Talysha Bujold-Abu

No game to play here, in the pushed back sleeves and wet hands of wash­ing walls. Squares of black space, they appear, only the shape­less hap­pen­ings of repet­i­tive labour. Cam­eras record with a know­ing assump­tion. They see hands and a wall.

The wash­ing con­tin­ues, up and down. Breath­ing with pres­sure flared nos­trils, up and down. How loud it is to be watched. I backed up, with a pho­to. Backed up again, with a flash.

A dark wet square dry­ing slow­ly, slow­er still was the water drip­ping off my elbow. Pack­ing up: zip­per, soap bot­tle, rag. Quick actions. Damp cement dis­ap­peared. The wall left with a phan­tas­mal stain, a pud­dle of grime rest­ing at the near­est cor­ner. The water kept mov­ing, find­ing hid­den slopes that lead down, pool­ing and expanding—chanting the same against the ground as I had with the wall: faster and faster still.

ANTICIPATING is a ner­vous and excit­ing thresh­old. An action, a feel­ing, a space to occu­py that with­holds patience while ask­ing for time. Struc­tures of Antic­i­pa­tion became this tran­sient space. A work­shop built for rein­ter­pre­ta­tion; ask­ing par­tic­i­pants to embody research and inter­ro­ga­tion, to mar­ry process with con­struct­ing quickly.

My process was in wash­ing, wip­ing down walls to cre­ate a square thresh­old, a mark­ing (also unmarked) in its anony­mous pres­ence. Hop­ing to mim­ic the nar­ra­tive lan­guage of graf­fi­ti, the way walls learned to scream pro­fan­i­ty, mir­ror pee­ing youths and embrace sym­bols or images of oth­er­ing. The mean graf­fi­ti, the cru­el stuff. I found the work (the act of antic­i­pa­tion) in the process of inter­act­ing with the wall, in the washed shapes. Doing the math but show­ing the work, the work being that sat­is­fy­ing surprise.

Was this the actu­al strength of graf­fi­ti? There must’ve been some­thing more to turn­ing sen­ti­ment into a pub­lic bill­board or sign. The act of “putting it up” and “putting it there,” a note to be seen or read, a stranger in the back­ground of the every­day. Alike to the cam­eras that watched me washing—the action of it feel­ing odd was enough. To sneak down a back alley (or park­ing garage) and wipe the walls clean … the only mate­r­i­al com­ing loose was dirt and city smog. Stand­ing there, scrub­bing, oth­er­ing myself while chang­ing the wall (if only tem­porar­i­ly) as the water dried.

Per­haps the dis­tort­ed nar­ra­tives of graf­fi­ti (on graf­fi­ti, over­lap­ping graf­fi­ti) is the rela­tion­ship between what can and can­not be seen; anoth­er space of antic­i­pa­tion that threads itself between what was left and who left it there. My shapes fad­ed, the pho­tographs only a last­ing impres­sion. I felt glad that some marks can disappear.