48 hours of joy-seeking in Santarcangelo

I have a love-hate relationship with London. The things we put ourselves through just to exist here are ridiculous. We wouldn’t stand for that kind of shit anywhere else. Everywhere is crowded, everywhere is an hour away, everywhere is teeming with wankers. And yet we do it because it’s literally the greatest place on earth. For those who have moved here from elsewhere, every day we pinch ourselves, grateful to be here and to be surviving, praying that our good fortune persists and we don’t find ourselves suddenly expelled. I sometimes feel like I’m going to get found out any minute, but then another payday rolls around, another invoice lands on another desk, and somehow another month’s rent is sorted and sent. Somehow.

In the summertime the love-hatery of it all is stretched even further. We sweat all day, noses to armpits on the tube, or, above ground, lining our lungs with smoggy residue, thighs a-chafing. We hear tales of friends who went to Hampstead Ladies Pond or Brockwell Lido or just for a walk up to the Observatory at Greenwich — it all sounds so lovely but it’s so far and we’re so sticky and we know we’ll probably be at work until about 8pm tonight if we definitely want to take a long weekend for someone else’s expensive wedding.

The joyful moments, when they come, take us by surprise: a gust of cool air as we change trains at Warren Street, a dog on the bus, a colleague arriving with a box of ice pops. Despite everything that has happened in recent months, walking over the Thames remains breathtaking. London glitters. You try to walk like you belong, try to look like you’re not still overwhelmed with excitement just to be there, to live here.

In amongst all this we become diary-people, maybe-people, ‘can you text me some dates’-people. There’s always ‘just another three weeks of madness lol’ before you’ll have time for anything again — for Hampstead Ladies Pond and Brockwell Lido and the view from Greenwich Observatory. There’s always three more weeks, always three solid weeks… of assignments and appointments and events and powerpoints… of snatched moments of life admin: midnight washing cycles and lunchbreak phone calls and almost-forgotten expenses claims and — maybe, if you’re lucky — quick, exhausted sex. That fourth week of freedom is a necessary fantasy; we cling to the hope of it. It’s nice to have I suppose.

Well, reader, I am a joy-seeker. I am a yes-(wo)man. Or I was, once, I think. Yes. I have sought joy in my time. Yes. I did and I was and I am. I AM A JOY-SEEKER.

This I have remembered in a moment of particular airlessness. On a day when London’s lid was screwed on especially tight. As I gasped and panted, an email arrived like an inhaler — would I like to come to Italy, to Santarcangelo Festival?

YES. YES I WOULD.

Artists at the festival will be creating ‘habitats’ in which audiences can explore rebellious bodies, human/non-human interactions, and new strategies for art production.

STILL YES. DEFINITELY YES.

There will be a ‘merman-in-residence’.

Y-E-S.

YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES

YYYYYYYYYYEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

So it is arranged. And I go.

I queue for a long time to get my passport checked by customs at Bologna. By the time I’m through the glass gates my bag has been taken off the carousel and left by the side with a couple of others. This fills me with a moment’s dread — how easy it would’ve been to steal — but then I remember I am a joy-seeker and I have come to Italy to swim with a merman.

A merman (omg).

I get the train to Rimini, and then back out again to Bologna, following the blue dot on my phone.

Our bodies take up space differently in the heat. It’s like they try to evaporate. More than just the sweat; the flesh too. We swell and expand. We want to get cool in order to deflate as much as anything. The first work I see is The Forgetting of Air by Francesca Grilli, and I just want to faceplant the cold tiles, try to get every inch of my skin to connect with them at once. Around the edges of the room, overheated artfolk crouch and fan themselves and press their swollen palms into the floor. Most people in the audience take up space awkwardly, but a few confidently move around the performance space, treating it like a gallery, like it’s all fair game for wandering.

In amongst our privileged twitching and rustling, four men of colour — asylum seekers, local men — breathe into conical aluminium megaphones (except not quite megaphones because they don’t offer any amplification beyond natural reverb) while a central pillar of steam rises into the air. It feels fairly gentle at first, but the sound comes and goes in waves — it can get loud-ish, and with all the stage-breathing and steam it starts to sound like rushing water, or wind, or, at times, a boiling kettle. It feels like a stretch for me to say this is all about the refugee experience — a refugee experience — and I am wary of my own (white) inclination to other these performers, but these sounds created a vivid aural seascape, a treacherous one at that, and it didn’t feel like a huge leap to imagine the journey each of these men has made to be here.

With every breath, they performed a physical act of survival; with every gentle movement, they shifted the space around them. What they deserved from us, from this international artcrowd, tanned but predominantly white-faced, was stillness. It is to our shame that we fidgeted and flapped and strode around, unselfconsciously taking up space as they laboured for breath in front of us.

On the way back down the hill I asked myself if a more considerate audience would have actually made the work less powerful. Like, does its impact rely upon a critical mass of inconsiderate (white) audience members? 20%? 30%? I think maybe not, I would still love it in peace and silence. After all, not everything has to be about privilege, or safety, or race…

…except of course that it does.

In order to be happy, we must tell the truth.

This is from the first page of a kinda DIY mix-and-match report document from Robot+Syndicate, a lab for thinking and strategising from an artist collective in Milan called MACAO. It’s like a zine, except you can fill it with whichever pages you like. (DIY within DIY: meta-DIY.) I take the English version of everything: funding breakdowns, governance charts, a survey of festival staff: where do they think the money comes from? And how much is there?

Santarcangelo is like a Postman Pat town, if Postman Pat were Italian. A tiny town, built on a hill, you’d walk from one side to the other in twenty minutes — not even that. There are rings of narrow climbing streets, zig-zagged with steps and alleyways, and a Hitchcock-y clock tower at the very top. Caves too. (I can imagine horror films being made here.) In the newer, flatter part, much of the festival happens in and around a large square; there’s a school, some grand old municipal buildings, a couple of cafes with terraces, a big fountain and an even bigger archway, commemorating something maybe, or marking the old entrance to the town. The whole square is white Italian limestone, state-maintained and gleaming. In their report, MACAO tell me that 77% of the festival’s money comes from public sources, whether regional or national, and in the programme, the mayor writes the welcome note — she heads a consortium of local townships who effectively own and oversee the festival organisation. This year’s curator, Eva Neklyaeva (sender of the joy email — the ‘joymail’), is the first to be appointed through an open recruitment process, the first in a 47 year history. While the mayor writes that this is ‘a bit risky’, the Robot+Syndicate report gives over an entire page — CAPS LOCKED — to say

THE FESTIVAL NEEDS AN IDEA MORE THAN MONEY.

Back home, it has only been a couple of weeks since the English NPO funding announcements, and less than that since one of my own project ideas was knocked back by ACE for the second time. And now here I am, standing in the middle of Italy (Italy!), accepting the generous hospitality of an organisation largely bankrolled by the state. I’m partly envious of their supportive local council, and partly wish that money didn’t even exist. Meanwhile, the artists around me quietly kick out against this imbalance of power, photocopying their dissent and giving it away for free.

Here’s something from another page (I’m not sure I agree, but it’d be nice):

IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU ARE DOING, YOU ARE NOT BEING EXPLOITED.

If I could contribute my own, it would say this:

IT IS THROUGH UNCERTAINTY THAT WE BECOME ENSLAVED (Yours, a joy-seeker.)

Stop reading and watching this now please:

How’s that for joy-seeking?

Artpop wasn’t even that good really, but Lady Gaga is 100% joy 100% of the time.

In R.OSA 10 esercizi per nuovi virtuosismi, Claudia Marsicano teaches us a dance to Applause; it is while waving my arms in the air that I feel the first rush of pleasure. I’m really glad I came. I’m so glad I made time for this. Why don’t I dance more? Can you even be a joy-seeker if you don’t dance?

It helps that Marsicano has a body of resistance: her rolls of stomach fat and wobbly legs have been programmed here for their rebelliousness, but out of everyone I sit with in this school auditorium, my own body looks most like hers. I like that this aligns me with her, lets me join her club, and for that club to be — finally — cool. She shows herself off to us, lit dramatically at times, accentuating every ripple and cellulite pucker, and she takes pleasure in the possibilities of her body’s rebellion. Halfway through, she removes her leotard and stands in bra and pants, and I am almost breathless with admiration. For a moment, the near-daily anxiety that is caused by my own monstrous shape, like living in a suit that belongs to someone else, is suddenly made suffocatingly close, but as Marsicano stands there smiling, I feel it rushing away from me with the same speed and intensity that the rush of pleasure arrived as she led me in a dance to Gaga, just half an hour earlier.

I wish to reject the appearance of the choreographer, Silvia Gribaudi, when she arrives on stage for the curtain call. I understand that the work is hers and I understand her central role in its creation, but the sudden presence of her thin privilege (to live for the applause-plause live for the applause-plause) is unwelcome.

(Later that night I will go back to my hotel and google Claudia Marsicano. I find a video of her dancing to The Avalanches and I will watch it 3 or 4 times before I sleep.)

Away from my home turf, as a guest in another country, I’m not quite confident enough to be silly. I am being polite and respectful. Because my hosts are great and the festival is 👌 and Italy is fucking beautiful, this resolve is only tested once, at Club Ecosex, where upon entry I am given a finger condom and invited to stimulate an orchid while a topless woman wearing cress on her face mimes going down on a pile of dirt.

Next door, three conspicuously empty beds are draped in scarves and surrounded by shop-bought houseplants. Rather than sit on one (god knows what might’ve happened if I’d done that) a guy wearing a bell on his willy dips my hand in clay and gives me an awkward, and apparently neverending, hand massage. Ambient music plays. Meanwhile, another lady/victim is coerced onto a massage table where we are asked to lay rocks on her.

I stop myself from laughing by maintaining a wide, fixed smile at all times. I probably look like I am on drugs — a shame not to be really; drugs are the one thing that Club Ecosex desperately needs.

There is porn lying around which is kinda cool from a zine-making perspective (basically just guy-on-guy photos where one of the silhouettes in each image has been replaced by waterfalls and forests and shit). Projected on a nearby wall, two nubile young white women with cress on their faces frolick in the same vacant softcore male gaze-y way that cam-girls bounce.

And that’s where they really lost me tbh. I’m genuinely up for exploring queer identities through art (it helps make up for my tiresome cishetness), and there’s a lot to be said for making love to the planet rather than systematically fucking it in significantly less amorous ways, but in the midst of a festival programme celebrating bodies which move differently, which take up space differently, which fight/embrace their own politicisation, or which otherwise do not conform to mainstream perceptions of beauty, to have all this plant porn involve young white women or hung white men just feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

I can’t seem to force ‘Santarcangelo’ into my brain and out of my mouth. I keep saying it like Santa Carlangelo, as if it was in Southern California. In some of my less hesitant moments, I realise too late that I’ve said ‘Sancartangelo’. There is a recording on my phone of my Italian colleague Giulia saying it for me. ‘Santarcangelo di Romagna’. She says it so quickly and effortlessly and her accent is so perfect, with little rolled-rrrrrs. I feel self-conscious trying to emulate it, so I stick with a mumbled ‘grazi’ or ‘scuzi’ and hope for the best. As an English person abroad, you know you’ll pretty much always be okay as long as you can say thank you and sorry.

This is my way of taking up space in Santarcangelo. My fat white body — my fat, white abled-body — is slightly rebellious but mostly not, and within it, my confidence in being understood is perhaps my greatest privilege. I don’t even have to say the name of the town right; no-one minds, everyone gets it. Santacarlangelo, Sanarcantgelo, whatever.

Late on Saturday night, we watch Ravemachine by Doris Uhlich and Michael Turinsky. As with the Silvia Gribaudi and Claudia Marsicano work of earlier in the evening, I feel uncomfortable attributing the piece just to Uhlich, despite what the programme says; it feels so wholly driven by Turinsky, the rhythms of his wheelchair and the gestures of his disability.

It’s funny too. The pair dance to beats created from sounds made by the wheelchair, while a smoke machine fires out the back of it like a stream of disco farts. Turinsky seems to revel in the opportunities for piss-taking too — the similarities between his own physicality and the movement of ravers, absolutely off their tits, brings a smile. I think of that bit in Wolf of Wall Street where DiCaprio takes the out-of-date quaaludes and ‘skips straight to the cerebral palsy phase’, or any one of about 20 different gifs from early 90s clubbing documentaries. Reflecting one another, there are moments when both bodies perform the kind of arm-dancing that we all know from daft nights out, but there are equally moments where Turinsky’s gestures and physicality inspire new moves, or quiet, tender moments where they merge in the middle, limbs knotting together.

Through my British eyes, coming from an arts funding culture that still (largely) tokenises and patronises difference, and kills shared experience by instrumentalising it to death, this feels glorious. Ravemachine assumes non-conformity — assumes no-such-thing-as-conformity — with the result that it inches closer and closer to some kind of end-game of universal generosity. While that may not yet be our reality outside of the performance space, where there are many battles still to be fought, it lets us glimpse something like utopia, something like a hopeful future, if only briefly.

If this was a different kind of blog, I would write that swimming is ‘having a moment’. In what is probably my favourite ever book, The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, she writes that swimming in the sea around Orkney is like being ‘saved: reborn and very alive’. Or later: ‘cleansed’. There’s another book I want to read too, Swell by Jenny Landreth, but a quick search for that brings up countless others: the swimming memoir, the mindfulness guide, the 28 wild swimming locations near London/in Spain/in Ireland/by the coast/etc. I have a friend, Amber, who has been to most of them, judging by her social feeds.

If the publishing industry is to be believed, swimming is a uniquely female pasttime, something undertaken to achieve inner calm and tranquility. I live a couple of miles from Hampstead Ladies Ponds, and yet I have never been there. Despite weeks of feeling sticky, and grimy, and bolted down too tight, I have come to accept that my life in London has no space in it for swimming.

Before I came to Santarcangelo, I ordered a swimsuit online and tried to remember the last time I had owned one. 2013? Earlier than that probably. What kind of swimming costume goes well with A) a mermaid tail, and B) a crippling sense of shame about the size of one’s thighs and belly?

I keep thinking about that line from the Robot+Syndicate report.

To be happy, we must tell the truth.

On Sunday, I see Between Me and P, by Filippo Michelangelo Ceredi. It is a show by a man who yearns for the truth — about his older brother’s disappearance, almost exactly 30 years ago — but will probably never know it. Instead, he uses his brother’s archive of photographs, plus a few hazy memories, to tell us what truths he can.

It’s a familiar format in many ways: man sits at desk, uses projector to tell autobiographical story. Except for two things. 1) He only speaks once in 70 minutes, and 2) it’s not really about him.

I love this work. I have massive, crushing love for it. It speaks to my need for narrative for it also feeds my wish for beautiful design and spaces to for the mind to wander/wonder. Through integrated images, video, text and live translation, and the gradual display of Pietro’s belongings, Ceredi creates a portrait of his brother, his art, his politics, and his troubles. The story is both extraordinary and heartbreakingly mundane, a desperate wish to make a difference to the world despite seeing hopelessness everywhere.

Pietro is glimpsed only accidentally — through reflections or in shadows — but Between Me and P excavates him in layers, like digital archaeology. There are, of course, the different friends and family who are heard in the show, and there are the tiers of windows that open on top of one another on the macbook screen, but his two-dimensional manifestation is in the shadow of Ceredi’s body too. As he purposefully enters the images he projects, half-dancing like David Byrne in dark glasses and a blank expression, there always remains a slightly bigger, slightly taller version of himself in the shadow — a Pietro-shaped absence, animated only through his brother.

I fucking love it.

My swimsuit is all black, with extra black ruching to hide as much of me as possible. I have a silver swimming cap because that’s in the rules of the public pool here. I chose silver because what I really want is a Barbarella bikini and a Barbarella body to match, but this is as close as I’ll get today. (I feel like one of the Club Ecosex finger condoms. It’s 2017. What are swimming caps even for?)

My tail is yellow and purple, like a rainbow trout. There is a brief moment of panic as I fear I will not manage to wriggle the waistband over my bum, but jumping into the water gives it the push it needs.

‘Breathe in mermaid’, says Merman Blix, ‘and breathe out human…’

So I do.

It is only after I’ve left the Ephemeral Islands show on Sunday night that I realise I had been standing in a former robot factory.

There had been manila files on old metal desks, and branded calendars from 2006 and 2008 were still on the walls. It had looked a bit Punchdrunky, except that it was clear this retro junk had just been left here, rather than especially sourced for the aesthetic. The name of the company was Paglierani. I had assumed they made cars because Italy has a lot of car companies, doesn’t it, and also because everything in the room had smelled slightly of grease and oil.

But it turns out that Paglierani make automatic bagging machines, automatic weighing machines, automatic whatever-you-like machines. Rather than make the cars, they make the machines that make the cars. I didn’t know anything about Ephemeral Islands before tonight but I think I can hear that in their music: what began as a bit weird and experimental, using tin foil and ball bearings and playing with analogue recorders to find pre-digital glitches, ended on a massive scale — windows open onto the factory floor. This reveal is fantastic; for the first 20 minutes or so we thought we were just in a single small office room and the sound would remain within it, then all of a sudden there’s this massive power shift — we’re the overseers of one tiny guy using tiny buttons to make enormous noise in the middle of this cavernous industrial graveyard.

It is hard to tell how big it is because so much is in darkness, but it is huge and we are high. I imagine throwing a spanner through the window at some labourer who had pissed me off, but it turns my stomach a bit. This architecture is like a panopticon, bosses like prison guards. I don’t want this to be my audience experience, so I move away from the window and focus back on the small-scale.

Out in another corridor, some other guys have pushed through a wooden panel and found a room full of abandoned paperwork, piled high. I follow them in, at first thinking I am entering some other part of the gig, but it feels pretty well forgotten.

I am not an elegant mermaid. I can’t make my body ripple the way to need to in order to swim properly, and it’s actually surprisingly hard to move a flipper-tail through the water. I decide to be more of a recliner-mermaid than an olympic-mermaid.

I share the pool with Blix, merman-in-residence, and an Italian family who only want to race one another from side to side. I mean, when have you ever seen a mermaid doing races? Never, that’s when. Mermaids sit on rocks and comb their hair and splash their tails in front of the setting sun. In some rare cases (ie: me), they also go on twitter and eat Oreo ice creams from the pool shop, but those are very unusual lesser-spotted mermaids and either way they definitely don’t just do races.

Blix seems cool with it though; he seems like he would be cool with most things.

I think about Amy Liptrot, wild swimming around Orkney. She writes of Victorian hydrotherapy and old Selkie myths, harvesting cockles from the sea bed and midnight solstice swims in head torches. Here, in a chlorinated pool under a 35 degree sun, I cannot imagine the sensation of North Sea water on my skin (or my tail). If there is a whole world between Santarcangelo and London, then there must be two or three between here and Orkney.

Or maybe London is the anomaly here, and Orkney and Santarcangelo have more in common than you’d think. On the train back to Bologna I look out of the window at vineyards and olive trees and stubbly, freshly-harvested fields. The uniformity of the terracotta roofs makes it seem like they are remnants of the earth’s crust, that the rest of the landscape has been excavated around them. I think about Hampstead Ladies Pond, and wonder how crowded it is and how deep and and how cold and how muddy under your feet and how full of posh mums and teenage supermodels and twats who splash. I think about the buses I’d get and how long it will take and whether I can justify taking the time away from work and PhD. My legs are exhausted still, from the previous day’s mermaiding and the current morning’s heat. I think about the sensation of the water on my skin and how different that will be in the rain and the wind of autumnal London.

Does swimming feel like joy in London? Will it be joyful in London? Or will it just be another thing to fit in, another laborious thing? And am I brave enough to wear my swimsuit if my anonymity isn’t guaranteed?

There were a couple of hours earlier this week in which I thought the end of this blog post might involve some kind of heartfelt promise to myself to swim more, like Amy Liptrot and Merman Blix and my friend Amber and all the other ladies who find peace in the water. But to be honest, I just can’t picture it. Showing my thighs in public probably isn’t the big deal that it once was, but the early starts and cold bus journeys and rucksacks full of wet towel — they sound like a right pain in the arse/tailfin.

In my case, joy-seeking has probably got fuck all to do with swimming, as human or mermaid or any other animal. Instead I think it might have a lot to do with breaking routine, doing something spontaneous, or looking forward to something ridiculous. Something like accepting an invitation to go to Italy and swim with a real-life merman.

Thanks to Eva and all at Santarcangelo Festival.