Collection Study

Ayan Farah, Stardust, 2011

Renee Gladman’s All These Not-Places for Wandering is written in response to Ayan Farah’s Stardust (2011), a work dyed and bleached by UV light and painted with acrylic paint. Gladman approaches the work and the project of writing about it questioningly. Taking the encounter with the work as one of ‘wandering’ through it, Gladman follows the different lines of thought that Farah's atmospheric work prompts, reflecting on the relationship between thinking, seeing and sensing.

Text by Renee Gladman

All These Not-Places for Wandering

It was in a moment of seeing light fail that I thought to finally look at what I’d built and address the question that had long been asked of me: was what I’d made what I’d seen, which had never been answerable, was boundless and led to my endlessly walking the streets of this city trying find a way to say what building was without isolating it from its environment. Building put a blur into space; it was something cut interrupted by something flowing and something radiant and fast slanting across something hollow. It was darkness placed inside a radiant stretch, the body and the stories of the body in a steel and concrete choreography. But it was also the blurring of space and time, invisible to the core, brightly dark and smudged. You took your buildings out into the dark of asking what was here before them, which movements were obscured, whose journey, whose crossings, what figures haunted time, blurring the syntaxes of completion and question. I made a mark so as to ask; it was the glowing dark. My looking made a screen too bright, and I built something. Space decided what would be inside of it and outside. When we are glowing dark we are in; when we are white we are out. You said that as if putting a bow on it then went to show people. They asked me to name my buildings: which were the oldest, which the highest elevated, which gave a clear view of the night sky, which looked out over an expanse, which privileged water, which made gathering possible, which was an archive, which formed a constellation and shone bright with its neighbors, which were so old they had names, so ancient the materials of their construction no longer existed, which were like paintings, which like poems? The questions blurred the frame; their reach was impossible: they took our sight. We were cast always at night, behind screens that were sometimes trees, sometimes water (it rained a lot when we were building), sometimes the silence of everyone else sleeping. You had to grow your materials in the deepest part of night to build inhabitable structures, and casting was the lining up of viewers and participants, the making family of seeing and blurring what is seen. I had the one house I’d built near the harbor, that rose high in the trees, so many trees that the view turned you back toward yourself, a house for trees, a being for tree time, a crowded sky. I had a cube under wrapping. There were many disfigured figures in my math. I counted dust; I counted mist. There were bodies standing under beams, but the beams weren’t glowing. I counted generations of wandering, people searching for houses, houses wandering. Everything had turned back at the moment of my looking to see what I would say: did I understand why I did what I was doing? Was architecture everything. Was paint? Was resin? Was dirt? Was dust the underlying structure? Was dust the blurring of material? You had to cover what you made to create an entrance; it was something blurring cut into texture; it was a pre-dawn withholding that opened when you stayed. We wanted to not-see together; we wanted to open and not-see and stay, and that was fundamental to building. 'Claim your dust,' everyone was saying to everyone else. I counted thirty-seven buildings on the blurring curve leading from the water into the outskirts of downtown; I counted one hundred and thirty-seven buildings before dust gave way to gravel; I counted buildings climbing out of water, but it was night, and I couldn’t see them as much as I heard their tremendous splashing. I counted the streets that led to water; they sat at parallels to one another, degree nth, long. And led to the last building of our city, which sat alone, enshrouded, translucently glowing, unseeing and unmoving like the other buildings, perched above mud, contorting dust to linen, dirt to skin, textured and blurred in its speaking; it seemed to defy that it had been built by forces outside itself; it was its own community. It contorted in clay. And there were all these minor features that occurred in the middle of my seeing, that I glimpsed in my counting of other things; there were constituents to the building I sensed that were not named, traces of clay and vinegar; there was sugar in the north quadrant, something fleeting marigold; matter placed then washed away. You had to step back and look at the structure; you had to listen to it hum and grind and blur. You had to step back and look up and then you had to push forward and close your eyes; you inhaled at the crossing. You saw something then let it go. You saw something else. It was cut from something glowing and was a blurring of something slow, making its unmaking with windows and doors. Dust at its bottom. Time nailing it to a wall. Time perched above water. My process obliterated my flow, thus accumulating these not-places. We were at the height of architecture when our doors wouldn’t close. I wanted to add something unreadable, for the one unfolding hallway to gleam, for its walls to crenellate its surface, allow for bodies to pass. You wanted a frame that let bodies through and wanted to protect them with covering. It was something radiant pulled through something cut; it was a blurring speed settling into texture. Communities not-being under dust.