Bejn sħab u duħħan

Abstract

The works shown in this book form part of a larger body of work in video, photography and drawing-paintings collectively titled Terrain Vague, which were first shown in Malta in 2011. Terrain Vague is a phrase coined by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, referring to the banlieue or the suburbs which took on a particular poetic resonance in the late nineteenth century. The phrase also stands for the existing urban void, the neglected post-industrial space or the place where the city meets nature, a space of indifference and ambiguity due to its disregard by the contemporary metropolis. These works are the result of my continued interest in trying to define the co-existence of realities in such conditions of vagueness; a process which inevitably always points me to the search for a dividing line, if indeed one clearly exists, that acts as the seam that holds together distanced, even at times opposing truths. Terrain Vague therefore, does not only personify the uncertain relationship between man and place, but also acts as an agent for the restitution and creation of new metaphor and meaning; harbouring equivocal spaces of becoming that are splay to infinite possibilities of engagement and interpretation. My rather long engagement with the term has resulted in videos, photographs and drawing-paintings that underpin and further unfurl the notion of the no man’s land, not seeking to act as chronicle or commentary but rather question the very core of the many truths which the works themselves suggest. Like a word with a dual meaning, such uncertainty presents alternative possibilities for the evolution and interpretation of the work, allowing me to constantly sway its direction from the reflective and contemplative on the one side, to the playful and folly on the other. These two opposing sides of the same coin meet somewhere down the line in a composition whose meaning more often than not ponders its own absurd veracity. The drawing-paintings Between ash and dust speak of implausible distances and detached spaces, breaching such evasive elements as smoke and sky. They are as much about the combined process of drawing and painting as they are about the ever-present imagery of war destruction taken from tabloids or television. These metaphoric memorials sway unclearly between human intervention and natural phenomena, where through the final reinstating of the main materials (charcoal and wood), the remains of such a destructive force are embalmed and given closure. The projected video Between smoke and clouds extends this concern to the cinematic medium, where man, who is destined to loom over nature as he becomes the surveyor of implied happenings, is placed in the unfathomable gap between encircling smoke, cumulous clouds and distant skies and is closely scanned by a constantly rotating camera. Like the drawing-paintings, the image is divested of all unnecessary noise, and glimpses of the surrounding countryside and overhanging clouds make their way through the sparse negative space left to gape around the dominating figure and the clouds of smoke that surround it. The person is both a god and an effigy, a Janus who silently surveys and scrutinizes the terrible tragedy of the erasure of memory, a detached keeper who betrays no hint of emotion or bond with the deafening void of barrenness. Come to blows (after Ajdabiya) is a work that was inspired by the battle for territory (of the Libyan city) in March of 2011, and together with the photographs in the Length of breath series, introduces the concept of measurement as an attempt of the proof of truth which we humans can relate to. The video loops combat opposing sources of smoke that evanesce into nothingness, while being pointlessly measured by the rationality of a steel ruler at the base of the image. The photographs, whose collective title alludes to the mathematical formula of the measurement of a two-dimensional area, present snapshots of what looks like an empirical medical experiment in rash pointlessness, summoning us to reconsider Blaise Pascal’s dictum, if indeed contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of it a sign of truth.