Echo the Now
It comes as a shock when at he end of Echo the Now the woman starts using her voice. For more than an hour she has been silent. She has been engaged in actions, unassuming activities, in different surroundings, dressed in ever different garments. One image keeps returning: on a vast, empty beach she sits in a rocking chair. The colour grey is everywhere. The sand, the sky, her clothes, clay that cakes her face. She is rocking, ever so gently, back and forth, back and forth. She is only surrounded by the wind’s whispers, and the soft creaking of the wooden chair.
The same woman, or so it seems, sits on a mound of potatoes covered in black clay. She moistens her fingers, scrapes the clay from a potato and dabs it on her face, her throat and neck. Clad in white she is standing in a white room, surrounding by crockery of a whitish hue. With one plate she smashes piles of plates that she holds, to pieces. The earthenware breaks with ear-splitting noise. The woman remains imperturbable, even when a shard wounds her foot and bright red blood appears. Later on she weaves a web of threads in a dark shed, lightened only by beam of gold. And always a single butterfly is a silent witness to her actions. Time and again a young girl appears. Among dunes. In a red dress. Standing still at first. After that gyrating, round and round. And time and again the image of the woman in her rocking chair returns, who slowly scrapes away the clay caking her face.
These are actions. Visual poetry without rhyme and line; rhythmic and pregnant with layers of significance that resonate with each other. It is life devoid of words, a state of being from a distant past, before humanity mastered speech. All is action. All proceeds in silence. Until the woman starts using her voice, raising it. Literally. Higher and higher. Heading for an ultimate, liberating effort, which in the end begets silence.
René van Peer, 18 september 2016