Mountain of Salt

‘I would like to be uninscribed by language...’ ¹

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The last year has taught us a steady lesson in the power of incantation. Since March 2020, we’ve listened to government bodies, media outlets, and less official platforms dissect a highly contagious illness, and with that a new terminology has surfaced as they track its patterns and anticipate its behaviour – and our own alongside it.

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‘The restrictions will not ease. The risk factor of gathering’.

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These new terms and phrases have been gradually charged with a strange force and now, like any effective incantation, we are not only alert to their content but are highly attuned to their cadence and vigilant of their rhythm. They’re powerful enough routines to alter the fabric of both the physical and asomatous aspects of our daily reality; they inhibit movement, they curtail touch.

Elaine Scarry has written of the toll that the body experiences from language, which is pure command, the particular ‘way in which a disembodied cause influences or “instructs”’.² Scarry’s focus is the vernacular of torture and the reproaches of an Old Testament God, but its theorem touches on our amplified relationship to language in light of Covid-19. Having been so thoroughly steeped in imperative and directive – in language that is interested in a single response – our collective nervous system is now coded with new and heightened responses. A sequence such as ‘close’, ‘contact’, and ‘tracing’, for instance, is sufficient to quicken a pulse or set a pupil flaring, extending Covid-19’s viral power beyond contaminant air and fluid; it bears down on a wider syntax as well as on these discrete clauses, in a way similar to its impact on wider collection of bodies as well as the individuals those bodies consist of. It spreads, too, through these maxims and clauses, which ring with the clear, irrefutable knell of a warning.

This form of exposure, one independent of touch and breath – a degree of intimacy however fleeting – is a facet of the virus with no end in sight, and one that will carry on shaping our psychosomatic terrain irrespective of immunity and antibody. Who knows what new terminologies are at this moment taking root, and what will linger on the tongue post-vaccination.

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‘I would not know how to invest wisely in language right now’.³

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In 2020, Bindi Vora began compiling a series of text-based collages entitled ‘Mountain of Salt’. Each collage consists of a found photograph from her personal archive and a titular fragment of news-related commentary which the artist refers to as appropriated text. This juxtaposition alone often captures the surreal, unhinged atmosphere that has coloured life under lockdown. The black-and-white images have a vintaged aura, and their captions shift from passive watchfulness to frenetic indecision and back again. Under an image of wild animals crowding a foyer we read ‘Close The Museum. Open The Museum. Close The Museum. Open The Museum. Close The Museum’, and ‘The Prospect Of A Vaccine And The Ramping Up Of Testing Are “Two Big Boxing Gloves” To “Pummel” The Virus With’ runs beneath a fatigued looking woman in a hairnet.

These pieces readily lend themselves to broader narratives that have played out since March 2020; the pantomime energy that simmers beneath a semblance of order, wrapped up in a disdain for government jargon. Similarly, there’s a, by now familiar, self-defeating irony to ‘Watch And Wait’, which features a volcanic eruption, and to ‘Disgraced Monument’, which depicts our own planet viewed from the moon.

More abstractly, in ‘Human Touch May Be The Enemy’ we see a flurry of hands reaching for a garter photographed mid-arc as it moves across the room. There’s room for poignancy here, if we linger on all the instances of tactile encounter, which have been irretrievably lost; the extent to which touch has been rarefied, turning it to a commodity whose value will only continue to increase.

The appropriated language often feels flat and hollow, perhaps unavoidably so, given that these snippets have already been either thoroughly vetted or vehemently circulated. The photographs, too, might be reduced to nostalgic relics, remnants of a more innocent, more seemingly straightforward and wholesome time.

But there’s a third tier of involvement to the collages; in addition to the found image and appropriated text, they are overlaid with digital shapes. These geometric forms – circles, squares, and lozenges in contemporary pastel shades – alter the photographs’ compositions and inflect their archival calm. At first, we might mistake them for a darkroom-glitch, the result of a rogue drop of dye or a slip of light. By the time we’ve looked closely enough to confirm this is not the case, we’ve taken part in a visual interrogation; one that lifts the pieces out of commentary and potential satire.

This effect is perhaps most evident in a piece such as ‘Making Something Happen For Yourself Has Never Felt More Urgent’, which features an open body of water. There’s a risk of text and image falling into a twee symmetry, but the shapes set them in a kind of generative friction. We see this, too, in ‘Daring Operation’; to the centre left of the image, two stuntmen are at the summit of a ramp, poised to begin their sharp descent. The yellow square, orange diamond, and pink circle don’t directly pinpoint any loci of action; we don’t hone in on the imminent rush of movement, nor the watchful anticipation of the crowd. Rather, the gaze is pulled to the space just in front of the stuntmen, to a point further down the ramp where they’ll soon plunge, and to the left of a spectator’s head where ostensibly nothing is happening. It is not the gathering action we consider, but a pending – and fleeting – destination.

Vora has described the etymological meaning these shapes hold, and in these collages, they bear down on their surroundings in the consuming way that words have come to over the course of the last year. Like words, these shapes pepper landscapes, they sit between family members at the dinner table. Tellingly, we occasionally see them where human beings are absent.

The content of these pieces is not a linear narrative, but the counterforce generated by our gaze tugging and shifting, tracing something in a manner akin to the gravitational pull of a body in space. Not only the pull of a ‘physical’ body, but what Daisy Hildyard has termed the second body, your ‘uncanny global presence’, which sees you ‘embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems’. These ecosystems might be the tangible emissions of the global food chain or the virtual connectivity of the internet, but the second body is the ripple effect of your singular biological presence on the earth. These ripples that mean while you ‘are stuck in your body right here,... you could [also] be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales toward the beach’.⁴ It is a part of ourselves that often goes unnamed and that many of us only began considering this year in the context of a contaminant force. (It’s ironic, perhaps, that a lack of physical movement has pulled our attention to this part of ourselves that is everywhere, all at once.)

There are multiple instances throughout the series – such as ‘The Most Dystopic Year We’ll Ever Experience’ and ‘In This Space We Breathe’ – alluding to an intangible, communally generated presence that makes itself known by way of its effects and more recently by its absence. This is hugely apt, of course, given the collective corpus that has been birthed during Covid-19; an omnipresent body produced by the sheer scale of an unprecedented common experience. While past historical events have generated far-reaching shared experiences, they’ve been primarily divisive, or combative, rather than unifying in nature. Rather than present a taxonomy of strangenesses from ‘the new normal’, or a disparaging commentary on the devolution of social consciousness to statistics, what ‘Mountain of Salt’ most succinctly captures is the ever- swelling level of communal consciousness, a phenomenon other global calamities have failed to engender. Systemic poverty, genocide, climate change – nothing else has slipped so inextricably under the patina of daily life, and so thoroughly altered the planet’s rhythms. It seems we required the jolt of chemtrails following months of empty skies, the cacophony of birdsong over the course of an otherwise silent dawn. These are, of course, sensory details whose impact might fade when the old normal seeps back in, but for now they speak to a newly awakened collective consciousness, one causally connected to Covid-19 but increasingly surpassing it.

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‘...but I don’t want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch’.⁵

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With a relative lightness and deftness of touch, ‘Mountain of Salt’ enters into this shared, embodied knowledge that is the result of living through and with a pandemic, living alongside its consequences; the conjoined space that rears its head during a mass extinction event. The series points toward the use value of the collapsed boundaries we now have at our disposal; what we might do with our fluency in the new rhetoric of unity, with our overlapping states, hyper-vigilance, and prolonged stillness, our familiarity with serial acts of restraint.

This context is, of course, indelible to the impact of the work. If the collages resonate with the viewer, it is because they know what it is to be hungry for language inside a vacuum of touch. They recognise a compulsive reliance on headlines, the frustrated sifting and siphoning through carefully worded dispatches for clues as to how our bodies will soon be permitted to move. Hildyard’s second body feels present too, in this combing through online media and printed matter and clinging to the effectiveness of protocols in other countries, generating more traction between local experience and global awareness.

This vacuum, as of yet, remains unresolved and open-ended, and ‘Mountain of Salt’ likewise makes no attempt to offer conclusions that as of yet do not exist. These are not finite, reflective works, they are a sequence of missives from the depths of a ceaseless interlude. They speak to an impossibly prolonged stature of anticipation, long since bearable.

In her memoir Lonely City (2016)⁶, Olivia Laing writes “What does it feel like, to be lonely?... It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body”.

This feels very close to ‘Mountain of Salt’, not only because its occasional focus is the loneliness that has been a pervasive by-product of the pandemic, but also for its equivalence of feelings with the stuff of brute matter. What has been occurring unseen, this last year, inside our ‘closed compartments’? What does it take for them to open? Should they ever be opened, or are they closed for a reason? If they do fall open, what will we see, and what will it take for them to close?

Given that Vora’s project is accumulative in nature, a large part of the series’ impact comes from its bulk and its slow composition; this is, after all, a year’s worth of language collected and gathered. Perhaps this is why moving through ‘Mountain of Salt’ sometimes feels like a gentle rebuke; how did we think this vast swathe of language would result in anything other than a solid, physical presence? A presence we can see right in front of us, that is scattered all around us, but one that has accrued, too, inside our altered bodies.

While we do not know, as of yet, the full scope of this new vernacular of isolation, quarantine, and contamination, Vora’s series is an instance of how we might work along its shifting borders; there are modes of intervention available to us in light of our still unfolding common ground, and there are more forms of witnessing yet to come.