LUKEWARM #2 - Postscript: Re-reading bekas

Geographies through dis/embodiment and memory

Excerpt of bekas - single channel video, 13:38, 2019

Still, for me, that was the least important aspect of the work. Because, no matter how "fictional" the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding." — Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory.

bekas came from a dream, conjured by fugitive water bodies clogged up and silenced with stolen sand. in the dream I woke up marooned, held hostage and pressed against an artificial terrain. my body was no longer mine, transformed into bekas, a receptacle that carries the memory of water. There are traces of what have came before and what may come after in the birthing of a landscape and the death of many bodies in its making. terukir bekas di dalam bekas, from where I was I could see black markings all over this body disembodied, but it remained demonic*. I could feel myself screaming but there was no sound.