Inquiry: From Mapping Light to Memory
When I started photography a few years ago, we were asked to keep an eye out for extraordinary light; this is perhaps one of the most rudimentary assignments photography students are given when they begin their creative expedition. Every day, I would take my camera out and hunt. As Susan Sontag says, “The view of reality as an exotic prize to be tracked down and captured by the diligent hunter-with-a-camera has informed photography from the beginning…Photography has always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths…Social misery has inspired the comfortable with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is a reality hidden from them…”
But every day, despite travelling and photographing different buildings, people, and places in the city, I felt a haunting detachment, like I was encroaching upon spaces I knew nothing about. Was I expected to act as a historian, calculating and framing narratives? Was I meant to be a scientist, taking inventory of the world as an outsider? I didn’t feel as if that approach to documenting the outside world lent me much objectivity. That method and my personal distance from those spaces, lives, and histories seemed to me like an imperialist way of revealing realities I could claim no authentic ownership of. My distance from the city spaces did not offer me an objective or transcendental lens. I did not want to feign curiosity in an indifferent manner or pocket moments I had no ties to.
I felt like I was a ghost trespassing.
any attempt to capture such spaces would impose a romanticised or historicised lens, dispossessing them of their lived reality and dishonoring the people who inhabited them. Later, I would come to read, ‘Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance’ by Taymia R Zaman and understand the nuance behind my complicated feelings.
Back then, however, when our photography professor insisted we venture out into the city, I was fixated on light and its transformative and malleable qualities. There was only one place I gravitated towards. Every day, when our class was asked to discover a new place to excavate through the lens, I would take two thousand pictures of this house – the house I lived in, to my photography instructor’s dismay. To me, it made sense.
This was my house, a house that I lived in, a house I did not take time to inhabit. For multiple reasons, I would venture out of my room to do things bearing the seal of visible productivity – make tea, dust or clean, sit at the dinner table, offer help, exhibit how I was not asleep, and repeat.
As Adrienne Rich eloquently puts it, “‘No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.” I never felt I could freely loiter outside of my room; thus, I had no kinship towards the rest of the spaces. It was uncharted terrain for me, and it made me infinitely curious. Due to the wedge that I sensed between me and my house, I, unknowingly, started a silent conversation with these areas, travelling back to the same corners, the same nooks, at different times of the day. I found that I could seek refuge in the moments when I could sit with this extraordinary light we were supposed to capture. It stretched time in uneven kaleidoscopic ways and dissolved reality for me.
Sometimes I let go of those moments, and that felt like a revelation – that some were not meant for the camera, they were meant exclusively for me. I could see through them and let myself be seen.
I was playing hide and seek with light, with abandoned or neglected spaces, with inanimate objects, with time.
This was a moment of recognition: I could carve space and time for myself, through the endeavour of photography as well as through the luxury of daydreaming. In small ways, I was altering my relationship to time and space.
I, as the flaneur, did not find the world picturesque. There was a jarring disconnect between us two; it was not only the politics of space or socioeconomic demarcations, nor was it solely how gender alters ownership and accessibility to spaces. Gradually, I came to the inescapable realisation that I could not digest reality as it was. That I was, in various ways, often attempting and seeking to soften the edges of the world to make it more palatable for myself. That quest led me to become a tourist in my own house, just as I felt like a tourist in my own body. I wanted to create spaces I could dissolve into; dissolving was one way of entering them.
Photography offered an alternate lens. I could reflect and investigate through the act of photographing. And I could photograph through the process of reflecting. And why would I deprive myself of that journey? Was I not allowed the luxury to stretch and feel greater than the limits of my body? Wasn’t that a political act? Why wouldn’t I daydream and time-travel, then, when it allowed me to carve and map out an architecture of belonging for myself?
“our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.” – Gaston Bachelard
The act of inhabiting these spaces in my house allowed me to discover a circular relationship with time. I was revisiting them and moving through my personal memories while daydreaming. I was visiting my old house while inhabiting my new house. The same table that I sat under now as a twenty-one-year-old was the very same table I sat under as a child. But in this new house, a silent transformation had taken place. The same plasticky cover laid over this Victorian dining room table was lit by the dull scrutiny of fluorescent yellow lights in my childhood house; the windows in this new house lent something far more tender which transformed the same plastic into something more. The light altered its materiality.
I was submitting myself to the emotional landscape of childhood, where wonder and awe precede spatial and temporal constraints. Time split into multiple realities as true and real as the physical landscape before me. In the most static of moments, I kept time- travelling through spaces while having a dialogue with those same spaces. Here I was, static and still, finding refuge in liminality and looking at these liminal terrains as fertile grounds for exploration and possibility. There was a new language developing, a new kinship bearing fruit.
“Photography may have been its most paradoxical invention: a technological breakthrough for holding onto the past, a technology always rushing forward, always looking backward.” – Rebecca Solnit
When we immortalise a moment, we treat time as an eternal cyclic landscape. The urge to capture a moment, the way we see it, traps us in a conundrum: we mourn the present as we experience it while we’re haunted by nostalgia. There is a past we have grieved and a past we are creating to grieve in the future.” Photographs are an inheritance we create for ourselves. They transform the moment even before it is captured, influenced by the experiences of the photographing eye. When one ventures out with a camera to frame a character, a story, or an experience, one embarks upon a pursuit for connection. The photographing eye lends emotional coloring to the scene and finds a hidden reality, a threshold of connection, a passage of entry. Reality alters before the camera even clicks, a new one having taken the old one’s place.
I look at the past to tangibly anchor and carve a future that is possible. This new reality, this distorted, alien reality, perhaps then changes what is known to be possible. It is through accessing the past that we access the future.
“The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it – can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.” – Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (1987)
I think of my own quest to rediscover my house in order to shape my relationship with it. As if by capturing its spaces in a new light, I would let their reality leak into my experience. As if shaping that reality allows me to shape my surroundings and gives me more agency over this house, a house where I am allowed conditional visibility. As if by me seeing the house,
and allowing it to see me, we will reveal ourselves to one another as well as to ourselves; invisible worlds unmasking and becoming vulnerable to one another, as equals, as playmates.
Then this reality – the reality I create for myself by holding space for this house filled with its shadowed secrets and neglected corners—is my personal inheritance. Rediscovering this landscape will enable me to grieve both the house I have lost and the house I never had.
I have recently started to think about the fourth wall as we experience it in theatre, on stage. I lived more than a quarter of my life on stage, and back then, time seemed infinite and had more weight. Every experience that was experienced then was stronger, more flavorful, more intense. It was more solid and grounded. It had the power to dictate and direct the rest of my life. I was sculpting my future just as the world was sculpting me.
Being on stage puts “living in the moment” in an entirely new light. One trick that I used was taking off my spectacles before performing, because the thought of seeing people used to scare me. The thought of reality entering into disreality and challenging my character and my suspension of reality used to terrorise me. It was the fear of faltering. For performers, it is perhaps a great mercy that the stage lights almost blind us so we cannot see what lies beyond the stage. That extraordinary light makes the world feel dissolved and fuzzy.
In ‘The World Thunderstruck’ from A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes describes a similar feeling of experiencing withdrawal from a world that shifts between the unreal and the disreal. Drawing on Precise eye contact, as well as a sudden disappearance or departure from the feeling of falling outside myself, or a sudden onset of falling inside myself, would be my undoing.
A performer must surrender to the moment in many ways, such as being active and quick on their feet, to make it magical for themselves and the audience, so long as the moment is the reality you’re trying to build for an audience behind the fourth wall. The moment a performer accidentally enters their moment, or their moment breaks through to the performer’s moment – the moment that hangs beyond the fourth wall – a performer might crumble and unravel. To live in the moment on stage, then, perhaps means surrendering, which at its core is a meditative practice. In many ways, performing is sustaining a daydream, but with one’s whole body.
I often think about how acting has transformed my relationship with space. I experience most spaces through a glass veil: distant, flat, translucent. Softening some of my senses permits me to heighten what I feel. I often like to take off my spectacles so I can feel real and dream myself into existence.
How do you add colour to a world devoid of emotional colouring? You play with light.
The language of space is play.
While photographing and mapping my house, I discovered that I could also play with objects, textiles, and found material to create impromptu theatrical productions. Of course, I was the audience. Like a child who arranges and curates their playthings, I wanted to see myself in the actors that were various objects and materials, such as the gloves I wore to dye my mother’s hair or the decorative objects I used to hide while playing the role of a detective as a child. I was always the one hiding them, just as I was always the seeker.
“And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood…”
“Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
With the passage of time, I realised I wasn’t meant to hunt; I had been gathering all along. These photographs and these moments spent between and around the photographs taken were all evidence of that. I was reaching a hand out through my past and grabbing time – not to recreate or regress to childhood but to excavate emotions that these objects and spaces had fossilised. Multiple, layered experiences all coated and wrapped around each other in infinite translucent Russian-doll layers. I had always carried them with me, but by carving a dialogue with these silent spaces in my house, I was taking the time to map them, to see their meanders and unique contours. It was about finding fragments of myself by using these spaces as my map.
To give time its depth, one attunes one’s attention and awareness to its gravitational fabric. Time that could have slipped by as something translucent and hazy is granted more opaqueness. Its solidity and gravity – its space – is made real through pause. It is what allows us to enter the future, because it allows us to touch our past. This pause, with or without the witnessing shutter, is what allows us to escape, because it allows us to transcend.
How odd, to want to taste reality with excruciating detail, whereby the process of escaping it inevitably changes the present through it. How odd for those fragments to be my compass.
“For images cannot be measured. And even when they speak of space, they change in size. The slightest value extends, heightens or multiplies them. Either the dreamer becomes the being of his image, absorbing all its space or he confines himself in a miniature version of his images. All small things must evoke slowly, and certainly a long period of leisure in a quiet room was needed to miniaturise this world. Also, one must love space to describe it as minutely as though there were world molecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in a molecule of drawing” – Gaston Bachelard
Imagination can punch holes in our memories. Sometimes these holes are entire islands.
As more time passed, I started manipulating my photographs. Not only was I having a dialogue with the spaces (in the way they were perceived or taken in a moment in time), I was starting to have a dialogue with my younger self who had taken these photographs. I was superimposing, distorting, and fitting my recent body of surrealist work in those spaces to reclaim them as my own. This was another kind of inheritance, one where I could inhabit a mark, a mark that was not as invisible as my body in that house.
“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived.”
– Susan Sontag
I did not belong to these spaces, just as perhaps I did not belong to my house. But I had started developing a surface and a stage, where I could experience belonging with them.
I was shaping them into alien forms, just as they had shaped me. I was dissolving and blurring the lines between me and these spaces, so I could find safety in them; assimilating myself through the process of assimilating them to the tonal opacity and intensity of my own emotional landscape.
The landscape was time – time as rendered by light, and light was everywhere.
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– Asavir Nadeem is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher based in Lahore. She completed her BFA with honours from the National College of Arts, Lahore and her Master’s in Management in the Creative and Cultural Industries from the University of York. She works as a curator, project manager, and researcher for various artistic projects. She is the co-curator of ‘Taiz Larkiyan,’ a research-based artistic project that investigates the intersection of spaces, mobility, and identity while imagining indigenous and alternate systems of living (funded by Transforming Narratives, British Council, and Arts Council UK). She is also the co-founder, researcher, and project manager for ‘Safar-e-Funoon,’ a research-centred, educational, digital archive that presents and analyses Pakistani art in an accessible manner. Asavir has also worked as a Curatorial Assistant for ‘Be(Coming) The Museum,’ (a Canadian Community Arts Initiative and BNU-MDSVAD, in collaboration with Lahore Museum and ThinkFest Lahore). She is a member of the Women & Gender Minorities In Music Tech-Pakistan programme (The British Council Pakistan in collaboration with Saffron Music, UK).
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