un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.
un Projects

by

List of words: Bathing, oceanic wayfaring, pain, bass, immersion, water, resist, sweat, aural learning, bath street jetty, return, heat, river, radiophonic, omnipotence, blood, sampling, sound, peripatetic field recording, god, thrashing, aural residue, aural research, dance, residue, thumping, chronic pain, stargazing, omniscience, ancestral regression, ancestral transgression, neurodivergence, astrology, grounding, intimacy, resource, stimulation, collectivity, problematise, liberation, rituals, transformation, cyclical regeneration, intent, discernment, clarity, membranous, permeability, movement, stillness, grief, purpose-built meaninglessness, bifurcation, dreams, textures, interstitial fluids, pseudoscientific metaphor, pilgrimage, ambiguity, opaci. And a text called 'Appetite': I can't capture the texture of air, or press its weight between our palms, with the ferocity of shared appetite. While we feast on each other I gaze with piercing refute into my own reflection and we "return the colonial gaze" in perpetuity. A familiar story of violence spills onto the table. At first the excess feels considered. [...]? I look to my hands again to remind me to consider there is always an esoteric logic in the space that surrounds another's pain. And four images: a person performing music, surrounded by instruments and a record player; a person holding a pile of rocks to their chest; an assemblage of toy cars and bricks and chains; close-up of chain wrapped around two bricks.
Photo of a person spread on all fours with the text: Hujan. There is a textile patterned with unidentified flora, it was passed between my familiar hands; laid cheaply across a dining table; wrapped around your torso; upon letting go it began to unfurl forlornly against the tightly tucked sheets of every bed I've been fucked in.It is all we can fathom.Derived from the oil that asks kindly to depart from the brown skin that held it. Love is a thing that pauses frequently and finally, I sent a postcard from a place I haven't arrived at yet. An indulgent longing cognisant of release; then I was lulled to sleep in the belly of a moving passenger train. it was just: quiet, warm. Hot rain. Cold rain. Across time there are sections of revelatory ablutions that fill each and every ocean, and I am nowhere except for where you choose to find me.
Photo of a man in a songkok with his hands to his face, and a book Malay for Everyone. Also text: Laut. I hear the sea speak ardently against the rock-ribbed intertidal zone of relation. Knowing that erosion is only a natural progression. Knowing, too, that bedrock is persistently generated through millennia of ancestral will and at some point the sea gets tired. Nonetheless— we bend to her will. Peering into poolings of tears she left behind, I contribute my own, scoop a handful of her memories into my palms; granular, full of bits of time. I walk towards the swelling edges of the unencapsulated and then release them with the next wave. And another text: Ritual Greeting (I Am The Baby). I salam my elders, cheek to cheek we press three times in quick succession. My aunty pushes her nose to my cheek as we turn our heads each way, as though inhaling me, I text a friend and he says, "Malay people don't kiss babies; we sniff them." I overlook the implication and laugh as though caught by the silence around me. What is a kiss except a (crossed out text: respiration of generational futures) breath anyway?
➨
In exchange for a twisted shield
Justine Youssef
⟵
-37.798627173603904, 144.95847112326103
Katie Paine
Filed under Article Aaqila Aaqila