I’m currently trying to read The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. I say try, because its heaviness keeps weighing too much on me and I have to put it down. I’ve come back to it a couple of times but its narrative is founded on the loss of the young narrator's sibling and it’s all a bit too close to home. However heavy the book is, it has some wondrous lines, slender gems that ask far more of you than you anticipated that it could.
“We don’t talk about the things we will never forget”
Reminiscent of Rachel Cusk at her philosophical best, this line left me, very appropriately, speechless. In that silence I was drawn away from the narrative to consider the things I will never forget, but don't talk about. As an artist, I look to find ways to express all those ‘things’ through a medium which I feel able to manipulate in order to project sentiments to the viewer. If I told you in plain english it would be too stark, the equivalent of me shouting in your face. Thankfully, the beauty of photography is that it is intentionally oblique, because sometimes there are things in life which feel too hard to even say out loud.
The deeper I grow into any body of work, the more I look to build a space in which I can invite the viewer into, to allow them to invest themselves in the narrative. I enjoy trying to create this space, knowing that the viewer will come away with different thoughts than when they entered it, not thoughts that are the same as mine or that have been spoon fed, but an amalgamation of their life experience and mine. A way of drawing closer to one another.
A few pages later, I was confronted by this line…
“There are two kinds of people, those who hold on and those who let go.”
I can’t decide on which side I fall. My instinct is that I am someone who holds on, but through my work I know I am attempting to let go. Maybe I’ve found a way to let myself reflect and project so I'm carrying less of the burden of the things I will never forget.
This article is taken from my November Mailout, which also features Richard Mosse, Chris Kilip, Marcelo Galvani and Kieran Goddard.
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