“UNITED KINGDOM LONDON. PORTRAIT O.A.Y.G.” by Josiane M.H. Pozi at Carlos/ Ishikawa captures scenes of personal artifact, of ordered clutter; the latter bearing witness to expressions of being that are often between self(s). Yet, at first glance, nothing is particularly remarkable. In order to journey from boredom to actualization you may sustain some level of delusion, a sort of personal artifice if you like. Observe the following: Liberate from the dogma of the “ideal.” Look at the reused and used and used thing to stage and capture meaning from the immediate present. No fixed definitions here.
A present that is myth and creative in its capacity for reflection.
A spatial configuration all set. Coordinates on lock.
Superposition’s probability denotes an opportunity for discovery. So we converge scales into multiple states j u s t before perception binds.
Stumble with aim.
It’s Tuesday and we meet at a cafe down Mile End Road. I’m late.
All bundled up, she looks straight out of an A/W 2010s Matalan catalogue. I notice the snakeskin bag (or was it crocodile? I don’t remember but it’s hot). In between trying my best not to eavesdrop on the Somali conversation to my left and a cozy chai, we bond over our love of self help and its corniness, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), and the transgressive but hilarious nature of memes. So I enter a temporal interval.
Saturday. E’s room’s. Evening. E and J are getting ready to go out to see Canje play.
A slash in the dialogue (/) indicates that the next actor should start their line, creating overlapping speech
J: I’m not gonna put/
E: Because of the magazine?
J: Imagine, imagine, December Issue, “I’m in love with… I’m in, I’m in love with Big!” [laughs]
[E and J laugh]
J: What are you wearing?
E: Yeah, I think I’m gonna wear this top, I’m not sure yet that’s what I’m gonna thinking uh, I don’t know. What are you gonna wear?
J: Um, I think probably what I’m gonna wear is… Oh, my gosh, I can’t … I’ll probably wear this like yellow… Actually, I don’t know what I’m gonna wear. One second, I’m gonna come back.
J leaves E’s room to get clothes from J’s room. J walking
J: Oh, my goodness, what am I gonna wear? What am I gonna wear? What am I gonna wear?
Beat
J: Oh, shit, goddammit. Fuck. Goddammit, shit, shit, fuck, fuck.
Beat
J: Um, what am I gonna wear?
J enters J’s room. Door squeaking
J: Maybe I’ll wear… Mm.
[door squeaking]
J: Oh, my goodness, I’m afraid. Oh, I’m so afraid.
[sniffs]
Beat
J: Oh… Oh. Fuck, I’m afraid, I’m afraid.
A collection of miscellaneous things that could belong in any domestic setting: an ashtray next to a bottle of nail varnish, a crumpled knit jumper laid atop a neatly folded tote and a close-up of large glossy faux pearls spilling out of a small leather bag. In a culture where many are quick to pathologize and insist on categorizations of identity and personhood, Josiane transmits the mundane to something that can iterate possibility.
J back in E’s room.
J: Okay, I’m thinking.. Oh, we’re both gonna wear blue. You look really nice.
E: I know, but I’ve been wearing this skirt.
Beat
E: I don’t think it smells.
J: No, I don’t think so.
Beat
E: Oh my gosh/
J: Oh my gosh right… I think what I’m gonna wear is..I’m gonna wear this and then I’m gonna wear this on, like, on top of it and then/
E: Are you going like cute or like, you looking like sexy?
J: Mm, I’m probably gonna wear… You know how I wear this and then I’m gonna wear my bra/
E: Are you wearing jeans or like a skirt?
J: Imma wear it with jeans.
E: Okay.
J: The ones I’m wearing now, and.. what do you think?
E: You know, I think, well I need to see the visual.
J: Okay, well I’m gonna put on the vision.
Macroscopic framing of ornament excludes the whole despite being of it. As each shot isolates objects, the containment is not about the loss of the wider field of context, but rather the usefulness of omission. Of lack. An opening is made for an autonomous encounter.
E: I don’t wanna spend money.
J: That’s my thing.
E: So I’m gonna bring some jiggle juice and then just get like one drink inside, that’s all I’m
gonna do.
J: Yeah.
E: ‘Cause I mean, it finishes at 11 and there’s nothing going on after, so…
J: They probably will be/
E: Do you want to like stay out? Well, I mean we can do/
J: I’m scared that if I get lit, I’m gonna call him and I’m gonna be like/
E: We can do the same thing that we did last time when we went out. Maybe if we actually go
out in Brixton or at least in that area ‘cause we were able to actually get home and it was
good ‘cause we got home, we got the train back at 1:00 AM
The enclosed choreographs an episode of an aged pocket dictionary placed next to a bedside table holding a lump of terracotta elevated on a small stoneware platform, the same leather bag from earlier, a lamp, a 90s pink tamagotchi, an opened Nivea sunscreen spray from the Protect & Moisture SPF 30 collection, a lidless glass bottle, a well used scented candle and the partial view of a bed frame and mattress. The room remains concealed, its larger context perpetually withheld. This is as explicit and detailed as it gets.
E: I don’t know if I should wear jeans.
J: Will you be cold?
E: Mm-hmm. Oh, well, I can wear tights isn’t it/
J: I like what you’re wear/ ing/
E: I can wear tights.
J: I do like what you’re wearing. Um, do you mind zipping me up?
I enter a dance, oscillating between revelation and concealment, mimicking the shaky act of perception. The production of accumulated goods often alienates our relationship to the craft behind material culture as it is through the invisibilities of forgetting that we further drift from process and embodied meaning. We do not mourn this separation.
E: Do you want me to tie? You know you can put it in the loops maybe to make it, to make it
tighter like that?
J: What, the bra?
E: Huh?
J: Okay.
E: Or even like.. with this thing
J: No, n/o
E: Oh, oh, I see/
J: Yeah,/ that’s smart.
E: I see, I see, I see, I see
J: I’m gonna wear it on top anyway/
E: Oh, and that actually makes it look/
J: Like part of the thing.
E: Yeah.
J: What’d you think? Do you think it’s a good look?
E: Yeah, just/
J: I think this is, I think this is/
E: I think it looks cool
The order of things, of life, identity, routine, and ego disintegrates. What remains are small pockets of light, of desire.
“superposition in perpetuity. A reality in collapse.”
A thing can be multiple things until it is measured. (I long for simultaneity).
Rehearsed from a curious primordial state neither alive nor inert located somewhere in between ambivalence and precision.
Perhaps it is about trusting this disorientation and non-linearity to guide it to form, to something coherent.
E: I wanna get a bit pretty lit, I think.
Beat
Not so lit that I’m like stumbling around butBeat
E: I love this skirt.
J: Where did you get that skirt?
E: I think it’s yours.
J: Is it mine?
E: I think so.
J: No, it’s not. It’s M’s.
E: No, this is not M’s. I remember I have a video of me wearing this when I was in your old place.
J: Yeah, because that’s where M was living then/
E: But I think it’s before you knew M. I think/
J: It’s not mine
E: I think I’ve had this… No, ‘cause I wore this at my 18th birthday party. It’s yours. 100% it’s
yours/
J: I don’t remember buying that/ Maybe someone gave it to me
N: I think of the late Lauren Berlant’s analogy of entering an opening or “a fold of life right next to the one you’re already living.” Without rushing to replace what there is, we can create new spaces from within the old, learning to enjoy the state of “both/and,” making way for our bodies to inhabit multiplicities.
E: At my 18th birthday party I wore it/
Beat
E: Hmm..What do you think about this? Do you think the other one’s better?
J: Um,
[clothing rustles]
E singing: “I cry only in the rain.”
J: Shit, I need to do my fucking hairrrrrr.
N: Maybe this creative process brings us to a cosmic function where living is a condition by which reality is known and hidden at the same time; the essential ambivalence of living as a person and working as an artist.
E: Did you get two of these or one?
J [laughs]: One.
E: Jesus
J: Did I send you the address?
E: You sent, yeah, you gave me, it’s like E2 something something?
J: Yeah.
[clothing rustles]
J: I reckon what’s gonna happen..we’re gonna go to Canje’s thing…
E: How long is he performing for?
J: I don’t know, an hour or something. I think I’m probably gonna tell him today.
E: Well, you better drink up girl.
[J and E both laughs ]
J: Here’s the deodorant E
E: Thank you
N: A still life in motion. Perhaps the knotting of time resists the final image, instead the sustained and extended gaze of the camera professes presence and duration as proof of life. In this way, Josiane’s practice reminds me of Simone Weil’s assertion that attention is a form of embodiment, a spiritual act drawn from openness. Through repetition and routine, her practice becomes a kind of devotion to the act of looking and to the ordinary as a site of revelation.
E: Um, No service?
J: … that she, she’s gonna take/
E: No service on the REDACTED Line between YOU! and THOUGHT! Um, oh fuck.
J: What time is it?
E: Okay, there’s the REDACTED train is still running. Um, fuck. I didn’t realise about this/ Okay.
J: Did we, did we not route it?/
E: 20… Six, 6:23. 6:23.
E: No, we won’t get there for 6:23. Bruv that’s in like an hour and a half/
J: So what time will we get this? We, he starts at 7:00.
E: I don’t think we’re gonna get there at 7:00.
J: Really?
E: No.
J: I have to get an Uber.
E: We can’t get Uber. Well, actually I don’t, that’s bullshit. Wait, I don’t even know.
J: We’ll get, I’ll get an Uber.
E: You’re gonna get an Uber?
J: I can’t miss the performance.
N: Extended to material form, “me from above” and “in my room” blur hues of brown and red
holding residues of her bedroom. The objects are absent as the body is abstracted into
familiar quotidian gestures, with “in my room” refusing approximation.
E: Okay, well, then if we get on the P train at, at 6:20/
J: Yeah
E: We’ll only be like 10 minutes late.
J: Yeah, and that’s/ fine.
E: And they probably will start late anyway.
J: Are you done?
E: Yeah, basically.
J: Really?
E: Just putting mascara on.
[camera clicks]
E: I don’t know where the fuck my jacket.
J: What jack- Is it not hung up on, under all of those clothes that are/
E: I, I checked but I couldn’t find it.
J: When was the last time you wore it?
E: Well, I was gonna wear it when we’re coming for your birthday but then I decided to wear
the trench coat instead.
J: Does my makeup look okay?
E: Look at me. Yeah, it looks nice.
N: Intimacy here is not privatized but made communal through its projection. Repetition
beyond the emergence of the idealized actual. “UNITED KINGDOM LONDON. PORTRAIT
O.A.Y.G.” is an act of faith in the present moment; a quiet insistence that the paying-
attention-to is where the possible lies.
E: You’ve got the concealer or no?
J: Oh, um, no.
E: Where did you put it? Do you want me to pick it up?
J: Where did I put it and where did I
pick it up?
E: Yeah
J: Urm..
E: I thought it was near the shoes, but it’s not there anymore.
J: Oh, maybe it’s actually here then.
J: Are you changing?
E: Mm-hmm.I just want to try on the other top because it’s kind of frustrating me
[camera clicks]
J: You look nice. You look really nice.
J: Here’s your palette.
E: Thank you.
E: Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?
[camera clicks]
J: Oh, it’s here.
[camera clicks]
Silence.
E: Alexa, play Fresh Off the Runway.
A: Fresh Off the Runway by Rihanna from Apple Music.
[music] [E singing]
R: “I see you walk, I see you”
E: Ah.
[laughs]
R: Love it then come and get it. I know that your fucking with it. You see me, you like it huh?
Heels Givenchy-huh.
Original concept for text, play and edit by Josiane M.H. Pozi
