“Into the Augusts of 22, 23 (how many more?)
remembering other summers before us and beyond us”

A duet of in-camera edited Super 8 films.
The title of the piece originates from the poem Logotechnia by Lysandros Pitharas and serves to connect two different sensations of being in August. The films are rooted in the present moment. Each shot is made with determination, yet with uncertainty about the result. The absence of editing allows the filmic gestures to remain uninterrupted, from their capture to their outcome.

He Loves A Bodiless Dream, shot on Gavdos in August 2022, is an intimate portrait of Andrew in Sarakiniko, using the last remaining light which, among other things, flatters the Cretan mountains on the horizon.

The Marshes, shot in August 2023 in London, is a short document of a place in Walthamstow where gay men gather to socialise, recline, sunbathe, and pursue their fleeting desires.

Together, the films prioritise looking as a form of poetic temporality. Echoes of longing are brought to life as the bedroom wardrobe safeguards images of pleasure against loss.

"Seeing Through Melancholia: Transcultural Melancholias / Hüzün in the Eastern Mediterranean" at the House of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios in Nicosia, Cyprus, from October 25 to November 19, 202, Curated by Dr. Alev Adil and Dr. Gabriel Koureas and produced by Catherine Louis Nikita.

Extract from “Logotechnia”

If you fear death that falls about your face,

the moment when all is light,

if you fear,

think of the light as a wondrous state of grace,

a place

the dark submits to as you grow near...

Now he’s sketching the shimmery film of blue ocean and his

body, silhouettes,

amongst wings and water,

floating in the long pause of August,

bodies made golden in the laughter of light,

and slowing in the gravity of the heat, and further by the sea,

entangling us in its realm of fluid silences,

inhaling, exhaling, its vast breath, dipping our hands in it

like hair.

Into the Augusts of 89, 90, 91

(how many more?)

remembering other Summers beyond us and before us,

how many, how many?

now diving into a colder blue, the break up of certainty,

as the water a thousand emeralds dissipate around us immersing

him to deeper and deeper levels,

immersed in the moan of the warm fluid that will eventually

disperse us all.

In our city, shaped like a battery, where love is practiced

like a holy act

a benediction in the cloying boredom of inescapable

government,

demanding ritual, mysticism,

a sudden baring of the flesh,

in our cities some kind of freedom

lies in our nakedness...

And statuesque,

in the dim light, the baring of her breast,

almost stone like my caress.

“Two years of fever, two years, that lifted me

much like a gale strikes a dove’s wing,

I see them reeling above rooftops,

oh unfortunate birds, unfortunate life!

reeling




in the talons of this unreliable, unknowable flow,

two years

the bruised lips of this epidemic, pout and kiss me,

and cover me in this sheet which is the Autumn sky,

and shake the clouds that thicken above our city,

(we below take notes, inventing

metaphors about the weather)

and stumble about,

in the cacophony of rumours, thick

armed shoppers and motorcars,

in the innuendo and blank stares of children

that might be enemies,

in the roar of electricity and fog that might be life,

and stumble

over memories, the previous lovers,

mounds of bones I built with my still hungry love,

and not regrets, and no appeasement, and no crazed shaking

of the fist,

to the quiet sky,

can reinvent our tired wing’s trajectories

as we fly...