start

To fall. A word akin to the utterance ‘um’. A definition of grey areas. The ability to fall, no choice but to fall, the misstep, the gravitational pull, the awareness of weight, the clumsiness of the body, the need to return to the upright position.

fall asleep
fall in love
fall into place
fall away
fall pregnant
fall in line
fall for you
fall apart
fallen soldiers

Two main findings catapulted my inquiry into falling.
The first being a question posed to the internet at 3:00 AM: “how do I get up if I fall?”.

And the second being the case of Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant who fell 10 000 metres from an airplane pinned down by a food trolley and survived.

In this way my practice is defined by what I understand as the found object. Can questions asked in the early hours of the morning be objects? Can stories be objects? They cannot be owned or put into a pocket in the same way that a stone can be. Or was I pushed? imagines a word in a pocket and encourages the viewer to try and feel its weight.

In her essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin suggests that the first human made object was not in fact the spear but rather the bag. “[B]efore the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home” (Le Guin, 1989: 167). This argument reinscribes something vital in our understanding of the development of human culture. It moves us away from the basis of human culture being grounded in a bashing, probing, killing object. I do not deny the latter that took place at the hands of human civilization, but Le Guin proposes a way of relating to humanity that is not coloured with violence.

Le Guin relates this to the
formation of stories and the expectation for what she describes as a killer story.

“So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead)” (Le Guin, 1989: 169).

This suggests that at the core of narrative form is conflict. She goes on to propose that
the apt shape of the story is in fact that of a bag or container: “a book holds words, words hold things”. (Le Guin, 1989: 169). I previously encouraged you to feel the weight of a word in your pocket. Pivot with me now to understanding words as both the thing and the container of the thing. The object placed within the pocket and the pocket itself. In this way we create worlds within words within pockets and have to navigate the constant carrying of this weight.

The capacity of words to hold becomes a central idea in my practice. If words
can be containers then it becomes easier to understand them as an artistic medium.

Hito Steyerl’s text, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, offers another insight into the history and politics of verticality.

To go down
a descent of sorts
-linked to Odysseus and Orpheus's visit to the underworld

Look to Urban Katabasis:
Spectral perambulations at Nighttime

-Nikos Doulos

Modernist conceptions of space making are based on the illusion of stable ground. This illusion not only assisted in the colonial project in terms of navigation, but also established key visual models that affirmed the idea of an individual, vertically anchored observer whose perspective is assumed to be impartial and based in science (Steyerl, 2012: 18). My work aims to problematise an ordering of space based on colonial configuration and presents the space of digitality as one not bound to these visual paradigms. The digital world of overlapping tabs and deep dives into never ending information, shatters the myth of stable ground, essentially offering a space of free fall. “And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity. In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose ” (Steyerl, 2012: 14). I plan to use the digital space of chat rooms, online confessionals and online Q&A platforms to illustrate a fall into the question of being.

I like the way he divides his writing into routes and detours

shifts a rigid understanding of how text is consumed

POLITICS OF THE GROUND

To speak about falling as something universal seems to disregard the reality of the ground. Paul Carter engages with the politics of the ground in his colonial critique The Lie of the Land (Carter, 1996). There exists an assumption that the ground is the same for all people. Carter explores this universal leveling of ground as a type of erasure that bars any further engagement with the fluctuations in particular terrains. According to Carter this deficient engagement with the reality of the ground does not
take into consideration how the history that is engraved within these grooves of the land pulsates up into the bodies of those who inhabit it (Lepecki, 2008: 52). This leveling does not engage with the reality of potholed, irregular, unearthed ground that increases the likelihood of a stumble.

The word fall appears in various forms in the English language. In many of these lie the essence of an arrival: the weighted greeting of a baby growing in a belly, the tumbling into infatuation, the slip between awake and asleep. We fall into all of these things. Fall in love, fall asleep, fall pregnant, fall ill, fall away. But where are we meant to settle?

It may be that settling is not the point.

I Find Lepecki's exploration of the ground interesting in relation to the concept of katabasis and the underworld

Doulos speaks about walking at night as a way of being with ghosts - one is attuned to the cities nocturnal undercurrents

This makes me wonder, when we are haunted on these night walks are we in fact more sensitive to the undulations in the ground that Lepecki speaks about?

To understand the politics of moving through space do we first have to consider an upheaval of the underworld - of ghosts - of hauntings - of history

In this move downwards or a fall is not only a disruption of modernity's upright man but also an entanglement with what came before and how this has rooted itself into the ground creating grooves and lumps and upheaval.

My work pivots around the conceptual idea of falling. In 1972, Vesna Vulović survives the highest fall in recorded history. Here is a great fall. What now does she know about being? How does one capture what it means to be a human? A laughable question. A question too big to be interesting. Clumsy in its
futility. My work is all about a clumsy fall. A clumsy fall into the question of being. Humans sit with the weight of their own absurdity growing heavier in their bellies.
“Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels
himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits
are one with the earth’s” (de Beauvoir, 1948: 9). How does one digest this insignificance? The weight of ambiguity, the weight of smallness, the weight of an unanswered question. My practice subsists in the human desire to be human. In the belly-aching pain of being. In the silliness of asking questions to the internet void to try and crack the code. Questions we all ask. Uncertainties of how to be. How do I walk, kiss, fall in a way that seems as if I haven’t asked?