GREY SCALE

 

 

Most often we look for the saturation of colours, the attraction of highlights. Colour enhances contours, it promises the depth of fulfilled desire.

Dry Dances listens to the silence of a stormy sea. It enters a landscape whose contours dissolve.

 

A journey through concrete: planes, solids, cracks.

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Sometimes they are sealed hastily with more recent material that bursts them even further. I touch the pavement divided into a grey chessboard with my cheek. I play this game by tracing the patterns. Greasy stains. Sticky streaks of blood mixed with earth. Cigarette embers that have eroded the structure. The porous asphalt surface takes on footsteps. Concrete is a basic substance, fulfilling whatever functionality is asked of it.

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The time between the event, the space deserted of visitors and meaning. Grey doesn't have to be anything: “It is the nothing special between all that's special” (Jaczewska). A fugue merging two tiles, a pause connecting words, air stopped for a moment in the lungs between inhalation and exhalation.

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Grey appears infinite and impossible to domesticate. Dirt mixes with bleached earth, pulverised stones, particles of bone. Grey volcanoes don't manifest themselves very often. They do not provide spectacular sights of blazing lava. They usually erupt unexpectedly, covering vast territories with dust.

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When I don't speak, the words rise up in me. I remain silent, feeling the mass of grey silence overflowing inside. It gives way to comments made by others in a loud voice.

 

Contact beyond language can happen in movement, in observation, in shaping a relationship to another and to space. It is here that the ordinary individual takes centre stage. Not as a sociological figure of specific political-historical circumstances. But as a tireless performer - in their invisible presence, in their similarity and difference to others, in their refusal to represent.

 

 

 

 

 

Kasia Tórz, Antwerp, 2022 

(written as part of the research for Dry Dances and BRUT)