Adam Man: Close to Being: Experiencing Lethe

I enter the dimly lit studio with around thirty other people and leave my shoes by the wall as requested. A huge natural-coloured carpet fills the middle of the room. It invites us to linger. Everyone starts looking for a position that suits them, sitting, kneeling or lying down. This takes a few minutes, during which we gradually get used to the semi-darkness. Screens are installed on three sides of the room, two on the long side and one on each of the narrow sides. Then the lights are dimmed even further and a female voice begins to speak in English.

The voice is electronically amplified so that it cannot be located in the room. But it soon becomes clear that it belongs to a person who is walking slowly around the carpet without any particular aim, making her way through the randomly distributed bodies. The text is spoken without visual support, purely from memory. It takes fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. The words and sentences are simple and spoken in a very calm, meditative tone. What is said? “It’s midday and very quiet now” is how it begins. Detailed observations follow. It is an account of what someone perceives as they are standing, walking and sitting in a largely dried-up riverbed. The person sees stones, plants, animals, rivulets and mountains, sometimes also objects left behind by people. But no other human beings. They only appear indirectly in the sentence: “I think of those to whom I would like to say, the earth is beautiful, I have seen it with my own eyes and it feels unreal to me.” The text flows along calmly the whole time, it stays in the riverbed, engages with it. At some point I understand that the carpet on which we are sitting and lying embodies the riverbed.

The text ends with the sentence “I am here, and elsewhere”. It says something that will also become increasingly true for me over the course of the next half an hour. But first, the situation changes. The sparse lighting is dimmed completely during the last spoken words, electronic sounds are heard and videos are projected onto the screen. These are video recordings taken from within the riverbed, a variety of different scenes. The images follow their own rhythm of fade-in and fade-out. They are fragments that will never form a whole. But they give us a sense of the landscape and the time spent in it. The riverbed with its gravel beds, its white stones, its driftwood, its plants. There is always flowing water somewhere, even if it is only in the background. Mountains covered in forest rise up on both sides of the riverbed, with the mostly blue, sometimes cloudy sky above.

In many of these simultaneously projected videos, a human figure is visible. It is always the same female figure lying or sitting in the riverbed, gradually beginning to move. She often eventually rises up to stand. Her movements remain apparently aimless, slow, tentative. As if she first has to realise that she is in this place. As if she wakes up again and again in this landscape that she is not yet familiar with. Perhaps even in a body that she is not familiar with. We see dozens of these moving images, a new one repeatedly begins on a screen just as another one ends. It is not possible to take it all in. My head and body turn this way and that, sometimes I have to decide whether I want to take in as many images as possible or rather a few and be more attentive and patient with them. I have to deal with the setting in the landscape of the studio, as well as how I feel in this landscape. As far as I can tell, the videos are not repetitive. So I will miss some, or only see them fleetingly. I eventually decide that it doesn’t matter. I try not to approach the images too consciously.

The sounds help me with this. Describing them is by nature difficult. The sound of running water is clearly recognisable, but it is enveloped and overlaid by electronic sounds. These change slowly but steadily. Later, a cello is added, with warm, strongly vibrating tones. The sound lends the images an atmosphere of enormous vastness, as if the landscape does not stop where the contours of the colours and shapes do. Again and again, resonant sounds dominate, capturing my attention. The rhythm in which they come and go corresponds to that of the images, although nothing is synchronised here. Image and sound are quite independent. Together they have a hypnotising effect. I don’t become drowsy, but something inside me calms down so that I can surrender completely to the situation. In the end, the sentence “I am here, and elsewhere” seems completely true.
 
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Lethe is not an immersive installation. It does not transport the viewer to the Tagliamento, even if it is present in a special way through the images. At most, the sound is immersive, with its hypnotic effect as described above. The setting with the three video walls onto which images are projected, which remain asynchronous, runs counter to any real immersion, as one projection repeatedly ends as others continue and a new projection begins elsewhere. Lethe is deliberately fragmented. Lethe starts again and again. Lethe confronts itself and us with the place from which the images, the sound and the movements originate.
In Greek mythology, Lethe is the river in the underworld that brings oblivion if you drink from it. The “space poem” Lethe is dedicated to the river Tagliamento, “one of the last great wild rivers in Europe, threatened by global warming and industry”, as the website for the piece states. So is it about preventing this river from being forgotten? Is it about creating a memory of a river that could soon no longer be a wild river due to the general industrial use of all land surfaces? A river that could run out of water soon due to global warming and whose existence as a river, whether wild or tamed, could come to an end? The conclusion that it could be about using art to save a river from oblivion seems obvious. But it fails to consider that Lethe is the river from which oblivion comes and not the river that needs to be saved from oblivion. The “space poem” is not called Mnemosyne, which in Greek mythology is the name of another river in the underworld from whose waters memory comes. If the title were Mnemosyne, then the interpretation that it is about remembering would be understandable. But the title is Lethe, and Lethe is the river of forgetting. Does the title mean that forgetting comes from the river Tagliamento? Since this river carries so little water at times, it can be said that it sometimes forgets that it is a river. The nature of this river is to forget itself from time to time. So is Lethe, as a work of art, perhaps meant to be about forgetting? That we as visitors should forget something?
The name Tagliamento only appears in the paratexts for this “space poem”. Although it consists of almost twenty minutes of spoken text, the proper name does not appear. Neither does the word Lethe. The text consists only of simple words and sentences. If we listen to them, we can safely forget the proper names. Nor do we know who this “I” is who is making the observations we hear. Not only do we not need to know who this “I” is, we are not supposed to know, nor should we even want to know. It is not about a person with this or that story making these observations and sharing them with us. It’s about the observation itself, the communication of which evokes something in us, the listeners. Presumably images, but certainly a mood. This is evoked by the calm and soothing female voice. The images, in turn, result from the linguistic communication of small-scale observations. They are micro-events whose testimony the text communicates to us.

Lethe is the river of forgetfulness. In this work of art, we literally step into a river that makes us forget. And that is precisely the point: to forget the expectations that we bring with us when we enter a studio or an art space. The expectation of a spectacle. Of virtuosity, of a strong presence, of provocative dynamics. Confessions of a suffering, traumatised subject. The expression of the inner conflicts of a person struggling for understanding. Lethe wants us to forget everything that to a large extent makes up the experience of art in the present. By forgetting these expectations, I am in a way forgetting myself. Lethe’s meditative, live-spoken opening helps with this. And it puts aside my prior expectations to such an extent that the sound and images of this other, nameless place reach me in a state that I would like to describe as naive, for lack of a more appropriate word.

It is a place, no question about it. But where is it? If I have forgotten myself sufficiently, this question arises for me outside any preexisting coordinates. Certainly, the shape of the mountains, the vegetation and the rocks are from inside the world I know. But they still seem alien, which is largely due to the fact that the sound only partially seems to come from them. This alienation is reinforced by the figure that finds itself in this landscape again and again. Each time, the figure begins to move in this place as if it had just been born there, or at least had just been born to this world. It actually seems to lack all the coordinates, all the habits with which we otherwise make spaces our own and have long since done so. In its movements, the f igure embodies an unfamiliarity or unaccustomedness, in contrast to the habit that otherwise structures all expectation. Concepts of order increasingly dissolve here. Each shot once again reveals the mysteriousness of what is seen, however familiar it may appear on another level. Time also becomes mysterious in these images. Sometimes it seems to slow down.

What remains of a place or a landscape when all coordinates and habits have been forgotten? If we do not visit and take in this place in the way we usually do when we are pursuing an aim? When we encounter the place as impartially as possible? If we leave behind the all-too-human logic of identification? Prior to the human, a place presents itself to be seen, heard and felt for what it is. It may be animate or inanimate, a place has its own presence that radiates from it. Some would call this presence the atmosphere of a place. This is not a bad description, if we assume that atmospheres can take possession of a visitor, which after all means that a place has a power that is neither human nor physical, but aesthetic, if not spiritual. But to speak of atmosphere is not enough to describe the present aura of a place, because the word atmosphere is aimed entirely at the “haze”, the “sphere of air” that envelops a place. However, this gives one element, air, absolute significance, while the other elements, water, earth and f ire, are ignored. However, the presence of a place is not only in the air that surrounds it. It also lies in its earth, in its water and its f ire, in its geosphere, its hydrosphere and its pyrosphere. These would therefore all have to be taken into account if we want to speak of the presence of a place. But with a theory of elements, the place is inevitably fragmented. And thus this would also miss the point.

A different term is needed. An older turn of phrase lends itself to this. In antiquity, a place was said to have a “genius loci”, a “spirit” belonging to it. This was mainly applied to sacred places. Does the sacred not perhaps consist precisely in this power, which stems primarily from the spirit of the place, and which is only made visible and reinforced by sacred buildings? In any case, it is this spirit of place that some of us come into contact with in some places, which we feel and which perhaps also moves us to think and act differently. And it may even stay with us a little when we leave the place again.

Can the spirit of one place be transferred to another? Certainly not in the strict sense, because then it would lose its essence of being the spirit of that very place. A sacred building cannot simply be moved to another place, because its sacred power comes from its original location. But if something of this spirit remains with us when we move away from its place, then it is obviously still radiating something in the distance. This is precisely what can be experienced in Lethe. The audience is indirectly exposed to the spirit of the place through the mediation of the artistic exploration of it. This happens in a completely different place, which has hardly anything to do with the original place of encounter, but which is precisely what makes this encounter possible in the first place.
But none of this happens by itself. It requires that some of us expose ourselves to the genius loci of a particular place and then find ways to make it accessible to others who were not there through mediation. This is only possible if the mediators remain true to the genius, which can only succeed if they forget themselves as much as possible in the process of mediation. An older word also describes well what this success might look like, but it must be understood correctly: congeniality. Genius alone would radiate its power without effect if there were not someone who perceives and recognises it. Whoever does this is in contact with the genius, is a companion, a partner, is congenial in relation to it. Lethe is based on such congeniality, is itself a congenial piece to the genius of the place of the encounter.

“They spent time with the river”, says the paratext to Lethe about the artists. After an hour in the studio, the viewer had also spent time with the river. I was lying, we were lying in the river, so to speak, and thus assumed the same position as the artists when they exposed themselves to the spirit of that place – even if certainly only for a fraction of the time that it takes to create a site-specific work of art of such density. The original setting would have made it possible to spend even more time on this soft riverbed.

The question remains as to whether it is really the spirit of the Tagliamento, or whether the Tagliamento, from whose riverbed the piece takes its material, stands for something else. The earth is mentioned in the text and her beauty attested to. Her, and not the Tagliamento. Even though Lethe is dedicated to this river, it is not actually about it, but about the earth, if not about the world in general. At least the piece carries this abundance in it. It cannot be confined to this place, to this piece of land. This is made clear by the sound, whose surfaces and volumes point beyond the place, which is always shown to us very calmly in the images. The sound reminds us that the place we are in is located in a boundless expanse. Perhaps this vastness of space, or in another word, of being, is what Lethe makes us remember by inviting us to forget.