On How Absence Is
October 13, 2015
I often think about why certain landscapes speak to me, follow my flows of feeling, thought and body to suss out a specific intersection of points that triggered such a reaction.
These exist in my memory as affective moments, strong enough to move me to unwrap Estella from her pouch and look for a means of transcription, representation, and reconstruction.
This set of instax snaps is also from my Taiwan 2014 trip, and these 4 images are very close to my heart. There is a strange sense of doubling in every photo, the presence of a something not quite there ... which is to say, the photograph is the absence of bodily experience within the landscape itself. How interesting that this visceral connect within and between my self and the environment is captured best when I have disappeared from the image altogether.
Fog lowering like a cold, heavy curtain into the bamboo on top of 阿里山, in a mountain village. I have always loved rain, but this time the rain couldn't fall on me; I was visiting it.
These faithful mailboxes will always be found side by side all over Taipei. I am drawn by their ability to hold the cogs of living - from epistolary correspondence, to tax returns and eviction notices.
On a foray into 九份, where residential and tourist spaces are superimposed, there are moments where I see how walls keep us in(tact?), even while nature is necessary for the 'picturesque' quality. Is this what makes a mountain village so enticing ... how we can still see how moss creeps up and over?
In the end, a typhoon is indifferent to your 3-months of travel planning. It rains and winds as it pleases and we move in and out of it as best we can. The rain brings me home in this foreign place though, the feeling of looking out the window at the rain seems to be the same wherever I go.