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 traveling through and photographing different buildings, people, and places in the city, I felt a haunting detachment, as if I were encroaching on 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? At that time, I did not feel that the approach to documenting the outside world allowed me much objectivity. That, and my personal distance from these spaces, lives, and histories didn’t offer me an objective or transcendental lens, and felt like an imperialist way of revealing realities – I couldn’t claim authentic ownership towards them. I didn’t want to feign curiosity in an indifferent manner or pocket moments I had no ties to. I felt like a ghost trespassing.
Any attempt to capture those places would impose a romanticised or historicised lens upon them, dispossessing them of their lived reality and dishonoring the people who inhabited them. Later on, I would come to read ‘History Unclassified: Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance’ by Taymia R Zaman, and I would understand these complicated feelings a little better.
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 felt a gravitational tug 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 one I lived in, to my photography instructor’s dismay.
To me, it made sense.
This was my house, where I lived in but did not take the 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 am 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. Therefore, I felt no kinship to the rest of this space. It was uncharted terrain for me, and it made me infinitely curious. Due to this wedge between me and my house, I started a silent conversation with these spaces, traveling back to the same corners, the same nooks, at different times of the day. I could seek refuge in these moments where I would 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 these moments, and that felt like a revelation – that some instances 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 – that 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 the two. It wasn’t only the politics of space or socio-economic demarcations, nor was it how gender alters ownership and accessibility to spaces. It was a growing inescapable realisation that I could not digest reality as it was.
There is perhaps an intersection of this realisation with phenomenology inside female bodies, but my experiences often meant that I wanted to soften the edges of the world to make the world more palatable for myself. That quest led me to becoming 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. It was one way of entering them.
I could reflect and investigate through the act of photographing. And I could photograph through the process of reflecting.
And why would have I deprived myself of that journey, when it became available? 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 create 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
I discovered a circular relationship with time when I inhabited these spaces: 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 one I’d sat under as a child.
A silent transformation had taken place, I noticed. In my childhood house, the plastic cover on the Victorian dining room table had been lit by the dull scrutiny of fluorescent yellow lights; in this new house, the windows lent something far more tender which transformed the plastic: the light altered its materiality.
I was submitting myself to the emotional landscape of childhood, where wonder and awe precede spatial and temporal constraints, and every atom of time is split into multiple realities, each true and real. I time-traveled in the most static of moments while having a dialogue with these spaces. I was finding refuge in liminality, and looking at these liminal spaces 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 turn time into an eternal cyclic landscape: we mourn the present while, simultaneously, we’re haunted by a nostalgia. We’ve created a past that we currently grieve and a past we will grieve for in the future. Photographs are an inheritance we create for ourselves. They seep into the moment and alter it from the moment it’s about to be captured, simply because of being subjected to the photographing eye. Before the camera even clicks, reality has already been altered, and a new reality has taken its place.
It is through accessing the past that we access the future. کل – both yesterday and tomorrow – an eternal cyclic landscape.
I look at the past to tangibly anchor and carve a future that is possible. This new reality, this distorted reality, perhaps then changes what has, so far, been known to be possible.
“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 goal to rediscover my house in order to shape my relationship with it. As if by capturing these spaces in a new light, I would let that reality become part of my experience of it. As if shaping this reality will allow me to shape my surroundings and give me more agency over this house, a house that I have felt no kinship to, a house where I am allowed conditional visibility. As if seeing the house and allowing it to see me will reveal each to the other, as well as to ourselves, invisible worlds unmasking and made vulnerable to me as equals, as playmates. As if this reality that I am creating for myself – by holding space for this house filled with its shadowed secrets and neglected corners – is my personal inheritance. As if rediscovering this landscape will allow me to grieve the house I have lost as well as the house I never had.
“(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an aquarium; I see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; I keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blue, into precision.” ― Roland Barthes
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 was stronger, more flavorful, more intense. It was more solid and grounded, and could dictate and direct the rest of my life. I was sculpting my future just as the world was sculpting me.
Performing on stage puts “living in the moment” in an entirely new light. One trick that I used was taking off my spectacles before I performed because the thought of seeing people scared me. I was terrified by the idea of reality entering disreality and challenging my character, and suspending my particular reality. I was afraid I would falter. For actors, perhaps it is a great mercy that the stage lights almost blind us so we cannot see what lies beyond it. That extraordinary light makes the world feel dissolved and fuzzy, in a way that Barthes describes in ‘The World Thunderstruck’.
Direct eye contact, or a sudden disappearance or departure from the feeling of falling outside myself, or a sudden onset of falling inside myself, would be my undoing. Of course, a performer must surrender to the moment in many ways, by being active and quick on their feet to make it magical for themselves as well as the audience, so long as the moment is the reality they’re trying to build for the audience behind the fourth wall. The moment an actor enters their moment, or the moment their moment leaks through to yours – which hangs beyond the fourth wall on the stage – an actor might crumble and unravel. Living in the moment, then, perhaps means surrendering to a new rhythm of the moment, 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 possibly transformed my relationship with space. I would describe my experience of most spaces as if I’m at a distance from them. 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. The audience was myself, of course. 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 decoration pieces I used to hide when pretending to be 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
As time passed I realized I had been gathering all along, not hunting. These photographs and these moments spent between and around the photographs taken were all evidence. I was reaching out a hand 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 wrapped around each other in infinite translucent Russian-doll layers. I had always carried them with me, but by creating a dialogue with these silent spaces in my house now, I was taking the time to map them, to see their meanders and unique contours. My act was about finding fragments of myself, and this space was my map.
To give time its depth, one attunes one’s attention to its gravitational fabric. And pausing is what makes time solid; it could have slipped by as something translucent and hazy, but it becomes opaque. The pause is what allows us to enter the future, because it lets us 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 went by, I started manipulating my photographs. Not only was I having a dialogue with these spaces in how they were perceived or taken, I began having a dialogue with my younger self who had taken these photographs. I was superimposing, distorting, and fitting my recent body of surrealist work into 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 the 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 —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 completed her Master’s in Management in the Creative and Cultural Industries from University of York. She is working 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” (Canadian Community Arts Initiative and BNU-MDSVAD in collaboration with Lahore Museum, and ThinkFest Lahore). She is also 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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