5. Surfaces

“Dreamt I was being haunted by a poltergeist, but we became friendly because I joined them smashing all my worldly possessions and it was fun for both of us. The poltergeist then went to kill a very powerful Nazi as a gesture of our friendship. No words were exchanged - telepathy.”

- Tai Shani [@Tai_Shani] (2019) Twitter. 14 June 2019. Available at: https://twitter.com/Tai_Shani/status/1139581778014953473

***

Ghosts lay on stairwells, stood in the corners of rooms until they became ‘invisible’, and incessantly activated automatic doors. They opened every window they could find and felt the force of wind flowing around them and through the space.

And some of them trashed the place. Fucked it all up.

They messed up rooms, disrupting clean slick surfaces by dragging about furniture and papers and wires. They got bored. And then they decided to reset it. Did it change anything? There was something liberating about finally giving into the fantasies of disturbing such a space, even if it only led to the understanding that it doesn’t actually change anything. Ghosting was a moment to indulge a refusal of at least one small part of an institutional landscape that – as one participant put it – feels so hostile to actually making art. 

How far can we go? How far do we want to go? What needs shifting, and what do we want to preserve? And, as another participant asked: “am I part of the problem?” Alongside the building around them, the ghosts intervened on themselves. They transformed the shape of their bodies with fabrics and tape and then staged photo-shoots of their own material-yet-incorporeal surfaces. While slumping into and pressing themselves against the architecture, they were studying their own sounds, structure and weight. Hiding and settling, bodies merged into the building itself.

But some people are far too familiar with disappearance. As another participant put it: “I don’t need to turn myself into a ghost to become invisible.” Some made a mess of the place. Some lay down in rest. And others – we called them ‘naked ghosts’ – walked around, seemingly fully human, refusing to quieten or conceal themselves.