030517 – Ecdysis – London

Life never quite goes as planned, sometimes events happen, often many at once that completely throw ones direction. Foundations that one believed were positive, stable and progressive, at another’s whim simply vanish. When hit by such events there are no options but to re-evaluate and adjust, set a new course and navigate the new conditions. This is life. Some are able to control and maintain ones pace and path but most of us are just so much flotsam and jetsum bounced around in the storm. Some events can take months to recover from, others may take many years. Such an event occurred in March and these essays have been put on pause whilst we respond to the new conditions. This recoiling, reassessment and reorganisation recalls an exhibition viewed back on 070317 but never reviewed. Whilst viewing this exhibition I considered how one orders and collates aspects of time to influence decisions so it would seem apt to now add this text as we begin to catch up and carry on.

All animals, including humans, shed their skin. With mammals it is an unnoticed continuous process but with reptiles skin is shed periodically. A reptile’s skin, its colour and pattern are intrinsic identifiers to the reptile. Snakes often shed all of their skin in one piece. Skin is shed as part of the rejuvenation, cleansing and growing process. Unlike mammals snakeskin does not grow but instead stretches to accommodate the growing body. When the limit of the snakeskin has been reached by stretching the snake grows a new skin below the old. When the new skin is ready the old skin is discarded, it will break at the nose and the snake moves forward through it. The skin rolls back like a discarded sock. The discarded skin leaves a trace of what the reptile was, a period of its life left as an etched veil, a record of its size, its health, its scars, its species and itself. The skin is a memory that has been solidified for all to see, a testament to a period of development, a fragment of a lifetime logged and chronicled. The snake has no use for its old skin so it is discarded. The snake has no need for a personal photo album to aid its memory, to help it recall what it is and where it has come from. The snake has no necessity to collect these sheaths of its former self and has no need to use these to direct its future self or quantify and justify its past. The snake is a snake its persona is not modified by continued self-assessment or configured by external forces.

Humans continually rejuvenate their skin as old skin cells die and are replaced by new, but what today is the skin of a human. Man lost his body hair around 1 million years ago but he did not start wearing clothes until 170,000 years ago. At first the function of clothes was simple, to retain heat, to stay warm and dry but with time clothes became a means of identity. Clothes also became chameleonic, changed daily, seasonally, according to activity or festivity. Clothes at the same time became a means of collective identity, the uniform, the tribe, the social signifier. Man magnifies his capabilities with clothes and tools, they are prosthetics that add leverage to his abilities. A man is clothed as much by his home or his city as these are extended prosthetics that enable habitation. The enclosing environ does more than simply shelter us from the elements it is a record of our values, our achievements, our beliefs and our technological prowess. Historically each manifestation or built work is eventually discarded, shed as a snake’s skin, that records who we were and what we did within a particular period of time.

The work Passages of Do Ho Suh at the Victoria Miro continues this analogy. “I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination” a journey through our environs recorded and discarded. An anthology of memory and modifier, the cause and effect that becomes us, here shed as a snakes skin, encoded and documented, fragments, surfaces and spaces. The solidification of past time and its use as a modifier of present time is unique to humans, a self selected memetic evolving. Our memory is never strictly chronological, it is bias and loaded, we rearrange and re-collate aspects of memory to put emphasis into message and meaning. Here the rooms from many cities, from different times are re-sequenced to form a seamless walkthrough. These are the porous boundaries of identity, chronicled and reassembled into a placeless fragmentary walkthrough of intimate memories. The discarded skin reused to establish identity and yet each is transient, ghostly, vulnerable both to interpretation and to the elements, fragile in its structure and its relevance, a mortal passing through a micron of evolutionary time. When we reach the limits of each skin we discard it and move on and create another.

Images left to right 1 Ecdysis, 2-7 Do Ho Suh

The Surrogate Twin