In The Dark

 

Contact printing the event.

4 x 4 metres of photographic paper.

36 exposures over 60 minutes.

Participants were invited to enter a darkroom space.

But In the Dark, wasn’t in the dark. It was dim. Saturated in red light.

A conversation began against the sounds of a ladder being dragged across the space as rolls of photographic paper covered the wall.

A flash light went off, counting 36 exposures that imprinted the conversation and its participants in subtle layers of black and white.

The unspeakable, the inexpressible, and beyond and before words, invited a desired conversation about practice. Silently, struggling with words, with language, in the dark, gestures of speech and performative interactions on paper, filled the space.

The contact print of the conversation was developed and returned to the space to be placed in a pool of pigment brought from a UK site. The print, now covered in pigment, partially erasing the activity of In the Dark, became something else, a site in Landscape Encounters and Transformations, a session that took place on the second day of the event.