crack crack

Make spaghetti. For sauce, melt butter in frying pan, put in garlic and onion until golden brown, mix in chopped tomato, cubed broccoli stem, chopped champignon, a bit of cream cheese, a bit of white wine, a bit of nutmeg, a bit of basil leaves, a bit of crushed cashew, and a pinch of salt. Mix all. Cover for a while with low heat. When spaghetti’s finished, mix together, and serve. Yum.

Dessert is avocado, sprinkled with caster sugar.

What is it that you want me to promise you my dear: that I will never suddenly die?
I can promise you the whole earth in my hand my love, but that would be simply a lie.

“Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.” Thank you, Daniel Wolfson. And thank you again.

In my dreams, logic goes in reverse. Once, in there, I saw my ID card — which was slightly bigger than it was in un-dream (or, the waking world, to avoid using the word “reality”), therefore might be fake and, in fact, was confirmed as (in that dream) only a reproduction — slipped away from my hand and instead of falling down to the floor actually started to float up in the air. It kept floating up, and up, and up, until it almost reached the ceiling. At one point before the ceiling, however, it touched a surface that I was unaware of previously. I knew that it was some kind of a surface because that surface suddenly rippled … like the surface of water touched by an object.

I gasped. I was underwater! I was underwater the whole time and did not realise that I was, until I saw that ripple. Immediately, the world changed — I was breathing underwater. That was how it felt to breathe underwater. It could not be anything else, because the card floated up. Only under water can objects float up.

This is the way most memory served me in my dreams as well: in reverse. As one event was happening, a memory was built to explain it. When a dream started with a scene whereby I could not open a door, for example, suddenly I would realise that it would be impossible for me to open that door because, in the dream, I remembered that I have lost the key just a few days ago.

Some of my dreams also feels like a reverse explanation of something that was happening in parallel in my waking world, like an alarm clock that failed to wake me up fully. Let us call this X. Upon hearing X, in my dream, my logic would construct a whole story to explain that sound — failing to get sufficient information from my senses — and it would work in reverse. X — now representing that loud inexplainable ringing-like noise — must have happened because of Y, and Y must have happened because of Z. Then, offering that explanation to my brain, my logic would have to put it in order of normal time (which is, forward), so that it makes sense. It would say, once upon a time Z happened, and so as a consequence then Y happened, and that was why we now had X. And so I would have a complete forward (non-reverse) dream-story in my head of how a friend told me she was going to call me up (Z) and so I was waiting for her call (Y) and finally the phone rang (X). This must have happened in a split millisecond.

Then when I woke up, I would exclaim, “what a coincidence!” — referring to the ring in my dream that somehow blended into the ring in my waking world. Dear old me. It was not a coincidence. It was my brain struggling to explain a phenomenon and constructing a whole story to support its theory of what that loud ringing noise was, having limited information from the waking world because it failed to wake my senses up fully.

Once, however, I remember seeing a character in my dream that was, although he stayed in the background, quite memorable. I thought about that character the whole day. Later that day, I somehow discovered my old journals, and started to read through them. On one page I saw my note and sketch of a dream I had approximately twelve years earlier. Eerily, that memorable character from my recent dream was in that old note. Lucky I sketched him — I could say that character (the old one) looked exactly like him (the one I have just dreamt of). I never remembered that old dream before that day. I always remember it now, together with the newer dream where that character had reappeared.

Had I not sketched that character twelve years earlier, I would not have known that the appearance of that character in my new dream was a reappearance. This unawareness of that reappearance made me think that my memory in one dream does not always connect to my memory in the other. It is as though one dream is a universe within itself, isolated from another.

It is amazing to think that it is possible to have a separate universe within myself. But it is even more amazing to think that this one character lives in both universes within myself, and I did not even know him. I still, actually, do not know him.

We walked the platform. As we pass the first class carriages, or perhaps a bit before then, you tried to initiate a conversation. Sorry that I can’t look at you in the eyes, you said, I’m too nervous. I nodded and pretended to understand, too nervous to ask more. A young couple stood near the entrance to carriage D. The girl hid her face in his chest. At a glimpse of her breath we stole a view of her crying face, and looked at each other. Wow, I said to you in my mind, she’s crying! Yeah, wow, said you to me in my mind, and I replied, still in my mind, don’t worry, I won’t be. I won’t do that. I won’t cry. I won’t cry, will I?

The train was leaving in eleven minutes. I couldn’t help you lift your big bag anymore, it has grown too heavy. We found your seat, number 11, and looked at each other again when we saw the girl sitting at number 12. I couldn’t wait to tell you and so I rushed out. You couldn’t wait either. As soon as we reached a good distance from seat number 12, you told me, I think I saw that girl earlier today or yesterday. I said, excitedly, yes, yes, I think we saw her in the National Gallery, ask her, ask her, and, and I think she’s Japanese, so maybe, maybe you can ask whether she’s from Tokyo and, and maybe, if she’s from Tokyo, maybe she’d know about Shinjuku. But it was only nine minutes before the train had to leave and we stood there wanting to say goodbye but couldn’t and just stood there on that platform in the closest hug possible. Can we sit? I asked. Let’s sit for five minutes, you said. Let’s sit there.

We walked there. Away from the train. We sat.

Sitting, and wanting to face each other, there was a distance between our knees. An awkward one. I didn’t want to move, it would be too uncomfortable if I did, and if I tried to be comfortable, the distance would have been greater. As long as I could still smell your face, and feel your lips, and try to remember the scent of your shabby jacket, and how I wish someone had invented a smell-recorder, yes, how I wish I could record all these and play them later again at home, and again whenever I want to smell them again. I wanted to talk more, so that I can hear your voice more, but the couple then sat down just opposite us and I didn’t want them to hear too much and besides, I didn’t know what to say. Rather, I didn’t know which, of all my thoughts, to say. So I stayed quiet so close to your body, and looked at the train schedule on the monitor. Negative and positive and neutral and of many sharp angles and opposing poles in my mind incomplete, I kept quiet.

The schedule monitor flicked. Five minutes, I said. And as though it was written on the lines of our palms, just after I said it, five minutes, I suddenly burst to tears. I didn’t hide my face in your chest. I didn’t even care what that other couple might think. I just held you as close as I could. I thought it was ridiculous, but no matter what I thought, I cried. Five minutes to what? I cried for whatever there were necessary to cry for, even though I thought they were probably not really that necessary.

Three minutes before the train left, with your heavy bags in it, and with that girl that we might have seen in the National Gallery earlier that day sitting next to your seat, we parted. You don’t have to wave, you said. Don’t wave. I won’t wave, I said. You went in and sat in your seat. You said something in a sign language that I struggled to understand. I answered in a sign language that even I struggled to understand. The train started to move. The window between us. I started to wave, but caught myself. I put my waving hand in my pocket. The window between us. I walked with the train, knowing it impossible to keep that same distance with it as before. The carriage between us. I walked with the train, knowing how powerful it was to create such a big distance, how powerless I was compared to it. I told my brain to remember that scene forever, and Click it went. I couldn’t keep my waving hand in my pocket, it went up and covered my mouth and sobbing nose. Click my brain went. The image of you, calmly retiring from struggling with that unknown sign language behind that window, went away. The train between us. Click my brain went. I kissed my waving hand. The long tail of the train between us, first class carriages. Click my brain went. Soon it became just a dot in the horizon. Click my brain went. The space between us.

The empty railway between us. Click my brain went.

I wiped my tears, but they were not all gone. I turned around. The couple, now only the male half of it, stayed in the platform. He didn’t walk with the train. He just stood there, at the spot he saw his girlfriend off into the train when it was still there. I walked. He looked at me and gave a friendly nod. I smiled back, trying to look tough and trying to walk pass him without interacting. An awkward silence. It’s always hard to say goodbye, he said to me as I passed next to him. I nodded and wiped the rest of my tears. Boyfriend? He asked. Yes, I nodded. So is he from Sydney?

No, I said, London. Oh, he said, maybe wondering a bit. I wondered what his case was. Was that your girlfriend, I asked. Yes, he said. I wondered whether it was a parting any sadder than ours. I wondered whether they knew when they would be reunited. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. He kindly solved my hesitation and told me, she’s visiting her parents in Sydney. She’s studying here in Melbourne, and on school breaks she’d go back home to her parents’. Ah, I nodded. The air somewhat, somehow, cleared.

Yes, that girl on seat 12 was the girl in the National Gallery. And I was right, she was Japanese. Amazing, you texted. I wondered what all these movements would look like from the sky. The crying girlfriend will come back from Sydney to the same spot in about a week. His boyfriend will pick her up, and they might repeat the same movement in the next school break. The Japanese girl — who earlier that day had crossed paths with us, gone elsewhere and then met with us again in the train — was to spend the whole train trip sitting next to you, after which she might visit the National Gallery in Sydney, fly elsewhere in a few days, visit another gallery, and perhaps fly again elsewhere in a few weeks, eventually back to Japan. From Sydney, you’ll fly to Tokyo to hang out at Shinjuku, and then perhaps more eagerly to London.

Some of us might see each other again, some soon, some might never. Some might never care. If moving around, parting and being in a distance is such a drama, which of ours is more dramatic than the others? For which should one cry louder?

That night I took the tram to East Brunswick through the city. Immersed in my thoughts, I mistakenly alighted on Swanston street, and so had to walk back to Elizabeth street to catch my Airport West tram. At one point during this choreography of all our movements in time, from quite a distance, you managed to make me laugh.

Presented as a party game, Terra incognita, et cetera (2009, interactive performance and wall installation) is an exercise in collective painting and, simultaneously, a spin on collaboration and territorial marking.

The interactive performance is an art exhibition opening party game where audience members can participate in cutting up a blank map of the world into bordered territories.

Prior to the opening, I painted a blank dymaxion world map with watercolour onto the wall.

During the opening a numbered grid is projected onto the mural. Two attendants, Daniel Wolfson and Kim Grondowski, walked around amongst the audience, serving trays of cocktail toothpick flags of five different colours and a bowl of glue. From these trays, audience members could choose a flag to stick on the mural within the grid reference that they specified, thus claiming the area, writing what they claimed as their last names with pencil to mark the area.

I then coloured the chosen territory in accordance to the flags, repainted the names in watercolour. I continued making up new rules as the interactive performance proceeded, in response to questions from audience members. When the party was over, I marked all unclaimed areas of the map as Terra nullius, and the finished mural – with the freshly marked borders, flags, and territorial names – remained as an artwork for the duration of the exhibition.

Indonesian curator Farah Wardani, after her speech that opened the exhibition, gleefully came to claim the area legally known as Malaysia. She didn’t tell me the reasons behind her choice, but from her triumphant grin it was obvious to me that she meant to refer to all the recurring territorial and cultural ownership disputes between Indonesia and Malaysia.

We also had a Jordan amongst the audience members. I don’t think she claimed the area of the geographical map legally known as Jordan, however.

Some people refused to mark a territory because they were “not into land ownership.” Some answered “I’m not that greedy,” in response to my stating the regulation that they could have as much as three boxes in the grid. Someone claimed three areas as his, Zipling, in green.

The project took territorial marking to new heights: upon a visit to the gallery’s toilet, I found a small toilet graffiti which writing (style and content) resembles one of the audience members’ (”Free Free Palestine” - “Franchez” - “bastien of Free Palestine”).

And as often found in toilet graffiti, someone actually hearts Georgie.

Almost everyone had a reason to choose a specific area. Islands were mostly on demands. Many marked their home countries or some other places they fell in love with. Others based their choice on some popular political or strategic views. Scoglio said she wanted to as much as possible minimise the possibility of maritime invasion.

We started with around 150 flags, and almost every one of them was taken. Some audience members glued their flags onto the wall without approaching me, so they didn’t know the rules of the game and didn’t inscribe their names next to their flags. I pulled out these illegitimate flags to allow newer, legitimate ones.

The piece was as ephemeral as the world’s geopolitical boundaries: when the exhibition closes, following art galleries’ tradition — as I had done with the interactive performance at the opening of the exhibition — I had to repaint the whole wall back to white. (Terra incognita, et cetera was part of Kompilasi group exhibition, curated by Kristi Monfries, Georgia Sedgwick and Tim O’Donoghue in Bus Gallery, Melbourne, 24 Feb - 13 Mar 2009.)

Photos courtesy of the artist and Lindsay Cox. Many thanks to: • Daniel Wolfson for his role as an attendant in the performance. • Kim Grondowski for her role as an attendant in the performance. • the audience members, including Farah Wardani, Fiona Jordan, Zipling, Franchez, Atticus, and Zoe Scoglio. • Ruth Wolfson-Solomon for rolling up lots of little flags with me.

Lure (2009) is a spatial installation using handmade miniature passports, handmade real-size passports, and a claw vending machine.

The installation consists of two coherent parts – the Intro and the Main part. The Intro is a long line of colourful miniature passports that is composed along the exhibition space, analogous to Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs leading back home. Each of the miniature passports is positioned vertically, with pages open, so the audience can see the cover and the inside sequentially as they are walking pass a horizontal line of miniature passports. When they are attached to the floor and the audience is standing directly above the trail looking down, and when they are attached to a frontal wall, the visual form that the audience sees resembles a bird’s footprints. Visually and spatially, the audience can follow this line of colourful miniature passports, which leads them the to Main part.

The Main part is a claw vending machine, analogous to the witch’s candy house in Hansel and Gretel’s story. In the machine’s transparent container, instead of a big pile of prizes (or chocolate bars), the audience sees a big pile of colourful handmade passports from all the current nation-states in the world.

The audience has the option to play the machine by inserting a gold coin into the machine’s slot, and controlling the claw to win some handmade passports. The claw mechanism is setup so it is challenging for the audience but not too difficult to win. When they win, they can bring the handmade passports home with them.

In Lure, passports are like candies: people want as much as they can have, and it is attainable for just a small fee. You still have to be either lucky or highly skilled, but neither as a boat person nor as a skilled migrant, nor even as a native to the land — as a player controlling the claw, instead.

Stemming from my ongoing project (Re)Collection of Togetherness, in which I collect and remake passports of all the current nation-states in the world, Lure examines the relationship between chance and citizenship in a re-imagined world.

(Lure is part of Some Rooms exhibition at Osage Gallery Hong Kong, 27 Feb - 24 May 2009. Curator for Lure in this exhibition is Eva McGovern.) Photos courtesy of Osage Gallery and Eva McGovern. Many thanks to: • Daniel Wolfson for assisting with the Melbourne part of the production. • Miranda Harlan for supervising the Yogyakarta part of the production. • Carmen Ho for liaising with the Chinese part of the production. • Eva McGovern for supervising the installation at Osage Gallery Hong Kong. • Roslisham Ismail a.k.a. Ise for assisting with installation at Osage Gallery Hong Kong.

Heat wave, unwavering.

In a distance, you waved to me a flying kiss. I waved back my flying kiss, and sat down at the front row. A girl with a big backpack came in. An older man in black with white hair came in, waiting for the girl with the big backpack to sit down, but she did not.

“Sorry — I just have to ask something to the driver,” she said, giving way to the older man. The older man smiled and answered intelligibly, but stopped midway, right besides me. Clinging to a pole, he took a second look at the girl with the big backpack.

“Excuse me sir, would you like to sit down?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he said to me, looking at me in surprise, “I have no idea! No, no. I have no idea!” and, as he walked pass me, touched my shoulder and told me, “Relax, just relax.”

So I did. He sat down just two rows behind me and started a loud one-way conversation with someone sitting right next to him. “That Yugoslavian girl,” while the girl with the big backpack asked the driver in an apparently Yugoslavian accent, “she seems to have lost her bag in one of the trams,” said he, while the apparently-Yugoslavian girl continued to ask the driver how to get her bag back. “And the driver has just told her how to get it back,” continued the man in black loudly.

I resisted the temptation of turning my head to take a look at that narrating older man. I looked at the Yugoslavian girl instead – it was much easier. She had a bag of chips in her hand. She sat down, opened the bag of chips and started eating it. She must have been quite hungry. Who knows what she had lost — her passport? Her wallet too. And she would have only had a few gold coins with her, and had to buy whatever she could for dinner. Poor Yugoslavian girl. She looked quite calm for someone who has lost her passport and wallet, though.

Next stop Victoria Market, and she went out. The woman next to me was also looking at the Yugoslavian girl. Or maybe she was looking at me? I resisted the temptation to turn my head and look at her to check whether she was actually looking at me. She sat too close to me for me to do it with subtlety.

“I love the Christians!”

“I love the Christians! The Buddhists! I love the Buddhists too!”

“Long live the Christians! Good Christians!”

This time I couldn’t resist any temptation anymore, and turned my head to look at the source of those yells. The woman sitting next to me didn’t seem to have to resist at all — she immediately turned her head to look. Everyone’s heads in the tram 59 going to Airport West at 10-something that evening were turned around to look at this middle-aged big man, back at the back row, who continued to shout, “Long live the Christians! I love the Christians! I love the Buddhists too!” or at least something resembling that, as his accent made it too unclear to me.

The older man in black with the white hair started answering him. “Yes! The Christians! What about them?”

“I love the Christians! I love the Christians!”

“Yes, but you are still quite young! Calm down! Be quiet!”

Out loud. The middle-aged big man continued to shout something like either “Long live the rich!” or “I hate rich people,” and the man in black shouted back, “Why are you going to Richmond? Why Richmond?”

“I’m going to Richmond!”

“You’re on the wrong tram then, my friend!”

“I’m going to Richmond!”

“Why? Why do you want to go to Richmond?”

“I love the Christians! I love the Buddhists! You killed all the Aborigines!”

“You still want to go to Richmond?”

“You killed all the Aborigines! You, white people, you! White people! Killed all the Aborigines!”

The woman sitting next to me gave up trying to compose a message on her mobile phone, shook her head, turned her head to the direction of those two men in intense long-distance colloquy and whispered loudly. It sounded like “Mori! Be quiet!”

She then went back to her TXTing, shook her head again, and said loudly while looking at her mobile, “Ssssoooossssh!”

I looked at her for the first time. If she was not those men’s some sort of guardian, why did she tell them to be quiet? I wondered. If she was those men’s some sort of guardian, why are all of them sitting separately? She continued TXTing.

Quiet. For a while. The tram was full of people but no one made a single sound.

“You see, it might sound scary, but when you think about it, it actually doesn’t affect you at all. You don’t have to be afraid. Nobody cares! Nobody is paying attention.”

The man in black continued in a lower volume, “I’m talking to you, boy! No fear. You don’t have to fear.” It sounded like he started talking to someone just behind me.

A woman’s voice suddenly emerged from behind me. “He’s fine. And you should stop. Both of you. Stop it, now.” She sounded like she was scolding two grade-twos.

But the big man started shouting again.

“You killed all the aborigines! You white people! You white people! I’m Turkish! I’m Turkish!”

I couldn’t decide whether I should feel relieved to finally hear something about his cultural rootedness.

“I’m Turkish! You all white people! You are all racists! You are racists! This is a racist country!”

A few people walked towards the front door. The scolding woman behind me walked up to the front as well, with her son. She was smiling awkwardly and her son didn’t look fearful. I wondered whether it was really their stop. Perhaps they just couldn’t take the shoutings anymore. I turned my head and saw the Turkish man standing next to the rear exit. The tram stopped and he walked down saying “This is a racist country!” It was hard to tell whether he was satisfied with his declaration — with my limited neck-rotating ability I could barely see his face.

As the tram started to pick up speed again, the man in black made a sound between giggling and laughing.

“Life can be easier,” he said, sighing. Not shouting this time.

The guardian woman sitting next to me turned to me, looked at me in the eyes, and said, cynically,

“Life can be easier if people stopped drinking.”

I looked at her. Her smile to me was bitter. I gave her a child-like smile, an understanding one, perhaps not as bitter as hers.

The next stop was not my stop — but I decided I’d rather go out and walk.

“Have a good night,” I said to her, right at the end of the tram’s pulling of its brake. She smiled, less bitterly, “Good night,” she said to me.

I almost ran out, quickly saying thanks to the driver. Looked like an Indian woman. Middle-aged.

Australia Day, I thought. Forty-something degrees. A few years ago, someone told me there is a National Barbecue Day in Australia. This must be it, I thought. My sandal snapped.

In your absence, scents seem to linger, even when they’re perhaps not part of reality. It is my truth, the only one I know, the only truth I can understand, and the one I’m sharing with you. Surrendering to flashes of reminiscence when blissful butterflies flutter little nerve endings, closing my eyes I saw yours close to mine.

Minus distance. My Bruce and Wallace, is home an act of remembrance?