A Slingshot and an Eye
A letter to you.
by Fer Boyd
Live arts is all about the exchange of energy between performers and audiences. But if you put a performance in a box and send it by post, how do you hear back from the spectator? If a performance is activated at someone’s home, without the artist present, is there an echo that somehow, magically, still arrives back to the author?
Fionde, a performance by Chiara Bersani with Ilaria Lemmo, was commissioned by Samara Editions — performances by post, in March 2021.
We have sent it to Fer Boyd and asked to write a response to the work.
This is the letter that Fer sent back to Chiara.
I am a receiver, completely unknown to you. This is often how it is when you put a text into the world, but rarely is it the case with a performance. Even if I am screaming on the street with desire I can see the other faces around me through the bloodshot.
That said, it is rare to enter the internal landscape of a reaction. In seated audiences, faces are placed in artificial night and what meets the performer is a sea of glass eyes. You can’t hear inside their heads unless someone breaks the social contract and yells out, or moves for emphasis. You have to trust that inside each skull is a desert, readying for mirage, gushing water, trickles of sand. Because of this, I want to tell you what happened when I opened the box. This is my impulse.
You write: to us the performative act is this: an attempt to stay in the present without knowing if we will be welcomed or overwhelmed. To be overwhelmed is not necessarily not a welcome. If we are a network of people intent on tonguing the world and stretching time, then every sensation should be listened to and used as guidelines for our lifelines. You ask me what names we should give to things now. To this constellation of stretching bodies I offer: low light networks.
Like someone walking along listening to a song, the screen of their face flickering with internal fantasies, you don’t know that I’m about to open the box on Saturday 17 July at 12:54. There is no timestamp: my phone is switched off and I’ve evaded the postal date by waiting weeks since the box arrived.
I like this power that we are each charged with — the power of never really knowing what people are up to, and I hope with everyone this always means that they are plotting forms of world-building and revolution. I know this might not actually be true, but the potential of it is true. We are each just furtively whirring in our designated corners of the world and could be doing anything behind closed doors.
It is only in the aftermath that I realise that you made me a performer, and that I was performing to no-one. I was performing to objects, and to the other dimensions that we can’t see. I was performing to luck, chance and physics.
There’s a point in my performance to no-one that I desperately miss seeing a performer that I can transpose myself into. There’s a point in my performance where I start to feel sick; the balloon suddenly begins to feel like a screen, not the sky that you told me it was; it is smooth and I have to look inside it into artificial flickering lights. Afterwards I have to touch the bodies of my dog and my lover in relief and I know that wasn’t your intention.
Instead of a screen I try and think of each balloon like an organ: a heart that I can see inside. I will gift the balloon to you, the reader, in an ice box made for organ transplantation. With it, it will carry my desires and my preferences, and where I am. It will transplant into you the desert inside my skull.
It probably isn’t a coincidence that I chose to open the box when the landscape of my house is bleeding. When the environment around me is that of the altered consciousness of two people that bleed simultaneously (the dog comes through, then a fly). You speak about a politics of extreme attention and presence, you don’t use those words exactly but I do. These altered states of presence could be used to build a different world: people who bleed, those taking hormones, people who go through menopause, those going on and off antidepressants etc. All of these states run adjacent to adolescent states of becoming; often these states aren’t respected, teens are called naïve, when really they often have extremely clear eyes.
No body is a constant landscape but all around I see people trying to make themselves appear invincible, performing invincibility, pretending they are ecosystems without nature and chance and death. People who plan for cryogenic freezing, say illness is for wimps, businessmen who take ayahuasca, the adventure capitalists and their lack of heartbeat.
I feel in my chest the competing desire of a child to own the balloon and to release it. If I were to give it to a child, I’d write on the balloon: para tí, cielo. Cielo means heaven, or sky, and is also commonly used as a term of endearment, like darling. I think of the kids on the street when they were first allowed to run again, they wiggled their bodies while walking, trying to feel it all.
What are the new stars that will guide us? This is what you ask me. I try to answer: The coordinates of our lovers? The stretch of time as sand? I hope like sand more time trickles into everyone’s lives. I long for capitalism to sink under, not us. I long for the moment the firmament gives over to stretch.
I make a hole in the sand of all the deserts you’ve offered me and lie down in it cool like a dog.
My favourite public art is the sand art made on the edge of the beach that meets the promenade. The makers often put flames (yellow) inside or create a place for water (blue) to come out. These structures draw WONDER from all that walk by. Where does one learn how to make these intricate and massive sand architectures? And why do I want to tell you that they are made by men who are immigrants, why is that important to the story? Because I can’t wonder at the owned architecture, heavy with cash and imposed permanence, but I can at the gift to the eyes of the sand architectures, created by bodies that have known movement, that will turn back into swash at the next tide.
You tell me that where you are, air is the only thing that can move. I want to tell you that months ago I wrote that weather is the only thing with the power to move. The weather of my body and the weather of the sky. I watched the (blue) rain coming towards me, the thresh of it moving from one side of the city to the other. I watched the (yellow) dust come up from the Sahara and coat the limbs and the plants confined to the balcony.
Sound too had the power of movement, although its many valences were stripped. If I could I would send you the sounds I can hear right now on the airwaves. I would enter the air of my location, and all that it carries, into your ears — flinging your internal space to my external landscape. Through my window I can hear the performers of my neighbourhood: the woman who screams hungry for love (does she go out every day to perform just to keep us alert? She never winks at me, but oh god I wish she would…), the woman with her wheelie speaker singing ‘It’s now or never’ (the track is set to loop, re-minding us of the message, and our eyes travel to her like thrown roses), the man selling plants and flowers to become gifts, the dog with its voice-box stuck on repeat, the sound of thousands of booze bottles being dropped from a height.
Right now I want to throw the box you’ve sent me from my window, to see what they will make of it.
the eye is placed in a slingshot and thrown to the five colours of the firmaments
I open the box and I follow the Manual and I lay out the tools. This makes me feel like a god. The street is happening below me, and I want to shout down, to be honest with them, to tell them that I am a god and I am about to change something — that I am about to enter the split second of a decision that marks us all. I want to tell my lover in the next room too, but I don’t. Instead I keep the power you’ve given me inside my own eyes.
Your eye can bring into focus even the things that are the most distant, you write. I think about all the seemingly expansive, but ultimately finite, resources on the planet. Water trapped in plastic bottles where it can never re-enter cloud or sea, food trapped in glass jars where its moulds and membranes can never re-enter the lifecycle to contribute to decay and rebirth. I zoom to these miniature landscapes.
Mirages happen when light passes through two layers of air with different temperatures. A night mirage would have to bend the light of the moon, which is in turn a reflection of the light of the sun. A process of re-gifting. At the window the breath in my lungs meets the air that has already been exhaled by a thousand souls, bending my desire upwards. It touches on the firmament; a dark blue tarp filled with rain. I turn to you and tell you: Hand me the knife.
In your letter you don’t mention the colours of the firmaments — the balloons you enclosed as proxy skies. I guess that they are factory fresh, rather than colours you’ve chosen specifically or created. I place my eye wet in the slingshot. I roll it around the leather like a new socket. I fling it and it arcs across the distances, pupil dilating disappearing the cornea into a black hole. My life flashes before my eye remembering the anecdotal and tangential, the things that you notice in shafts of light and mirages, the dust motes of life that build a spirit, the memories colours offer. What I would freshly name for you: the tangential terrain.
My eye lands and sinks deep inside the colour of each firmament.
RED: I saw a brown owl in a bright red flame tree —
During the first session of writing this text, I go back and forth to the kitchen to make breakfast for my lover. Shifting too fast between these states, I burn my hand badly on the pan. For the rest of the session I am writing on paper with my left hand in a glass bowl of ice.
When the red balloon bursts I expect its skin will split and fray like a blister. The cry of a thing returned to skin where once it was full with fluid. You write about the fog: the absence of everything so dense you could wet your hair. You must go microscopic and you will find it teeming with life — like the occasional spatial twitch of a tadpole cloud.
I open the red balloon and let the breath of it out onto my face. I spin with the new of this sensation. Often I think about the limits of the body — that my hip bones will never touch, that my eyes will never look into one another — but now I’ve had the experience of breathing my own cloud of breath onto my own face, through the mouth of the red firmament.
GREEN: I saw fist-sized green seedpods from below like rising balloons backlit by the moon and I fingered the spikes on the trunk —
All I had while held stationary in my room was the firmament. I’d stare at it like never before, the ceiling, the cielo lying low over me like a lover. My only landscape was above me — the sky, the moon and sun. Each pigeon and parrot was an individual, they were not one of many. Venus, Mars, swallows, sparrows — all were micro in my world.
My most microscopic attention was given to a pot on the balcony in which grass grew without intervention. The pot filled itself with plain, everyday grass. I could tell you about each blade. The pot invited my only guests, small brown sparrows, who I watched attentively, savouring the entire visit, trying to catch their eyes.
When I could go outside again I went to the old Greek theatre. The backdrop of it, where the sea might once have been in other, ancient places, is a wall of rock, then green shrub, then high tall trees. Seeing this green expanse with my microscopic vision was indescribable, almost. Every waving thumping arm of conifer, every raindrop, every ripple. My ears were pricked up, and so were my eyes. I could zoom in to the fronds of each tree as if it were a single blade of grass. I was seeing green right down to its pores.
BLUE: I saw a gnarled jellyfish that looked like stone communicate with a blue man o’war via a language of light, illuminating the stretches of sand at the bottom of the sea —
I blow onto the stars, hear them scuttle. In front of the mirror I focus on the dark side of the blue orb. I notice my height as I raise it to the ceiling. The belly of the moon out the window poking through a hole in the night sky. The stars drop out the paper bag like jewels out a velvet purse.
After reading you, I feel resolve, that so many others live like me, in this global enlace. I tongue the word globular. A red (a network in Spanish), red with love, rede with love (a network in Portuguese, that I hear pronounced like ‘ready’ in English, even though it doesn’t sound anything like that from out the mouth). I feel connected to the strangers that I share an eye with. And that gives me hope. I crunch the blue gel of the icepack to make it beat like a heart.
PURPLE: I saw a little purple god sitting on the branch of a dying tree —
It was the week of Christmas and New Year and we put up forty metres of gifted fairy-lights. We hang them — red, green, blue, purple, yellow — throughout the entire flat, down the length of the corridor and we set them to pulse.
At first it seemed extremely festive. We were away from those we love and are to have our first festive period alone, so that we can choose not to celebrate it. But the lights, the artificial colours, they tripped us like switches. We became totally different people. We roamed the street inside a time without an end cackling in different voices and colloquial accents adjacent to our own, drinking in the stares, fake coloured lights shining out from inside the black of our pupils.
For an artificial thing to have transcendent energy is rare. A human-made object that unsettles everything feels like the pullback of a wave when it hits the shore and the shingle crackles its skulls.
YELLOW: I saw a pool of fire. A hearth for kneeling against the black waving air. I picked grit out of my knees from years ago, my brain a black dehydrated walnut, a mirror of complexity, vultures chewed off the flesh. The flat plain of brain where it cracks in two halves, a turgid split like a moon of yellow melon in the mouth —
During the first quarantine I wrote in Spanglish: I need green wind (viento verde) and a fountain of sun (sol fuente).
I inflate the yellow balloon facing the open window. I place the O of my mouth over the turgid O of its opening. I wonder if anyone in the factory kissed or licked the balloon, to implant something of themselves. I would do this; it feels good to know that your DNA lives in the micro-world of another’s stomach, growing in its yellow acids, crystals and moulds a scene of their HUNGER.
It inflates to match the yellow plastic O of the redundant HOSTEL sign opposite. I let it go and it blows my breath into the room spiralling onto the green balloon on the floor generating a green flash — the final wink before it sinks.
Fer Boyd is a writer and artist. Other texts include HELLBOX, a molten memoriam handling night grief and the psychedelia of non-accidental near-death in C_anal magazine (2019); Skinned/Detouched, a horror story in zero gravity and an erotic fiction about PVC (Eastside Projects & Motto Books, 2018); and FIRST BIRTH, a collaborative audio work excavating pleated skin for Liverpool Biennial 2021.
