agent of change and migrations, using humans to transport its seeds to other islands in the Nusantara archipelago. The map of teak/human symbiosis in the film is complex, dynamic, cyclical and animist. Everything is alive and in continuous transformation. The film is one small part of a decade long and ongoing, material,  genetic, historic and poetic exploration of stories of wood in island Southeast Asia by The Migrant Ecologies Project.

Lucy Davis is an artist, art writer and educator; she founded the Migrant Ecologies Projects in 2009 as an umbrella for collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiries into questions of art ecology and more than human connections. Davis’s practice encircles ecologies, animal and plant studies, art and visual culture, materiality and memory—primarily but not exclusively in Southeast Asia. She is currently Professor of Artistic Practices in the Master’s Degree Programme in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University, Finland.

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