the hundred
A film by Peter Lewis and Sophy Rickett
Produced for Mark Dean’s online exhibition, The Spiritual Exercises 2.
How to collaborate? The term being misunderstood generally, to weave threads of those sources retrieved in the mondialité (a whole-world mentality) of diverse orientations. What residue of the mondial, in the archipelago of images, skews necessity to repair the sense of the world in the broken symmetries of its milieu? The contingency implicit of a collaboration prohibits the overtaking, of one realm by another realm. Collaboration, self-engendered, may itself be transversed to escape any such takeover, by the assembly of a dissimilar set. May we not conceive that a hundred different events might as well follow from a missing cause in the field of these surface effects? May not also, both cause and effect remain at absolute rest in the ashes of language? The Portuguese have an untranslatable word, Saudade, spoken at the point of breaking symmetry, felt in the opacity of innumerable tacit meanings. Something opaque, out of melancholia, subtracts art from within photography and literature. Birds, architectures, sounds, all melt in the heat of a sun, a stranger to the great Outdoors. Who is it who calls out Saudade, who insists? The call and response of heteronyms, assembled together to speak of their uncommon, asymmetrical styles, discloses how one voice speaks for the figures of another in an exchange of gifts. What words are spoken to whom, and what will be the other’s, if, to ease the ground they do not co-relate to the world in all its asymmetries and opacities?
“The concept of relation (…)enables a relation between different people and places, animate and inanimate objects, visible and invisible forces, the air, the water, the fire, the vegetation, animals and humans”.
from Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality - An Introduction to One World in Relation, Manthia Diawara, Documenta 14
2021/ DV with sound. Mixed media collage of photography, DV, sound and text from archives of Peter Lewis and Sophy Rickett/ duration 3min 59sec