Echoes from a ‘Mostly Empty Space’
A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
At the very beginning of this filmed performance we view the world as if through Yardena’s eyes, looking down on a clay vessel held between her hands as she walks across a field towards water, catching glimpses of grass through a hole in its base. It is a perspective that quickly shifts to that of an observer, as we watch her walk back again along the field and away from the riverbed. An incidental change of camera angle perhaps, but contained within it, is a Brechtian shift, a reminder that we are standing outside the scene looking in. This move, from inhabiting experience to observing it, plays a significant role in the performance narrative. We too are caught in the repetition of a ritual, experiencing its rhythm and continuity alongside Yardena’s actions, yet at the same time, remaining at one remove, enough to notice with increasing prominence, the routeways; the frequently walked pathways (Lakoff & Johnson:2008), that accumulate beneath her feet.
The performance takes place in Alibaug, India, where Yardena’s Jewish ancestors were shipwrecked 2,200 years ago. According to tradition, seven men and seven women survived and settled in Konkan villages, later migrating to cities Mumbai, Thane, and Pune to become the Bene Israeli community. Her family name ‘Kurulkar’ carries this heritage. When surnames became formalized under British rule, many Bene Israel families adopted the suffix ‘- kar’ derived from the Marathi language to signify ‘from the village of’ or ‘inhabitant of’ following the name of their ancestral village. It is also a word intertwined with broader narratives of the Ancient Near East, to geographical locations or tribal names in the region where ancient Israel was located. Towards the end of Yardena’s name then, carried by this very small exhalation of a sound, is the narrative legacy and Jewish origin of her ancestors.
‘Mostly Empty Space’ was devised in response to this cultural legacy, as a reflection on Yardena’s place within it. There are twelve clay pots to symbolise the number of breaths she takes in a minute; each shaped by a single sharp exhale made mouth to mouth with the vessel edge, an intimate process that imparts its own material lineage, as the remnants of clay from forming one pot, are transferred onto the next. The film follows Yardena as she takes each one down to the water’s edge, to release them into the Konkan water. This footage is accompanied by the soundtrack of the dry clay as it dissolves, offering its own emission of air to accompany the scene, as if an echo of her breath but in slower motion, and a sound that gently mimics the hum of birds from the surrounding forest.
The film establishes an elemental rhythm taking place between the act of giving form to matter, and then letting it go, observing its release into the terrifying beauty of the world. The camera acts as witness, recognising the many footsteps that walk in-between these two points of mortal exchange. At just over thirteen minutes in length, Yardena describes the footage as a quiet meditation on impermanence, 'the body returning to clay, clay returning to nature’ but there are nuanced smaller stories concealed in her pattern of gestures, and in her choice of the word ‘meditation’ to describe them, that require a deeper look.
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In responding to the film, I struggled to find a route into its narrative that didn’t assume I had in-depth knowledge of these rich histories, belief systems or their cultural resonance, or indeed cultural dissonance. I needed to find another way in, to set in motion a trajectory of interpretation that could lead me into its details, where the process of writing could shape other vantage points. To begin this, I temporarily removed the events, dates and geographies from the story, and instead, tuned into the primacy of Yardena’s embodied encounter, and the landscape in which our senses are so profoundly embedded. What follows is recognition of how our engagement with the film can be understood as much a narrative of reacquaintance with our breathing bodies as a retracing of socio-historic familial lines, and a proposal for how one can inform the other.
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A full engagement in our sensory participation with the world can often cause that world itself to appear to change. As we allow the vitality of humming insects, clouds and rainfall to move into more prominent view, our fascination with the importance of man-made objects can begin to fade, their weight in shaping our thought processes, lift. Hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences start to emerge from our periphery, tall grasses, flowering weeds and spiderwebs coaxing our senses into newly reconfigured choreographies. The material world wakes up and vies for attention. This shift is not simply achieved by redirecting our focus. The sensuous world lies in wait at the fringes of our awareness for us to remember it, as an integral part of our living, breathing body.
Just as with our human form, all other shapes and species borne of the earth: trees, birds, fish, oceans and streams, have coevolved with the planet’s shifting rhythms. They too are composed of layers upon layers of its earlier rhythms and forces, shaped over time, and so, together with climbing vines and dragonflies we share common animate elements. To fully engage with their textures and gestures is to recognise ourselves within them, for our senses to be led into the ‘inexhaustible depth’ of their echo of the patterns that formed our own flesh (Abrams:1997).
The extension of ‘kin’ into the ‘more-than-human’ world, is a resonant description of our participation within it, we are not merely observers, our sentient bodies reach out in continuity with the vast body of the land (Merleau-Ponty:1999) and we are experienced in return. Just as with verbal conversation, our sensory perception unfolds as a reciprocal dialogue between the sounds, gestures, textures of our body and the animate world that surrounds us; we see and we are seen, we touch, and we are touched.
This interaction of the body as subject and the body as object, can be most palpably encountered through our interaction with the material of clay, where to impress our fingertips into its surface is to simultaneously feel the clay impressing our skin. It is a dance taken further still by the act of giving form to clay, where the same demands of attention and care in making: ‘tending to, encouraging, counterbalancing, and compensating for changes in material properties’, can foster an equivalent emotional sensibility (Brinck & Reddy, 2020; Mäkelä & Aktaş, 2022).
If we take these thoughts back to our reading of ‘Mostly Empty Space’, Yardena’s sharp inhalation whilst making does not simply mark the time it takes to make the pot or merely offer an interesting metaphoric equivalent to accompany the foot, belly, neck and lip of a vessel. The act of making is an act of care, with each pot a reciprocal encounter between tending to the earth and attending to her breath. Her sound, made beneath the level of words, speaks to the sounds of shaping matter in her hands, and as if in reply, the same tonality and utterance arises from the emission of air from the dry clay as it dissolves into the Konkan water.
In many oral traditions, language is considered less a human possession than a property of the animate earth, where words are not fixed into alphabetised index but shaped by the air carrying sound to each other, as ‘the unseen medium of exchange’(Abram:2019). Our participation with this telluric world is renewed by the telling of our own stories, not isolated, abstracted tales but by taking part in this ‘thicket of meaning’, recognising the air as already full of stories told by other creatures, plants, rivers and winds from the hustle of grass to the laughter of swaying trees.
If we now reintroduce the events, dates and geographies of the Bene Israeli narrative to this thought, we can identify beautiful correlations, not least of those being that the Hebrew word for the ‘divine wind’ or ‘rushing spirit’ when pronounced correctly, requires both inhale and exhale: ‘ru-ah’ a living breath moving within and around us.
Alike many other spoken histories, the Bene Israeli story-tell in ways that adopt a chiastic structure, where a sequence of ideas are presented and then repeated in reverse order, an approach that creates balance and cyclic movement, drawing attention to a central idea around which the other elements are arranged. It is often used to intwine past and present, serving as a mnemonic device to enfold current identities into past events and actions. More specifically in this instance, interlocking Jewish and Indian folklore to create stories that couple and collaborate one another.
Yardena’s ritualistic actions in ‘Mostly Empty Space’ continue this tradition, combining historic and present narratives around the central theme of return, taking a breath in the making of a pot, returning the clay to the water, and walking back to retrieve another breath. From both historic and ecological perspectives, the film captures Yardena as she follows the echo of her body into the sensuous world, connecting and communicating her presence as a part of it, and using the ritual of performative story-telling to bind her actions to a continuum. The ‘empty space’ referred to in the work’s title, is in fact where all meaning lies, if only we know how to remember it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dr Natasha Mayo is a practitioner, researcher, HEA fellow, member of the Royal Anthropology Institute, the Folklore Society and trained in Oral History techniques.
Her practice is fuelled by an interest in approaches that move between social, technical and creative ways of working, calling on drawing, relational aesthetics and sensory anthropology, alongside more traditional approaches to clay – to test the boundaries and preconceptions of the discipline and to identify more holistic, generative approaches to creativity.