Have been mad busy prepping 'Alleys of Damansara Jaya' for a show at Kafka's, opening May 3. An old work that has never really been shown, this was a collaboration with my ex-partner, Tessa Wetherill, made while we were living in a suburb of Petaling Jaya.
There's a website for the project now:
Alleys of Damansara Jaya
Click
here for the Facebook event
The following is a revised version of 'Notes on Damansara Jaya'. Never been a fan of artist 'statements'; instead, the following piece of writing speaks more to process, experience and reflection on making the 'Alleys' project.
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Alleys of Damansara Jaya
Photo
and video installation, 2005-2007
Kajin
Goh & Tessa Wetherill
Not long after arriving in KL, Tess and
I rented a room from Mrs. Tan on Jalan SS 22/29, in the suburbs of
Damansara Jaya, in late August 2005.
It was an air-tight, gated suburban
home; the air humid and heavy, as the windows were latched shut with
the curtains drawn. A yellow, musty film seemed settled
indiscriminately over everything; plus an ancient, oily smell of past
meals seemed to have penetrated right into the walls.
We shared the house with sad, troubled
Simon (Mrs. Tan’s brother), his nubile and somewhat aloof
mail-order bride from the mainland (who seldom registered our
existence with so much as a stabbing upward glance from her compact),
and a seldom-seen Indian engineering student who sequestered himself
in his room, distracting himself with a transistor radio and the very
occasional visitor. Tess and I had a large room opposite, with
attached bathroom and grilled-in balcony overlooking the front of the
street. Rent was 500 RM/month.
We had moved to the neighbourhood
ostensibly to be close to Gudang, Hamir Soib’s art studio, where
we had started a residency and were working on several pieces to be
shown in an ‘Open Studio’ group exhibit later that year.
Every day we would rouse ourselves
(late to very late) from bed, head over to the Atrium complex on SS
22/21 to linger over kopi (bahasa for 'coffee'), or teh
tarek ('pulled tea') and telur kampung ('village' or
boiled egg), and then head over to Gudang to work as long as we could
before the mosquitoes ate us alive. End of day we would go makan
(eat) at SS 22/11 or SS 2 or 19, and after meet friends for drinks or
yet more tea, pick up a pirate DVD (rental stores no longer exist in
modern-day KL), or simply head home, often staying up till 3 or 5 am
or whenever sleep overtook us.
We left and went home through the back
alley. For me, these were environments strongly resonant of my early
childhood spent near Kampung Java Park in Singapore, a place I hadn’t
set foot in or seen for twenty-plus years. For Tess these were wholly
unfamiliar and fascinating, novel spaces. Compared to my childhood
haunts, the alleys in DJ were narrower, flanked by deep longkangs
(storm-drains) dropping away from either side of the path, with stone
steps poised over the abyss to access yards or kitchens beyond
heavily-padlocked iron gates.
Every day, scents spilled from the
kitchens at dusk, the drainpipes gushing a foamy liquid into the
longkangs as people washed or laundered. The back-facing province of
hired help and cloistered pets, a resonant broadcast of dis-embodied
voices, radio, and TV would blend daily with the pounding of mortar
and pestle, staccato knife-rhythms on the chopping block, dogs
barking.
While the street-facades of DJ's
suburban dwellings sported an almost ubiquitous, assembly-line patina
of respectful, middle-class inviolability (or at least a cautionary
discreteness), the lives of our unmet neighbours seeped unedited
through the back because the alleys
didn’t really seem to matter; perhaps the assumption
being that – being so little used – there would be no reason to
suppose any person would be present to register, hear, see or receive
the unfiltered and disposable material of one's daily life.
In months of living there, we witnessed
perhaps less than half a dozen of our fellow human beings
negotiating, walking, much less loitering in the spaces we now began
exploring with greater frequency and in more expansive outings.
There was neither any discernible
collective or singular attempt to bolster the cosmetic or functional
properties of these passages, which so intimately linked all these
homes together. The alleys were empty, nearly derelict, resonating
with a curious air of obsolescence and abandonment. They seemed often
a kind of voided channel that one imagined should operate as a
vital, connective tissue for the neighbourhood (as they once were, in
the not-so-distant past), but now they merely appeared a footnote in
space, the echo of an afterthought, forgotten, in general disuse.
But this apparent human absence was
amply offset by another kind of presence, a rich and barely
contained ecology of plant and animal life. Fruiting trees, creepers,
moss, slime, microfungi and sewage mould; plus rats, squirrels,
endless outpourings of insect life, assorted vermin, and cats. One
could compile an engaging anthropology (or bestiary) on these dense
and overlapping cross-sections of indigent life in the alley, with
all its creatures and flora sifting and interlacing over each other
from cycles of dawn to dusk to twilight.
Glimpses of things emerging or
descending into cracks, fissures and cavities; things eating and
being eaten, or negotiating routes towards eating or being eaten,
issuing from the recesses and darknesses and just as quickly merging
back into the depths and the damp. Bats would drop from unseen roosts
and blitz the evening sky right above our heads; after dark there
might be the now-familiar crunch of a cockroach underfoot on our way
home; one morning we discovered the baked silhouette of a gecko
unwittingly flattened between the hinges of our alley gate.
The alleys drew us in; they were
informal (literally of the gutter), yet emanated a very rare and
intimate quality, allowing us to become (at times voyeuristically)
attuned to the subtler pulses of the neighbourhood. We found them
very beautiful.
Each day it became a form of ritual
observance for one of us to point to the other some otherwise totally
glossable detail; minor shifts and goings-on in the alleys – a pile
of rice rotting on the path, a dayglow hue to a certain section of
sewage that day, or more unexplainable sightings like the ominous
scores of dead goldfish which appeared and reappeared daily for a
month at a particular junction on our walk. We often found ourselves
pondering how these places and their modest 'happenings' related to
the larger physical and mental space around us.
For one thing, despite the richness of
all the observable minutiae to grosser phenomenon to be discovered
within, alleys seem defined partly by a kind of absence…spatially,
they appear to operate not by being anything in particular except
in eking out their existence between 'things'.
Is an alley in any sense an actual thing? Or are they negative
spaces simply distinguished by the opposing, tactile 'facts' of walls
and boundaries?
We began thinking of
trans-space…'transitional spaces'. An alley operates as a
conduit, route or passage, purpose-driven in intent (moving people
and sewage) and yet itself never static or fully concrete (tending to
engage process over form). But trans- also as the sense of occupying
that space in-between, something inter-penetrative and eliding
the socially-structured demands for containment, and thus given to
trans-gressing boundaries. Things happen there that no one
(except perhaps the alley) witnesses.
Because alleys in Damansara Jaya (and
extending all over modern-day KL) are so unused, unseen,
unregistered, they began to seem to us to be irresistibly romantic.
That something could so pervasively coexist within the physical
matrix of shared space and yet (almost invisibly) evade common social
experience seems to give it enormous potential for a kind of
ambulatory expression, even freedom.
There are unknowable possibilities in
spaces, those especially beyond the pale which elude direct,
regulated and authoritative vision. There is potential for these
unbidden, unscripted zones in which a subconscious desire might
ruminate, and where various forms of (even sub-species)
self-determination can flower in the absence of a controlling hand or
surveilling eye.
The fact of the matter is alleys in DJ
are not actually hidden, but that most
people simply do not see them. And in Malaysia, this
lends them an especial air of reprieve.
When we first showed the early
photographic results of our excursions, the unexpected responses
registered from surprise to shock that these images were recorded in
the midst of a suburb of KL. Many of these reactions issued from
life-long residents of the area. Plain, un-lovely, un-poetic
Damansara Jaya...how surprising! Which brings to mind an old idea
about what in effect constitutes a 'worthy' subject, and whether a
so-called artful rendering belies or enhances the subject in
question, and to what end?
It's a recurring trope in all the
post-colonies, where externally-imported narratives and 'normative'
aesthetics are still superimposed and written over the landscape, in
principal affecting the common perception of the worth or value of
the host culture – and to a deeper and more disconcerting degree,
its own imminent and experiential 'realities'.
While there was at the time a generally
tacit praise for something 'beautiful' captured in these images, what
becomes apparent now is the glaring blindspot simultaneously
buttressing the range and apprehension of our surroundings. Is this
where images, art, words, sounds begin to reveal rather than obscure,
as in 'naming' the features of one's landscape? A moment of visual
arrest might point us equally inward as outward towards the object of
our contemplation. I think also that the act of recognition, of
see-ing, renders emergent a certain psychic potentiality in our
perceived but ultimately active relationship to the space
around us.
And in this there is something
approaching a kind of fantasy – not a deranged ‘fantasy’ of
make-believe, or a wish-fulfillment for what doesn’t exist
or would only wistfully be brought upon to exist (without hope of
actualising), but what life in its movement between the
'interstices' can coax into experience – a momentary leeway which
widens the channel for a potential social contract, or evocation of
the social imaginary. It is very much a shift of accent into the here
and now, engaging at the same time with the hidden, internal reality
of things.
Our fascination with the alleys was
that they could support so many simultaneous processes at
once…trans-species, trans-cultural, trans-economic, and also be
so many things at once: olfactory (how does one even begin to
describe an after-rain smell in the east?), multi-sensorial, perhaps
even trans-physical, a scape which shifted continually to
heighten the acuity of ones self-perception. In the alley one becomes
very aware of being a body, and its spatial projection into the
moving dark around it.
The alleys are simultaneously
autonomous and participatory zones, interfacing between public and
private spaces. They are never enclosures, and because of this able
to sinuously traverse the urban fabric without eliciting comment. And
for us, they became the quietly unassuming alimentary canals that
allowed nature to insinuate itself into the concrete heart of the
city.
A whole constellation of animal and
plant life lives, breeds and feeds off the by-products of human
culture in mostly unobserved but daily symbiosis. Tess and I were
simply transitory agents passing through an environment layered with
multiple levels of feedback. Through this we began to understand how
highly nuanced the effects of space and time were in this densely
charged space.
This was how Alleys of Damansara
Jaya came to be, out of our extended wanderings through the
alleys at night, through the alimentary canals.
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Full moon. We were on our way home one
night when we noticed how progressively illuminated the passage
became as we moved deeper into our alley, away from the streetlamps
and houselights. Every surface, every recess was sharply delineated,
and in the way moonlight works upon any exposed face, our specific
world unhinged in an instant from the familiar, and was cast into a
new and magical light.
Something about the quality of nocturne
had always impressed itself upon us since arriving; in this part of
the hemisphere, night seemingly “grows its dark” (this line comes
from a poem of my father's). The quality of night here is impossible
to describe to anyone who hasn’t yet experienced it…impenetrable,
mysterious, and somehow, dense and full of energy.
It was an energy I was familiar with in
my earlier upbringing in Singapore and Malaysia, but which I hadn’t
been in contact with for almost two decades, and now both Tess and I
were living with it, in it, on a nightly basis. We realized later
that the dark informed much of the work we made…of the five works
we produced together or individually while in Malaysia, three could
be properly described as nocturnes.
We grabbed our Nikon and tripod and
shot opposing views of the alley outside our home. Long exposures of
2 to 8 seconds each. As we later brought up the images on our laptop,
a whole new aspect of the spaces we had been experiencing was brought
into awareness.
The first impression was how
differently the camera rendered what we saw with the naked eye…the
experience of trying to frame the shots in situ was difficult because
in the dark, we couldn’t really see what we were doing, but now
there was revealed a richness of detail we couldn’t register in
real time and space. We realized how much the night is ruled by
colour. The effect was almost hallucinogenic in its displacement
(and by now substitute replacement) of the real. So our photographic
memory somehow supplanted or began to merge with our direct
experience of the alleys.
The project grew organically from these
first few photos, until there was suddenly a scope that was
systematic in nature. We would document every alley in Damansara
Jaya, SS 22, through all the moonlit nights that fell during our
tenure there. So there was a temporal, lunar-driven aspect to our
journeys as well, taking almost five months through just before the
beginning of monsoon to the end of the rain season.
The companion piece (the video) to the
photos also grew as an informal experiment, and is a more personal
reflection of our experience there. This has more to do with the
emotional life of a couple unmoored, in transit, and in transition,
in a relatively foreign place.
The fact that this place was once home
to one of the partners simply imposed another complicated layer on a
shared experience, of being somehow in suspension and out
of time in our interactions within this environment, to which
neither partner could fully lay mutual claim.
So the feeling of not quite touching
the ground became a distinct part how we felt about our relationship
to things. In other words, we found ourselves becoming a part of
things without belonging to them.
A couple is something of an emotionally
contained unit, filtering their internal experiences through each
other against the larger canvas of their (often assumed) society. We
didn’t really travel, but instead set up camp in the suburbs, and
over time, after the excitement of initial contact had subsided and
we had finished our work at Gudang, as well as completed a short film
collaboration (with Nazim Esa, lensed in the very same neighbourhood)
a slightly terrifying stillness set in, and our journeys went inward.
Plus we were suddenly broke.
The photos document the exteriority of
the experience…observation, wonder, curiosity, investigation,
exploration. There was some risk in walking into the dark, of not
knowing what we would find, of transgressing space. The alleys are
sometimes so eerily quiet, so intimate, and quite a bit haunted.
The short video piece (much of which
had to be truncated when a hard drive went down,) reverses the lens
and records something closer to the interiority of the experience.
The photos show spaces vacated, de-peopled, yet nevertheless full of
exterior, vegetative, auratic, sensory presence.
The videos became much more about our
subjective experience framed within the 'stage' of our observations,
but in these our relationship to the environment becomes licit,
and loses its supposed critical detachment (while paradoxically
portraying our non-attachment to the physical ground of earth).
There is less to say about this that is
rational than subjective and intuitive. We had the distinct feeling
of floating through things. There were strange, uncanny incidents
which began to manifest themselves in our lives. And then it began to
hit us, in ways we couldn’t at first articulate (perhaps because
the truth was far too simple and self-evident): we were not home.
This was the Dorothy finding herself and Toto out of Kansas (and in
Oz) moment. And this was true in both a figurative and literal sense.
Implicit for me in that realization was
that I had come back seeking a place I had lost (I had spent the ages
12-13 in KL) but the 'centre' (my anchor and attachment to place,
culture and people) had shifted. I could relate to the place;
but I was from and not necessarily of it. I had to
learn to accept those terms as they had been determined by the way my
life had happened.
Tess had left home (in Kelowna, BC,
Canada) as an 'experience' or reality years before, and suddenly felt
a strong yearning to reconnect with the physical, actual connotation
of her place of origin and her people, an experience she had rejected
and rebelled against as not hitherto feeling wholly of her
place and people.
One has to recognize this as a conflict
belonging not only to individuals displaced into other, strange
localities, but those emotionally trapped, psychically constrained or
merely out of sync within their own, respective localities. And we
both had to get very far from where we had come in order to realize
that.
But beyond that, there are further
distinctions in how we worked through this part of the project. One
was re-investigating the notion of the nocturne described above. And
quite frankly, we were originally scared shitless by the dark, as we
initially had to struggle to find our way home blind. But here the
accent shifts from deepest dark to approaching dark.
In the east, night doesn’t just “grow
its dark”, it grows it swiftly; the sky bruising
by such rapid degrees that in a seeming instant all of
night’s creatures will shake off their day sleep and begin to take
wing, amble through the gutters, or reconnoiter outward
from their hiding places. There’s an almost tensile contraction, a quickening vibration of the air. You feel all of this
very keenly in the alleys: the sudden rousing of a collective
animal, vegetal, human, possibly even dis-embodied spirit.
The photos were generally taken between
the hours of eleven pm to one am. In contrast, we would set up our
tripod and borrowed camcorder to shoot the video around dusk, during
the period our friend Nani Kahar described as the Forbidden Hour.
The restless spirits awaken, bats begin to hunt and sweep their
radar, dreams take on new and more volatile meanings. The very
movement of the air shifts as trees drink in our exhumed breath, and
we breathe in theirs.
To sleep during this period is to
invite risk into your unconscious. The transition from light to dark
is a changing of the guard from the order of the day – and the
rational business of going about ones daily preoccupations – to the
order of the night, the unconscious, and the spirit realm.
In hindsight, when Tess and I have
reviewed the footage, we each sense an intense vulnerability in our
collaborative self-portrayal, as well as a sense of risk. But there's
also at least something humourous in portraying our own sense of
dis-location (and humour was always our best method of
self-protection). By now, as life has moved on, and we are returned
to Canada (though no longer as a couple), there is also the unavoidably
added aspect of biography, fringed by the lengthening passage of time
(it is now going on six years since our return). It is probably for
the both of us our most personal piece.
In the consideration of that year,
another theme quickly began to assert itself. We returned home
importing a sense of peril that was borne out in the most difficult
of our individual years so far. In short, things fell apart very
quickly. There was a sense of foreboding about this. In some aspects,
there was a reckoning of our individual histories which had to take
place, and in many ways, this particular piece we had worked on
seemed to become more resonant and indicative of a very real
emotional, psychological and psychic reality and turning point.
There is the real experience and then
there is the symbolic, internal transfiguration of that experience.
And the symbol that resonated most upon reflection of that experience
was of entering the forest. It’s a potent, mythic sort of
metaphor, but it’s the one that somehow rings true. One can go to
various sources, and there are many – the Anderson and Grimm tales,
the legends of the Grail (or Graal), numerous permutations of
indigenous folklore and rites of passage, the introductory stanzas in
The Inferno, or read ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket’ – you can see
the multitude of ways in how this experience of getting lost
manifests itself; it must surely happen to every one of us, but at
some point each person must learn to interpret the events of ones own
life in ones own way.
And what did Tess and I experience, in
the forest, and what does it
mean to reveal this work now? I would say:
We entered without knowing which route
we would take, and at one point lost sense of the way we had come. We
saw and wondered and were confronted with fear and beauty, and what
we saw and wondered at we couldn’t take with us, but that sight
into parts hitherto unseen became part of who and what we are now,
part of our experience, part of our pain as well as our pleasure. And
for us, the alleys of Damansara Jaya were our personal forest, one we
felt compelled to enter, and one we had to leave, and now – as we
pass this on to become part of other people’s experience – the
traces of a vicarious journey left recorded in a modest sequence of
pictures and moving images, hopefully with none of their charm lost,
and all of their power intact.
Kajin Goh,
May 2007 – April 2012
Vancouver
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A selection of images from 'Alleys of Damansara Jaya' (
full project site here )
