This text is presented alongside the exhibition Fade Into U by Andrea Illés and Stacey Collee as part of the Seventh Gallery Emerging Writers’ Program 2024.

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A note from Charlie Lee

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‍What started with becoming more familiar with Andrea and Stacey’s work prior to their Seventh Gallery show grew into discovering a deep starting point for these words. The previous writings evolved primarily from their month-long activation at Blindside Gallery in the CBD. I’d love to extend thanks to the teams at Blindside and Seventh Gallery, alongside Ange Glindemann for the pairing, and Andrea and Stacey for the rich conversation to follow.

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Next time we

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Red ribbon filings gently grate, by way of scissors across a metal bed frame

Grated, they too continue to curl

Softly around the sand, some sensual impression

Brief contact

Soft rubbings

A metal spring mattress leaves cuts and nicks across bodies

But also scratches other fleshes,

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Perhaps more gentle

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A microphone utters across a ground

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Perhaps more gentle

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A sequin dresses across a bed frame

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Perhaps more gentle

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A sand paths across a floor

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Perhaps more gentle

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A finger across a button

A splash across a lip

Murmur across an air

Hope across a desire

Numbness across a grief

Lens across a body

Tide across a shore

Grain across a wave

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An afterthought of the moon, the sand from the under/commons too takes aim at the tide. A soft resistance enabled by that which it aims to control. Information from within sands washed across oceans transmuting information of past forms. Aged mountains and rocks mutter stories and hopes, although now the order of happenings has been muddled by the tides.

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Water across a cheek

Trolley across a path

Construction across a window

Landing across a chair

Guesses across a nostalgia

Uncertainty across a gaze

Wishing across a want

Operatic across an excess

Overture across a mutter

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I would like to track the journey of a single grain of sand as it exists now

I understand in its breaking apart that my eyes may struggle to glimpse it as it grows small

I wonder if my touch or eyes will lose track of it first

A soft rubbing or a gentle refraction of light

Of course, to cease to know where it is is not to think it is gone

A gaze that extends beyond sight or touch is one led by knowing

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Bristle across an arrangement

Gathering across a collection

Fabric across a wrist 

Ladder across a horizontal

Ornament across a hope

Illegible across a poem

Release across a leaking

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Speculation also takes aim

Conspiracy flutters as winds blow sand into edges and nooks

Perhaps this unseeable grain of sand, a fugitive hope, has entered into a lens

Images blemished with kisses that scratch

Or scratches that kiss

I suppose there’s no way of knowing if this blemish is

the same as the grain of sand I began with

Opening across a stretch

Guessing across a pose

Listening across an image

Ripping across a wearing

Softness across a metal

Kinks across a cable 

Wheels across a concrete

Insistence across a pushing

Knowing across an action

Phrase across a bar

Dew across a rooftop

Opening across a hallway

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Portals to soft re/orientations

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'I said goodbye and I was out the door in a flash, into the train going uptown ... it was always a shock entering the straight world of cars full of grim people sitting dumbly with suffering on their faces and in their bodies, and their minds in their prisons.'

John Giorno in Muñoz, Cruising Utopia¹

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I had a similar experience leaving Remember Me Remember Me. I had spent the past two hours on the 7th floor of an inner-city building and existed in what felt like an out-of-time-out-of-space world. Upon my descent to Swanston Street, I returned to a world with a singular choreography. Like Giorno, I felt shocked, closed in. Streets arranged for 9-to-5 commuters, cashed up tourists, coffee dates. The world, built for and oriented towards certain bodies, schedules, and lifestyles. Existence within a single dimension. 

Using Purcell’s opera Dido & Aeneas as a starting point, Andrea Illés and Stacey Collee adapted and un/made this narrative into a four-week-long iterative rehearsal. Using the gallery as a stage, mythology and autobiography blurred as lines of desire, tragic love, and yearning crossed into each other. An evolving chimera of performance forms inhabited the space. Choreography, pop covers, live photography, and noise overlapped and opened portals into worlds of memory and desire.

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Sand piles between seams and shoelaces untie

A sequin dress contains multitudes when

Tag still on, the fabric stretches so much

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Through their activation of the gallery, the pair imbued lines of gaze with grief, yearning, love, directing them into the future, toward the past, within the gallery space, or beyond a shoreline; the construction site clambering outside the window. Particularly enchanting, their gaze rarely extended to the audience in the room. Their lines of viewing stopped short just before reaching a viewer, or instead looked through and beyond, aspiring toward an indeterminate elsewhere or elsewhen. There was an acknowledgement of those in the space, but the performance was not for them. Seldom did the performance embrace the present, or a singular present at least; the spatial dimensions of the room were likewise pushed: The pair would climb into the upper corners of the room like moths towards a lamp. Blinds shut and opened, and objects placed in nooks previously unnoticed.

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Sand works its way in, held by the fibres that

Undressed, the elastic relaxes and the sand remains

Emptied out of an old shoe

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Queerness is characterised as a 'warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality' in José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia². It is the rejection of the here and now, turning instead to the then and there. Ultimately it is a ceaseless negation of the present, a drawing from the past to imagine an alternate future. Utopia is not about arrival but instead about making home in hopeful indeterminacy. To trust and believe so deeply in something ephemeral—and unseeable. What’s invisible cannot be seen. The unseeable holds more hope; it may be found and enacted, and perhaps somewhere it already is/has been. A more tangible invisibility. Multiple paths towards the future are superimposed on top of each other, all existing beyond seeing. To make home within the indeterminacy of superposition allows new worlds to be imagined, in which desires and charged yearnings can be enacted³.

Illés and Collee conjured a performative quality that pulled from the past to evoke, and gesture towards, a futurity beyond the here and now. The word 'saudade' comes to mind: a melancholic longing for a beloved something, the love that remains. Traces, sands, hauntings imbued with yearning. Assembled footage, read-out conversations, repeated actions, and an ensemble of found objects. The performance layered these traces within each other, blurring memory and desire, creating worlds and sanctuaries within a conjured-up indeterminacy.

The re-performing of actions, bodies, text conversations and pop-song arias is never completed. Re/enacting, re/creating, re/imagining these traces invoke a performance that is drenched in, and yearning for, futurity.

Within the sand lies red ribbon filings from the bed which

We spend an awful lot of time

Waiting so may as well prepare it

In advance by taking a pair of scissors and peeling

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The re/performing of utopian desire and hope gestures through and beyond exhaustion, metal-spring imprints, grief, pain, and physical space. In rejecting a singular space-time so insistently, the lines between pain, hope, and pleasure become blurred. In Illés and Collee’s performance, the act of scraping red paint off the bed frame with a pair of scissors stuck out to me. The noise, jarring at first, soon felt commonplace. Red paint spirals fell like ribbons, mixed with the sand underneath the bed like washed-up sea debris. This un/familiarity was un/comfortable. Why would this bed need to be scraped clean? This act opened a portal to another possibility, one where desire and care take a different form. In peering through this frame, this performance drew attention to the frayed edges of our world, an unveiling. Our 'world; is just one of many potentials. The longer that these portals—potentials—are held open, the more our ontological knowledge of the world is uprooted, and ephemeral, indeterminate worlds beyond can seep in through the cracks.

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The paint tends to land in patterns

In the sand until the detritus makes its way in

To a bag which gets filled

The implications of writing a piece like this troubled me initially – would its publishing be complicit in cementing this work inside a singular time/space, an unavoidable permanency? Sensing a problematic, if not reductive, inflexible reliance on photography and writing within archives, which can often feel deeply static, I felt a duty to allow Remember Me Remember Me to keep existing within the indeterminate ephemeral world it had built.

Working within a frame with deep associations and material limitations doesn’t mean we can’t still gesture towards an elsewhere. Although we can’t yet enter the portals we open, that doesn’t stop whatever they hold from seeping their way into our world. Two things can exist on top of each other, and both be true. Illés and Collee, too, gesture towards portals, offering glimpses into worlds of yearning and desire, charged with potentiality. These fired kernels haunt the spaces we inhabit and re/orient our associations with the world.

With sand and traces that pour  

The day I attended the performance, I felt this charge even before the pair entered the space. It held a sense of in-progress, a happening, a leaving in a hurry The assembled items held just as much memory and insistence as the artists themselves. Illés and Collee wrestled with a sharp spring mattress, the same mattress wrestling with them in return. Leaving imprints on bodies and grazes across feet.

Even without their bodies in the room, an aliveness traced the space beyond the performance. The atmospherics had been altered, or perhaps haunted.  Perhaps in attuning ourselves to these traces, we become more capable of building maps and portals to other worlds.

Traces that pour out

Through the holes we knew were always there

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Normative orientations are built on a series of lines that have been lived on, trampled across, and cemented in flat tarmac⁴. Swanston Street, a world with a singular choreography.

Remember Me Remember Me redirected these associations, drawing overlapping maps to portals imbued with futurity. Witnessing the space in action, assumed associations between the items in the performance and their uses were altered. Queer, temporal, and dis/re/orienting performance has the potential to rewire our connections with the world, and provide a glimpse into infinite new ones, superimposed on top of each other. The re/figuration of bodies and objects gestures beyond the gallery into the minds, untied shoelaces, and sandy shoes of those who visited.