Luce Choules

Here I am. An accumulated and elevated mass, an imperfect rock structure broken into parts and heights – alive and well of course – under organic material and water. I am considering my position carefully, from the treeline – above, ragged rock, snow and below, forest, rivers. All together, we are observing and contributing.

This afternoon, my mountain premise is set, and fluid – a mountainsides composition – a place and space where different modes of knowledge prevail. Research and books are introduced early just as the daylight hovers above dusk. Soon, exposure and translation perform as themes, while high-altitude tourists scale the eastern ranges and geologising gives way to climbing, hushing the valley chatter – exposure has more than one meaning in this place. It is a poem. Generations and formations become interwoven – how can a human be measured within geological time? I notice not all are looking at the heaving bulks of hills and mountain, some are pretending – mountains are inert, like a drawing, witnessed later. Writing-out-the-stage, scale becomes event in a geobodily remin-istance. On Everest, it is a dialogue of two places – here we all are, and here we all go.

It’s early. Performance writing gives way to Greek and Latin – are we looking at metaphor or translation? How is performing, transforming? We are here in this space. We are together. An interview becomes an inter-view. Performing becomes measured – never give up! In a process of letting go ambition, intuition relies on experience – it is experience that gives a live-ness after all. As the morning fades, elements become conductors of imagination. Moving is palpable – rock and eye move each other. The rock invites you. The ground is always moving. We experience a continuous becoming – a meditative immersion and temporal re-immersion. Flexibility of material is key – it is hard to leave the object behind. Roped together, music drifts through stilled mid-air – communication at once aloft, the next sprawled by coiled weight. Later, through the European ranges, images and words flow together as a stream of collective events and documents. In the cities of the lowlands, buildings are imagined as scalable space – inside and out. As the day grows dark, peaceful waters roll and flow in a summer lost, while climbers who eventually dusted chalk carelessly on rock retire at the bar of no return.

Another dawn. A reader notes the passing between places – a translation of journeying forth. A death, happened. An improvisation, a climb made on site of pigment and charcoal, talks of movement. Touches the floor. A boulderer draws across a rock with chalk and effort, failure witnessed over disembodied words. A participatory walk examines followship of the all-together. Is there a correct meaning for recording an experience? The studio can be an elevation. As the sun reaches the zenith, future festivals look back, task unpredictability, and share adventure – expanding, staying small, and continuing on other continents, the remit to roam is a question of scale. Here I am again – peaks above, valley below.