Several members of the Floating Projects Collective (FPC) will be in dialog with California-based Artist-writer Zach McLane. To Zach’s pieces in his One Hundred Waitings project, FPC folks will respond with photography, graphics, or sight-and-sound. This is an introduction to the general sentiments of this exchange. What is waiting? What is writing?
\n**feature image: site left by the demolition of an Indian store in Las Palmas, photo by Linda Lai
\nStarted in September 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, One Hundred Waitings is a writing project by Zach McLane, which is “an ongoing collection of poems, entries and essays, written in waiting — as a temporary situation, as a place one returns to, as a way of being in the world.” [visit the project…]
\n\n
What does waiting amount to? Here’s the author’s citation…
\nI was always drawn to waiting, which sometimes I get the feeling is the only thing I’ve ever really done. — Sergio Chejfec
\nKnowing how to see, before sight, knowing how to hear, before comprehension, to keep the space of waiting open.— Hélène Cixous
\nWait with me. Wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes. — Claudia Rankine
\n\n
Sandra Cisneros (1954- ) on writing and collecting buttons … 蒐集「按鈕」，寫自己和別人瞬間的存在
\nSandra Cisneros
\n“I think all writing and all art is a spiritual act. I always talk about writing from a perspective of being spiritual. I don’t mean it in connection with any religion, but I mean spiritual in the sense of being really present and alive in the moment.” — on writing’s spirituality
\n寫作的精神性
\n「我覺得所有寫作和藝術都是有靈性的行為。我常常從靈性的面向去講及寫作；我沒有意思把靈性跟任何宗教扯上關係，反而是指實在的存活於此瞬間的那種靈性。」
\n“You write poetry when you can’t see, when you want to write about a molecule of time. You write a story when you have something on your mind that you want people to listen to. I grew up with a lot of people talking at the same time, and we never listened. So when you could say something that people would listen to, that was a story to me.” — difference between poetry and fiction
\n詩與小說有甚麼分別呢？
\n「你寫詩，在看不見的時候，當你試圖去寫時間的份子的時候。你寫故事，那是你的腦海裡有些甚麼而你很想別人聽見。我長大的環境，常有很多人在同時說著話，而我們甚麼也沒有聽進去。所以，當你能說點甚麼而人們會聽，那對我來說就是故事。」
\n“One thing I do is save what I call ‘buttons.’ By buttons, I mean little scenes, little dialogues, things that I’ve written notes on, things that I remember, or things that I heard on the street. I have a little file of buttons, and I try to write a button a day.” — on creating scenes
\n創作場景
\n「有一件我常常做的就是保存那些我稱為『按鈕』的。我說的『按鈕』是指那些小場景、小對話，那些我曾經記下來的小筆記，有些是我記得起的，又或那些我曾在街道上聽見的。我有一個小檔案把這些『按鈕』存著，然後我試著每天那一個『按鈕』出來寫寫看。」
\n“Writing is so solitary, and it takes us to deep emotional places. It should. If it’s not taking you to such places, you’re not working hard enough. Fellow writers can sustain you for the long process of creation, for the long haul.” — on a writing community
\n書寫的群體
\n「寫作是孤單的，而且帶引我們去那些情感的深處。是必須如此罷。若不，那就是你用功不足。有了寫作的夥伴，就可以彼此攙扶，持續創作的過程，走長途的路。」
\n摘自：
\nSource: Vanessa Willoughby, “`All writing and all art is a spiritual act.’ Read Sandra Cisneros’s best writing advice.” | December 20, 2021, 11:50am | Literary Hub
\nhttps://lithub.com/all-writing-and-all-art-is-a-spiritual-act-read-sandra-cisneross-best-writing-advice/
\nZach McLANE (from Manifestos II)
\nMANIFESTO: Speaking Many Languages, In Many Bodies, An Excuse to Speak With Someone
\n• Videos begin with imagining. They begin with not seeing. Videos begin with a kind of touching without seeing, touching that is its own kind of seeing, and they lead to seeing that is a kind of touch.
\n• Video making is sculpting with materials that move and change, that dissolve in your hands if you get too close. It must begin as imagining because video exists in that space of dreams.
\n• Video making is about speaking; it is about learning to speak. Videos are that process of coming to articulate. Arranging images together, we find that they say things we ourselves are unable to say—but that’s a video that I made, who else would be speaking?
\n• Video making is about trying. Even when you don’t feel like you are getting it right, when you look back you will see that trying to speak is also speaking.
\n• Many times, it is difficult to say the truth, especially to yourself. Video making is about finding the language to say those things you haven’t been able to say, don’t know how to say, and are afraid to say.
\n• Images themselves are bodies. When we treat an image as a body, we approach it with a certain tenderness and respect.
\n• Images speak many languages that we do not always know how to understand. In images, illegibility is its own kind of meaning.
\n• Recording is collecting. It is an act of hope. To record is to believe in the possibility of meaning. It is precisely those things you could not have known about the image when you recorded it that will end up being the most meaningful.
\n• With video there is no source or “true image.” Something will always get in the way. Videos are degraded, played on reflective screens, or projected onto uneven surfaces. These conditions tell us the history of the images we look at and remind us that the context in which we view an image is important.
\n• At its best, sharing videos is an excuse to speak with someone else honestly
(May 2019, Revised May 2020)
\n+ + +
\nI am drawn to making videos and I am also drawn to writing. Perhaps the two are not so different. My video practice is influenced by reading and writing—the way that language wraps itself in its twisting and turning forms, the ways in which words, like images, might become bodies themselves. Video making and writing are for me both processes of articulation. “There is no appointment with writing other than the one we go to wondering what we are doing here and where we are going,” says Hélène Cixous. [1] And our appointment with video? It, too, exists surrounded by a kind of uncertainty. I record videos and don’t know what they will mean—if anything at all—when I sit down to look at them again. Perhaps this is the appointment we have with video: to look again, despite our own not knowing.
\nBut before looking and looking again, videos begin with not seeing. My own videos begin with imagining. They begin at a place that is both too far and too close. Making a video is a process of bringing my memories and dreams into focus, even if what is brought into focus is not always so clear. In this way, video making is a kind of sculpture—it is sculpting with time that is both far away and eternally present. There are many ways I might describe this process. Video making is searching, digging, waiting, hoping, ripping, tearing, writing, sharing. Video making is imagining; it is working with a medium that is both present and absent.
\nIn this space between absence and presence, video exists as a movement. Videos are a gesture in time which is also a gesture of time. In repetition, these gestures become rhythms. Video making is composing these gestures as though they are songs. Just as sound might be distorted and filtered, I compress and expand my images until they break open, spilling out broken pixels and revealing hidden forms. I am drawn to this failure to represent. The moment when a video tries to speak, but is unable to, tries to move away from itself, but returns to speak its only truth: “I am a video.” This kind of reflection is what interests me, that movement outward that concludes with a movement back—returning to the self. I speak of the world only to end up outlining the contours of myself.
\nCreating Tearing (2019), I imagined a video that began at a loss. I imagined a video that was already destroyed, that had already forgotten, whose fragments had been fragmented. A video that was broken but remained fragile. “What is indestructible is fragility itself,” write philosophers Jean Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “…the fragility that dwells in speaking or in writing, in opening your mouth, in tracing a word.” [2] I imagined this video that remained fragile, flickering in and out of visibility, that refused to take shape, that existed on the verge of becoming a body, a face, a reflection of light on water. I imagined a video that was so small it had already disappeared, a video that was already a shadow of itself. I found a video of the reflection of light on water I recorded two years prior and uploaded it and downloaded it until its colors began to blur and its forms started to wobble. I collaged multiple instances of it together and edited them until otherwise invisible patterns appeared with clarity. Through this process, I arrived at what I had touched but never seen. In creating a video, I encountered myself again.
\nI Stood Before the Sea (2019) was created after a trip up the coast of Northern California. Moved by the vastness of the ocean, I recorded a video out of the window of a moving car. In the unedited video, the image of the ocean is legible, but its presence is entirely absent. Through editing, I encountered the sea again. The presence of the sea appears in the few seconds of footage that I distorted, recolored and looped. Video making is this process of documenting in order to find again. Through images, I reunite with the world.
\nWe organize around a screen. We get into groups and discuss the ways that images make us feel. Together, we try to find a way to talk about images and the videos we make. In talking about images, we find the language to speak to ourselves. Perhaps the use of video making is to be an excuse. Let’s use video as an excuse to speak to each other, and images as a way of returning. I once imagined an image that might be more like a mirror than like a window, an image that returns you back to yourself, that pushes you back as much as you push into it. After watching such an image, I imagine we might all turn to each other, joining the conversation that the video breathes into the world. If making videos is about finding a means of speaking, sharing them is about finding a way to listen.
\n(May 2019, Revised May 2020)
\nNotes
\n[1] Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 100.
\n[2] Jean Luc Nancy and Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Noli Me Frangere,” in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford University Press, 1993), 268.
\n
