Notes on loving, part 1. For Jeanine van Berkel, whose imagination and kindness inspire me.
Just because she's not looking at anyone, I know we're being seen. Not viewed, but understood in our desire to see ourselves in the urban landscapes of the cities of which we are part. She inspires me in my reflections on what I've been thinking about a lot lately: I need a visibility that doesn't depend on our physical presence. And, I long for a visibility centered around a recognition that we actually derive joy from. Or, at least a mitigation, a relief where it is not required to be reminded of a detriment. That this softness comes in the form of a four-meter ode to our moments of rest and our inner lives, that is a loving.
Moments Contained, the work of the British sculpture maker Thomas J Price that is placed on the square in front of Rotterdam Central Station, is a love. There is a softness to her. This is partly due to Price's intentional choices in materials form, certainly. But, there is also her soothing vibe, a coming to oneself that is both focus and flow. The serenity with which she looks beyond the people who behold her, reminds me of Stillness. Hers, ours. Stillness as a matter of space. And, how powerful it is to create these spaces in the midst of chaos. Or, as Toni Morrison taught us, in response to it.
Om Moments Contained, this beautiful praise of our pauses, seen in a space so equated with sound, bustle and haste, is poetic. It is a beauty that we often overlook or rush past because we have come to believe that Stillness is a waste rather than a part of time. Relearning not only to recognize our sounds, but also to recognize ourselves when we are not presented as a spectacle, requires imagination. Often we need something to give foundation to this imagination, so blessings for the artists who, when considering how to show us, choose our Silence. Decisions like these require vision and care. And tenderness, because even without her pedestal, more is needed than craftsmanship and a good eye for beautifully styled baby hair to make a four-meter-tall girl symbol of recognisability. Especially when that recognisability is a subtle, ever clever method of not only criticizing but also rejecting the Eurocentric connections between scale, material, form and what is important. Of Moments Contained Thomas J Price gives us ourselves in one of my favorite forms of rest: unbotheredness, a state of being where we don't allow ourselves to be disturbed.
Thanks to Price's intentional choices to give us hardly any codes that contextualize her, she is a reference to the possible. We can't even say for sure what she's doing. At first I imagined her relaxing her fists. This reminded me of an Instagram post about relaxing our shoulders, dropping them, and no longer pressing our tongues against our palates. I can't remember the source but I remember the lessons and once in a while, when I try to breathe myself into relaxation, I think back to these instructions. Perhaps we see her in a moment just after this realization and in the process of settling down. But, maybe she just snapped her fingers. Try it: immediately after the finger snap, the hand seems to clench into a fist. Maybe that's what's happening. Perhaps her thoughts took her past a sonic softness. And perhaps, as she thought about what the work of Romana Vrede and Adison dos Reis taught her about belonging, she remembered the sounds of Benjamin Clementine and Cesária Évora. It may very well be that while her mind's ear brought his operatic voice to her heartthrob Morna, she remembered the note in which Lorraine Hansberry wrote that a classical people deserves a classical art. And, to underline that science and the music… she snapped her fingers.
The multitude of possibilities presented to us Moments Contained shows that Thomas J Price offers us with his sculpture a work that is both a work of art and an artist. Whoever people think she is and whatever it is they're imagining she's doing says a lot about the people watching her. Those who are not concerned with the ways they are viewed by people irrelevant to them become spotlights. When we don't relate to someone's urge to make a spectacle of us, we turn the focus they hope to put on us back to who they are. The circus they tried to set up becomes a one-person clown act, because why on earth do they react so violently to a refusal? For example, if we are asked to smile and we don't, we are disrupting something. When we are asked to behave in such a way that certain social codes, kept in place to maintain very specific forms of comfort, remain intact, and we don't, something changes. When people think that statues are about status, grandeur and worth… and they believe that the honor of their admiration is something that a young, Black, casually dressed girl in sneakers will never get… but she still shows up and she refuses to give them any a fraction of the attention she spends on her baby hair… Mad things rearrange.
This shift, no matter how modest or huge, tells us something about ourselves, about others… More than the carefully formulated intentions and who we hope we are, these changes tell us something about our capacities to connect with each other. They are informative. This gives Moments Contained its dual role as a work of art and artist, sculpture and maker of psychological portraits of her passers-by based on the ways in which they look at the world.
The spaces for our daily experiences are cluttered with distractions. By this I mean specifically those distractions that, as Toni Morrison taught us, prevent us from doing our job. I am curious about the experience and impact of the placement of Moments Contained on our sense of belonging. And, I wonder how this shapes her sense of home. I look forward to seeing what the organizations involved in her places have put together as a placement ritual. Her homecoming, so to speak. I wonder what, according to these organizations, fits her Stillness. Hers, ours. My ceremony would consist of a soprano singing, Cape Verdean aunt of about sixty and Pelumi Adejumo. They would both be dressed in a reimagination of the outfit designed by Marga Weimans Moments Contained wears. I would invite them to take a seat on an installation 2.50 meters high, opposite but not too close to our new Rotterdammer. There, as we gather in their midst, I would imagine these three representations of our Stillness their imagination of our unbotheredness let it cross. That. Four meters above our heads and as close as we can imagine, that would be my welcome. A sonic settling of the possibilities we are the representations of. A home calling. Loving one.
The English version of this essay is here readily available.
Part 2 of this essay is here to read.
