On Sunless and Sun-babies

Two weeks ago, I cycled to Museum De Pont to see Tino Sehgal’s Thisyouiiyou. I only knew two things about this work at this point. Firstly, that the ‘constructed situation’ I was about to see is an expansion on El Greco’s, Adoración de los Pastores.  And secondly, that this situation would only exist in the here and now. No captions, wall texts, or any other form of documentation, neither in images, nor in written instructions.

Until two weeks ago, my encounters with Sehgal’s work had taken place through the stories of others: friends who had seen his pieces at Documenta in Kassel or at ‘t Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; fellow writers and artists who had performed in his works and lived to tell their tales, or who had approached them, as I did, in blissful ignorance and later tried to capture the experience in works or words. 

Ten years ago, Niña Weijers wrote a column that, for some reason, has stayed with me. She describes her first encounter with Sehgal’s work: how she entered a darkened room, heard singing voices that drew closer, and how she ended up dancing, hip to hip, with someone she couldn’t see and didn’t know. Halfway through her account, she interrupts herself with the following reflection (English translation by me):

“(Dat het overweldigend was, wilde ik schrijven. Angstaanjagend. Ontroerend. Opwindend. Al die woorden die een gebrek aan woorden verbloemen. Groots. Aangrijpend. Uniek. Wat is schrijven soms een armoedige, tweederangs bezigheid.)”

“(That it was overwhelming, I wanted to write. Frightening. Moving. Exciting. Those words that disguise a lack of words. Grand. Affecting. Unique. How impoverished, how second-rate the act of writing can be.)”

She then quotes a song by Willeke Alberti:

“Ik heb alleen nog wat foto’s / en die zeggen ’t me weer / ’t Is voorbij, m’n eerste baljurk / die draag ik niet meer.”

“All I have left are some photographs / and they tell me again / it’s over, my first ball gown / I’ll wear it no more.”

For Weijers, the encounter with Sehgal’s work was like that first ball gown: intuitively she knew that she could never experience something in the same way. There are no photographs or videos or voice memos of how, in that dark room, free from the banalities of language, she found someone to dance with in the sensual landscape Sehgal had constructed. What remains is a vision of a youthful dress she’ll no longer be able to wear.

You can imagine that I had high expectations for my first direct encounter with Sehgal’s work.  

As I walked into the exhibition, I paused to look at several works Sehgal had curated from De Pont’s collection. I was especially drawn to Rineke Dijkstra’s family portraits, that age-old art form she described as “magical shields against time”. Dijkstra has always been interested in the human desire to preserve and capture human ties before they cease to exist.

As I was looking at the portraits, I heard two singing voices further down the hall: one producing a rhythmic, high-pitched trill, the other a long, unbroken wail. I decided to enter the space behind the portraits, assuming I would come closer to the singing voices. I traced the railing, further into the dark. With Weijers’ story in mind, I half-expected that at any moment my hips might be seized by invisible hands.

Instead, I walked straight into a wall.

The thud echoed through the entire museum; the singing stopped; I cursed my temporary blindness and the acoustics of the museum. I had, it turned out, wandered into a work by James Turrell; a geometric plane of light that looked like a 3D render, without a trace of another human being.

Relieved, though slightly disappointed, I found my way back. Full of anticipation, I turned the next corner, and walked straight into the situation. 

It was shaped differently than Weijers’ ball gown, not taking place in darkness, but in the filtered daylight that seeps through the milky skylights of the industrial hall at the back of the museum. The hall was nearly empty, except for four people: three adults and a baby. The baby crawled; the adults knelt around it.

One reached out her hands protectively now and then, slow but assured. The other two, the singers, had, like the child, their palms pressed to the floor, mirroring its movements. Visions of El Greco’s painting lingered in my mind, overlapping the contemporary scene I was witnessing.

I saw four children in total, each unknowingly acting as the choreographer of every movement, the conductor of every sound. One slowly tilted his head toward the ground, and the adults followed in silence—until he burst out laughing, that full-bodied, luminous laughter only babies know. The performers looked up, mimicking the sound, stretching it out, turning it into a kind of hymn. We, the audience, had no choice but to smile along with them.

On this gray, autumnal Thursday, the baby was the sun, and the adults were flowers, turning their bodies toward its light.

After spending nearly an hour inside these intimate, domestic scenes, set within a vast, grey hall, with a soundtrack and choreography that translated the language of babies into something at once tender and unknowable — a language that seems designed to vanish the moment it’s spoken, reminding us of all we have forgotten — I left the situation.

As I was cycling to the station, I realised I had turned the babies into canvases for my own projections. I had tried to imagine what it was like to experience the world as an infant, to live entirely in sensation, without words, without memory, while at the same time imagining what it would be like to be a parent, shaping that world, witnessing it unfold, surrendering to its rhythm, day after day. I had made the situation about me, without hesitation.   

The babies will have no memories of their participation in this work; the first years of a human life are reachable only through the stories of others; of those who looked at you, held you, kept you alive. For the care-takers, those stories become a form of preservation, ‘a magical shield against time’, a way of holding on to what the child will forget, to what they themselves once were; for the child, these stories are the inherited myths of a life before memory, a narrative to cling onto as they develop into conscious creatures.

What remained of this situation, for me, the voyeur, was a trace: a reflection of the sun-babies and their shepherds, spiralling, already dimming to black in the eye of the beholder. 

It’s from that same vanishing point — the moment when light turns to memory — that Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil begins.

The eye absorbing a spiral of light, it’s a recurrent image in Sans Soleil. An eye caught between perception and hypnosis. Marker borrowed it from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film obsessed with looking, remembering, and losing hold of what’s real. It’s an image that seems to stare back at us; reminding us that seeing is never neutral, that every image already carries the shadow of its disappearance.

When I first watched Sans Soleil, I didn’t catch this reference. In fact, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It drifts from Africa to Asia, from ancient rituals to airport lounges, from comic books to video games, from animals to animatronics. Footage of places and people, separated by both geography and time, are stitched together with letters from a wandering cameraman named Sandor Krasna, read and reflected upon by a woman we never see (who often starts and ends her sentences with: "He wrote").

This “documentary” is narrated by fictional characters (Krasna doesn't exist, nor does the person who did the soundtrack, it was all Marker), reminding us to distrust the director’s gaze, to distrust the archive he built, the dream of total recall.

There is no grand narrative here, no single history to hold onto; only the shifting terrain of subjective memory. Of things worth noticing, brought together in a sequence of images.

At one point, the film refers to the Japanese writer and poet Sei Shōnagon, a lady in waiting for Princess Sadako, who compiled lists of "things that quicken the heart”. This ritual appealed to Marker. Sans Soleil is full of “things that seem to quicken his heart”, and these things are deceptively banal.

These are some things I remember from my last watch:

Emus in Île de France
A temple consecrated to cats
People sleeping on ferries
Takenoko girls, or baby martians
Horror film stills
A dying giraffe
The pope in Japanese department stores
Fountains shaped like genitals
Animal masks in Guinea-Bissau.
A woman calling her family
A woman looking at the camera
A woman trapped in a video game.

I’m pretty sure that if you’d ask me to make a similar list after another rewatch, it would contain other things.

Each time I return to this film, I seem to follow a different path through the same landscape, remembering images I hadn’t noticed before. After watching Sans Soleil at different points in my life, I’ve come to think that what quickens my heart most is not what it shows, but what it leaves out; that elusive space between image and memory, between what the camera sees and what we remember of it later.

Marker’s film is made entirely of fragments, yet it’s haunted by what falls between them: the unrecorded moments, the hidden references to other images, the lives passing just outside the frame, the cuts that separate one image from the next.

The flickering, sunless spaces.

They say we tend to remember the beginning of stories, not their ending. Sans Soleil begins with a quote, on how countries might be far apart yet close together in time, and then, there’s blackness. The voice describes the first image Sandor Krasna told her about. It shows three children in Iceland in 1965. Eighteen years before he made this film. We see the children briefly, before the screen is black again, interrupted by the voice telling us that he tried to link this image to other images, but it never worked.

She says:

“He wrote me, “I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a long piece of black leader. If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.”

I wonder if I ever saw happiness in Marker’s pictures, but I’ve seen the black. Marker’s cinema, as Catherine Lupton writes, is “a cinema and a consciousness deprived of the natural light of lived experience, yet compelled to reconstruct meaning through fragments of its artificial reflection.”

Maybe that’s where the two artists meet: in the exact moment the natural light becomes artificial.

Sehgal creates situations in which the audience can bask in the natural light of experience, keeping the artificial light at bay. Marker comes at it from the other side, gathering what remains of that light once it’s already gone, trying to give shape to what memory alone can’t hold. Both try to create their own magical shields against time: one guards the living from being fixed in an image, the other shields us from mistaking the image for the living.

So, how to watch this documentary?

Well, maybe you will see happiness where I didn’t see it or maybe you will see things I have never seen before. Perhaps the most generous way to approach Sans Soleil is to shamelessly use it as a canvas for your own projections. Not to understand it, or even to remember it, but to simply move with it.

To circle around the images as the adults once followed the baby-sun, without expectation, in the here and now. Not with the intention to preserve, knowing that everything we’re about to see will soon start to fade.

To bask in the artificial reflection, to experience the flicker before it dissolves, again and again.