This double triptych was selected from a longer experimental series in which I responded to my collaborator, Oliver Driscoll, and he to me, across a period of time. It is an inquiry into the viability of collaborative creative writing and interdisciplinary making practices (photography, painting/drawing, poetry/prose), to test their combined scope for thinking through and animating questions of ethics in moments of crisis. Composed via writing exchanges and provocations embarked on during the covid pandemic of 2020 in Melbourne, it brought creative nonfiction methodologies to be bear on questions of isolation, responsibility and climate (in)action, braiding these with autofictions and employing polemical devices to ask hard questions softly.
Working in an ekphrastic mode (poetry responding to artistic images, in this case di Chirico’s work from 1955), its narrative world appears at first trapped in a kind of eternal sun that never sets. When it segues more concretely into a recent version of Rome, it shows layers upon layer of various kinds of griefs, and implied mortalities (close and global). It tries to create a geological thickening of affect, which reinforces—as it reinflects—the opacity of what loss might mean, and how we approach it by sliding away from it (resentfully, hopefully, fatalistically).
Its significance lies in its employment of (re)combinings of creative artefacts (ekphrasis, poetry, mark-making) to approach the unsayable affective fallouts of the recent pandemic in Australia and its still-being-articulated collision with climate change imperatives and emergent sensibilities. It offers an intertext with interview material, with literary references, with cinema, and throws into question our insistence on narrative cohesion in a moment that might belie the plausibility of assuming time’s continuation in any recognisable way. This publication weaves with and extends my work in TR modes on questions of time, the body and neoliberal consequence.