It culminated in an hour with Kelsey Lu and I. When t araxos opened, she performed for twelve hours in all weather, which was intense. Over two years ago, I had already invited Tosh Basco to inaugurate the piece, almost like a La Jetée science-fiction figure that would just appear in the park. I think of the work very much as a portal to the self, through meditation, time, and slowness. There’s a sort of mythology around t araxos, which was developed over the course of the years that I've been working on it, and there will be a book about it eventually. You can use them in all kinds of way: to seduce someone, to heal someone, but also to start or end a war. SAM: It definitely did, although not so much in the sense that writing was a suspicious thing to me. Did that come into play when thinking about the project? Which is interesting, as it is right next to the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. This public sculpture was also the space for a performance, tarax’up, which was conceived as a time to slow down and embrace silence. Basically, I'm granny.ĪD: This reminds me of t araxos (2021–22), an installation which is currently on view outside the Serpentine Galleries. And writing, whether in code, on social media, in your news – fake and otherwise – is all part of that, which feels very slippery to me. I am feeling very averse to the ways in which there is this mass encouragement to simply move online and out of your physical surroundings. Maybe because of Covid and of being stuck in a room for a long time, I've become suspicious of only using language and not the body, or embodiment, in a way that I hadn't been before. Everything starts with a seed and in writing, it's a letter. I have this cosmic feeling between writing, mapping stars, visuals, pattern recognition, repetitions. Like types of ‘beats’ in a life that had been pulled out to illustrate a more general story, that hopefully people would relate to. But also, when I was writing The Girl Who Fell To Earth, I had this urge to categorise my chapter headings with star constellations.
It really struck me when I learned about it, because at the beginning of the verses of the Qur’an, there are these individual letters that are just there and which are the subject of much debate. Have you ever heard about the medieval Arabic doctrine known as the Science of letters ( al-ilm al-huruf) by the mystic, scholar and poet Ibn’Arabi? It's a sort of esoteric, cult book, about how letters of the alphabet have powers or meanings which are related to the stars. Sophia Al-Maria: I was just thinking about this recently. How does writing inform your visual work, and how do visuals influence your writing? A Memoir, 2012), and have edited Fresh Hell (2015), the 8th issue of the art writing journal The Happy Hypocrite.
You have also published your memoirs ( The Girl Who Fell to Earth. You have a background in comparative literature, you screen write for television, and have yourself been a writer in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery. Anahita Delcorde: As a writer in residence at Afterall, I first wanted to ask you about the role that writing plays in your visual practice.
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