As a child of 7, I stood at our living room window in Florida, just outside Johannesburg, and watched two curved dark tunnel shapes spiraling powerfully across the horizon. The tornado hit Roodepoort, five miles away, and next day I learned that four people had died. My father packed us into the Pontiac and drove us out to view the streets littered with crumpled corrugated iron roofs.
Today, in those parts of the US where tornados occur, tracking them has become a popular pastime with those who crave being drawn into the elemental. But experiencing being drawn into the force field of a tornado is now as possible as dammit at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. On the exhibition ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’ the brilliant Mexican based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is presenting Tornado.
Running with his camera directly into the swirling dark forms of the tornados in what seems an act of total madness, Alÿs, allows himself to be battered by flying debris and huge volumes of sound. One cannot but be awed by this unstoppable natural force.
The beam of light emanating from Penny Siopis
Last weekend at the lagoon at Churchaven, walking with Penny Siopis and Emma Bedford as the sun sank in the sky, we witnessed an intriguing natural phenomenon of a much quieter kind. Each of us could perceive a beam of light above the shadow of our own heads, but not of the other two. Interestingly, the beam could be seen even as we each photographed our own shadow.
No comments:
Post a Comment