Low fugitive laughter — a few things

_{Low Fugitive Laughter}

^{Recordings of a three pitched lorry horn, stretched and scored for two tannoy speakers. Installed as part of the Keeping Time exhibition, Alba, Italy, 2019}

^{One day in February and everything is at a standstill. Today is the high school graduation of Halima’s youngest but it has been called off. The city is on strike along with the workers at the main gateway that feeds the country’s imports and exports. The entry point for eighty-five percent of all imported goods. A contract has been signed to sell the rights to the South Port Container Terminal to a Philippine port operator under a twenty year concession. We sit down and conversation is already flowing. I realise that assimilation can be my only mode of action; a muscle I have been using from an early age. And I relax my bulging eyes. I remember Meiling Jin’s [1] words “One day I learnt / a secret art, / Invisible-Ness, it was called”, but it never fooled anyone. I remain an observer. Halima starts to grind the coffee. It is damp and the beans take a little longer than usual to fragment. A track. Suddenly, the sound asserts an agency of its own. I stop this thought in its tracks. Tracking. More furnishings. Leave it alone. It remains somewhere between artefact, relic, and event. An anonymous material, keeping time.}

^{[1] Jin, Meiling. Strangers in a Hostile Landscape. Osnabrück, Germany, Druck- & Verlagscooperative, 1993.}