Dream: I am in the Interzone

dream: I am in Interzone

Daniel Lomholt-Welch & Lewis Murray

Tangier Zones, Semester 1

epigraph

“Let the setting be Tangier. But of course not the city of Tangier that you know. This is another that merely resembles it. A Tangier parallel to the one you consider real. But, mind you, being parallel doesn’t mean it is fictitious.

Let us agree from the outset that the binary of reality and fiction depends entirely on where you’re looking from.”

Said Hjiouij, Kafka in Tangier

Mohammed

abstract

Approaching Tangier through an exploration of William Burroughs’ hallucinatory texts and Brion Gysin’s method of cut-ups, the city manifests itself as a parallel, as an other. This teeming sea of relations between, across, and through the city become permutations of Tangier’s material reality; a pin-cushion of imperial flags, camouflaged and flecked with the wear of its fluctuating history. The undertones of colonialism reverberate in its streets, in its language, in its law.

Host and guest switch roles with increasing acceleration, the parasitic visitor corrupting the former only then to be corrupted themselves. Their architectures operate in the intersections, folds, convolutions. Within this process there is no gauge as to whether these devices are relational or real; who is the hostthe operator or the monad?

Within Tangier’s former Custom House, notions of tradition, possession and law are stained by the sudden presence of a parallel: the Court of Land Exchange. The historic seeping of parasite into host generates a novel architecture by way of palimpsest. It draws in, extracts, and imitates its architectural setting.

Devices are cast forth from the Court to the city, a manipulated legal framework providing a mandate to reclaim territory in a move against the zeitgeist. This series of chance operations becomes a form of cutups that projects back onto itself simultaneously.

Hidden in plain sight, the parasites exploit Tangier’s incongruities to mask themselves as convenient civic infrastructures. A parasitic gantry device takes root in the projection room of Cinema Rif in an apparent move to project films onto a stage across the Gran Socco – while using this as a ploy to consume the interior of the cinema to be reused as material for new parasites.

Bolstered by their endemic presence across the city, the parasites begin to embed themselves in aural, visual and textual forms of representation. The liminal threshold of entity and relation buckles. Using representation as a conduit to creation, the parasites embed themselves in the urban fabric of their conception – Chambers Street. The fleeting encounters across it instigate further proliferation, taking root both in the studio and in public space.

note on the exhibition

due to the nature of the work produced, it has been presented in multiple sites across the ESALA campus.

the main body of work is exhibited in the Tangier Zones studio on the third floor of 7/8 Chambers Street, while the remainder is being displayed in the Gap Gallery at Minto House.

this portfolio documents the entire body of work which is being submitted.

Idream: I am in Interzone

the dry hum walks with me. an incumbent sky not theirs but not ours mediates the crossing beneath. infinite permutations unfold from the cloaked tower. one to another and itself. hands of larceny shake without grace the further distortion of land. cut copied pasted. the singular fades beneath.

and the walls come tumbling down

in the market of psychic exchange on balance and weight. conversations disengage the break of entity and relation from one. cut drawn shown to the world. exposed in the dawn espoused a release the grip slackens the land unfurls. not yours not mine. twelve to resolve history and present again.

displaced fuzz

a sea seethes beneath the eye. awash with the vice detritus deemed on balance. tradition spurned for opposites spurned again. broken from the mooring the wave crashes over the wall hauling steel wood glass and all matter on the shore. looming the shuttle flies to stitch up the tattered remains.

device of portmanteau

vibrating soundless hum in the Socco

ringing the boundary enclosed shell torn open. silent carcass of institution and language muffles the trenchant corruption within. lies still streaming forth flows over the stones into the gutter and. do you see what you recognise does it make you believe. devices for the under standing cloaked by all.

parenthetical parasites

hieroglyphs sited in a temporal threshold. marks move across the surface shift and dilate. drawn law and written representation fluctuate tomorrow today yesterday. left to right it stems the novel framework for possession and claim. form breaking from its mold to propagate an other yet.

the limit is not yet

a cross the border of architectural production.

return that which was taken anew into the self only to be more visceral. the liminal threshold of entity and relation buckles.

return to project it reels round to face upon face.

not the city that you know but one that merely imitates it.

obituary

the grasp slackens and the breath is drawn. pillars of what once was is and will be shatter with the breaking of the unremitting tide. from the clutches of larcenism tumbles the words: liquid seeps into the surface. the stain seeps beyond.

keep the change

conversations spill out across the table from one to other. repeating nodding distorting. seize the scrap and the discarded. repeat what others do say be. beg and borrow from each across the field, time and self.

posthumous biographical material

the host turns parasite on stroke of twelve. scratches marks imperceptible to one. crossing of time untold murmurs re-present in a momentary gathering coagulate. lead down the line turn again on the point to another distant crossing. the shuttle flies again. the foot on the treadle of the loom gliding the strange shapes beyond form.

Tangier