Now and here and there together

About

The present is continual and everywhere and there to be shared with others. At Cable Depot I’ll be with companions. What can we make and do together to know what is going on - right there between us, and all the way over here? I am making a four sided carpet on a spinning loom. Its pivoting point is a dog lead clip that is attached to my climbing harness. Leaning back against the harness holds the warps in tension. As they diverge, the carpet’s cotton face will get woolier and wilder. It’s likely to become a terrain formed of peaks and troughs. My studio is next to my balcony, overlooking the corner between Darb El Asal and Towashi Street in Faggala. It’s a very old neighbourhood in Islamic Cairo where generations of families grow and age together. A short walk down busy narrow streets can lead me to the workshops of woodturners, welders, carpet makers, glass blowers and leather merchants. The near continual sound of human voices is mixed with those of animals - of street cats, chickens, sheep, donkeys and the sparrows that live in the acacia tree opposite my flat. I feel the tree and I have formed a relationship. I do not fit but I feel at home. Soon I will bring the loom to Cable Depot and keep on weaving. Audiovisual technologist Neil Cheshire devised a sound-streaming system with a Raspberry Pi computer at each end that we have been Facetimeing towards readiness. Soon sounds made within hearing of my balcony will get to Cable Depot almost immediately. Once we are there together we will explore the acoustic character of its windowless room with an inner artspace skin. Searching for the tones which resound best within it will be a good time to make use of our conversations about improvisation - as a musical form and a creative principle. We’ll test out tin can telephones and send sounds shivering across the surface of water held in bowls. Light from the sky outside will come in through a hole in the wall and be tipped onto the floor by a mirror, where it can become a form. Simple demonstrations of the real present. Imagined light can’t hit the floor. Only a loud-enough sound can vibrate a wire. But what about images? They are a way to give visual evidence of here. It is difficult to decide what to show, bring or say. This project has made me face that unease. It also led me back to what my old child-self already knew - that making, doing and seeing are challenge and joy enough for me. Choreographer Olive Hardy and I will spend a few days together, often moving without planning or pausing. It is so exciting to try a different method of thinking. When you are following the momentum of one sensation after another the mind is too well occupied to generate many words or ideas of past or future. Olive introduced me to Qi Gong when we met at the Sadler’s Wells studio last November. On my return to Cairo I began Qi Gong and Taiji training at Meshkah, a Martial Arts Hall here. Mercedes Melchor is one of my instructors. In May she will have a conversation with Olive and I which will be broadcast online. At the end of the month there will be an evening where the activities and forms are gathered together with people who have come to see them. Writers Agnieszka Szczotka, Derek Horton, Farida Youssef and Niamh Rhiordan will each contribute a short text about what they found in the work and through our months of conversation. I invite visitors to draw their own connections. I have come to think that the point of the project is simply to do each thing.