Swamp Breathing
in collaboration with John Brooks
BLINDSIDE, Naarm/Melbourne
Exhibition text: Panda Wong
Documentation: Nick Archer, Jess Tan
save all the soft things*
for they deserve to be held
silky king cavalier spaniels
with bulging eyes & skulls too small for their brains
loaves of Subway bread
baked with the same chemicals
as yoga mats & the underneath of carpet
the off brand plushies that i won
in a dark time of my life, a mild crane game addiction
characterised by the rapacious guzzling of coins
save all the soft things
save all the hard things
they deserve to be held
last night i watched a Hoarders episode where a woman,
when asked why she left a Ziploc bag of raw meat on the floor, said
I’ve been under a lot of stress lately
like seeing a rat with an irresistible & inexplicable blow wave
I just want to touch things to know that they’re real
wild how yr touch can make things break down
but… very slowly…
reading abt a film & about how time is the only plot device in it
that keeps life moving. a tin of pineapple expires & so does a great love.
objects mark time better than ppl anyways. patinas, smudges, stains,
cracks, debris. our memories are like champagne magnums at a
buck’s party, fizzing into weak nothings
the quiet sadness of moving an ornament from a place
it’s been for a long time, its lifetime,
its own special patterns in the dust
the crop circles it leaves behind
dust as a sign of neglect but also,
dust as the scientific explanation
for the colours of the sunrises & the sunsets
& how they ignite each bland day
someone once told me that life is just
rearranging yr belongings into many
infinite configurations until u die
i don’t know. too cynical for me… too annoying
don’t forget that the world is a place where we live.
*title is a line from ‘Together and by Ourselves’ by Alex Dimitrov