Marcus Bergner text for Yanni Florence ‘Footpaths’
----------)) what follows is perpendicularly beside/after the unraveling shadows/ stirrings of my essay in Yanni Florence's photobook: Trees and Fences.
re-
beginning:
It’s possible to walk
And step only on the bits of a certain pattern,
But then you can’t help wondering how it feels
To go on the other bits only.
- Margaret Tait. (Poems, Stories and Writings)
Tait Tait could not wait, saying: "The cinema I care about is at the level of poetry."
her finely hoed films a-rose from shallow footings, downward gazes and everyday epiphanies connect in the minds eye to these footpath pics musty darkened alongside lateralized lions
awaysides
((aligned lapsEs following slant
well known are the benefits to thinking from walking, whereas crawling, somatically, is thinking and sensing on steroids
(hence these photos: substitute crawling-paths for footpaths)
“Again I received a strictly lateral invitation to wholly exist in a region imposing a supine inhabitance. A region whose architecture, being parallel to Paradise, is only visible to a horizontal gaze. Should one stand up to it, it must disappear. Somehow, unable to dissolve into mist, and thus too dense to enter a mirage, the nearest I could conform to the arid aquatic was in becoming crustacean.”
- Mina Loy (Insel)
Benjamin's 'a small history of photography' delegates the aura of an art work: as a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of a distance, no matter how close the object may be.
body is the ground, grounding body, the ground as medium
seeing thru the hands and kneeds, closer crunch and pebbled gluebedded grime glowing infantiles or cosmonaugts eyeballs faller crawler
snapshotted
craved measuring without distancing as Vitruvian measurement based on the length of the palm of a hand
rendering
hieroglyphs of the ear now handfulls furrowing underground apocalyptic opening
rhythmic drum beat of the sun
cathedral spacemat, a match, who decides what's relevant or knot
downfall and droplets aint fixeeeeends.
footpath of confronting surprise
footpath of supple feelings
footpath of largely traps
footpath of procrustean peril
footpath of force holding into itself
footpath of the not yet or no longer
footpath of under-stepping oneself
footpath of walking the lines for Klee
footpath of gawkers reunited
footpath of pathological pathos
footpath of doesn't need to be this way
footpath of internal exile
footpath of the unmoved
footpath of nodding acknowledgements
footpath of turning inward outside
footpath of turning outward inside
footpath of nail and wood
footpath of artificial antics anticipated
footpath of everything up for grabs
footpath of movable architecture
footpath of where to fall upward is as easy as downward (ref: Frank Lovece's art journals)
footpath of old wayawayawayawayawayawayaway (Ulysses)
footpath of originary senses.
a flâneur switches the role of private and public spheres at whim; then, there are urban pathways such as in Naples,* Lagos, Mumbai etc where porous gushings and reversals flow between inside and outside spaces: a permeable ambulatory transgressive street theatre. This is in dire contrast to suburban footpaths as ramparts, barriers, blockades between private property and free space. Epitomised by Google's dystopic, and sardonically named, Sidewalk Labs, involving maximum technological infiltration into all aspects of public space.
skewed ajar climaman appt-ears descend- -lye
ragtag apertures blended/ actuale )) TAunt
All titles for photographs in this exhibition arrived by eavesdropping on the conversations of footpath users the moment the photographs were taken; like a soundtrack of rhetorical hearsay or new literary imaginary, the affixed words to images become poetical /political provocations....
(stains gain emPATHy by touch)
(optical metabolism paved layer-cake)
And these verbal snippets as titles amount to an apocalyptic chorus, as the footpaths, and all paths, inevitably are leading us to the sixth extinction (there's a mammoth in the gallery), pathways of mass amnesia and neoliberal psychosis with the only chance being
( )
(ominous besides, everything by sidewalks)
that this ending time reveals moments of anamnesis, as economic and ecological catastrophes become unavoidable, with the destruction of the biosphere that cannot be sidelined, remembering Alcmaeon of Croton who said
“we perish because we cannot join the beginning to the end.”** Or Ernst Bloch: “The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end. And it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical.” It's then footpaths are to be crawl paths, supine pathways of recognition, revolutionary paths, pathways to universal basic services and ecological communism, joining paths
of collective self-uplifting.***
- Marcus Bergner 27-02-26
*See: On Extinction Beginning Again at the End by Ben Ware ( Verso, 2024).
** See: Naples by Asja Lacis and Walter Benjamin (1925).
*** This universe is a machine for effecting the salvation of those who consent to it. -Simone Weil