if loss were a currency: on kamila kuc’s i was there

Contributors

Kamila Kuc, Laima Leyton, Dara Waldron, Ecka Mordecai, Jeremy Fernando

Description

One sometimes wonders if silence speaks loudest not only because it signals to an absence, or an inability to articulate despite wanting to, but that it reminds us that even in whatever is said, uttered, yelled, there is always also a silence accompanying it, walking beside it, within it. And it be tales which hold on to these silences who speak loudest to us.  

I Was There is one such tale. A story by Helena Kuc as inherited by — and simultaneously born(e) through — her granddaughter, Kamila Kuc, it is both from before and after her. So, two tales telling themselves in their own times and contemporaneously, with each other. Fully cognisant that what is lost in the telling, in all tellings, what remains silent, is the now — that remains for the ones who watch, the ones who listen, the ones who see.

That it be the ones attending to these tales — Laima Leyton, Ecka Mordecai, Dara Waldon, Jeremy Fernando, Kamila Kuc herself, and you — who hold on to this loss. A loss that is a currency: not just because it is traded, shared, but always also electric, charged. Where all of us run the risk of being charged and held accountable for — and potentially recharged and electrified by — opening ourselves to that loss.

Reviews

‘If loss were a currency’ is, in many ways, a haunted book — a book of spectres appearing on the very thresholds of language and meaning, allowing no word to pass surely or swiftly before our eyes. It is as if the authors present us — as Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said of Cézanne’s and Picasso’s paintings — with things, places, and events that stand “bleeding” before us, still surprised by their own birth on the page. If chatter expresses a language all too certain of its meaning — and in its very certainty soon empties and loses itself — then here we are confronted with the hesitant birth of meaning, the very first encounters with a significance that is still unsettled and thus remains always yet to come. ‘If loss were a currency’ thus situates us on the side of creation rather than finality, on the side of experimentation rather than stabilised truths. Its stammer, if we may call it thus, is the stammer of poetry and of art entering unknown land. And we, as readers, are invited into this opening — into this clearing that is also a wound — to reflect on our own losses, to confront our own silences, to contemplate our own wounds — wounds that are as impossible to share as they are impossible not to speak of.

~ Anders Kølle, in Cha