We Took Photographs

Simon Ellis, Paul Hughes and Hamish MacPherson. 2018

In May 2018, Simon Ellis, Paul Hughes and I had a residency at S’ALA in Sassari, Italy. It was an open-ended residency and we wrote a response to our time there. It covers things to do with collaboration, power and when things don’t seem to be going right.

1. Nothing special

We didn’t need to leave here with any clear outcome – a performance, an artwork, a firm plan for the future – but we’re suspicious of relying on any vague appeals to unproductivity, of slowing down or lying fallow; of simply letting the richness of this process feed ourselves. We have a responsibility to consider how others might find value in what has gone on here.

It’s not because we think that what happened here is special. But something did happen. Something that shook us. Something not yet nameable. Something that cannot be revoked. Something very messy, perhaps even dangerous. Something between three men working, living, playing, moving; eating at the edges of pride, shame and rejection. We inhaled and then exhaled into long silences, long spaces of listening and seeing. We groped (and perhaps were groped) in the dark. It was a little terrifying. We wanted to leave it, but we wanted to stay in it. It was seductive and repellent. Yet within the stress, the awkwardness, the silences, the fear, the jokes that didn’t quite sit right and the expressed desires biting at cross purposes, we noticed something shifting. What shifted was not some romantic breakthrough or a sense of common purpose. Fuck breakthroughs. Fuck common purpose. It was darker and more fragile than the usual shitty tropes of collaboration.

So we ask ourselves: why would anyone be interested in reading this? We went on a residency together and stepped on each other’s toes – this is hardly unique. But rather than shrugging this off, we think there might be some value in sticking with this writing; some reason to risk its earnestness and narcissism. That we might learn something in an attempt to stick with and articulate these feelings of shame, anger and grief. Something shifted, and the shift was fleeting and fragmented. How can we report on this shift; notice and communicate one’s own trauma as-it-is-happening? And to whom are we communicating: before whose eyes are we trying to understanding ourselves and make ourselves known?