The Temple Papers

Explores the institutional bondages that inhibit living together-otherwise.

The Temple Papers is a new and ongoing research project consisting of spoken word performance, images, 3D animations, 2D objects, and sonic explorations. Influenced by the blue of Armenian icons, and informed by texts and lectures from BAK. The Temple Papers investigates the societal restraints that mute the voices, histories, mythologies, and philosophies of people who sit outside of normative modes of operation.

The Temple Papers, Composition #01

Dark Mofo, Mona, 2022

SCORE FOR THE TEMPLE PAPERS, MONA, DARK MOFO, 2022

Prologue

A battle of minds negates the pain of a body split between worlds. Clicking fingers and a clenched left hand. Seeing the world simmer whilst struggling for inner peace. The red wine pours freely until woken with another sore head. Sitting at the bar, the TV spews products to buy. Plastic-wrapped vegetables signpost a system not wavering to future needs.

Islands told to sue nations.

Governments of neglect voted in through tactics of lies and coercion. Mirrors on the wall show our true selves, whilst masks help us walk in the light of the day. Too tired to sleep, the white wine eases the solitude.

Another boiled egg.

Familiarity helps the shattered routine. Houses are as broken as the system that sells them. Greed served on platters as humans gorge on the travesties of those beneath them. Promoting particular races and beliefs belies organic worlds’ beauty, brutality, and cohesion.

Prologue reading

Audio excerpt from Temple Papers 3.0 performance Dark Mofo 2022

— 3.01 —

There is poverty in this place, or at least remoteness. Burnt walls speak of ceremony and reverence. I would like to know, who prays here, and when they congregate. Who left the picture in the window?

RITUAL / CEREMONY / REVERENCE

Flickering candles on a blackened night. Snow-capped peaks background the solitude. What makes us feel sanctuary in ideas outside of nature? What makes the trees I touch and the grass I stand on less than the image of a god no one has witnessed?

REMOTENESS / BLACKENED / INTANGIBLE

The char of the candle sends prayers upwards. Places of worship are sanctuaries of belief, but who leads and who follows? Smoke and fire are two eternal ingredients which some have used to distinguish us from others.

PRAYER / MIRROR / SMOKE

Is prayer the escape from the conditions of living within the labour of the everyday? Systems of control that promise new utopias, a code for life, and the eradication of poetics. How can we be creative within the stare of ‘Man’s’ god?

SANCTUARY / COLOUR / ILLUMINATION

The Western god is intangible and a liability, ‘he’ is purely a mirror where man preaches to himself and projects his colours and views onto others.

— read the full text –

— 5.03 —

When you stand on the salt lake from dawn to dusk, moisture wicks from your skin. The layer of lake that forms on limbs is an invitation to sit. Natures intelligence is a far cry from the anthropocentric milieu, whose structures focus on efficiency and culture serves too confine.

MOISTURE / MILIEU / WICK

How would you feel if you were asked to leave your material body and be uploaded to a digital hive? Will you miss the intimacy of touch? Are you willing to become part of an endless evolution? Are we not already part of such a system?

HIVE / EVOLUTION / SYSTEM

With a new distant horizon beyond the world that would not die, the remnants of land division erode in nature’s grasp. No longer do we fly and look down on unnatural geometries. Cartesian grids release their prisoners, and relinquish their hold on others.

CARTESIAN / GRASP / GEOMETRIES

Within a world cusped with salt, passive observers transmogrify in a multiplicity of assemblages. Art becomes a process of slow- analysis, seeking new strategies. When will the old die to enable the new to be born?

ASSEMBLAGE / STRATEGY / FLUX

In the world of others, I no longer feel as though I am standing outside the rule book. The rules are in constant flux as listening enables positive-failure. Worlds collide and fold into each other, bringing relief that we are not all the same.

— read the full text –

Temple Papers 5.4 Reading