04:36 pm January 21st
“Hopscotch, Breakout, Nike, Outfitters, Body Shop and Orange tent” I finished my ritual of putting up the tent at the exhibition site (an under-construction shopping mall in Gulberg). It almost felt Violent. Occupying space that is not mine and making it mine was an act of ferity and I felt confused for some time. People were staring out of curiosity but after a while they got used to my presence and my orange tent that had become a part of that urban landscape. A temporal architectural structure in the midst of shopping malls that would be my home for a night and two days.
“I Was Here” It’s interesting how the first inhabitants of every architectural structure are the people who build it. They first build it to occupy it and then occupy it to build it and build it to occupy it and occupy it to build it. It’s like the “chicken or egg” paradox . You can never tell what came first. When I camped at the site I thought I would be the first occupant but I discovered there were a few more living inside the building. But I was the first occupant living outside of the building with no walls and ceilings. My presence will become a lingering memory of the space that is still in flux, destined to become a Mall but had been an exhibition site first and even before that a residence to an artist and a potential site for anything and everything. I was here and my memory will become the memory of the place like that place is in my memory. My voice will be echoed through the walls. My breath lingering in the air and seeped into the walls. My day-dreams hovering over that building like a cloud. My smell absorbed into the smell of the space.
05:03 pm, January 22nd
Anatomy of the space Unit 1: The space is almost empty, floors are not fixed and stairs are almost a suggestion. An installation of cardboard boxes, charpai, old shoes, broom and hardly functional furniture. A man making chai in the left corner just beside the entrance. One wall in that hall is transparent glass with sunlight pouring in. White walls with shapes made by the shadows. A man is looking out the window of the building in front of me. I wonder if he is looking at me from behind the glass window just as I am looking at him from behind the glass wall. Unit 2: Same size as the unit 1 -three levels but darker. It has no windows. I wonder what it would look like at night in the dark. nine stairs to the first basement. This is my favorite part so far. The walls are grey/cemented. Another nine stairs to basement 2. Two beds, three pairs of shoes and a red cloth tied to the pillar. I don’t know if it’s gonna be there on the exhibition day. This portion seems older perhaps it was built first. Outside, next to my tent on the paved ground, a plastic table with two wooden and a plastic chair. We are having chai, chatting and looking at the passing traffic and people against the tall buildings in the background adorned with lit brand names. A deja vu: Outside, next to my tent on the paved ground a plastic table with two wooden and a plastic chair. We are having chai, chatting and looking at the passing traffic and people against the tall buildings in the background adorned with lit brand names. Unit 3-9:36 pm. This is the first time I’m entering this hall. same size, three levels and no windows. The sunflower windmills are waiting to be installed. Standing here I can see all three levels. Newly built and still wet wall on the left. My tent is just right in front of the 2nd Hall’s entrance closer to the roadside with a banner on the wall behind it that says Shops for Rent contact…… Another shopping mall in making but first a venue for the exhibition “A Site for Sight”. When I was first asked to contribute to the exhibition, I instantly fell in love with this site and wanted to interact with this space and witness it’s evolution from a construction site to an exhibition site that would contain the works of 35 artists. Conceiving an art exhibition in this site is a very crucial decision because it’s truly taking the art to the viewer and making it accessible to the public. Also creating the paradox of art serving the market place and that place serving the art institution. It’s like a negotiation or a fight for claim. Displaying art amidst buildings where you go to buy consumer products also reminds me of the presence and absence of consumption of art.
04:29 pm, January 22nd
From Space to Place At 1:30 am I ordered myself a large black coffee through the foodpanda app in order to expand on and understand the idea of locatedness. Conversation with the rider: “Xinhua Mall” he said “No opposite to Xinhua at the construction site on the corner just after you make a U-turn” I replied He confirmed “Miss the building that is still being built or behind it?” “Yes the building that is being constructed…you will see the orange tent that’s where you’ll find me” said I “I see the orange tent” (he said laughing) He gave me the coffee I gave him the cash and he asked me if I lived there and I told him yes temporarily. Later a kind friend asked me if I wanted to have chai so he brought chai for me at the tent. Another friend who knew “through the internet” that I was gonna be there came to see me the next morning and that space became a place where people knew they would find me. My locatedness had turned it into a place within a space that was recognizable in relation to the existence of these fixed places and the place recognized in the boundless space. I had managed to create an alternative temporal geography by putting it on a map in the foodpanda app.
02:48 am, January 23rd
“Alone alone all, all alone, Alone (in) a wide wide (city)” At 2:39 am I decided to get some sleep as the shops had been closed and there was less traffic. To my disappointment it didn’t die down completely. As soon as I was inside I felt that someone was outside my tent. I saw a shadow and then heard a very loud sound. I grabbed a pair of scissors ( my weapon) and opened the zip to my tent to take a peek. But there was no one outside, at least not just outside my tent. A few people across the road though, speaking very loudly and the shadows I realized were from the passing traffic and people. We tend to ignore the sound and its role in making us feel at home or feel safe. The sounds were a constant reminder that I was outside and not home, not safe. I was inside a “Safe Place” but I didn’t feel safe because of the sounds so unfamiliar to me, the ones that you don’t expect inside the house but only outdoors kept invading my space. I was in/out-side at the same time. The inside-outside dialectic is not just physical but phenomenological. One explanation can be found in Relph’s understanding of this concept: he suggests that “If a person feels inside a place, he or she is here rather than there, safe rather than threatened, enclosed rather than exposed, at ease rather than stressed. Whereas , a person can be alienated in/from place, and this mode of place experience is outsideness.”
“There’s no place like home” There’s no place like home There’s no place like home” This line from The Wizard of Oz kept ringing in my head while I was in the tent. What is home anyway? In the past 10 years I have moved 12 times to different places that I called home. This includes moving to different cities and countries. Whenever in my dreams, I see a home or me in a home, it’s always the house in Multan, my very first home where I was born. And it’s always full of people with my parents and siblings and friends and people that I have not seen in ages, and my dreams of that house are always festive that leave me with an incomprehensible nostalgia and longing for something that I don’t even know. I remember the last time I moved I cried so much only because I bumped my head into a corner of a cupboard which I didn’t think would be there thus came the realization of being in an unfamiliar, unknown place that I would have to work hard to make a home by learning a new choreography around the new architecture. Even during my performance, in the beginning I really struggled with how much to bend in order to enter or come out of my tent. After a few hours my body had learned it without me paying attention and it just knew how much to bend and precisely at what angle. I told a friend the other day that a home is where you can walk with your eyes closed and not bump into anything perhaps because my brother and I used to walk in our home in Multan with our eyes closed and would never crash into anything. But what is home anyway? I think you can make any place home by putting the familiar objects, practicing the familiar rituals of the household, by reliving the memories of protection, safety and intimacy. Heidegger suggests that “dwelling is the basic character of being in keeping with which mortals exist”. We as children start making these dwellings as part of our pretend play with cushions and pillows, sheets, furniture, sticks, legos, mud, chalk and pencil. All children do that at some point in time. It’s like we are wired to build, build homes that will become sites for our imagination to be played out in. And when we grow up we build homes where we can safely daydream about what can be. The idea of home is part fiction and part reality. A home cannot exist without the walls and a roof but it can also not exist without the daydreams and memories and the idea of home of its inhabitants. In his novel “House of Breath William Goyen writes: That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until it’s name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME. And put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover;…” Whenever I close my eyes to remember my performance the first visual is always me sitting in the sunlight eating oranges next to my tent and looking at the passing traffic and people; smiling and staring at me with their confused eyes; wondering why am I not home? But what is Home anyway?
The piece was written as a memory of the performance “The Liminal Space” 21st-23rd January 2020 for “A Site for Sight” Publication.