There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be

 

How do we mourn without occasions
without the appointed places and times?

There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be is a film about memory and mourning, war at a distance, and grief that overflows or fits poorly into the usual containers. It departs from the premise that both grief and black holes are so dense and intense that they bend space and time around their specific gravity – warping perspectives, reshaping the physical world, and throwing those caught in their orbit out of temporal sync.

In part 1, Lost in Space/Time, old negatives and prints are scanned and combined with newer footage and audio, moving through a series of dis- and re-locations, disjunctions and conjunctions, to evoke places and people lost over the past twenty years.

In part 2, Copernicus, or Clouds of Unknowing, low-resolution public Copernicus satellite images of the Gaza Strip, dating from October 2023 to September 2024, are paired with a text loosely adapted from accounts of aerial bombardment as experienced by people on the ground, in the recent past, and pilots in the air, during World War I – – the first conflict to make widespread use of both aerial surveillance and aerial bombardment.

In part 3, Monstrous Gravity, black hole simulations from NASA move through landscapes from Kabul and Beirut, warping their surroundings with their passage; the audio here is a sonification of a black hole.

In part 4, Chaotic Heart, or All Known Laws Break Down, the black hole at the center of a spiral galaxy quivers like a madly, irregularly fibrillating heart. This segment is scored by Qasim Naqvi.

In part 5, Afterimages, or Ghosts of Dead Stars, frames within the frame alternate short videos shot during my everyday visual note-taking with more NASA imagery and poetic texts, building up a set of visual analogies mediated by the movement of light. This section is broken into two parts around a passage of more abstract imagery that fills the entire frame, whose base layer is footage of ripped fabric (rended garments), filtered through warp effects.

Throughout the film, layered sound design by Panos Chountoulidis moves us through time and space. Ambient sound dissolves into less recognizable or more musical elements, most still derived from ambient sounds like whistling wind or rustling fabric.

As the title indicates, There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be is concerned with the way grief can feel simultaneously personal and political, individual and collective; each absence felt as both a wound in the heart and a hole in the world.

When installed, There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be is shown in a dedicated screening room, with immersive, spatialized surround sound, accompanied by a suite of textile-based artworks called Death Stars. These wood and fabric panels are constructed from the artist’s discarded and torn garments and possessions, each tied to a specific personal memory: a scarf worn at a funeral, costumes from past films, and blackout curtains from a previous studio. Small pinpricks of light shine through holes in the panels, playing on the theme of black holes – whereas black holes are so dense that even light cannot escape them, these are concentrated points of light. However, one way that a black hole is born is through the collapse of a massive star, and most galaxies spin around supermassive black holes. These objects also play off the Rumi quote referenced in the film, “The wound is where the light enters.”

A series of six 20 x 30 pigment prints on Moab Somerset paper was produced alongside the film.