Tearing up as we move through – Moving from a place of friction with the stream of tears was the name of the research that Hanna A. Lokøy and Aikaterini Dimitrelli worked on during their IN PROCESS residency at HAUT, in the new black box at Thoravej 29. This text is part of the collaboration between HAUT and bastard.blog. A collaboration where they try to find new ways of documenting artistic research and work methods.
Dear Hanna and Katerina
When I met you before your residency, Hanna told me that she had been feeling overwhelmed lately and that she’d been crying a lot. And that now she had reached out to you, Katerina, to explore this feeling. „I wanted to learn how to not cry,‟ you said. Initially you wanted to „control‟ your sadness, even though you knew that it was maybe a wrong way to think about it.
You said you were going to approach the project as scientists, but when I looked at you move in the space the other day, I also thought you could have been extraterrestrials. That you were creatures from a foreign planet who had been observing humans and now you were trying to repeat the action of crying. It was like you were doing all the movement that is involved in crying, without actually crying. The shaking of your bodies. The convulsions. The contracted faces that you hid behind your hair or your hands.
I tried to see if the tears would ever appear, but they didn’t. „Where did the tears go?‟, I thought. Had you used up all the tears in your body before we came? Is dry crying a thing? Or were you just extending that moment right before the tears would come? ‘Tearing up’ means almost crying, but it can also mean ‘damaging something’. Isn’t there also something damaging about never getting the release of tears? To almost cry for an eternity?
In the black box you had made a small altar in the corner. It consisted of a wooden cabinet with drawings, notes, books, snacks, wigs, shoes, tarot cards, a mirror and a fan among other things. Was it an altar for crying? Or was it tools to help you not to cry?
You moved slowly through the space, in short spasms of movement. A little forward, a little backwards. You didn’t stop shaking. Music started playing. A voice over said: „I’m not going anywhere,‟ echoing your restrained bodies that were almost unable to move forward in the space. Or maybe it was the sound of your tears, clinging stubbornly to the tear ducts, refusing to let go. „I’m not going anywhere‟, the tears said, while you kept shaking.
Then the shaking stopped. And like all good aliens you eventually ended up dressing up. You went to the little altar. You put on blonde wigs, dresses, heels. You put a few small blue self-adhesive gems in each other’s faces as glittery tears. You started taking photos of each other. The shaking was gone. For now.
You explored the space with your newfound identities. You ate mandarins and left tiny mysterious envelopes for each other on the floor. It reminded me of when I was a kid and my mum and I would write fictional letters for each other and put them in a little toy post box, inventing our own personas with tragic backstories.
But then the shaking began to come back. It was like your legs started crying. Your hands. Crying was trying to find the way out of your body. Crying was showing its face in the cracks of your disguise. You got desperate. You were trying not to let the stupid shaking body take over. And then a shift happened. Suddenly it felt like you were inviting crying in. You grabbed an onion – crying as prop comedy. You rubbed it in your face, but still, you didn’t cry. You started rolling around on top of each other, rubbing your faces in the other person’s clothes. It felt like you were trying to help each other cry, but also somehow you were preventing each other from crying.
Finally, you removed your shoes and massaged your sore feet as after a long day of work, tired after all the almost-crying. And then Katerina, you removed the small shiny gem tears from Hanna’s face. Now they were stuck to your fingers.
„Don’t cry,‟ we sometimes tell people when they cry. It’s like we’re blaming everything on the act of crying, instead of the sadness that it’s symptomatic for. The idea seems to be, that if you could just stop crying, everything would be better. I understand the feeling though. The powerlessness you can feel when someone you love cries, sinks into sadness.
When you said you wanted to immerse yourself in a „river of tears‟ I couldn’t help thinking of that scene in the film The Neverending Story when the boy Bastian and his horse Artax makes it to The Swamp of Sadness. We’re told that: „Everyone knew that whoever let the sadness overtake him would sink into the swamp.‟ The two of them try to cross the swamp, but halfway through it Artax stops. „What’s the matter?‟, Bastian asks the horse, but Artax doesn’t move, just slowly sinks into the Swamp of Sadness, while Bastian yells: „Fight against the sadness Artax! Artax, please. You’re letting the sadness of the swamps get to you. You have to try, you have to care. For me, I’m your friend, I love you‟.
I feel like Bastian sometimes, when I try to comfort people in my life who are living with depression. When I think about it, I think that like you, I also want to be able to ‘control’ sadness, even though I agree with you that it’s maybe a misunderstanding.
„Where did the tears go?‟, I thought when I looked at your shaking bodies and dry faces. Now I realized that some of them might have ended up in this text. Delayed tears. Small glittery gems, shaped like commas.
I wipe them away.
They stick to my finger. ,,,
With love,
Filip