The Interspace II series was produced from photographs and videos I took in January 2022 in New Cross during a community gathering and libation service on the 41st anniversary of the 1981 New Cross fire, and for the unveiling of 87, a mural commissioned by Richard Simpson, his wife Sharon and family, owners of the local Cummin Up Caribbean Takeaway, as a memorial to the 14 young Black people who lost their lives in, and after the fire. ‘Yes! We are Here’ says the plaque in the mural. 

The images in this series consist of minor details in the recordings of the event, spaces where not much seems to happen or moments when something is about to happen. The focus on liminal spaces, both visual and sonic, is a recurring concern, partially inspired by Antonioni’s movies. Here it is serving primarily as a tool for self-reflection, a reminder that it is in in these undefined, uncertain spaces that ‘the other time already at work’ (as described by Derrida) may be perceived, and that an unfolding, a release of forces and a transmutation may (begin to) happen.

An interesting concept in Gilles Deleuze’s book The Fold (1988), one of his minor late works and a creative reading of Leibniz and the Baroque, is that consciousness can be traced in the material plane. It is embodied yet hidden as a result of an origami kind of process where some exterior matter is folded again and again until it becomes interiority.

From another perspective, and in relation to the production of new subjectivities, the processes of unfolding/refolding of interior matter may also offer the possibility of teasing out and healing the painful, hardened scars generated in personal/collective traumas and stored in the subconscious, or of releasing unconscious entities. In this sense, the moment of unfolding is a mysterious, precious, delicate and sacred time. A time when she/he/it is simultaneously dispersing and gathering, shapeshifting and cohering into another singularity, generating a unique curvature and texture and producing, by virtue of her/his/its elasticity and extension, another kind of folding, another shape, in an ongoing, fluid, nomadic movement of trans-formation.