[S:] Timothy Morton challenges the idea that there’s something called ‘Nature’ which is separate from ourselves. Instead, Morton argues, ‘Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness.’[1]

Morton’s words have been important in my thinking about our project. For me, healing and connecting with the natural world first of all means connecting with ourselves (as we are part of the environment, and if we’re disconnected from ourselves how can we truly be connected to anything else?); then it requires us to connect with each other (again, because we are each other’s environment).

I’ve been thinking that our project is really the ongoing experience of building trust, connection and intimacy, building the relationship between us. I think the subject of our project is the experience of creating connections. And the things we make – the ‘outcomes’ – are by-products of the experience of creating relationships.

 

[A:] I totally agree that connection and intimacy are important concepts in our practice. When we started this project, we didn’t know each other at all, we built our relationship through the act of exchanging the work, monthly meetings, in other words, collaboration to build our practice. We found connection and intimacy through all of our ongoing experiences; they weren’t there from the beginning. There is a word in Japanese that specifically describes both connection and intimacy together: ‘絆’(Kizuna). I think this is the perfect word for what we are trying to say. 

 

Connection and intimacy was not the core subject of my creative purpose at the beginning.  In the beginning, this experiment was motivated by our shared ‘need/desire’ to make.
I viewed our act of exchange as a work of art from the beginning. It became my motivation to keep it going. Throughout our collaboration, I was constantly seeking meaning in ongoing collaboration, and as you say, the connection and intimacy appeared before I knew it – maybe we found it? 

 

In the beginning, we used to send the audio pieces alongside the description; later, we decided to send the audio piece first, and then send an additional piece of free writing later on. I liked this change, particularly, the shift when the language we were relying on was taken away. We decided to give each other a space to perceive the pieces in their own way. 

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To me, this whole practice of exchanging work is a dialogue, and this dialogue is about ecology. You send me a piece, and I listen, and the way I feel really depends on the environment, day, and feeling I’m situated in; so as you make a piece, your creative outcomes depend on the environment and feeling. Moreover, this cycle affects the way we perceive each other’s work, and so on. 

 

[S:] Yes, and fundamental to what we’re doing is also noticing – awareness and attention. In our field recordings, for example, we are paying close attention to the physical environments we are in, the differences between them, and how the aural environment of recorded sound creates a sense of space.

            

The way our work has developed (with the layering of sounds from different places/contexts, for example) gives me a sense of us both trying to disrupt sense of place – layer/collage different spaces together – trying to create imaginary spaces. 

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[A:] On the one hand, there’s a bit of a weird feeling in me to simplify our subject to merely intimacy and connection. Because, being with the strangeness, accepting the unknowability of the other, wasn’t always an easy process for me.

 

I guess it’s not necessarily exposed in the sound pieces themselves – and this may go back to the point that our way of perceiving the other is simply different – but it required a lot of contemplation (of how to perceive your work), frustration and struggle sometimes, and particularly it was evident at the beginning.

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This is my note after I listened to the piece you sent to me on 16 April 2021.

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3. May. 2021

Bite

The frustration I've been having lately.

Strong desire for food. Rebound

Putting things in my mouth

Crush, crush, and crush

It gets mixed with my saliva

The mixture of it; into my stomach 

it goes

becomes a part of me

 

What I cannot grasp

When I try to grasp

In the hand that grasps is

empty

I feel frustrated

that I was so close to getting it.

 

Word, feeling, voice, phonetic symbol

In the shifting of sounds contained in sounds

The sounds that have left me with itchiness                  

I break it down one by one.

I want to grasp it because I cannot

Am I greedy.

By the time I finished writing this, my appetite has subsided.

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To me, this implies my confrontation with the strangeness of the Other. What do you think of an element of uncertainty in relation to our practice?

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[S:] I was particularly interested in the quote from Felix Guattari that you sent me – where he talks about ‘otherness’. It makes me think back to Timothy Morton and his idea of the ‘strange stranger’. To me, this is implying something about respect or reverence for the strangeness – the unknowability – of the other. The intimacy maybe comes about through allowing in the strangeness of the strange stranger. Accepting and being with the strangeness of the other.

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I feel like the Guattari quote you mentioned also resonates with Morton’s sense of the ‘ecological thought’ as needing to include ‘negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation and sickness’.[1] This chimes with Guattari’s statement that the artist ‘rips fragments of reality out of their established contexts, de-territorialises them’. ‘De-territorialising’ actually feels like quite an appropriate word for describing what we’re doing. You could say that in the process of making sound pieces – we record sounds (from various environments, including ourselves), ‘unframe’ them (as he says), place them in new contexts, and essentially, through that process we are de-territorialising the sounds – freeing them of one context, creating a new context for them. Openness, playfulness, strangeness – these are ways of describing what we’re doing, I think.

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I agree with you that we created our own practice in the act of sharing our work and holding space for each other’s creativity. As you say, ‘We found a meaning to it’. And to me, this goes back to the importance of intimacy, connection. 

Our collaboration started back in May 2019, and I remember going to see your sculpture/installation which was this metal structure covered in gauze which you could sit inside and listen to field recordings which were playing both inside and outside the structure. I remember sitting inside it and feeling both enclosed and also open to the world around me. To me that piece has always felt very womb-like; it was really the starting point for our collaboration, and it’s a touchstone that I keep coming back to in my thinking. The feeling I had sitting inside that, to me, the womb-like structure was safety and peace. It’s really fitting that we’ve come full circle with our project, back to the desire to create a space, for this exhibition, which has that womb-like feeling.

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[A:] Yes, the idea is to create an imaginary space which is also intimate, that people can get into and feel relaxed inside. A utopian kind of space, not belonging to a particular person – a ‘belonging to everyone’ kind of space.

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[S:] The idea is to create this space using physical materials (e.g. netting, fabric) and by playing sound pieces made out of our improvisations and recordings together to create the desired ambience of intimacy, connection and strangeness. 

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I go back to Morton’s idea of intimacy with the ‘strange stranger’[2] (which we all are to each other). He says, ‘Rather than a vision of inclusion, we need a vision of intimacy’.[3] In some way, I think that is what we are exploring – creating between us, through this developing work, a working ‘vision of intimacy’ – a way of creating and working with intimacy.

 

[1] See Guattari, Felix, ‘Ecosphical Perspectives’ in Three Ecologies, Heibonsha Library, 2008 (pp. 127-128).

[1] Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010.

[1] Ibid., p. 4.

[1] Ibid., p. 7.

[1] Morton, p. 16.

[1] Ibid., p. 80.

[1] Ibid., p. 78.

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