March 2023: Dear laura, …
What a tender joy it was to be surprised by you handing me that honour last November, and then to read your thoughtful note in December. I carried the message of your December column with me - sometimes it might be good not to archive everything - to the other side of the world and back. It echoed in my mind as I exfoliated existential grief(s) in the sea, and burned away layers of psychic weight under a hot sun. You encouraged me to interrogate the nature of some of my own compulsions to document and defend.
One definition of ‘archive’ describes a “documentary by-product of human activity, retained for its long-term value”. I realise now that painstaking documentation and retention is only half of the picture - there must be a perceived value, and this isn’t something that can simply be enforced from the outside. After re-reading your words, I feel like some link can be found between this value and the type of circularity you identified: both in Alok Vaid-Menon’s generative quest for queer histories, and in the music and DJ mixes that move us both. Timing, context, and sometimes sheer novelty must intersect with these artefacts. It could be, as you said, as serendipitous as Josh Cheon fishing Patrick Cowley tapes out of his attic long after they were made, or perhaps in reinscribing the story of acid house to accommodate the early experiments of Charanjit Singh. In December, when I read about Manuel Göttsching’s passing, I immediately dusted off my copy of E2-E4 and as I listened I was warmed thinking of all the other folks who must be engaged in the same ritual at the same time: stepping back into the familiar quicksand trance of that album’s journey, enculturating those endless loops with a new melancholic value, deconstructing and relearning what was already familiar.
This all makes me think of the excellent television series I just finished watching, Station Eleven. It depicts a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic, post-industrial world where only 1% of the human population has survived. A troupe of theatrical performers travels by foot in caravan formation around one of America’s great lakes every year, performing Shakespeare for scattered, scarred, cobbled-together communities. The players (and their audiences) uncover something new and profound with each performance of the same text, and in one crucial scene a makeshift museum of pre-apocalypse ephemera is burned to the ground; a symbolic sacrifice made to allow for life to truly begin again. In the show, it is the circularity itself that holds the potential for true healing, not the memorialising of an original wound. I hope this means there’s some unknown future value in asking Belleville Three, or any of our elders, to again circle around the histories that have been told so many times before. You asked me what I want to leave behind from 2022. My answer now is: nothing that I do value or could value.
For now, slow, deliberate loops and repeated listens are gently governing me back towards a sense of place. I’m luxuriating in the slow nod of Paul St. Hilaire, the narcotic funk of DJ Screw (RIP) and DJ Python mixes, and while everyone reminisces about their hot amapiano summer, I’ve cosily crawled back inside these productions for their bluesy spaciousness and minimalism.
I look to the remainder of the year with no expectations, but I do hope the next glance you cast across the dancefloor might catch mine. Until then, I’ll see you here, again, sometime soon.
Love, Christine
DOWNLOAD FLYER Translation by Thilo Schneider / Artwork by Ophélie Napoli