Just the other day, yesterday, in fact, was a stressful day at work. In retrospect, however, there was an element of satisfaction. It had reached a stage of what felt like continuous manual labour: obtaining data, images, saving files, relocating files, importing files, adjusting images. A million mouse clicks for a million images. It felt like I was pasting this giant, busy layered sheet of images flatly onto a another flat layer of concrete. It's the beauty of format and structure that I am beginning to appreciate in this new project. In stead of building up, exploring, off-shooting, dwelling, detailing, and spiralling gently around to create a dynamic, gently shifting spherical world that is documentary, I had this time created neat rectangular slots into which I drafted meaning, and a complementary slot into which I drafted its functional counterpart: looks. The stretching of infinite meaning in one small thing has been beaten out, bent and stretched into one meaning stretched over myriads of words, myriads of images, all moving in the 2-dimensional.
None of this was in fact my point of origin with this post. What was, is the totally different project I was forced to embark upon in the midst of all this regimented hysteria. Pulling myself away from the loose ends of our assembly line, I sat down with a self-contained and magical calm in the front seat of the (like our production process) well-worn out yet highly effective Suzuki; enjoying not only the neatly defined boundaries of my space, which gave me no other choice but to just sit, but also the boundaries of time. I just sat in sublime disconnection, in the crepuscular ether around us, arriving in lovely, haunting and green Defense Phase 1.
There I was greeted with an alltogether different order of things. Content, self-sufficient domestic staff, beauty lingering at every corner. A warm, functional beauty where the juxtaposition of angles, space and perspective was lovingly rampant. A frank but welcoming word, the brashly warm insistence of tea, and I found myself alone with the crew in a space that was yet again totally different from the rest of its body. Naiza's studio is sparse, lofty and high-ceilinged, but busy with activity and construction in every corner. Metal works prod and poke out in awkwardly fragmented human shapes at one side; paintbrushes, tubes and the like collect in a big, satisfying array of sheer bulkiness and number. Fixatives, water colours and paper lie are doing their own dance with the big work surface and the huge, sprawling imli tree outside.
Once our camera was set up, I started shooting. I felt as though I was being hydrated with a wieldy, fluid calm, as I performed a slow pull focus starting from the muted colours of a flushed pink painting to the delisciously sharp spikes poking out of an armour piece.
It was a world of words, context, abstract spaces and boundaries. A world which found structure from the inside out, insteading of shoving in shreds of what was once meaningful into gaping vacant slots. Perhaps I absorbed the calm in the room so steady because of the gritty reality I had just separated from.
The balance was sublime
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