by George Storm Fletcher
I met with the artist Hamza Ashraf, and he explained to me how he lost his residency status from his birth country – due to ‘online nudity', which also ‘outed’ him as gay. Ashraf processes his new reality of ‘statelessness’ in We Fear No God, But Ourselves – a monograph of poems, narrative scripts and photographs, which are predominantly taken with a polaroid camera.
Hamza tells me about the influence of the French writer, Annie Ernaux in his work. I have only read one of her novels, a novella of barely eighty pages, called The Young Man – which is about a break in the protagonist’s life, an intervention in the form of a love affair. Through the process of starting, and ending this brief relationship, Ernaux becomes motivated to write again, but ‘The Young Man’ is somewhat used up in the process. In his monograph, Hamza reestablishes who gets consumed by the writing process, allowing his work to sustain, rather than subsume or deplete him. The book is the first of four – it is the start of something, rather than a culmination of events. We talk about another of Ernaux’s books, The Use of Photography, which is about an affair that she has with the photographer, Marc Marie. Hamza says it is hard to know who was married, as the French call lots of things ‘affairs'. He explains how the book centres on photographs taken after the act of sex. ‘A Classic’, I say, we laugh, ‘A Classic’. Each party then writes about each photograph, but without discussing with the other person what they have written. I have not read this book, and so to some extent Ernaux’s book will always be what Hamza has told me of it. Similarly, we can take the images and personal reflections in Ashraf’s book and create a form of ‘truth’ based on what we have been shown by its author.
Hamza tells me that friends have referred to certain photographs in the book as ‘crime scene photos'. The images in question are in colour, but the objects strewn across the beds appear flat and lifeless. In INT HOTEL CORRIDOR – NIGHT, there is a canister of Kodak photographic film on the bed, it functions as a reminder that photography is not always documentary. Ashraf overlays prose directly on the outline of this photo. The influence of Ernaux’s photography book, of acts, and a sense of chronology is perceptible here. Ashraf’s composition tells us to directly contextualise the text to this given location, that this photograph either predates, or follows ‘an act’, perhaps of sex.
In his polaroids, Hamza spends time in the spaces, and choses a moment to set the camera on a timer. Whilst photography is a series of decisions, the use of a timer is not sharp, it blunts the gesture, softening it across time. The polaroids in the monograph are therefore an elapsed moment, in direct contrast with the precision shutter of the ‘crime scene photos'. In the hotel room act we are made aware of the presence of a voyeur, a television showing an ‘An ad for knives, cutting nothing’. Is declining the mechanical exactness of the posed portrait, and using a timer in the polaroids that follow this story, a reaction to possible violence – a refusal to cut the bodies being depicted?
Hamza and I talk about Margaret Atwood, and how she writes that we are all ‘our own voyeurs'. But there is no sense of the photographer versus the photographed in Ashraf’s work: as viewers we witness, yes, but the hand is imperceptible. Because of this, his monograph does not sexualise pain, despite repeated images of weaponry. This point is reiterated later in the script with the phrase ‘The TV keeps selling knives to no one’. If the narrative given by the metaphorical voyeur (in this case the television) is to buy knives (self-harm), then it is something that we (the protagonist) are not buying. The hand that would cut the body is not present or felt.
Hamza draws my attention to the presence of the red stitch that binds the book together. The thread is a subtle suggestion of the realities of harm in these stories. In a later image: a hand lays upon a bed, with a presence of blood on white bedsheets, creased by the body. The image is black and white, and the rhythm of the red stitch, travelling vertically on the page, in five even drops, is the only colour present to indulge in a bloody, bodily gesture. Here we are informed of possible harm, but it is an editorial decision that seeps in, and stains – like the blood on the sheet – rather than cutting us like the knives on the television.
In the proceeding script we are met with a narrative of ‘cleanliness’, the characters ‘HIM’ and ‘YOU’, converse:
HIM
You clean?
YOU
Yeah.
HIM
Good.
‘Clean’ in this context refers to the presence of STDs, particularly HIV. It is a slang commonly adopted in the queer community, but one that clearly lends itself to a metaphor surrounding shame, and particularly in this monograph, Godliness. This narrative is interrupted by the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, an audio-based alert that the narrative is about to change.
Whilst I am talking to Hamza, a fellow patron knocks over a glass, and we both turn to look, exemplifying the device at work. The familiarity of what the Adhan sounds like, is not needed to understand the drama of this event. We all know what it is for a phone to ring, or to jump at a sudden knock at the front door. The effect, of being taken out of the moment, and back to ‘reality', is universal. The specificity, however, is the intrusion of faith into a deed that contests HIS religion and causes the sex act to cease. Praying, and the sex act described involve bended knees, a form of deference – both are therefore forms of submission.
Ashraf’s use of nude photography, the same act that caused his ‘ban’, is understandable. Ashraf’s monograph examines choice, the decision of when to release the shutter on a camera, how and when to talk to God, when to submit oneself to kneel. Where he has previously been subjected to a loss of agency, the reclamation of these positions is a powerful gesture.
In a later section Ashraf asks, "I do not pray, Mamo, but I think about it every day. Is that not a kind of worship?" Hamza says that your Mamo is the uncle from your mother’s side. The descriptors available to explain relationships are far more accurate in Urdu. Here we meet a binary opposition – a specificity of culture, of traceable lineage; and the ‘statelessness’ that Ashraf now finds himself in.
There is an atmosphere change in the monograph. On the left page, a polaroid which depicts a man, his right eye looking towards us, the right page shows a journal entry from July 2024 that begins, "I am back to being an anxious ..... after last night honestly." The second half of the writing is redacted. An unintentional mystification occurs in the form of Ashraf’s complex handwriting. His cursive is particularly beautiful – so beautiful that it makes one question whether the point of writing is to communicate, or to express what the hand wants to say. With these illegibilities, Ashraf’s enacts what he writes in his text: "I never wanted to be whole, just the parts I could handle." As we turn the page there is a clear image, a soft green polaroid of a tree.
There is a clarity of breath in the following piece, weight of the world. Hamza tells me he allows memories in, allows himself to feel them, and then sees what ‘comes up'. But we are forced out of this space, and Ashraf writes: "The light has changed. What was once warm now cuts through the room like a blade." In the next black and white polaroid, the sitter at first appears headless, but they are not decapitated – the head is in recession as a double exposure, in a state of flux. Ashraf’s monograph communicates, through the book form, what ‘has happened’ to him – it speaks more clearly than ‘factual’ written statement could.
When we recall a memory, we are not finding an intact object, rather we recreate memories each time we remember them. Psychologist Ed Yong describes that, "Memories aren’t just written once, but every time we remember them", and in this process there is a window for ‘reconsolidation'. I am struck but how this is akin to making and editing book works. Until a work goes to print, it is subject to a series of edits, manipulations and erasures. Our readers will never see these changes, and this is exactly how our memories can work – old versions are over written, changes are lost, and revisions are made. Ashraf manipulates this process to reimagine the narrative that has been forced upon him – it is a powerful reclamation of story.
We Fear No God, But Ourselves by Hamza Ashraf
1st Edition published May 2025
Sources referenced in this review:
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (New York: Doubleday, 1993), pp. 721-22.
Annie Ernaux, Marc Marie, The Use of Photography (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024).
Annie Ernaux, The Young Man (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023).
Ed Yong, on rewriting memories:
by Emily Moore
The poet Gwendolyn Brooks said that she didn’t ‘have any special religion’, that her religion was ‘PEOPLE. LIV—ING’ [1]. One certainly feels this when reading any of Brooks’ work. Her characters are complete and entire, filled out from every angle, with voices that make them come alive, and contradictions that make them human. Her work has this in common with that of Gayl Jones. Indeed, it’s one of the qualities for which Jones admired Brooks. Jones wrote of Brooks’ “In the Mecca”, that it was ‘about individual, particular Afro-American human beings’ [2]. Jones’ work oozes the same faith in aliveness, takes the same joy in rendering characters in all their human vitality, in all their beauty and all their flaws.
We can see this from Jones’ first novel Corregidora, published in 1975 to much critical acclaim. The protagonist Ursa is as alive in her taciturn silences as she is in the blues she sings. Both help her to make sense of, accommodate, absorb, and heal from her lovers’ abuse and the trauma of Brazilian plantation slavery with its attendant sexual violence inherited through her foremothers. Eva, of Jones’ second novel Eva’s Man, published in 1976, tingles with this same aliveness, despite her fall into an intense psychosis, despite the fact that she commits an atrociously violent crime, and despite the hostile critical response by figures such as June Jordan who wrote that the novel ‘perpetuate[s] “crazy whore”/“castrating bitch” images that long have defamed black women in our literature’ [3]. Nevertheless, we feel Eva’s aliveness in the shadow of her past. We experience it in her madness, her psychic breakdown, the fracturing of her point of view, and the hallucinatory turn of her language. As Jones wrote of the protagonists of this novel: ‘that man and woman don't stand for men and women – they stand for themselves, really’ [4]. And we see this same human vitality in Harlan and Mosquito, the protagonists of her 1998 and 1999 novels The Healing and Mosquito. These novels, which broke Jones’ first long literary silence, mark a stylistic shift in her oeuvre. They represent the inauguration of a rambling, meandering, conversational tone – a distinctly prosodic real human voice. And it's in these novels, in this more conversational tone, that Jones starts to consider the idea of the human more explicitly; its relation to freedom, agency, racialisation, and oppression. Finally, Almeyda of Jones’ 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist Palmares – the sweeping and lyrical first-person account of Almeyda’s escape from slavery and search for her lover Anninho and the settlement for escaped slaves Palmares – has an aliveness that is fantastical, magical, and multi-dimensional.
There are some constant elements of Jones’ innovative, incantatory style that nurture this aliveness. Her powerful orality – the repeated ‘like I said’s, the ‘I acknowledge y’all’s and the ‘Ain’t I told y’all that?’s – means there is an implicit assumption that we can really hear her characters, really see them, even talk to them, ask them questions and receive answers. Her intertextuality achieves the same thing. Her novels are littered with “easter eggs” like the allusion to the Spider Web bar in The Unicorn Woman, which is also mentioned fifty years earlier in Corregidora: ‘not the Spider where I was to work later, but the old Spider Web that was long since torn down’. Characters reappear in different novels – the newsletter of a secret society in Mosquito contains references to The Birdcatcher’s Catherine, The Healing’s Joan, and Amanda Wordlaw, a phantom writer who features in several of the novels. The “Jonesiverse” is like a kind of truth claim. The characters and the places they go to have real lives that extend beyond the confines of their novels and seep into others. And Jones talks about her characters like they are real, agentive beings. She says, ‘I really did think Ursa would stay with Tadpole. I really didn't expect him to do what he did’ [5]. Her characters have their own lives, their own wills, and make their own decisions independently of their author.
We might take Jones’ commitment to her characters’ aliveness for a kind of humanism. Famously reclusive, publishing in flurries of activity between long silences, and having given no interviews for over twenty years, Jones hasn’t explicitly engaged with the debates swirling within the field of Black Studies between the Afropessimists and the Humanists: debates as to whether the anti-Black violence which has excluded Black people from the category of the Human – as theorised in the Enlightenment and upon which modernity relies – has effected a unique kind of social death; or whether it might be possible to replace this exclusionary idea of the Human with a multifarious, inclusive, and fluid planetary humanism.
So, we don’t explicitly know what she thinks about how to deal with the legacy of slavery’s dehumanisation. But she does seem to share Brooks’ commitment to using the tools at her disposal, her literature, to represent Black people in the fullest, most vibrantly ambivalent reality possible. Hers is a humanism then, of storytelling. Her characters come alive in books. Maybe we can contextualise this idea within the history of Black people being banned from literacy in the US during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. And we might also relate it to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s which celebrated oral tradition in literature – real Black human voices. But Jones’ humanism is about more than just finding a voice in the textual, and its more than empowering oral traditions by embedding them in literature. Her storytelling performs a kind of healing work – a revivification. She redraws the concept of the human by creating Black characters who are irrepressibly and incontrovertibly alive. She undoes social death by declaring social life. The concept of the social is important because Jones’ humanism is of the world. It’s not the liberal humanism of 1950s New Criticism that saw texts as independent of social, political, and historical contexts and assumed the fixed and stable nature of the human subject. Her humanism, rather, entails many implications and contexts. It’s important to talk about the social here, because Jones’ stories aren’t just about humans, but the relationships between them: between characters; but also, in Jones’ words, ‘between the teller and the hearer; and ‘between the storyteller and the story’. These are the virtues Jones recognises in “storytelling” – it’s inherent ‘human connections’ [6].
Jones’ most recent publication, her seventh novel, The Unicorn Woman, is a contemplation and confirmation of her particular iteration of humanism. It tells the story of Buddy Johnson (Mosquito’s uncle), a tractor repairman and WWII veteran. Having returned to Kentucky from France, ‘sometime after the Second World War’, he sees the Unicorn Woman (a woman with the horn of a unicorn in the middle of her forehead) at a carnival and is enthralled [7]. The search for her – or ‘hunt’ as the novel puts it – consumes him. He consults doctors and healing women with questions about her and all other romantic partners fall short of her image in his mind. Although populated by women griots, healers, jokesters – the kinds of alive woman that we’re used to getting to know in Jones’ novels – Jones’ humanism is expressed differently here. The Unicorn Woman – as a motif, as a symbol, as a woman, and as a character in a story – becomes a way of thematising and contextualising the humanism evident across Jones’ oeuvre. She is a way of invoking and inspecting the fraught relationship between Blackness and the notion of the Human: the way in which the modern definition of the Human has depended on the degradation, dehumanisation, and oppression of a racialised Black other.
There is the implicit suggestion throughout that we might take the Unicorn Woman’s horn as an analogy for Blackness. Though this is certainly not a straightforward analogy. It is complicated, for example, by the fact that the Unicorn Woman is herself Black. One spectator says, ‘“They don’t have colored unicorns. All the unicorns I’ve ever seen have been white”’. It is complicated also by the gender dynamics at work in Buddy’s pursuit of her. And finally, that the Unicorn with its horn is a decidedly European symbol disrupts this easy comparison. Tentatively overlooking these confounding elements, however, let’s pursue this thread a little further.
If the Unicorn Woman’s horn functions as an analogy for Blackness, it is not Blackness as an essentialised, unchanging, innate quality, but Blackness as a racialised construct that has been used to enact oppression and dehumanisation. It’s the thing for which the Unicorn Woman is fetishised – ‘“maybe it’s easier to ask people about the horn than the woman”’. It’s the thing people use to declare her non-human – ‘“He thinks my horn means I’m a devil”’. It’s the thing that prompts consideration of what makes anyone human – ‘“That would be something wouldn’t it? If every human being had a horn?”/“Yes, it would sure be something. But if we all had horns, it would just be a natural thing.”’ It represents something for the people that come to see her – ‘“it’s the horn, not me. It represents something for ‘em”’. But there is also the acknowledgement that it’s something that might empower her – ‘“Because that horn is her signature. I mean it has significance. I don’t know what that horn might mean and neither do you. And I don’t know what might be in that horn. Maybe that horn is as special to her as her soul is”’. And it prompts consideration of what everyone’s own “horn” is – ‘“A horn can be anything [...] I ain’t gonna tell you what my horn is though”’. Thus, the horn might provide a way of relating to one another. The Blackness the horn is compared to then, has many implications and meanings.
Alongside this analogy is the novel’s insistence on the humanness of the Unicorn Woman. We often overhear spectators of the carnival show asserting this, saying things like, ‘“She’s a human woman; she ain’t no goat or a lamb”’. But there’s more to the novel’s elaboration of Jones’ humanism than this insistence. It’s not simply that Jones equates the Unicorn Woman’s horn with Blackness and then insists that she is human. Rather, the horn is a way of contextualising the uses of this Blackness.
The symbol of the Unicorn Woman is a way of deftly reminding us of the painful aspects of the history of Black performance. Either explicitly or implicitly, Jones alludes to various ways in which Blackness has been (and, as she reminds us, continues to be) treated as a spectacle. She acknowledges the bleak and disgraceful history of Black individuals being spectacles at exhibitions, sideshows, and carnivals. One character talks about avoiding carnivals because of an exhibit called ‘The African Dodger’, which involved ‘“making fun and games out of hitting colored people and throwing balls at them"’. There’s an oblique reference to Sarah Baartman (a woman exhibited in the early nineteenth century as “The Hottentot Venus”) as Buddy talks about ‘Venus of Willendorf hips’ in a story he writes. He also dreams that he himself has become a sideshow exhibit: ‘“What makes him a wonder? He looks like an ordinary colored man to me”’. Jones invokes the coerced and misinterpreted incidents of song or dance at terror-laden performance sites such as the auction block, the coffle, or in front of enslavers by reminding us that ‘“the struggle of the old slave continues into this day and time”’. Finally, Jones makes reference to the unruly and uncontainable legacy of minstrelsy and Blackface performance and the exploitative, fetishistic, and exoticising elements of the modern Black entertainment industry. Spectators’ comments make this connection for the reader: ‘“She kinda remind me of Billie Holiday, Lady Day”' and ‘“She reminds me of a songstress”’. All of these references are present in the figure of the Unicorn Woman. She becomes a symbol for this painful performance history.
But there are dangers in this analogy. Does this symbolism strip the Unicorn Woman of her humanity? Is her voicelessness a problem? Do we as readers somehow become complicit in her dehumanisation?
Firstly, although Jones reminds us throughout of the fact that the Unicorn Woman is ‘“a human woman”’, she ends up bearing huge symbolic weight. As a symbol of Black performance history, an exemplar of the process by which modernity’s Man is defined opposite and against the racialised other, the Unicorn Woman becomes not quite human. She represents historical and fetishised Blackness. Of all Jones’s literary creations then, she remains most enigmatic, most bereft of the vital humanity that usually characterises them.
And secondly, what of the fact that, despite the reminders of her humanness, we don’t ever hear her actual voice? It’s often ventriloquised through Buddy’s dreams and imagination, but the Unicorn Woman herself remains silent. This is striking in light of Jones’ deep association between voice and personhood; between ‘the liberated voice’ and the ‘“whole consummate being”’ [8]. Is this an unfortunate coincidence? This is Jones’ first novel written from a male perspective. It’s an attempt she has long been planning. (In 1988, she wrote ‘I should probably try that with a novel—just to try it—to see how the man would order his world’ [9].) By finally realising her desire to explore the male perspective in this novel, has she set up a plot that inadvertently accomplishes the very thing she has spent her career railing against?
It’s hard for us to believe strongly in the humanness of the Unicorn Woman, to undo the process of fetishisation when she remains so resolutely abstract and voiceless. So, she does end up becoming the spectacle, the gazed-upon oddity, that we are told she is not. Are we lured into believing too rigidly in the analogy between her horn and Blackness? Do we thus become complicit in her fetishisation? In rendering her non-human? Is Jones, as she so often does, making us uncomfortable on purpose? Why does Jones’s Unicorn Woman partake in the silencing of the protagonist’s humanism that she elsewhere fights against?
Jones must be doing this on purpose. The novel must be a deliberate demonstration of dehumanisation. It enacts the dehumanisation process, enacts the impossibility of love under conditions of inequality, enacts the impossibility of escape from the traumata of Black history in the US. It enacts exactly the dangerous error noted by the poet Audre Lorde in her poem ‘The Black Unicorn’ where ‘The black unicorn was mistaken/for a shadow/or symbol’ [10]. The plot becomes a metaphor. The novel, or rather, storytelling becomes a tool in making clear to us what is at stake in the idea of literary aliveness.
And it’s not only the plot that serves as a metaphor. Buddy’s storytelling voice, his interest in words, sounds, meaning, and naming achieves something similar. He gives us the sense that language is not what it at first seems. There are slippages, doublings, and contradictions. As a child he hears his name, Bud, in the expression ‘a little bird told me’; he refers to ‘a din of iniquity’; he confuses ‘farmer soldiers’ and ‘former soldiers’, ‘colored flours’ and ‘colored flyers’. The mishearings go on and on, multiplying meanings each time, highlighting the audibility of the words and the contingency of meaning upon sound. All of this relates back to the novel’s meditation on spectacle and racialisation. These mishearings parallel the effect of the Unicorn Woman’s horn. The horn means many things at once. It’s made to stand for one thing, but many possibilities lurk beneath, like the various meanings veiled behind the words on the page, hidden in sound, in unexpected aural similarities. Language then, like plot, becomes a metaphor, a metaphor for the novel’s blurring of the line between reality and unreality, between the reality of a human woman and the unreality of a mythical unicorn, or, analogously, between a Black human woman and a Black woman figured as non-human. In this way, writing, words, and storytelling become tools to resist dehumanisation and degradation. Once again, they are a means of declaring Black humanity, not just by representing Black voices, but by being wrung for all their power, all their aesthetic, representational, symbolic magic. In Jones’ own words, ‘The language is no longer flat and one dimensional. You have the sense that [storytellers are] trying to make the language do things. And it's not just to be playing with words, either; they have a stake in it’ [11].
The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones
London: Virago, 2024
Notes
[1] Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003) p. 102.
[2] A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 201.
[3] Jordan, June, “All About Eva: Eva’s Man”, New York Times Book Review (16 May 1976), pp. 36.
[4] Harper, Michael S., ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18, No 4 (Winter 1977), pp. 701.
[5] Harper, ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, p. 696.
[6] Harper, ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, p. 695.
[7] All citations of the text from Jones, The Unicorn Woman, (London: Virago, 2024).
[8] Jones, Liberating Voices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) p. 178.
[9] Jones, ‘About My Work’ in Porter, H. A. (ed.), Dreaming Out Loud: African American Novelists at Work (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), p. 111.
[10] Lorde, Audre, ‘The Black Unicorn’, (London: Penguin Classics, 2019) p. 4.
[11] Harper, ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, p. 706.
- May 19
by James Dyer
Two models are variously splayed and stacked in a small, Paris hotel room. They are staged in Trees Heil’s distinct style that fuses adolescent dress-up with complex eroticism. The room interior is sparsely furnished, like a make-do doll’s house; bed, lamp, side chair.
Despite the bare flesh, silken underwear, and close gentle contact, the models in Room 01 are palpably asexual. There is no suggestion that they desire each other, savour the gaze of the lens, or the eye of the photographer. But they seem chronically aware of the ways they are exposed to these angles of sight; they guard their faces behind hair, a hand, they push themselves into the bedsheets. This timid self-consciousness, along with the harsh lighting and the awkward orientation of the camera, give the photographs a look of private, softcore polaroid snaps. What the models convey is stilted, vulnerable but ultimately trusting. Further, the way they are unflatteringly dressed feels like the work of an amateur director with an image in mind; veiled behind their recording device whilst in front their erotic vision is fumbled into form.
The models’ clothes are a half-worn mismatch of things frumpy, sheer, and furry, from the packet-fresh blue calf-length stockings to the knee-high polished black leather boots. Heil, it seems, gives shape to a fantasy that comes as awkwardly to her as it does her models, there is, as such, something sincere at play here. At a few steps removed from the room, the hotel, the city of love, it’s increasingly clear that the pallid fantasy held in Room 01 is an urge for spectacle.
This series of photographs contrasts Sophie Calle’s 1981 series, The Hotel. Working as a chambermaid in Venice, Calle would search through guests’ belongings, read their diaries, and sift through their bins, taking photographs as she went. Typical of Calle, this was an obsessive kind of investigative portrait photography. The developed images gained their authenticity through the absence of the sitter. In Room 01, by contrast, Heil’s artful obsession is evident in the barefaced construction of the bedroom scenario.
There is, however, still an authenticity in Heil’s photographs. It comes from the inevitable shortcomings of the models, in their ultimate inability to truly occupy, to invade and actualise, that uncertain vision being urged into focus. That is to say, a true fantasy is most efficacious when it retains an indefinite shape, a less-than-tangible form, it is best kept as a feeling, a hazy intuition. Once it is actualised and made specific in action, words, or in image, for instance, it loses some of that necessarily uncertain quality that made it so alluring in the first place.
When Calle peeked and peered, she was drawn to the chance, the accident, the lucky find. By contrast, it is the constructed, the spectacle of the incident itself, not the accidental, that Heil stands over in Room 01. Heil observed that, “of course the room is staged, but it is also utterly real; in an absolute sense, in front of me there are two people laid on top of each other, but this is only one of many other possible ways of seeing what is happening in the room, I just happen to enjoy being physical with people in a way like how animals play with each other’s bodies.”
This is a break from Heil’s usual style that makes the absurdly artificial appear as if it were routine, natural. Here, in Room 01, the scene is forcefully synthetic. Any naturalness of the image is only recognisable once we look through the artistry of the mise en scène to see the scene for what it is. As mundane as that might be, there is something vulnerable at its core and from this point of view, the location, costumes, and poses take on a peculiar uncanniness. It is a traceable fault line running through the entire series that cleaves what is actually going on from the fuzzy designs of fantasy.
In one photograph, the models look almost like mannequins temporarily propped against each other in an upright pose waiting to later be set right and adjusted to take on a more human-like stance. In another, the models’ legs and arms are stiffly interlocked with each other on a chair. It’s a naive, sexless intercourse. What stops all this from appearing too doll-like, though, is a hand softly held in brunette curls, the elastic squeeze of underwear into dimpling flesh, and the distinct sense that each pose is fallible, needing to be kept up, maintained, endured.
There is something in the way Ebba van Beek styled Heil’s models that traces back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s carnal Paris of dancers and sex workers. It’s there in the flowing layers of fabric, dynamic, loose, translucent, and the fluff, frump, and ruff of the thick, off-coloured faux-fur. As a painter of modern life as he lived it, Toulouse-Lautrec offered an uninhibited reach behind the doors of brothels. His 1896 work Seule (Alone) figures a limp sex worker in black stockings hanging over the edge of an unmade bed. It looks like a comfortably familiar scene for the painter; grim but with a tender warmth. Conversely, the bed Heil photographs remains made and the models lumped on top of it seem bloodless. As such, where there was once a dilemma of hedonistic jouissance there is now a despondent, desiccated try at meaningful connection.
Also in Paris' shadowy rooms, in Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel L'Enfer (Hell) the protagonist is a new guest in an old hotel. One evening he notices the light from the room next door being cast into the darkness of his room through a hole in the wall. Much like a photographer, he moves his eye in line with the hole. From there, at a distance as thick as a few rotten planks, bricks and plaster, he imagines the stories of the neighbouring occupants. The protagonist of L'Enfer is a voyeur, what he sees is laced with the tastes of his imagination. As such, the lives of the people next door retain an excess that exists beyond what can be seen through the sketchy viewfinder. Ultimately, the protagonist’s relationship to his neighbours insists on him being obscured from view, breathing lightly, peeking. Heil, on the other hand, is not immediately a voyeur because she is oppressively present in the room, she steps through the viewfinder to direct her models. What they are and what they can become, as such, is the result of how Heil postures them in failing forms with uncertain purpose. Fittingly, Heil shows me a 1988 painting by Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for meaning), that partly inspired Room 01, its strewn form echoes Toulouse-Lautrec’s Seule.
Heil’s Room 01 guards against an insipid visual culture that prizes the immediate, the intuitive, sameness, the readily-known. She does this in a few ways, most notably by emphasising discontinuity – primarily between what is unreal in fantasy and what is made real in lived life – she also makes tangible a sense of deliberation in a medium best known for its instantaneity and she gives narrative shape to a gut-level excitement for the oddity of ambiguity. All this extends beyond what is inherently false in photography, its partiality of frame, insistence on fixity, and openness to interpretation. There is no afterglow in Room 01, instead we are left with the raw obscenity of communication, it’s a numb and lonely feeling.
Photography credits:
Room 01 Photography by Trees Heil
Styling Ebba van Beek
Trees Heil: https://www.treesheil.com/