reading from afar

I have enjoyed reading your posts from afar when the internet was good enough (which was not that often). Tunis is an extraordinary place - complicated and warm and tense and hurting and intense. The festival I was part of, Dream City, came out of the revolution. The first year it was set up underground to keep art in the city. Now it’s almost a decade old and much more out in the open (though there are always concerns in Tunisia about the possibility of violence given the instability of the political situation). Artists were from Morocco, Lebanon, South Africa, Belgium, Canada and Tunisia. My piece was called The Colour of Time. It was composed of hand-loomed textiles made by the last weavers of the medina (the centre of Tunis). They used to be everywhere, but today silk is too expensive and the work is too slow to really make a profit. And so the art is dying out (the men who weave are in their 70s and 80s - this is a men’s trade. Women make the carpets). I bought the silks in the spring, and then spent 5 months unweaving them, and then, once mostly unwoven, sewing the threads back in. I thought of it as giving time. Then I worked with the spice most common in the medina, turmeric. I explored different natural mordants (what allows the dye to hold onto the fabric) and was able to create several colours. I chose 3 - red, green and yellow - made with soda ash, copper and citric acid. In Tunis, I set up the piece in an abandoned prison (that had a more recent life as a library, before it was reabandoned). Then I added 100 kg of turmeric, as well as some of the mordants. And I waited.

The piece is called The Colour of Time. It takes the time of the world and moves with its colour. It rained and rained the first few days. The turmeric turned to mud and the pieces were quickly dyed from the bottom up. For days the red was bright from the water mixing with soda ash. And then it blew and the pieces flew around, the spice haunting the space. And then the sun came out and hardened the turmeric into a rock-like surface, slowly drying the fabric.

For me, it was a synesthetic experience of the world’s artfulness. It took a continual sense of letting go, of allowing the weather to do its work, of accepting the different effects, of not holding onto the time I gave the art, of allowing another kind of time transform it.

Here a few pictures that show the transformation.


October 1 (sunny day)

October 2 (the first rain, fabric beginning to dye from below)

October 3 (more rain, soda ash emerging, colour changing)

October 4 (more rain, the red backgrounded, copper becoming visible, threads now invisible)

October 5 (more rain, fabric now significantly dyed both from the ground up and from the top down)

October 6 (red re-emerging as the ground begins to dry)

October 7 (the ground is drying)

October 8 (everything is dry, the fabric is not longer being dyed from below, fabrics are moving in the wind)