I’ve packed my things and I’m leaving the studio and Wong Chuk Hang. I’m glad I came just to meet Jimmy, Robert, John and Dan but it’s time to move on. I loved meeting John for coffee in the mornings and being taken around the local art spaces. The theme park was a life experience. I can’t edit footage productively in the studio as it’s just too hot. Imagine being constantly damp all over your body. Then imagine every part of your body sticking to any other part of your body. With your body sticking to anything it comes in contact with. Everything is sweating, the walls, the air. The air is thick, try sucking on a tumble dryer vent hose, it’s probably pretty similar. I’m getting lonely and depressed in the studio.
I’m so fed up of the food already. It’s like having a Chinese takeaway every night. My stomach needs to adjust to it all as I’m just feeling sick from it all. Last nights dinner was awful (apart from the deep fried dough stick thing). I had to leave it. There are no refunds as the food is how it’s supposed to be, it’s just that my pallet isn’t taking it very well. Every time I’ve eaten out I have started to heave. This dish was like some very thick jelly cream soup with pork fat and other bits. This was the safest option as anything else the waitress said sounded like ‘intestines’ or ‘insides’. I looked around at everyone else in shock, they were loving it.
There’s still no contact with E. I think he is angry at the world and at himself.
I ate at the local cafe, it looked like Kung Po pork. Then I got a bus (the right bus!) into town. A schoolgirl helped me to find my hostel. It’s so humid, around the late 60’s in humidity, argh! As soon as I arrived at the hostel, the air conditioning and a few hello’s from travellers calmed my mood instantly. I felt that heavy weight drop. I’m staying in a female dorm but they mainly keep to themselves. The guys in the social space are much more talkative, I’ve been laughing and relaxing since I got here. It’s very international and mostly everyone speaks English. There’s free tea and coffee, a massage chair and a roof garden! I’m pretty sure that I’ve found ‘home’ for a bit, this morning people are dancing to french music. Everyone is so friendly and I am happy here. I went for a walk and the area is buzzing, with great food!
E contacted me. He seems to be very angry towards the world and me. I hope he realises that the pain can end if he stops using. I don’t know what he is doing (apart from using) and I’m trying to distract myself as much as possible. It’s like a deep dark black hole sucking negative energy in. It must be an awful place to be. My mother seems to be happy in it but I can tell she is self medicating for deeper issues. Any time I try and talk to anyone about it while travelling, I try and keep it brief. It’s a bit heavy for most people. There are a few travellers flying back to countries to meet people they fell in love with while travelling, which makes my heart sink. I feel like I’m lugging around some heavy baggage and hopefully my load will lighten at some point. Friends and family from home keep in touch and offer regular support. My friend said I’m sounding like a misery junkie.
I’m finding it hard to process my life before I came here, it feels like something from the film ‘Requiem for a Dream’. I know the key is to be in the present, you know, the Power of Now, and all that. Travelling with longing and heartbreak is tough though. People usually work through it at home and have familiar people and things around them but moving around is a distraction. Being distracted makes it harder to put stuff into perspective and into some sort of logical order. Is there a logical order? I packed up my home, left the city and now I am surrounded by people but in my own head. Most people carry baggage of one sort or another, I have to remember that. The user is usually the star of the show, getting all the attention and help. This trauma from helping has made me take the focus off of myself, trying to help. Now I have to focus on myself but don’t really want to.
I feel betrayed and still want to fix it, even though I can’t. It was and is outside of my control, it’s not my fault and I’m doing my best to move through it. I just can’t comprehend how a drug can make people give up on love, or give up their children. Using addicts need and love the drug more than anything else. That hurts deeply. Heroin doesn’t discriminate. How do people choose that path in the first place? Are their hearts and minds not in the right place and does heroin exacerbate that?
The girl above me was snoring all night and there is hair everywhere in the bathroom. I can’t really complain as being here is a luxury. I have been bitten all over, mosquitos seem to love me and I’m trying to resist the itch constantly. This morning people are talking about their daily plans. The hostel arranges evenings out, tonight it’s a bar crawl, which I don’t want to go to as it’s just a temptation to drink and a waste of money and time.
I’m going to WING platform today to see the space I’m exhibiting in and to meet Leslie.
I met Leslie and her dog. A cash dispenser swallowed Craig’s card so he went to sort that out. I managed to find the gallery which is actually a huge, really swanky rooftop apartment in an industrial building.
Images courtesy of WING platform
After the meeting I wandered around with Craig, we went to the library and out for some lovely dinner, at last!
The library is huge. Im booking a meeting room there for an important Skype interview next week. Fingers crossed for me everyone please. I’m going to book a room tomorrow to test the wifi connection. The large windows look out onto towering skyscrapers. I’m going to feel like a newsreader.
This cheeky local mechanic had a fun hairdo.
Another flash car. Best Friend Forever.
Olympic hosting countries with years cancelled due to wars.
My dad, bless him and all his support, now knows what a USB stick is and how to use FedEx. He raised me on his own, with my mother being, well not very maternal and mentally unwell. We moved to Israel and lived on a Kibbutz when I was a child. He married and divorced out there. We were there during the the 1982 Lebanon War. The bomb shelters came in three different forms. The children were in the deepest shelter, residents in the next and visitors had somewhere else (I can’t remember). I do remember the sirens going off and we’d run from school into the shelters. There were walls of beds, one on top of another, with curtains. The girls dorm here in HK reminds me of those beds. I can’t close my curtains on the bed because of that. I remember hearing bombs and cuddling my knees. I wanted my dad but he was in a different shelter.
I spoke fluent Hebrew but became confused when I moved back to England, so just stuck to English. I have heard tapes of me speaking Hebrew but I don’t understand anything I was saying. Can you imagine hearing your own voice and not understanding what you’ve said? I went to Bat Mitzvah classes in a Synagogue but something blocked it all out, trauma I think. I was the worst at picking it up in my class. People say it will come back if I went back there. I don’t want to go back there and I know that it’s gone.
I’ve been thinking about blogs and what they are meant to be. This really does feel like an outpouring. Is it too personal, raw or direct? I will talk about editing and the relevance of my work shortly. I spoke to Lesley at WING about the exhibition, discussing the video works and the performance. There will be four films, two projections and two screens. The performance will have two female drummers, one drum kit, two dancers and a spoken word element. We talked about exposure and supporting addicts. In my case, I focus on a strong network of women supporting each other (this is referencing the female support networks in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous). I’m thinking about the body as a space that is taken over and controlled. Then the body in a space, activating it.
Someone in the hostel is showing me how to use my Cannon 70D. He has been going to a vintage camera market. I want to go there. All the numbers involved with cameras confuse me but I will experiment more and eventually it’s bound to soak in.
Last night I walked around Causeway Bay on my own (initially to take photos at night) and started singing an old Christian Hymn. I heard the voice echoing outside of myself and had some sort of existential experience. The Chinese neon lights moved in frames, individually stamping their imprint on my brain. I don’t sing hymns. I can’t sing. It doesn’t matter. Am I important? Lately I don’t feel it. I go from laughing with others, to walking alone and feeling a deep sense of angst and then jump to something very practical, like buying apples.
What the hell am I doing? It feels like a lifetime until I go home. Wherever that is going to be. My stuff is just sitting in that storage container in Southend, waiting for me, unactivated. My friends and family are getting on with their lives. Have I been in relationships to fill other people’s needs with no expectation of any kind that mine will be filled in turn?
Most people put the notion of death out of their minds and go about living their lives without thinking about their mortality. When and how does death and existence enter your mind? This angst I’m carrying, is about that awareness dropping in at intervals throughout the waking day, being temporarily terrified of being alone, of death.
With loved ones dying, or using (it’s a kind of living dead thing), for me, confronts the fact that life is finite. I miss them in so many ways. I write this sat in the library in Hong Kong. Everyone is tuning into something.
As John Donne said it centuries ago:
“No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
