Alleys of Damansara Jaya
Photo and video installation, 2005-2007
Jah Goink & Tessa Wetherill
Shortly after arriving in KL, Tess and I rented a room on Jalan SS 22/29 from Mrs. Tan in the suburbs of Damansara Jaya, in late August, 2005. It was a typically air-tight secure-gated suburban home; by ‘air-tight’ I mean the air hardly moved, the windows more often than not locked shut with all the curtains drawn, so that it wasn’t only stiflingly hot but a yellow, mildewy cast seemed to settle over everything, soaked in an ancient, musky cooking smell which amply testified to the ghosts of meals past.
The other occupants were Mrs. Tan’s brother (sad, troubled Simon, the caretaker and preparer of said meals), his nubile young bride from the mainland (whose sole acknowledgement of our existence would consist of a stabbing upward glance from constant self-regard into her compact mirror as we entered each evening, if only to register us as aliens or ‘other’), and an engineering student from India who sequestered himself in his room with a transistor radio and occasional visitor. Tess and I had a large room opposite plus attached bathroom with a grilled balcony overlooking the front of the street. Rent was 500 RM/month.
We had moved to the neighbourhood ostensibly to be closer to Gudang, Hamir Soib’s studio which was a close 10 minute walk away, where we were working on several pieces to be shown in an ‘Open Studio’ group exhibit in November. So every day we would rouse ourselves from bed (late), head over to the Atrium complex on SS 22/21, linger over kopi or teh tarek and telur kampung, and then head over to Gudang to work as long as we could before the mosquitoes ate us alive. And then we would go makan at SS 22/11 or SS 2 or 19 and either see friends or grab a pirate DVD or simply head home, often staying up till 3 or 5 am or whenever sleep overtook us.
Our general route to and from the house went through the back alley. For me, this was a space vaguely resonant of growing up on Halifax Road (near the Kampung Java Park ) in Singapore, a place I hadn’t set foot into for twenty plus years. For Tess these were places of a more recent, new-found fascination. But compared to my childhood haunts, the alleys were narrower, with 3 foot deep longkangs on either side and stone steps leading to neighbours’ back yards or kitchens beyond padlocked iron gates.
They were also full of life, but not in the usual ‘front-end’ way, the way of facades facing the open street. Every day, scents wafted out from the kitchens at dusk, the drainpipes would gush a foamy liquid into the longkangs as people washed or went about their laundering. The back-facing province of hired help and out-of-view pets, sometimes voices, radio and TV would mix with the pounding of mortar and pestle, knives on the chopping block, dogs barking.
While houses seen from the street often wore a mask of impenetrability, or at least cautionary discreteness, the hidden lives of complete strangers often seeped without filter through back walls because the alleys didn’t seem to matter. That is to say, nobody bothered to pay much attention to these passages which intimately linked so many of their homes together, and they were empty, near derelict, with an air of abandonment. They were a kind of voided space that one imagined should operate as a kind of linking, connective tissue for the neighbourhood, but were instead more simply forgotten and left in general disuse. In months of living there, hardly anyone (we would say less than half a dozen in total) ever negotiated, walked through, much less hung out in the spaces we started exploring with greater frequency and in more expansive outings.
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 (bananas, papayas), creepers, fungus, moss, slime, sewage mould and mildew; plus rats, squirrels, and endless outpourings of insect life, assorted vermin, and cats. One could compile an engaging anthropology (the word feels truer than ‘bestiary’) of the alley by focusing solely on this dense cross section of indigent life, with flora and fauna sifting and interlacing over each other through cycles of dawn to dusk to twilight.
Glimpses of things emerging from or descending into cracks and fissures and cavities; things eating and being eaten or negotiating routes towards eating or being eaten, coming out of the recesses and the dark and then quickly back into the depths and damp. Bats would drop from unseen roosts and blitz the evening sky right above our heads; after dark there’d be the familiar crunch of a cockroach underfoot on our way home, and in the morning we’d find the baked silhouette of a gecko unwittingly flattened between the hinges of our garden gate.
The effect of this was that the alleys began to draw us in; they felt informal, guttural, yet possessed a very rare and intimate quality in allowing us to become somewhat voyeuristically attuned to the subtler pulses of the neighbourhood. We also simply thought they were beautiful.
As our daily habit, the alleys began to exert a stronger influence over how we saw (and saw ourselves within) the place we were living in. It became a form of ritual observance for us to point out to each other the minor shifts and goings-about in the alleys – a pile of rice left rotting on the path, a certain dayglo hue to a section of the sewage that day, or more unexplainable sightings, like dead goldfish for a month at a particular junction on our walk. But we also found ourselves beginning to think about how these places related to the larger physical space around us.
For one thing, despite the richness of all the observable minutae to grosser phenomenon to be discovered within, alleys seem to be defined by a kind of absence…spatially, they are defined by not being something in particular. In a sense, and not just perceptually, they are void spaces, or more accurately, negative spaces supported by the opposing, tactile fact of walls and boundaries.
The best descriptor we could think of was trans-space…trans- as in transitional, because an alley is a conduit, route or passage, purpose-driven in intent (moving people and sewage) and yet in itself defined by a certain lack of concreteness (never still for a moment, so tending to favour process over form). But trans- also in the sense of occupying that space in-between, penetrative, eluding the demands of containment, and thus given to crossing boundaries. And so things happen in there that nobody (except perhaps the alley) sees.
And partly because alleys in Damansara Jaya, and to a certain degree alleys in most of modern-day KL, are so unused, unseen, and unregistered, they seemed to us to be irresistibly romantic. Not in the sense of a projection of an idea or feeling (though as a sensory environment, these spaces are rich to the point of overwhelming), but because something could so pervasively coexist within the physical matrix of shared space and yet remain so invisible within the common social experience seems to give it…enormous potential for a kind of ambulatory expression, even freedom. There are untapped possibilities in spaces beyond the pale which escape direct common attention, perhaps approaching those subconsciously-desired, unbidden, and unscripted zones in which various forms of (even sub-species) self-determination can flower in the absence of a controlling hand or surveilling eye. And the fact of the matter is the alleys are not actually hidden, most people just do not see them. And in Malaysia, this lends them an especial air of reprieve.
We felt this because the initial reactions to showing our early photos registered from surprise to sometimes shock that all this could exist in the midst of a suburb of KL. And these were comments from KL lifers. The other curiosity was that there was a general acceptance or recognition of these pictures as being something beautiful, which is maybe besides or not-besides the fact. This is less a matter of taste or aesthetics than something to be said in the fact of suddenly apprehending beauty in things considered un-beautiful. Something like the ugly-duckling phenomenon, or the narrative of an unloved child. The moment of visual arrest might point us equally inward as outward towards the subject of our contemplation. I think also that the act of recognition, of see-ing, brings to light a certain psychic potentiality in our perceived relationship to the space around us.
And in this there is something approaching a kind of fantasy – not the ‘fantasy’ of what doesn’t exist or would willfully be brought upon to exist, but of what life between the interstices can allow to exist – a momentary leeway, which widens the channel for a potential social contract or social imaginary, a proposition to the mind and perhaps whole metabolic organism to give itself over and allow receipt of the uncharted, to know by intuition something can reside beyond the periphery of vision and learning to listen to what it can tell us. It is very much a shift of accent into the here, the now, and engaging with the hidden, internal reality of things.
On reflection, our fascination with the alleys was that they could support so many simultaneous processes at once…trans-species, trans-cultural, trans-economic, and be so many things at once: olfactory (how does one even begin to describe an after-rain smell?), multi-sensorial, even metaphysical (if one wanted to go there), tending to heighten the acuity of ones self-perception. One becomes very aware of being a body and its spatial projection into the moving dark around it.
The alleys are both autonomous and participatory zones, in the intersection 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 were 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. And Tess and I were simply transitory agents passing through an environment layered with multiple levels of feedback. And we began to notice how the effect of space and time were highly nuanced in this 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.
*
It was a 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. Every object, every shadow was sharply delineated, and in the way moonlight works upon any exposed surface, 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. 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. And 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 we couldn’t properly see what we were doing, but in the photographs before us there was a richness of detail we couldn’t access 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 almost 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, and in transit, and in transition, in a relatively foreign place. The fact that this place was once home to one of the partners simply added another layer to the filtering of a shared experience of being somehow in suspension and out of time and our interactions within an environment to which neither partner could lay mutual claim.
So the feeling of not quite touching the ground, despite our being in the groundwork of nurturing quite a number of social and environmental interactions, became a distinct part how we felt about our relationship to things. A couple is something of an emotionally contained unit, filtering their internal experiences through each other against the larger canvas of their (sometimes assumed) society. In other words, we found ourselves becoming a part of things without belonging to them. 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, and lensed in the very same neighbourhood) a sort of stillness set in, and the journey 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, and of transgressing space. The alleys are sometimes so eerily quiet, so intimate, and a bit haunted.
The short video piece (much of which had to be truncated when a hard drive went down, I mean literally, while I was vacuuming around the kitchen chairs in my Vancouver home) 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 become much more about our subjective experience framed against the scenes 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: that 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.
Because implicit for me in that realization was that I had come back seeking a home I had lost (I had spent the ages 12-13 in KL) but the centre had shifted. I could relate to the place but I was not necessarily of it. I had to learn to accept those terms as they had been determined by the way my life had happened. And Tess had left home (in Kelowna, BC, Canada) as an idea years ago 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 bruises by rapid perceptible degrees and suddenly all the night creatures shake off their day sleep and begin to take wing, or amble through the gutters, or reconnoiter outward from their hiding places. There is 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, vegetative, human and 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 exchange 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, and the unconscious, and the spirit realm.
In hindsight, when Tess and I have reviewed the footage, we each sense an intense vulnerability, almost a nakedness, in our collaborative self-portrayal, as well as a sense of risk. There is also a certain humour 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 back in Canada, there is also the unavoidably added aspect of biography, fringed by the lengthening passage of time (it is now going past a full year since our return). It is probably, for the both of us, our most personal piece.
But 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 that point to a spiritual crossroads in the Inferno, or read ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket’ – to see how this theme manifests itself, but in the end one must interpret the events of ones own life in ones own way.
We entered without knowing which route we would take, and at one point even lost sense of the way we had come, and 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.
Jah Goink,
May 4, 2007
Vancouver
