This text was written on the occasion of Emily Wardill’s premiere of Fulll Firearms in M KHA. It was originally conceived by Jacob Korczynksi as a spoken response to the film, that was recorded and played on the night of the premiere in the cinema. Jacob Korczynksi is a curator at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto.

‘Come Fulll Out Firearms’: four incomplete emails unsent to Emily
by Jacob Korczynksi

Hi Emily,

I received the preview of the film and have now finally moved through it, instead of just beside it, or around it. What I entered was not the architecture of Imelda’s commissioned house as I had previously thought, but the same liminal state as the characters themselves. If Imelda’s house occupies the centre of the film then perhaps the centre of the film is a kind of void? I still don’t know.

After I watched Fulll Firearms I found myself finally opening the Voids catalogue from the Centre Pompidou, the one that we spoke about when you came to de Appel last fall, the one that I brought back with me when I left Amsterdam. I found myself settling into the essay by the musician Arnaud Michniak entitled It’s Not That! and the title alone threw my thoughts on Fulll Firearms into question.

He says:

“Speak to us about power and Power.
Yes, power is strong, demonstrative, can be seized. This is why so many people fight each other to get it. It is open to criticism, visible.
But Power doesn’t play in this field. If it were the case, it would be just another form of power. But it is something else. It’s the Power.

It’s not that, it’s a vibration around that. It’s the search for that, the loss of that. It’s that followed by a question mark, it’s a question that became that. It’s not that, it’s one hundred that’s that become one that, then two, then three, then a hundred again. It’s someone who is looking at us. It’s a girl. It’s a close up of her gaze. It’s a black screen. That lasts. Before the first image. It’s the voices in this black."

And it’s not over, far from it – that’s only the first paragraph.

JK

Hi there,

Today I watched the preview again, so I’ve been thinking about Imelda’s and the squatters’ encounter with the house as two layers that unfold alongside each other, but coming in and out of sync – a space that is shared between Imelda and the squatters as they come in and out of phase.

On my way home last Thursday I caught an interview on CBC 2 that was recorded with Steve Reich when he was in Toronto for a concert at Koerner Hall last year. They played an excerpt of Come Out and talked a lot about it, as it is the 45th anniversary this year and they also spoke of the history it holds in relation to the recent riots in London.

“Come Out was composed as part of a benefit, presented at Town Hall in April, 1966, for the re-trial, with lawyers of their own choosing, of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem riots of 1964. The riots were sparked when a 15 year old boy named James Powell was shot and killed by an off-duty New York police officer. The voice in Come Out is that of Daniel Hamm, then nineteen, describing a beating he took in the Harlem 28th precinct. The police were about to take the boys out to be ‘cleaned up’ and were only taking those that were visibly bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open bleeding, he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken to the hospital. He says: ‘I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.’

“Using the same technique as he did with It’s Gonna Rain (1965) the phrase ‘come out to show them’ was recorded by Reich on both channels, first in unison and then with channel 2 slowly beginning to move ahead. As the phase begins to shift, a gradually increasing reverberation is heard which slowly passes into a sort of canon or round. Eventually the two voices divide into four and then into eight.”

Even though I had not heard it in years, it only took the texture of Daniel Hamm’s voice to reopen my first encounter with it. Come Out appeared on this small compilation called New Sounds in Electronic Music that was one of the maybe two dozen records they had in the library at Glengrove, the first school my Dad taught at over in Pickering. All of the resources he was able to draw upon for the unit he developed on the civil rights movement were mostly static images like books and slides. The experience of listening to that record was something else entirely, it pulled at his students and I like the materiality of the tape pulls at Daniel Hamm’s voice – especially on the interconnected soundsystem they had at the time that broadcast throughout the entire network of open-format classrooms unbroken by the demarcation of doors and walls.

His classroom was in the most recent addition to the school at that time, an enormous round pod with a domed ceiling and roof. As the voices pulled apart from one another I remember I could almost see them racing around the perimeter of the walls without angles or edges, sprinting around us until they were everywhere and we were nowhere, in the middle of catching up with ourselves.

JK

Hi Emily,

If the house is a void then it is an opening that permeates the entire space of the film – the space between Imelda and the squatters, between Imelda and the architect, between us and them.

Today I moved away from the dense array of texts included in the Voids catalogue and finally returned to where I began with Arnaud Michniak’s essay.

He says:

“The void speaks in each sentence, between the words.

It’s worth it to keep looking with words. A sentence can save you. A certain expression can free what a hundred others were imprisoning.

But it’s also worth it to look with the void too. Its exits are hallways, we’ve got to move to a new place all the time, we wonder there, we make friends with questions. All of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of friends.

An actor who smiles. The man who impersonates the actor who also smiles. And when the actor leaves, and once outside he notices that he forgot something, we see him return without noticing him, as if it was not him returning but the guy who just said goodbye.

The void speaks in each moment, in the spaces, when people don’t speak. We can localize it but it’s always so far away, like in these dreams where we just can’t get there and which have endings that never end. We imagine it populated with ghosts, and we find an image."

JK

Hey,

A void is met, two different times come into phase and Come Fulll Out Firearms has been echoing in my ears for the last week.

With Reich’s composition coursing through my head I wanted to return to the void where I heard it first unfold.

Taking advantage of the annual holiday bazaar at Glengrove last night I entered the main doors of the school early in the evening and followed the familiar path to the right of the foyer where the open classroom pods began, where my father and his colleagues collaborated with his students.

In the darkness I reach out for the curve of the continous wall. Instead I arrive at:

A set of double doors
A wall
A hall
A wall
A corner
Discarded modular furniture thrown together in storage
A wall
A door 
A closet
A corner
A door -

- I had nowhere else to go but outside and into the night.

I return to a house later that evening, but not to a void.

JK

(Toronto – December 14, 2011)