100 Works Etched in Sun (working title)

Unfolding across 100 pieces and composed of diverse materials and approaches, the series reveals an iconography of associations and connections. Drawings, paintings, readymade, felts, digital matter, garden, domestic, building and sound-absorbing materials traverse times and worlds. Segments from Daniel Ashery’s trousers and a 1947 diary written during the British Mandate in Palestine are some of the autobiographical contributions.

Foraging for fallen feathers is a durational activity that generates artistic gestures and storytelling. Through checking-in and testing-out, the process is tangentially inspired by Blake’s –Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion; the readymade in emancipatory gardening; Dora Benjamin’s 1929 exhibition Healthy Nerves; inter-species’ desire and time laps in Memoirs of a Spacewoman; bees as cosmovision; non-binary attention spectrum under heat & hormonal fluctuations; AI glitches, spirit data, lungs, curls, analogue, autobiography, streets, buildings with windows; intersectional land and food security visitations and many other artists and artworks.

I bend to pick up a feather in a street.

Not one of those seamless bends > a dancer gliding across the stage, notionally touching the deck with a tip of a finger > a bubble burst in a blink, pfttt.

My bends are more achey, hesitant, shifty, self-conscious yet determinate.

Like anyone cares… you’d think, but few passers-by have looked back, unconsciously exercising a double take, a seccsesion of neck flicks. Pondering if they might have missed a banknote that would’ve helped their day. A cup of coffee hailing towards a new fiver.

And I want to offer him the feather and say, trust me, this is a beautiful one [they all are), it will make your day if you let it—help you connect. He is lugging two heavy looking decorators’ kits on wheels, hands full. I would have had to fit the beautiful feather in between his lips.

It is the briefest of spirit data encounters, acknowledging that we are both on a short break from worklife. I’m doing something that is legal, but opaque [in the USA collecting naturally fallen pigeon feathers is illegal). He, with a hi-vis vest hanging loosely from his pocket, discernible yet anonymous in civil uniform, conjuring up a 70s North American queer-archive image of cruising. According to the hanky code, a yellow bandanna in the back left pocket flags a pisser. But the coded handkerchiefs were a different yellow, a warmer hue, borderline orangey, such as the one indicating dehydrated on the urine colour chart. The acidic hi-glo yellow of his vest stipulates a good piss on the charts, hydrated.

Spirit data is a term I coined to describe encounters or existences that involve little-to-no exchange of data. A meeting or lives of souls, spirits, that leaves no information crumbs on the system.

There are colour inconsistencies when comparing the urine tones of the varying hydration charts. Rummaging online for the colour of your piss to fast track concerns about your body or your health brings about psychic displacement. You are engrossed in noting the contradicting information and resorting to the infinitely wise Generative AI, while mourning the planetary cost of farmed intelligence. For the following few days the algorithm chases you, suggesting that you need to buy things to help you out, pointing to related health conditions, diverting you further into mindless terrains of somatic disempowerment.

Your creative writing becomes a rabbit hole of online search histories with more references than authenticity. You run a bath with fresh rosemary you picked from the window seal, or from someone’s garden to cleanse the techno-hypnotic dust off, and reset. it is crispy, you breath it in and out, clearing the toxic density away. You look to the sun at your core. Searching inside of you and inside of others, until they overlap. This can become a ritual, or a chore. Both.

You expect that this found place of refuge will assimilate into the virtual ether, reflecting  a hall of mirrors to your recent cherished lived experience. The apps that twin your real like experience sell mindfulness and authentic living, Mediterranean and Japanese diets, walking and rehydration regimes, liver tests and varicose veins removal. Some of the imagery resorts to body horror and when you ask to remove the adds, there is no option that adequately describes the reason for the offence. There is no category to tick called capitalism. Free new horizons, for self development, immediately become paid commitments with subscriptions and discounts that  you don’t wish to be part of. All your body wanted was more water, you wanted to know how to drink more water.

You keep inventing with others what belonging is that is not automated, and that becomes a practice. Rituals. You learn from the intelligence of insects who reinvent themselves with every updated cycle of insecticide spray. Smallness in numbers as resistance

A close friend by my side is coiling back uneasy, slightly cringing in abjection [always with a friend, not always, mostly solo), remarks that it is disgusting, that the feather is a pigeon feather, nothing special and that I can catch something bacterial, urban, dirty. This isn’t a countryside pigeon you know. They ask [with care?) for how long am I planning to continue collecting feathers. They half offer a hand sanitiser, a memorandum that catapult us in an ecliptic pivot towards the pandemic. If only time was linear and not parallel. Amygdala (uh·mig·duh·luh) is computing in no time:

I am collecting feathers = does that make me a hobbyist, the feathers are not special = does that make me average, the feathers are potential carriers of diseases = does that make her a danger to herself.

I regain ground as a memory trace smokes its way up to the surface—hand sanitisers have side effects. More grounded, I assert myself in the knowledge that ideological hygiene regimes, and collections, are hierarchical and othering by nature. What remains is touch, a healer’s way to getting to know something about something, support its recovery.

I will bend for feathers for as long as necessary and keep with the birds I reply.

Current references on dirt and hygiene include Bell Hooks on the self-care industrial complex; Mary Douglas on dirt and ritual; Vita Peacock in Writing opacity: Going beyond pseudonym with spirit portraiture; the ‘glass man’ at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden; the racist widespread practice of spraying Mizrahi and Moroccan Jews with DDT in the 40s and 50s by Isreali immigration authorities.