The Squash

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.

Imaginary Friends: A Study On Long Distances

2016. Frank’s, a bar in Fort Greene of Brooklyn. A square, black box of a room, crammed with an outline of observers. I’m waiting to see my friend Marissa dance her new solo on the cold floor of this bar, which I imagine is covered in the stickiness of old booze. A slightly disheveled young man appears before us with his guitar, kicking off the string of acts to come. I feel a judgement of doubt as I stare into his wild, inhibited expression, eager to sing and pluck. At first I internally groan as he starts to open with an anecdote of sorts. But I eventually warm up when I find myself relating to his storytelling of nomadism, of vagabonding; his flouncy, traveling way of life, never staying in one place for too long, and being far far away from his home and people. I admit I feel I’m part of this seemingly niche, traveling clan. I feel pride as I nod in agreement with him. 

“Thank you, to each one of you, for being here” he says with an ecstatic warmth. “While I have many friends and family at home who I love and I know love me; it is you, the people I stand with and in front of every night, that is sharing this moment with me. Your energy, your listening, your human sounds and your being, is what feeds me.” 

His words stuck with me, and I’m still thinking about them. It got me thinking about periphery and the people you choose to keep within the peripheries of your life. Traveling has allowed me to interact with all kinds of people both on very intimate levels, and not. I am constantly connecting and disconnecting with people, old and new, and I’ve learned to pretty quickly find something I love in the people I meet. I’ve crossed paths with an overwhelming amount of generous, interesting, and engaging humans in my young life; resulting in connections all around the globe. But in turn, the relationships and friendships I consider to be closest to me are often no where near my physical proximity. That, sometimes I feel conflicted about whether I should live in the present or fantasize upon my history. 

I wonder about the validity of relationships that are not put into frequent, interactive practice. My family, close friends from college, a lover in Vietnam - people I’ve not seen for at least a year - are all participating in long-distance relationships with me. I think that real, truthful interactions can only occur face-to-face; the rest of the time, these people that we hold so dear to our hearts can only exist in a realm of imagination. Even when face-to-face, there is always an element of illusion and unknown. The task of trying to empathize with, and understand someone, requires imagination itself. 

So here is where I feel I’m at the cusp of loneliness (which albeit, is something I’ve been trying to feel since venturing into my travels of constant space-changing). How do you maintain realness in a long-distance relationship without regular interaction? After lots of time and space, how do you not get your feelings for someone obscured and distorted by your most ideal version of them? How do you continue to feel padded by the spirits of your favourite people without living with the past? I will arguably say, that I don’t think it’s actually possible to. And I feel overwhelmed by the realization that everyone you know is literally a result of your own, individual perception. While it’s hard enough to understand your own individual truth, it’s near-impossible to completely understand someone else’s truth. 

“Do you miss your friends back home?” someone asked me a few months ago. I found myself wondering who those friends “back home” were. I try to line-up Skype dates with my favourite people, but I still only see them once every three, six, twelve months or more. The rest of the time I feel I have to put them aside and live where I am now, with the people I physically have around me. Because a breathing relationship requires fresh, and regular stimuli - making it dance, pivot, and intermittently shift. Otherwise the more continued indulgence you give towards a static memory, the more it just becomes distorted. One can only imagine connection with someone for so long. 

Relationships plateau and sometimes they disappear; occasionally they return during a more opportune time. But what is the balance between investing in longtime, faraway relationships, and purely living in the now? What is it to freely allow yourself to be identified by your past and memories of, but not get lost in your own imagination? To be fair, there is also probably a healthy dose of imaginary living to be had.

I should say that throughout this brooding I am enjoying the people that surround me here in London town; I continue to be fed by my constant interaction with the various citizens of the world. I seem to, in fact, be endlessly adding to my list of relationships worthy of longtime nurturing and wondering.