I was at Fabrica gallery this afternoon. It was a strange afternoon. Outside, it was a lovely sunny day and the streets of Brighton town centre were packed with people with buskers seemingly on every street corner. Everyone out enjoying the sunshine. It felt extremely hard to go into the gallery and spend time with the banner. T was there and two volunteers and I enjoyed chatting to them. We got talking about White Night on 25 October and I found myself suggesting we have a party on that night in the gallery until 2am. It seemed in incredibly bad taste to suggest such a thing in the presence of THE BANNER. But it also seemed necessary to be light of heart and not to pretend to some kind of solemnity that would have been inauthentic. In fact, I think it was a deliberate provocation of mine to suggest partying. In defiance of death and the warmongers.
But, I suppose, since we ARE the warmongers, it amounts to dancing on the graves of the people in the images.
I couldn't be doing with it all today. The work, the people, the atmosphere. The warnings to people as they entered the work. The dumb screens. The books lying potently around the place.
No one is using the response email:
to send in comments. There have been hardly any posts to this blog. Which is not surprising since I am posting semi-tracts to it which are all pretty much my attempts to articulate my thoughts without leaving much room for others to step in.
But that's all fine because it's all an experiment and I can adapt and adjust to the situation and rethink and work from here. What I did do was to photocopy the comments book to bring home so that I can reread it at my leisure and add other voices into this blog. And I took some photos.
But I was glad to get back out into the late afternoon sunshine, out into the crowd. I went into a shop and started looking for a chunky orange scarf to buy. I suddenly got it into my head that I had to have an orange scarf and went from shop to shop quickly before they shut up for the day, like the demented consumer I sometimes am. Couldn't find one. I noticed the comfort of the quest though and the sense of purpose it gave me.
Orange. Brightness. Brightonness. Energy. Everything positive under the sun. Away from all that awfulness. Away. Away.
