underground – Kaiser Caimo

Still working on the murals in the underground carpark. I did not notice when I was taking this picture, but the silhouette in the background looks like a figure dragging itself across the floor. So goddamn creepy.

I’m pretty sure it’s actually just the outline of a backpack resting on a dimly visible table. I don’t know why there is a table in this place, but it’s very convenient. As is the box in the foreground, and the metal rail fitted to the ceiling (not pictured) to which my magnetic LED light clings snugly. This place is kinda like the Room of Requirement. Whatever you need, it provides. I even found a bottle of still water for washing my brushes, just lying on the floor near the wall. Thanks, bro.

Progress is still slow. The paint I’m using now is thick as tar.

But my girls have legs now.

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Separate project in the same space: I’ve also been working on some choreography. I have no recollection of taking this picture whatsoever, but anyway.

Pointe shoes. Adjusting the light, I guess.

And at a later date (these I do remember):

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When I was leaving, I made friends with a filthy but affectionate stray that lives around there. I’m calling her Kino.

It’s very dark down here.

Much of what I’m doing lately revolves around this place. I go down sometimes with friends, who come often to play and record. I’m still working, bit by bit, on this mural, although the weather’s gotten much colder and I can’t hold the chalk for long before my fingers go numb. I’ve also been bringing my violin down here to practice. The echoes are wonderfully rich and very forgiving. I feel less vulnerable when I’m playing, as if the music were a forcefield that I am generating, keeping some undefined threat at bay. It feels powerful. There’s a weird sensation of momentum, slashing the darkness with the violin bow, like some machete-wielding explorer hacking through jungle. Until I stop. Then the silence rushes in and I suddenly feel very exposed.

I’m also slowly working on a piece of choreography for that place. I don’t have much to say about that just yet, but at the moment I imagine videotaping, altering and projecting a solo performance, probably to an audience of no one at all. In general, I prefer any finished work of mine to be several steps removed from the initial impulse. I want to allow for the passage of time. I don’t much care if no one ever sees it. I vaguely imagine some time-distant viewer interpreting its layers, like an archaeologist, but I’m not equipped to make immediate connections with people. I am not a performance artist. I keep myself at a distance.

That’s what draws me to this place: its remoteness. It distances one even from oneself. Something about the dark, it creeps into all the cracks and levers apart all the irregular plates that you have grafted together into an identity. You feel yourself breaking up, like an ice-sheet cracking. You experience everything more purely, each sensation concentrated and isolated, from exquisite animal fear to a lunatic joy.

Whatever happens down there seems to happen to someone else. Whenever I go down to resume work on the Wall I approach it cautiously, curiously, as if it were the work of another hand, a long time ago. A cave painting by a direct ancestor. I am always baffled by signs of other human presence down there – bottles or food or used condoms, smashed lighting or objects moved around. It feels like evidence of time travel or a parallel universe: theoretically possible but so wholly improbable as to make me doubt my own perception. Who the fuck would come down here?

Except me, of course. Except us.

Tag: underground

The underground carpark.