Indentations
There are indentations in the footpath
as if a series of small musical notes have stepped into the asphalt.
An incantation of sighing footfalls that has softened the asphalt
into miniature urban rock pools
that pocket last night’s rain.
A clean rain vainly trying to rinse the city from the winter’s sand dust
coating and stifling the tired bodies that wade through it long into spring.
Further on, old flights of steps have worn, dawning into slow smiles. Long years of rush hours have curved their lips, smoothed down the stone with their comings and goings.
Is it this step on this step
broadening the smile, making the indentation deeper, wider, softer, is it my impression?
At home our bathtub has smooth rounded corners, with small angular feet
That lifts it off the tiles
And cups me
Underwater my fingers run across striations of stretch marks
(Ridged, like filled in potholes)
and across the impressions made by the seams of tights, undies, bra, on soft skin. a daytime infrastructure that reminds of a vertical upright existence.
Lying down, they are soft desire paths
between breasts and legs
With bathwater pooling in my navel, I feel a wornness
Further on, the soles of my feet are shrivelled and puckered. Curling my toes causes the ridges of skin to touch, like corrugated cardboard, like velcro, so foreign, the end of my self is uncertain, and my steps out of the bath onto the dappled tile floor come unexpectedly, out of rhythm with small pools and deft feet of the indentations of the city.
- Florence Wild, June 2024
Florence Wild, April 2024
Tinkering
Brush, brush
strokes, hands across the water
Not the plastic water of chlorine
soaked pools but water
whose surface ripples and ridges and does not
Care of skin
Orange skies
Foghorn through the night
A stake out of minute seconds
painstaking as holding one's breath
clustered together
into a dust that salts you,
calcifying your follicles so that your
whole body feels tinged with the water’s pigment,
right up against the balls of your eyes, feet
lining your nostrils
If I get close enough
I can smell a surface whose textures
Disembody the hairs gently drawn across
It smells of fingerprints
I always thought powdered steel
should stain your fingers
like rust
Like when I was five with a wiggly tooth
visiting a stained-glass window maker
Who told our sticky fingers that lead was poisonous as we shyly stroked his dappled glass
But I could not help giving my tooth a wiggle
To hear that spittly sucking sound
And walked back to school with balled fists, locking the culprits away,
sure each step was borrowed time
Inside another sodden green big bag
Spilling out and overflowing
like belted old soaks’ beer bellies
I find stuffed an upright piano
wrenched apart as if with bare hands
Leaving the keys skeletal and exposed
Ripe for plucking
The endless bags give the city a tired feeling
Of unwashed dishes
A new terrain could be formed if all these bags
Were just swept under the carpet
-Florence Wild, November 2023
Envelope poem
The balloon floats in line with the sun. The early evening is still, the sky emptied-out and purged of movement, as if all wind, clouds, and precipitation had been shepherded into the envelope’s small mouth, contained there to keep it afloat.
The envelope is a swollen tear ready to drop through the droughted atmosphere out into space. A frame in a Muybridge-sequence of droplets in various stages of falling.
The wind, the rain, moisture, are thoughts holding the balloon buoyant. Rearranged to form the sky’s words, sentences, song inside the envelope. My thoughts swirl into compositions in a seemingly soundless voice.
This voice in my head is like water: I pour new words in.
The bag of a hot air balloon is called an envelope.
Plants pollinated by wind are anemophilous, wind-loving.
Some of these words composed in the air are fastened on paper. Saved like the small envelopes, seeds sticking in their crisp corners, I keep stored in a low kitchen drawer for Spring.
A breeze moves through my head, words rustle. I am writing soundlessly with my water voice while I vacuum dust the living room floor, shake dust out of rag rugs over the balcony railing; while I rhythmically scrape thickly slathered white paint off an old bookcase, the minute shavings spilling onto the wooden floor.
The dust I have tried to corral into the vacuum bag, expel into the air and scatter over the floorboards outwits me. Already it is resettling, nestling back into the grooves of our LPs.
I will later delicately wipe it off their round shining faces.
When a breeze eventually picks up it is carrying its own small powdery kernels, infiltrating openings in our heads. Spring powdering nostrils, throats, ear canals, irises; stifling and smarting, making each breath coarsely damp, as if the air must wend its way through a sodden sponge.
Collateral of the wind-lovers, our senses blunted and dulled, tears streaming, we cower indoors, in the dust of our own making.
Florence Wild, May 2023
Stained Glass
During winter’s late afternoons when darkness has already stained the air, bitten into all the small breaths, I move along suburban streets and gaze into the illuminated windows of apartments I pass. The wide panes of glass hold deep yellow-orange glows within. Nudging against the darkness, each rectangle seemingly exudes the warmth of a lit candle or kerosene lamp; a pre-electric glow, folk-Dylan.
I peer in past ladders of venetian blinds and tenderly arranged pot plant silhouettes, their leaves and fronds fingertips on the glass. Sentry-like table lamps are positioned as lighthouses on the marble sills over radiators (you see, I know these rooms). People arrange themselves in small gestures contained in the little dioramas of their own making. Rooms that are empty wait expectantly for figures to pass through their doorways. The world needs to have some mysteries left.
But some rooms are aquariums, bathed in the blue streams that emanate from gaping screens affixed to walls outside of my fleeting field of vision, submerging living rooms into inertia. They watch, unaware of the watching of their watching, and I wonder what they will dream of in there, later in the night.
I wake up late, my body repelling the morning, to the clank clank of metal slotting into metal. A scaffolding is being strung up around the building, and each day as I come and go I have observed it gradually extending, lengthwise and widthwise, like a Nimis. Solar panels are soon to be installed on the roof and I can sense other’s bodies moving up against the buildings' pale bricks.
Curled cold toes on the wooden floor I can feel the sharp slithers of sun piercing the edges of the drawn blind, my hand lightly dragging on the bottom ready to release the catch and shake the day out.
For a moment I imagine the wall separating the movements of the builders from my bare morning legs and dishevelled bedroom dissolving; and we stand side by side, and I reach out to touch the sleeve of a hi-vis jacket. I reach out for the sleeve of my dressing gown and swaddle myself in, leaving the blind drawn and fallen and the room grey like an early morning. How different to look out than to look in.
Florence Wild, March 2023
A Méliès Malady
The same moon, that's the way my mother talked about us being connected, being under the same moon. The moon haunts much closer, more watchful. Perhaps it was through the moon I started seeing faces in the arrangements of things - the glimpse of an eye, the hint of a profile, a mask of suggestion - a sort of malady a lá Méliès.
I saw faces as worn as the moon, in all those spectral birch tree eyes that have that same silvery moon-sheen, peopling my landscapes. I wanted to meet them eyeball to eyeball and feel their rough knots on my retinas. Maybe they will stick, like tongues to cold lampposts.
This persona sticks like a stocking-mask, blurring my features, clouding my vision, slightly suffocating. I remove it, leaving in a puff of smoke. We are all living double lives, what does one reveal, and what to keep to oneself? Sometimes I would offer up small crumbs, an impression of a feature, never a full portrait.
All I remember of what I took when I moved are clothes and records. An old dress of my mother’s, now slightly moth-eaten about the collar; my friend’s mother’s dress, with whom I have lost contact. My graduation dress, a flouncy 80’s construction; and a dusky pink 60’s number. 50 000 000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong, The Best of the Righteous Brothers; Fleetwood Mac’s Fleetwood Mac, or was it Rumours? Their album covers have blurred together in my mind like two seeping sepia photographs. The dresses and LPs have become parts of larger collections, on bigger rotations. I try the dresses on sometimes when I am alone, at the same time aware that the records I carefully transported through four countries seldom get played anymore.
With words I have a tendency to overshare. They spill out, unfettered due to a supposed temporality, momentarily basking in the glow of being heard. I try to curb these tendencies, to not reveal too much, by writing in short start-stop smatterings, pinching small fragments together, while trying to see the same forms/faces in the words. Words that will eventually dissolve, be forgotten, partially mis-remembered; pocketed only to be thrown out with old shopping receipts.
Meanwhile, the copper tape encasing my studio detritus is slowly darkening, like a face flushed in a fury, ageing into a patina worn through touch. In some places it starts to sag and I need to add more innards, studio stuffing, bolstering their frames in order to keep them afloat, like most endeavours. Weathered objects tend to keep things to themselves. The absurdity isn’t in the characters, it is in the world.
Florence Wild, January 2023
(Naive melody)
A couple of years ago, I made two small works. Companion pieces, you could call them. It was while making these two small works I found myself, suddenly, not capable of returning home. As with most things, the correlation between these two events only became clear with hindsight. Now, the correlation seems obvious, but time is elastic and unreliable, and my memory of making these works now is vague, dislocated from time. But it must have been during the period I was not capable of returning home.
One of the works sits on a small wooden shelf. The shelf is a nondescript piece of found wood, probably pine, origins unknown and forgotten. It is about the size of a large bread board, and is attached to the wall by curved, prefabricated, plywood brackets. I would refer to it as an ‘artist’s shelf’, a sculptural answer to an artist’s frame, cobbled together, enfolding the work.
Arranged across the shelf are small, mainly upright structures, triangular or rectangular in form. The forms are constructed from balsa wood, that soft, light wood of hobbyists and modellers and childhood. Arranged together the structures form an empty architecture, an abandoned landscape of an anachronistic future and like shadows or scaffolding they suggest the form of something else, a filling of a negative space.
Each balsa wood structure is made to hold a card.Together, the shelf holds 12 cards. One card is small, the size of a tea bag; another is fastened to a block of wood, with a bent wire metal stand; yet another is a slim spine-like card, fastened with a thin maroon silk ribbon. Most however are a standard folded A5. The cards are watercolours and pencil sketches, some originals, others printed editions, each one drawn by my father. My father is an architect of a small local firm, who first went to art school, and wanted, I heard much later, to be a cameraman for television, but has always been a sketcher, a watercolourist, and maker of cards. These 12 are some of the cards, sent by my parents, on the occasion of a birthday or christmas, to Sweden from New Zealand, in the years between 2010-2020.
The drawings are scenes native to New Zealand; of cliffs, bays, kauri and cabbage trees, the old army tent, Mum and Dad with peaches, modernist NZ homes, a bedroom interior. The assembled cards peek out around each others' corners like a fragmented ensemble of a miniature theatre.In the triangles of the open cards one can catch my mother’s full, rounded, flowing handwriting contrasting my father’s spiky architect’s scrawl, and the ends of their words. -ence, -ear, -mas, -day.
I wanted to intentionally use something sentimental - a desire to excavate and expose myself; to uproot. This was also around that time we moved, and I had another home alongside the home I was not capable of returning to just then. I had begun to think of the home as a space of small sculptural assemblages and inadvertent installations.
The other work, the companion piece, is an embroidery. The twelve balsa wood structures holding the collection of cards are now picked out in thread, transferred from 3 dimensions to 2 by hand and eye - an impression, like sketching a landscape en plein air. The embroidery is stitched on a piece of linen, about the size of a folded pillowcase.
Left-handed, I start from the upper left and work my way around the fabric clockwise. I work with backstitch, which creates a smooth, even, continuous line. The threads are in bold colours, and gradually shift hues across the forms, pinks into reds and purples, to blues, greens, yellows and oranges in a circular motion. I collected the linen and threads second hand, mismatched and chanced leftovers from the hands of half-hearted kitset enthusiasts.
Flattened, the structures cluster together, a celestial constellation, stars to travel by, signs of the zodiac, a compass rose. That there were 12 cards was incidental, those were the ones I chanced to find. I liken it most to a wonky, misshapen clock, a face with no hands, and once again I am back in an elastic, dislocated time. The hands of the clock are extraneous, for time has passed through my own hands, in the accumulated stitches worked across the surface. With backstitch, as the name implies, you have to work backwards to go forwards. When I hang it, it hangs low on the wall, close to the ground. Clocks are always placed up high, easily seen; I read recently that time goes faster closer to sea level, slower in the mountains. Time is the original unreliable narrator.
Though I referred to the embroidery as the ‘clock’ in the studio, an affectionate smeknamn, its title is ‘I think I’ll go back home.’ I took this title from a song, by NZ psychedelic blues band Human Instinct, released in 1969. At least, according to Human Instinct and the rest of New Zealand in 1969, ‘I think I’ll Go Back Home’ is indeed an original Human Instinct song, apparently written by one Jesse Harper. But listening to the song exposes this a fabrication, a sly sleight of hand, one that a local band perhaps naively believed that they could get away with, because it was New Zealand in 1969, when distances and times were chasm-like, and words and sounds trickled slowly, analoguely, to the far pockets of the globe. Because the song I think I’ll go back home by Human Instinct is really by Neil Young, and written in 1968, and called ‘Everybody Knows this is Nowhere.’
‘Everybody Knows this is Nowhere’ became the title I gave to the shelf.
I Think I’ll Go Back Home / Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, is a means to travel, in time, in small steps, to a scenography that no longer exists. I found myself, suddenly, not capable of returning nowhere.
David Byrne of Talking Heads has said that the song ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’ was his attempt to write a love song. Home, is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there. I think most works of art about homes are love songs, so on that note, I will call this text a love song as well. I leave this here, a home as a love song as a text called (Naive Melody), read aloud on the occasion of the exhibition Capable of Returning Home.
Florence Wild, September 2022.
Pearls
I first thought of a little fragment of text I
had written a month or so before.
In her twilight years she would take her artworks out of storage and, like her Christmas decorations, set them up around her home.
Moving through her salad days
When the world was her oyster
I think of texts and paintings taking shape in simultaneous parallel lives in many places at once.
It doesn't feel possible to imagine my aged self. Often it doesn’t feel possible either to recall my childhood, as if the memories are left behind in objects and belongings and places, as if external hard drives. Is that why old books and the clothes of old people have such distinct smells?
Like sand through an hourglass, eller?
When leaving her studio, Milli tells me to go to the op-shop. “There is a good one up there, it’s where I go to procrastinate”.
I find a familiar ordered cacophony of teetering crockery, jostling glassware on too small shelves and miscellaneous fabrics draping over hangers like pairs of mis-matched slacks. I spend some time walking around, forming sentences to myself, feeling out words, before taking tunnelbanan back to studio.
Not a procrastination as much as a looking, a sharpened, roving gaze that is inadvertently seeking out form, line, colour, composition. Colour-coordinated arrangements of glassware, conical stacks of plates and bowls. The framed paintings and prints that are hung, salon-style, in a circumstantial salon des refusés.
I wander through other people’s lives, architectures, interiors. The second hand store is an exercise in psychogeography in a condensed material form, a dérive through an urban landscape by the donated possessions of its inhabitants, and made inhabitants through their belongings assembled in the city’s second hand stores.
A dérive accompanied by an orchestration of fingers: flicking, stroking, rubbing, leafing, shifting. Delicate movements of fingertips brushing over, wending through the stacks and surfaces, nimble and private. Thwuck, thwuck, thwuck (of records in crates) zvish, clack, clack, zvish (a thrumming through hangers and garments) ffrrrrrrrp, ffrrrrrp (leafing through pockets and paperbacks); a propulsive and drifting haptic looking, visual touching.
Brushstrokes the width of a finger.
Milli’s op-shop is part of a chain of second hand stores in Stockholm; two such stores are part of a chain of andrahand opportunities that fans out from my small cellar studio in Atlasområdet, just below Sankt Eriksplan. A string of pearls that curves like the arched bow of Sigrid Fridman’s Kentauren; from the bronze centaur’s position on the lip of Observatoriekullen, an arc is traced from Stadsbiblioteket around to Odenplan, across Sankt Eriksbron to Fridhemsplan and further up to Hantverkargatan. Far enough to come away and get back.
Sigrid Fridman started to sculpt in 1911 as a tidsfördriv; a way to pass time, a pastime, to propel time and let it drift.
When I visited, Milli’s studio was in an artist’s studio collective in a 1970’s former industrial building in a small industrial area between Vällingby and Råcksta. The concrete facade had that general feeling of being in a final spurt of activity before becoming inevitably ear-marked for demolition. Demolition leases are a recurring theme for studio collectives in Stockholm, as artists work in these pockets of unintended, ruptured space. It creates a hurtling time, a rationing of procrastination.
There is no time to procrastinate! Soon the building will be gone!
I’m frantic, let me drift
I leaf: dawdle, browse, linger, flick, pick things up, put things down, shuffle. Eyes and fingers ready to discern silk from polyester, cashmere from acrylic; crystal, faience, teak; first edition, first pressing, near mint.
When Swedish was unfamiliar and beguiling in my mouth I would try to use words as I would in English, fit them into my tongue and flick them out with confidence. The countless times I told people I bläddrar in op-shops, because of course I browse in the same way through shops and in libraries as in printed matter. Only later did I learn that bläddra is to leaf, leaf through the leaves of a book, and one cannot leaf through a store, not with language at least, but beyond words it can be the same thing.
Later, after visiting my studio, Milli tells me how she is searching for somewhere to find a thick piece of frosted glass to make paint on. Riva pigmentet med bindemedel på matt glas. It is difficult to know where to look, what words to use, how to find such places in a new town, the support structures, cultivated through living somewhere a while are yet to be formed. I remember the Glasmästeri at the end of Rörstrandsgatan from my regular walks past their open doors on my way between home and studio back when living in Huvudsta. I would glimpse the stacks of leaning panes of glass and think about their weight and dust. Later, she messages that she got a perfect piece of glass, for free.
Florence Wild, Stockholm, June 2021
From Far Flung, a publication accompanying the exhibition Far Flung by Milli Jannides at Coastal Signs, Auckland, NZ.
Filmhuset, or: behind the red door.
(VOICEOVER)
My favourite door can be found at Filmhuset, and is painted a vibrant tomato red. I love the painter’s complete disregard for the accepted rules of door painting, instead letting the paint continue beyond the door frame in wide, loose, strokes, and leaving it at odds with the rather austere late-sixties institutional interior it resides in. The paint loops and whorls around the door like a mirage, as if the door has once been animated, a wobbling, jelly door that will eat you up if you pass through it.
I don’t know where it leads to. It does not have a handle, just a lock.
I walk past the door on my way into the folds of the cinema, admiring its mystery and exuberance.
(EXTERIOR, AFTERNOON, WIDE SHOT)
Filmhuset (The Film House) is grey and glassy; a long, jutting, angular, 1970 concrete monument to moving image that sits wedged between the uptight gridded streets of Östermalm and the springy, Domain-like grassy fields of Ladugårdsgärdet like a cigarette in the corner of a film noir private eye’s mouth, on the lip of Stockholm, where I now live.
Built specifically for the needs of the Swedish Film Institute, it contains spaces designed to produce, present, store, and restore Sweden's moving image industry and its history.
I make my way to this corner of the city most weeks during the Autumn, Winter and Spring months as one of Filmhuset’s many roles is as home to the long running film club Cinemateket (The Cinematheque), an organ that is as much a part of Filmhuset’s architecture as the building itself. The regular visitors to Cinemateket and their comings and goings within the building create an inner warmth, a blood-like flow behind the brutalist, cool-to-the-touch concrete facade.
It is a building whose function and purpose seep out its concrete pores (pours), scallop-edged perforations running up and down the exterior like celluloid splices, gently breaking up the polished concrete’s impregnability. Rows of tinted windows with delicate wood frames encircle the building’s 155 metre length like strips of film stock, shiny, uniform, mysterious. They suggest a dynamism of a high shutter speed, or sharp, fast cuts; or an interior where little of the outside world can seep in.
(TRACKING SHOT)
To enter Filmhuset, the visitor must traipse up an enormous ramp, which always reminds me of the 20th Century Fox production logo. I count 55 paces up the ramp before reaching the sliding glass doors which mark the transition to interior but not the end of the ramp. The ramp is lit from above by a zig-zagging line of red fluorescent tubes, giving a hazy atmosphere of a red carpet.
In Swedish, Rampljus means both footlights and limelight.
The steep ramp is a daunting prospect for many however - prone to be icy underfoot during winter, and a testing feat of endurance for older visitors, as they determinedly stagger up or shuffle down its length. For wheelchairs, with which one often associates ramps as entrances, access is nearly impossible without assistance. This serves as a reminder that buildings should be designed for the bodies that frequent them, not solely by ideas buildings embody.
*
(CLOSE UP)
“One night we went to see The Outsider, with Marcello Mastroianni, in the smaller theatre, and nearly all the seats were taken with only single spaces dotted around at awkward corners down in the front rows. It was easy to see the young latecomers were on a date; I imagined it was a date, and that it was one of their first.
The last two seats were beside an old man in the second row, who had sunk so low into the soft black leather chair he was wearing it like a jacket. The young man timidly inquired if it were possible for the man to shift one seat over, so the couple could sit together.
The old man loudly, rudely and flatly refused; as it was his chair, his place; and perhaps it had been his body slowly forming the contours and indentations in the leather upholstery over all those years. The cinema of faces observed this tense face-off impassively and watched as the couple are forced to take their seats on either side of the old man.
It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes into the film before the girl got up and walked out of the cinema.
The old man who refused to move was snoring audibly before the film ended. I wondered if the young man was forced to prod him awake.”
*
(INTERIOR, EVENING)
There is an intimacy in the sharing of solitary pursuits. A mutual trust in sharing a darkened space. Cinemateket became a means for me to navigate a life in a new country, to learn a city and explore a language and reassert a self-reliance that had frayed through relocation.
I would say I am on the younger side for a Cinemateket habitué - many regulars have surely been members since Filmhuset opened, or even earlier, when Cinemateket screenings were held at the Modern Museum and the Workers’ Educational Association. They come singly, or in pairs, as couples or companions; their unfailing presence illustrating the need of such cultural endeavours, and the importance of recognizing our older generations as the backbone of cultural events, happenings, concerts, exhibitions, performances, screenings.
We always gravitate to our preferred chairs. Cinema-going is an architecture of habit.
There is something important about the physicality of film that also speaks of the physicality of cinema-going, and in turn about the spaces where the act of cinema-going takes place. The sharing of physical spaces with strangers is intrinsically linked to the memory, history, and development of a society, and is shaped by and reflected within the cities, buildings, and places in which we move.
This sharing of space becomes tangible in every visit to Filmhuset.
(CUT)
Filmhuset is one of the few remaining places where analogue films can be played: sometimes it is easy to forget that film is a material that has a physicality, and the architecture and technology required to present it respond to that physicality. I often think of film as three dimensional, and sculptural.
I think about the cue markers punched into film, so projectionists knew when to switch over to the next reel. Like surface noise on records, it is a mark regarded as an unavoidable impedance or distraction due to the limitations of the material.
Whereas really it is a signifier of bodily presence, of labour, and inventiveness: a reminder to the audience that they are not the only people in these spaces, inhabiting this architecture, the cue marker bringing the silent, hidden projectionist out of their booth and temporarily into the consciousness of the audience. The shift to the digital, even more accelerated and palpable these past six months, is a flattening of space, a two-dimensionality, and with it, a loss of architecture.
At the apex of the ramp is Filmhuset’s public space - foyer, cafe, restaurant, library and cinemas. Archival film posters for the current Cinemateket season line the walls, and costumes from Swedish films adorn headless mannequins in tubular glass vitrines. My red door wobbles hello. It is an architecture of projection - viewing Filmhuset through the lens of filmmaking, this public realm is the ‘film’ - the polished veneer. The rest of the building remains hidden, off-camera, behind the scenes, its inner workings and machinations playing the part of the production, the ‘dream factory’.
Architect Peter Celsing designed Filmhuset in the form of a camera, with the lens pointing North. The lens is depicted in the unblinking, unseeing steel eye that gazes on the old Headquarters of the Swedish Armed Forces, who demanded the North facade of Filmhuset be windowless to deter prying eyes. 50 years later, the Armed Forces have relocated, and a dirty stain runs from the eye down the side of the building like an endless trickle of tears.
(FADE OUT)
The last film I saw at Cinemateket was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope on March 3rd, 2020. A few days later, like the majority of other cultural institutions in Sweden, Filmhuset closed its doors and Cinemateket went into indefinite Intermission. The Corona pandemic has further distanced us from physical spaces and opportunities for communities to collectively experience the world around us, and our own constructed interpretations of that world.
It is now August, and Cinemateket has been given to go ahead to resume its daily screenings as of next week, for up to 50 people. The days are getting noticeably shorter, and soon it will be dusk when leaving Filmhuset, and then will gradually be dusk when arriving for a six o’clock screening, and it will be dark outside when the lights come up. Eventually it will be dark not only on the way out of Filmhuset but also on the way in, as winter makes itself known and the building loses its external form in the darkness.
Florence Wild, August 2020.
Local Haunts
“You will often find us at our local haunts, drinking cheap beers and talking about, around, and across each other on what we are doing, planning, potentially regretting. Ideas (like tongues) become a bit looser after a few drinks, ideas later deemed to be ridiculous, but which here, at our local haunt, get their 15 seconds of fame. They float in the air above the fake wood tables, between the dishwasher-worn glasses and the ubiquitous tea lights.”
In Local Haunts, friends Joran Stamatakakos and Florence Wild present a collection of reworked and reassembled paintings, sculptures and wall works that reflect on mostly invisible (but often audible) aspects of making. Those conversations, links, texts, chats, studio talks, vernissage discussions, bar hangs, rants, doubts, affirmations and decisions that make up the tissue of close friendships and art practices. Both spectral and tangible, like a low fog or giant wobbly blob of jelly.
This ongoing back-and-forth is the other side of our often solitary labours of working, accumulating, drawing, note-making. Half-spun ideas from our local haunts are pocketed away in scribbled notes, phone memos, ‘I-will-remember-this’ memories, until there is time to get to in the small confines of studio to uncork them beneath the unforgiving perpetual daylight fluorescent tubes.
We shared a studio for a short time after art school, but were seldom there together. Joran wasn’t very well, and had little energy to leave the house. In studio, I mainly lay on the couch and knitted spools of fishing line, trying to settle in, but not really succeeding. When Joran left and went back to Australia, dismantling the studio, I saved scraps of the old paintings he destroyed. He threw away most of his things, only to have the belongings he’d decided to hold on to lost in the murky depths of shipping transit.
I, on the other hand, am a saver - a stockpiler and collector of things that may one day come in handy. I stayed in Sweden, moved studios and took whatever might come in useful with me. These remnants, traces of other’s lives and events re-emerge in the works shown here, in found and saved materials, in the knitted sculptures often rolled for ease of storage, and those painting scraps reframing canvases.
Local Haunts uses each other’s works as support structures to build up, hang against and rest upon, referencing the way we use each other to propel and realise our endeavours.
Local haunts are the conversations, work spaces and social spheres we inhabit, as support structures and points of anchorage. For this show we have worked closely together in my studio, riffing off one another, letting ideas stack up and spiral off, imbuing the works with a sense of familiarity, a trading of jokes and anecdotes.
-Florence Wild, January 2020
(working title) Visiting
Katta and I walk through a small square in a quiet neighbourhood. It’s nice working here she says, people greet each other in passing, a ‘hej-hej’ kind of place.
At her studio, one large painting hangs on a wall while a number of others are leaning, facing away as if waiting their turn. Katta begins hanging up the paintings on a smattering of screws and nails. I am greeted with an anatomy of cleaning trolleys-
glistening plastic bags bulging, microfibre cloths drying; jumbles of mops, brooms, buckets, paper towels, toweling towels, squeegees, rubber gloves, sprays, detergents and disinfectants,
fleetingly documented and painstakingly rendered
in quietly ambiguous repose; in various states of paintedness / undress. In the tips of my fingers, I can feel the looped threads of a microfibre cloth languidly drying on the lip of a plastic bucket.
I want to personalize these trolleys, name them like ships, and they are slightly ship-like, ships in the night, passing through the fogs of bodies passing through nondescript spaces - platforms, gallerias, corridors, airports. Our legs and our eyes are moving, roving through these landscapes and across and over these painted surfaces.
hej-hej.
Look closer, they say.
We talk; about working, routine, time, cleaning, painting, layers applied, layers removed.
“There are never enough hours in the twenty-four.”
Imperceptible build ups of surfaces, paint, grime, dust.
I think about last week mopping my studio floor, working backwards towards the door, lifting and placing my bucket in tandem with my retreat, so as not to be stranded, islanded in the yellowy grey concrete pond. To back away from a space; like raking the gravel of a Japanese garden or obscuring footprints from the scene of a crime.
There are different ways of moving through the spaces depicted in these paintings; our own fluid, knowing movements contradict the edging, crab-like nature of the trolleys, who always appear to me as if they are walking sideways, always viewed in profile. Suddenly the periphery begins to come into focus, centred, like an abrupt sharp turn of the head.
Some backgrounds I recognise, some I don’t; most feel unimportant as spaces but vital as landscapes, as holding a vessel in a landscape, vessels of their landscape. Surely that red/green plastic bag combination at Kungsträdgården is pure coincidence? As a camouflage, or are trolleys chameleons? Or no coincidence at all, but a conscious effort for such objects of our shared spaces to be as inconspicuous as possible. Observed from the corners of our eyes. I appreciate coincidences; they make us pay attention to the world around us.
Hej-hej.
I become more aware of an inconsistency in time, because the cleaning trolleys speak of other hours than the stark afternoon sun beaming through the studio windows; tired late nights or early mornings when the light is soft and yawning. The hours mostly devoid of human bodies and activity, when the trolleys are out picking up the scraps of peoples’ lives, catching the streams of debris we leave in our wake.
I know Katta is nocturnal, painting late into the night, into the city’s hours of low vitality.
Towards the end, I ask a question; about a photograph or sketch or other source material, and she extracts an A4 printout from a thin drawer in a worn oil blue industrial-looking wheeled cabinet. The symmetry in that Katta herself works from a trolley is not lost on me.
I watch her hanging up the paintings on the smattering of screws and nails fixed to two adjacent walls, shuffling and moving items in and on her trolley that stands at a slight angle to the walls, making a sort of triangle. It is a working corner, filled with the traces and matter and residue of working, paint flecks, small scraps of tape and paper, tools and nails and stretched unpainted canvases close at hand, other materials with names unknown to me, all radiating out from the working corner, giving it a rhythm and activity. We gravitate towards corners and build ourselves up around them. A dense, concentrated space,
like a concave mirror.
(Working title) Visiting, accompanying text for the exhibition Arbetstitel by Katarina Lundberg, Ingela S Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.
Text for Giulia Cairone, Konstfacks vårutställning 2018, image source
Ode to the oarfish
A scent permeates this, lavender, rose petals, coconut, sweat. It seeps out my pores. Pours into small ordered intervals that degrade, dishevel, distress with my mo-vements. I will run with them.
Hanging as long tears that collect and stretch, drawn downwards, pooling and gathering under my ankles. Gently lathered and washed by hand in the bathroom basin to then dry across the shower rail overnight. A second skin, or first layer; turning away while glancing back.
I see the traces of my own legs in these drooping, draping phantom limbs, elongated Lucas limbs that at once are and are not my limbs. I am the magician’s assistant, sawn in half.
I keep the extra weight of water, letting it trickle like threads through the rows and warrens of holes, of porous pumice limbs filled with dripping droplets that catch and stay like bubbles. Stays and runs, fluid; limber poised and waiting on tip-toes. They hang next to precarious glass shelves overflowing with make-up samples my mother sends me. The flotsam and jetsam of gift bags, magazine subscriptions, pharmacy giveaways. Small sachets of foundation, tiny phials of perfume, miniature soaps, muted shades of eyeshadow and garish shades of eyeliner. Why she bothers to send them, I don’t know, but I keep them together, partially used, long past their used-by dates. It is her collection, and to throw them away without permission would feel wrong. I sit absentmindedly rearranging them to the musical tinkling of droplets falling into the curved enamel tub.
I remember reading of stocking shortages during the war, and women drawing seams on the backs of their legs with chocolatey eyeliner, deceiving passers-by from a distance. Straight tattoo traces right up under the skirts; like a shiver going up a spine, making me feel hot and cold.
It is the sensation of my soft downy hairs peeking through the denier like static fronds tasting air with the tips of their tongues, through the innumerable pin prick holes expanding and compressing as I move, breathing. Our seams are negatives, light on dark. Making small holes at the base of the foot and letting the ladders shoot up our legs as we pull the fabric tight. Tight tights, dabbed with nail polish to seal our seams, racer backs, zip lines that sparkle and glisten. I run with them.
Drip-dry my mother used to say; wringing is bad for the fabric, twisting and tearing and splintering all those miniscule fibres into unnatural formations through the spirals of my clenched fists. Delicate wash, shampoo, not detergent, because the material should be soft, silky, have bounce. I lightly weigh the waterlogged reinforced toes of my dangling, drying, delicate wash stockings as if to see if the elastic still had that extra kick.
At home, I feel the thick pile of the bathroom mat on my bare soles and it feels lukewarm and pastel. I always make a point of never stepping on the cold tiled floor with bare feet, instead reverting to childhood games of islands and oceans, hopping between small pockets of land, small habits that crystallized sometime in early adolescence and are worn unconscious movements now, second natures, second skin.
Drying they recede like the tide going out. Shortening to reconfigure to my recognisable silhouette. There are my heels, my knees, my hips. A body doesn’t wash away.
It is always nice to revisit yourself.
Oarfish dwell in the twilight zone. Our seamy laddered limbs are like their spines that sway towards the night, to wash up in the tepid waters of old bathrooms. Oarfish are mediums, seers, predictors of quakes. Messengers from the Palace of the Sea God.
Ode to the oarfish, Florence Wild, 2018
Ode to the oarfish, accompanying text for Giulia Cairone in the group exhibition スウェーデン／日本 国際作家交流展
International Exchange Show Sweden-Japan 2018 in Tokyo 「Mångata / 木漏れ日」, Tokyo, March 2018.
MOONLIGHTING AT THE DEPT. OF WAYS AND MEANS
MUSIC: Strains of Carpenters ‘Yesterday Once More’
Every sha la la la
Every woah oh oh oh
Still shines…..
Fade out
The cool tones of a late night disc jockey:
And with that voice, like drinking cold water from a spring well, Karen welcomes you all to another Love Song til Midnight, alongside yours truly, here to help you turn the clock over into the small hours, with every sha la la la, every woah oh oh oh. Tonight, through means necessary and ways unknown, we wind up at the Dept. of Ways and Means, moonlighting on the airwaves, looking for the means to find the ways and the ways to get the means: straight to your heart.
Once more I was moonlighting at the Dept. of Ways and Means, a place that feels so enclosed it has the atmosphere of a labyrinth in a sphere, and, coupled the labyrinthine tasks of finding ways to use means and using means to find ways, time there had a way of turning in on itself... Moonlighters - that was what they called the casual night shift workers, who were each filled with ulterior motives and non-transferable skills. We all had our own methods.
I could find a footstep on a field of artificial grass. Swish swish, I whisper, but the grass as ever, would remain soundless.
PLAY MISTY FOR ME
And we’re back, this is Love Song til Midnight, still moonlighting and daydreaming, all night long. Different ways, different means, same modus operandi. On repeat and by request, that was Johnny Mathis playing Misty for me, the leitmotif of the evening.
Would I wander through this wonderland alone /Never knowing my right foot from my left /My hat from my glove/I'm too misty, and too much in love/
Let those hats and gloves come off, Johnny, the mist wash over you, here at the Dept. of Ways and Means (whispers) to your heart...
The Dept. of Ways and Means was a ways away, and the only means of access was on foot, the meaning being to make it hard to reach, as no one was using their feet in those days. It was like the artificial grass could sense one’s gait, a cadence and stride that vibrated through the arches and whorls of our soles, like treading over a waterbed with perfect balance.
There was a stillness, water off a duck’s back, sensed in the way condensation would prickle over the perfectly glistening marble staircases cast in the finest linoleum, and across the tesselating faux-bois parquet floors. Lots of soft space. Swish swish sung the eaves and the sashes and the flies.
PLAY MISTY FOR ME
Playing Misty for me, on Love Song till Midnight, that was Erroll Garner. By request, on repeat, going out to yours truly and all you other lonely moonlighters keeping the night alive and the artificial grass growing. Swish swish goes the seconds hand as we round up and wind down to the strike of twelve, as I clock off here and make my way across the lawn to the Dept. of Ways and Means (straight to your heart).
Ways and Means move. Like ships in the night, hard to catch. Like cats, all grey. Hard to differentiate between them and the seemingly as endless as the task of tailing them. And soon, I started to realise the ways and means of the Dept itself, it had its own methods, that moonlighting was to expose my ways and means, my thoughts, impulses and reactions.
Labyrinthine, spherical, artificial: everything was the other way round, ways were means, means were ways, waysmean, meanways
PLAY MISTY FOR ME
PLAY MISTY FOR ME
Every sha la la la
Every woah oh oh oh
Still shines…..
Florence Wild, 2018
Moonlighting at the Dept of Ways and Means, accompanying text for the show The Dept of Ways and Means by Richard Krantz and Katarina Sylvan, Platform, Stockholm, Feb-Mar 2018. Photo Tomas Sinkevičius.
Near Mint
2017
The jacket does not have the banana, banana has been peeled. Banana is totally peeled. Good shape overall. Banana is peeled. Peeled banana. Pealed banana. Banana is pealed. Banana is completely peeled. Banana has been peeled, but still pretty crisp.
Banana is totally PEELED (no yellow at all)
SLEEVE IS MISSING BANANA
No banana. Intact banana. Banana intact but has small tear on side. The banana peel is intact looks like small tear 1" down on peel but matched up perfectly. Half of banana torn off.
looks kool with half exposed banana.
VERVE GERMANY BANANA. Banana looks as though it has been peeled half off then possibly glued back on with some damage at the top. Half of banana peel peeled off top to middle. Banana nearly intact with partially some folds/creases, some slight tears and rips, banana is in 2 piesces. Sleeve is half peeled, small pen marks here and there, little ageing signs, banana peeled off completely.
Full banana, slightly off center and a little over the top edge, but all there.
Banana is 95% unpeeled, just a small part missing near top. BANANA still 99% instact. Small portion of banana missing (approx. 10% tip and top). Banana peeled 1/3 at bottom.
BANANA INTACT! TORSO SHOWN!
Peeled banana. "Airbrushed" cover. Pink banana only. Writing on pink (peeled) banana. Cover has been peeled, even a piece of the pink banana is missing. This is a peeled cover, i.e. No banana. Very good plus copy mono peeled banana pink. Excellent condition, peeled banana. Unpeeled banana. Sharp corners.
Jacket does not have the banana, sleeve hard used, karton open at the outsides, banana have a cut.
Peeled banana
Peeled banana
BANANA IS COMPLETELY PEELED OFF
Every movement brings peril
2016
from parallel lines, an accompanying publication to the exhibition parallel lines at Galleri Verkligheten, Umeå, august 2016.
On silence and stillness
during late nights and early mornings in Umeå
where light is pale and still and silent and slips
in through the slits in the venetian blinds
curling like tendrils under the travel eye mask which I wear to block out this intrusion on my habits, and it feels like moistened cotton balls on my eyelids pressing me into sleep.
I lie motionless, as still as light.
When it tries to wake me, I remain silent.
Teg
The silence of the north is naked, exposed. A silence infused with light, a soft gauze film dampening the air with the slowness of humidity. I walk slower; I don't listen to music. It feels inappropriate, a faux pas – a deliberate fuck you to 'here', right now.
Like the past, 'here' we do things differently. I don’t need to be further removed from my senses.
There is a bathtub in the apartment and most nights I lie in the shallow pool as it drifts into lukewarm, gently pouring runnels of water across my torso.
I appreciate the wordlessness of water.
Swept still
The first few days the wind blew unnaturally strong.
” It’s not usual, but it's not uncommon”, or so I was told, yet it felt like a rebellion on behalf of the city, my presence both the cause and the effect of this change in tempo. I stay indoors in the one-room apartment unless absolutely necessary and through the large double-glazed windows I watch the birch trees soundlessly shudder and flail like bodies in ecstasy while sipping cask wine with delicate, considered movements.
Damp silences are replaced by the constant shivering of the birches small leaves as the wind streaks through the tree-lined avenues. The silence of white noise. The sound of rice grains dumped en masse upon a concrete floor. Nature sounds like chain mail; up in arms, metallic.
Umeå's first line of defence has always been its trees. The row of birches along Östra Esplanaden halted the progression of the Great Fire of 1888, when the sun was high, the rain was scarce, and the wind blew unnaturally strong. The gale force winds bore the fire throughout Umeå’s cramped quarters and winding streets until the city was a tired wreck, the wind carrying the fire across the river into Teg and onto Ön.
The only things left standing were chimneys; motionless, backs turned.
“they are doing the same thing as yesterday”
“they will do the same thing tomorrow”
“so they are doing it in perpetuity.”
Elliptically.
The day is comprised of four parts, corresponding to the four seasons and the four weeks of the month. Morning, or spring, is a time of promise. Noon, summer, the period of growth; afternoon, or autumn, is the period of realization. Evening must be winter, but I never found out what evening represents – as if this time of day did not exist the Northern June. The period of realization extends silently into the small hours like an image coming into focus.
2304-0216
Do we stare at our screens the same way those before us gazed at the stars?
Stillness is not always the absence of movement; stillness is a consistency like toothpaste. A liquid solid, or a solid liquid. The gradual transition from light to dark, the greys, yellows, blues, pinks and purples that colour the sky after the sun has disappeared below the horizon and that greets it upon its return.
I have lost track of time I murmur inside of me. I don't feel so far north until darkness doesn't fall.
I believe in fate. In coincidences, conspiracy theories and sometimes destiny. That accidents are just ideas not yet thought. That my own decisions and the events over which I have no control are on equal footing. But I don’t believe in a higher power.
Behind refrigerated glasses
not quite thawed
a chilled condensation of aloofness or uncertainty marks you out as a visitor
still acclimatizing to the change in temperature
Or the change in pace, in space
And the actions of the visitor are always repetitious, familiar, recognizable because everyone acts alike in a strange land
That’s how we know they are tourists
they remain in light
I become increasingly aware of my own movement: gait, rhythm, cadence. Navigational tools of the body as I wander through Umeå’s viscosity. Every movement brings peril; peril being the possibility of action, of chance, of the unexpected: remnants litter the city after the gale force winds – are the broken boughs and trunks of young saplings just further casualties from Umeå’s first lines of defence? On Ön I duck and weave and sidestep along the narrow paths encumbered with debris while mosquitos manage to penetrate two layers of clothing to feast on my blood. A foreign delicacy.
Still motion
Efforts to blend in, to transition into darkness, to slip below the horizon, feel superficial. My presence is refracted off the external surfaces through which I interact, mirage-like.
I stare compulsively into apartment windows of inhabitants who no longer notice the lightness of night, oblivious to the stretching of time pulled tauter every evening. The stretching of natural light to unnatural lengths. But what is natural? Natural light is so desired, commodified, replicated, and controlled. This light of 1am feels as unnatural as the daylight fluorescent tubes fraudulently flooding my studio.
By evening, I am hurtling towards darkness. In a reverse parallax, the light appears to change before the scenery does; a fog descends, shrouding the tree tops and giving the light a sort of tangible elasticity which would leave a sticky residue if touched.
Touch is a commitment, a reach into the unknown, in a way that differs from sight and hearing. Even accidental brushes denote a sense of proximity to an object where the invisible barrier delineating personal space has no room for construction. The desire to remain self-contained and intangible intensifies.
I lose touch as I don’t have to feel my way in the dark.
SUNDRIES vol 1: Malmö
2015
artist book, printed on demand