Tate Britain, Summer 2018. 10AM.
Still sweaty from the cycle, I shake my backpack to the ground. I’m about to become the Squash. What is the Squash?
I raise my heavy gourd and hide myself from the incoming humans. I lounge on a tiled plinth in the grand halls of the Duveen Galleries. After a couple of hours of morning’s empty echoes, I watch as the first visitors glance and stare at my gourd-topped body as it drifts through suspended stills.
As one of fourteen performers embodying “The Squash” in Anthea Hamilton’s 2018 Tate Britain Commission, I was presented with a blank open space. It was adorned with some 7,000 white tiles for us to communicate something. Nothing exact but something that, for some reason, seems to captivate the eyes of my passersby.
Vision-impaired and submerged in the hollow darkness of a gourd head, I slither the tips of my fingers and I trace the bones of my toes up, down, across the shallow gutters separating each uniform square. The lines and curves of my body converse with those of my tetric space. For eight hours: I am gourd. In quiet meditation, I examine my visiting humans.
I’ve not been sent here to entertain, but to research. To research the mundane. A mundane that, for me, turned into an intimate love affair with my gridded architecture. I lie splayed on my ceramic couch and I wonder how I'll get to the bathtub twenty metres away. For a Squash, that’s a million miles.
The thickening ride of curiosity takes over. I think of how a Squash’s tendrils would search for an object in space in order to accelerate its coiling growth, how it feels to see through the clear proprioception of my skin, instead of the blurred light of my eyes. I let space and its geometry take my body through flowing moulds, mould me for intimacy, mould me for a conversation with inanimate structures. After a million miles of languid odyssey, I’m about to seep over the threshold of the bathtub.
But the heel of my hand meets the heel of a shoe.
A human. An onlooker. Always there, but usually at a distance. But this heel I feel now is part of my composition. I keep contact and spiral through the cluster of more shoes, more obstacles at play, an oscillation of breathing bodies, a nuzzling of warmth. Here we gather at the Tate, and you’re all looking at me. But only because I am the Squash.
The humans watch. They watch with an intensity, lips upturned. Some stay still, others rock in hypnosis, and now we all become the Squash. I feel my body mingling in close friction with another nearby. We mirror each other’s actions into a new dance, fill each other’s empty spaces until we meet at a touch. Time stretches as we roll the landscape of our backsides against each other’s, our arms meet and our hands kiss, we undulate, we share, we become a moment.
There is something about moving with another that is beyond any physical or mental attraction. There is an intimacy that can exist between strangers: between humans, between Squashes, between anything or anyone who dives blindly into the flowing waters of movement.
The Squash is empathy. The act of sharing and understanding the state of another.
My partner and I conclude our dance. We bow to each other in silence, but before she can stand again, the security ushers her out of the Duveen. Closing time.
I lower my gourd and pick up my backpack again. I no longer look like the Squash. In fact nobody knows I'd just been the Squash. Once more, I am human. Just the way I started. But as I leave the Tate, I see heels familiar.
I remember that heel. I reach towards it. But there are different rules now.
A big thanks to Anthea and Delphine for the opportunity, and the other amazing thirteen of the Squash patch. Photos courtesy of John McGrath, Dominic Jacobs, and Steph Berge.