This communiqué borrows its title, The West of the Nile, from a phrase uttered casually by a friend recently. A phrase which seemed to waft toward me laden with all the fragrant, poetic mystery of far-off places. Following this prompt, I begin with a meditation on Mike Nelson’s exhibition, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), a show redolent with the intoxicating appeal of travel. Also, I reflect on the making of my 2021 film The Visitation, which premieres this April, considering the work as a portal to a cinematic underworld. The text concludes with three cultural recommendations.
Mike Nelson, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), detail, 2022
The Room
I recently travelled up to London from Hastings to visit The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), Mike Nelson’s exhibition at Matt’s Gallery. Tickets to this show, while free, are strictly limited, as only one person is permitted to enter at any one time. Given the nature of this exhibition, this is entirely appropriate. Nelson presents a single room, a room as potent for the imagination as Tarkovsky’s room in the 1979 film Stalker - a place, at the centre of a transfigured landscape, where dreams or unconscious desires may become manifest. Nelson’s small room, once entered, seems to expand to encompass the world, enfolding time and space into its obscure dimensions. The work is ostensibly simple, a makeshift bed surround by a library of paperback books, overseen by a globe of light. The makeshift bookshelves are crammed with outdated travel guides, of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide varieties, which visitors are invited to examine. This bed, curiously constructed out of a time-worn rug and an old, beaten frame, is a cot for dreaming. These travel guides, once perhaps stuffed into the rucksacks of hopeful, intrepid backpackers are all now to some degree outdated. Their obsolete listings brim with references to obscure train stations, affordable hotel rooms, directions to statue-encrusted temples, paths into jungles, belonging to a world now impossible to recapture except by the imagination. The lost world they describe now returns, to be resurrected and enfolded into this work. This room is a way station for solitary adventurers, perhaps one that might be found at the centre of a maze or located at T.S. Elliot’s “still point of the turning world”. This is a chamber that, were it not for its worn-in, broken down quality, might appeal to Jean des Esseintes, the self-isolated dreamer of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À rebours (1884). A character who, having imagined a journey, felt there was no need to actually undertake it. Of course, in this room, the memory of lockdown returns. I’m reminded of the first UK lockdown especially, a time, for me, when the purest seclusion reigned and meditative stillness descended, where travel became impossible and distant places receded from view. There is a sadness too, a mourning for the lost, an elegy for paths now faded or destroyed by exploitation or overuse. On leaving the exhibition London had never looked so strange, a labyrinth radiating out from this transient, dreaming room.
More information is online here.
Visitors in the 1970s marvel at the cave of Altamira, Spain. Photo sourced here.
Beyond the Screen
Imagine the cinema as a site of mediation between realms, the screen functioning as a point of convergence between the world inhabited by the spectator and the world beyond the screen. In this scenario, the cinema becomes a liminal chamber that offers, to the initiates gathered there, access to an otherworld.
David Lewis-Williams’ widely influential book The Mind in the Cave (2002) pre-figures this idea, claiming that this concept actually emerged alongside the very origination of images. Written from a rational, scientific perspective,The Mind in the Cave has nonetheless become, to some, a hands-on guidebook to the underworld, an underworld accessed either via subterranean caverns or one locatable deep in the cranial chambers of our own minds. Writing about the painted caves of the palaeolithic era, of sacred underground spaces like Lascaux in France, Lewis-Williams suggests that the imagery ranging across the cavern’s undulating rock surfaces (in most cases of animals, although other more ambiguous entities do appear) might represent depictions of beings existing beyond, or through, the cave walls. Here, inside the earth, these underworld entities were seen to arise to press up against the subterranean walls as if from within, the solid rock face imagined as a porous, semi-permeable membrane separating this world and the realm of the spirits. Lewis-Williams aligns these visions to altered states of consciousness, the mental states that radiate off from the mind’s default setting, heading toward deep introspection, hallucination, trance and dream. He sees these cave paintings and the context that houses them as a holistic space where the obscure, mystery-cloaked regions of human consciousness are made manifest and enfolded into an integrated belief system.
To me, art often seems to inaugurate some sort of altered state - be it the heightened thrill of being confronted by great paintings, or the intoxication of being borne away by reading - of being taken into a space where you are both present and absent. Film does this too. As spectators, we’re conscious of ourselves sitting in the cinema but also of being simultaneously elsewhere, of having projected ourselves onto the screen.
The Visitation, film still, 2021
Psychic Underworld
My 2021 film The Visitation takes place in what looks like a subterranean cavern or a shadowy, twilit grotto. To me, the grotto is site of powerful resonance, a pagan site of origination, the space from where life emerges. Also, I see the grotto as being linked directly to the underworld, an access point to the ghost realms that extend beyond the wall. Throughout the duration of The Visitation the viewer is invited to examine what is surely a fragile microcosm, a portion of a fragmenting world temporally held together by the swaying strands of a spider’s web. This is a space that seems to be in the process of splitting apart, the cracks in the walls revealing an inferno beyond. The Visitation is comprised of a single sequence which suggests, to me, a stream of uninterrupted reality, albeit a reality far removed from anything familiar - a record of a moment in time relayed from a site of cosmic upheaval. The Visitation also seems suggestive of the limitations of the recording medium, the camera’s faltering ability to register and absorb extreme phenomena, as the screen becomes overwhelmed by a torrent of otherworldly lights. The Visitation’s score, by composer Abi Fry, combines the sound of a viola freighted with anticipation with the immense, foreboding sound of a Chao gong, an instrument that, in this case, seems to herald extinction. Listening closely, attending to the sounds beyond the immediate instrumentation, I also think I can hear a record of indescribable things lurking at the outer reaches of the film’s expansive audio-space. The film’s title alludes to the arrival of the supernatural. Perhaps these mysterious noises are the sounds of other-dimensional presences drawing closer from across the threshold, approaching from the space beyond the screen?
The Visitation has been programmed to premiere at the 2022 Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival. For me, Alchemy is a special site, a temporal zone where the visions of the age make themselves manifest. The festival will take place in Hawick, UK, from 28th April to 2nd May. For more information about this wonderful festival visit: https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/
Jordan Belson, Untitled, paper collage and mixed media mounted on board, c. 1970
Cultural Recommendations
Recently I’ve been micro-dosing poems from the Altered States anthology. This collection, featuring the work of writers who were mostly unknown to me before, “explores the varieties of consciousness and revelatory experience”. Rather than simply presenting paeans to intoxication the book’s texts appear to proposes a renewed engagement with different modes of reality and a revised relationship to our natural environment and the various entities that inhabit it. The book, edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, suggests that the 36 poems contained therein “stand at the thresholds of alterity to propose a new psychedelic style for the 21st Century.”
https://ignota.org/collections/frontpage/products/altered-states
I’ve made two visits to Tate Modern to see the exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders. This vast ten-room survey amounts to a major reappraisal of the Surrealist movement. Among the marvels exhibited, I was particularly drawn to the four small works by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, one of which is pictured below. These tinted miniatures present composite scenes brimming with bizarre hybrid creatures. The exhibition runs until the 29th of August. For more information visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/surrealism-beyond-borders
Torn-paper, landscape-themed collages by the experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson are currently showing at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, until 23rd April. Judging by the images of the work online, this show looks enchanting: https://matthewmarks.com/online/jordan-belson
Kaveh Golestan, Untitled, from the Az Div o Dad series, 1976