ALWAYS COME HOME WITH SOMETHING
2023

Text written for and included in 't u r n i n g s' publication:

't u r n i n g s' seeks to set up interstitial, intimate encounters, with questions and answers stemming from a close listening to others’ experiences of ‘residency.’ Co-authors span artists and curators Lily Lavorato, Eliza Coulson, Ruth Dorber, Cicely Farrer, Dr Sarah Forrest, Alexia Holt and project convener Lucy Rose Cunningham. Contributions speak to the role of hosting; connectivity; precarity in the arts and living situations today; access; and the act of situating oneself in a space and time beyond familiar environs.

*always come home with something

In the blinding height of summer, under the dappled shade of the three story fig tree, she sits, cutting freshly picked memories in half. She cradles them in the palm of her hands, knife slicing towards her and pieces splaying open onto a rusted clothes wrack. Balanced in line on the shredding spears of metal, air picks up their liquid weight and carries it down the hills to the misted sea beyond.

They stay here for days, a collective welcome for visitors walking through the metal gate to the garden. They shrivel to half their size, with curled edges puckering like squid tentacles on a hot grill. She’s boiled an old jar, adorned with a gummy collage of labels that trace its previous contents: quince jelly and before that, pickled aubergines and before that, olives.

She places the dried memories in the jar and tops them with a fresh peppery oil, just made, from a plot of 400 olive trees which a lost son split between eleven children. As she seals each jar, she thinks about the flavoured oil that will be ready to use once deeply steeped. She hopes it will lubricate her tongue to tell the stories that they ask for. They’ll look at her, with the oil pooling in the crevasses of her collar bones and with a deep breath she’ll say, “I can’t tell you how scared I was and for how long.”

In the mornings he wakes, blinks open eyes to darkness. Toughened memories cling to her ankles, dissolving the bend between her foot and leg. She refuses to turn on the lights in his room. She can only watch him fade in black and white. He is still, always. Nestled in so deeply that flesh roughens to cloth beneath, raw, oozing and alive. No one knows how time passes for him. Tended to and cared for, his body composts in the green house on the hill that he built. Still she refuses to turn on the light.

He is from a lineage of bad lungs and as mucus coats a dialect already thick, our eyes meet and we fall silent. We don’t understand. His body sinks and in the corridor between sleep and awake, he travels freely to almond trees, grape vines and olive groves. The room is always dark. But he is well fed with food grown by his son, on land from a lost one. Meals arrive in his room, alongside goat skulls softened for the bone marrow and cartilage he has always loved.

Dappled light that intrudes and conversations overheard stir his cell-deep knowledge, and he barks commands to plant out, prune and harvest. Yes, I know about osmosis. His is seeds crushed to a fine powder, travelling through blood and calcifying on the weakest joints that have pruned for a lifetime. And in the ache of his bones he knows what needs doing, as his body sinks in the bed in the green house on the hill that he built.

In the afternoon she, bent over in a thin space, looks at her body and then up through a mesh gap to the mountains above her. She asks their hands to pick out what had been harmed and is left as a sack of skin, flapping in the wind, with only calluses to hold her up. She sucks damp air into her belly and with this flooded space between vertebrates, she slots into ridges of the mountain's edge which in turn roll over her. Marvelling at their strength and pounded by their presence, she is confused as to why she must walk out carrying her shit in a small black envelope.

In the evening, she washes her feet so the cold sweat of day won’t follow her to sleepless nights. Despite this, she stirs at midnight and wakes from a light sleep. Thoughts cascade over the front of her mind “…if sorrow was steeped in the ground and I treaded carefully to stop water spilling over…” falling asleep before complete.

*always come home with something

I try. Knowing that with every step it will fade as the place I brought it from does. I walk home to find ways to retain what was found. In my drying, pickling and preserving, the essence changes; when freshness is lost, something else intensifies in its place. I rush to consume it, knowing that with each second it deteriorates. So it mixes with the newness of this place and becomes something else. It’s churned. They told me to always come home with something, a pocket of moments, a sprinkling of seed, a bulb, a current. And I do. They taught me to sustain, to know my place in a cycle, and that is the practice.

It’s a stitching together of fragments, moments lived, dreamed and imagined. Learnt gestures and ways of residing from those nearby are vessels to funnel memories unspeakable with ‘I’. The parasite of trauma encases everyday moments, it’s monotonous work, grasping to capture its surreal omnipresence. Bodies as collections of organisms who live within, on the boundary of, and outside. A thank you to people who have held me when needed and the way they have taught me to be, without language or explanation. The lineage of those who have gone before, who resided differently, but whose resilience, I hope, is steeped in bones.