Drowning the memory, On visiting Tomás Saraceno’s Event Horizon, Copenhagen, Denmark - By Malene Engelund

I first drowned when I was eight. My step-brother and I were spending the afternoon in the public indoor swimming pool in our home town, after a summer by the ocean. Over the break we had been staying with our various constellations of parents at different borrowed summer houses on the Danish west coast, perfecting the balance between body and sea, each day testing the weight of our bones in saline water. 

Even now, I recall that period as a state of floating or diving. My memories are made of water, only occasionally interspersed with the chill of the Nordic summer evenings and the strangeness of a dark material we would carry on the soles of our feet when stepping out of the ocean. A tanker had run into trouble that preceding spring and dumped its fuel, creating an oil spill in the area which gradually washed to shore and settled on the sea bed, on the bodies of seals, birds, and us. I remember scraping the sticky black material off my feet with my nails, unsettled by its presence on my skin. To this day it seems the only dark spot in a narrative flooded by light and a reacquaintance with my body’s lightness in water.

 As light gradually lost its moorings, we returned - transitioning from the blue and golden notes of the coast, into the increasing grey of sky and our home town’s industrial landscape. One Sunday that following autumn, we spent the morning at the public indoor pool, practicing underwater somersaults - the kind where your hands fold into fins and work the water, spinning your body into the first, second, third and record-holding fourth turn.

I wanted to be master of water again, master of my brother, and I turned, turned, turned, turned until my brother turned too - swam off with defeat echoing behind him - leaving me to my underwater queendom. The spinning must have disoriented me - the door to the terrestrial world was reflected onto all surfaces, air bubbles seemed unmoving, and I swam my all too human body and its burning lungs in the wrong direction, finally knocking my head against the bottom of the pool. Here I crossed the boundary from light public blue into a private black space. 

 I drowned that day. Or, the underwater creature I once was, and had inhabited again that long summer, died. I left it behind in that private darkness when the sun fortuitously came through the windows of the indoor baths and revealed light to me. The final remains of air in my body were illuminated, bubbles travelled upward and I followed. I swam for the hell of it, felt like a beam of light escaping the event horizon of a black hole; somehow miraculously resisting the gravitational forces of the dark, somehow surfacing. With my brother nowhere to be seen, to bear witness - and my pride too settled to tell anyone about it - I reduced the incident to a fine thread in the tapestry of my childhood. I spun the dark into an almost invisible white, made it thin enough to be brushed aside like the spider web spun overnight as you sleep.

 The second time I drowned, I took myself into the very centre of darkness, more specifically Tomás Saraceno’s site specific installation Event Horizon currently showing in Cisternerne in Copenhagen. Cisternerne is an abandoned subterranean reservoir that was built to supply clean drinking water to the city after thousands of people died when Cholera spread through the capital’s infected wells in the early 1850s. Initially an open basin, the reservoir was covered by concrete, and a lawn was cultivated atop, making its existence imperceptible to the unknowing passer-by. When the reservoir ceased operations in 1933, the space lay unused and abandoned for the next 60 years, becoming a fine thread in the subterranean memory-web of Copenhagen.

 Stepping down into the reopened reservoir with its dripstones, darkness, and damp feels like a return somehow, and Saraceno’s engagement with the space plays into a familiarity that, as I enter, I’m still unable to decipher. Receiving me is a decking to which wooden boats are moored and I’m guided into my vessel by a gallery assistant who I can only perceive as a ferrywoman. I cling to every instruction given by her, her words seeming like a thin rope to steer by. As she places me in my small boat and gently pushes me off into the black stillness, I feel at sea in every sense.

 Saraceno's use of the naturally occurring water in Cisternerne, making the exhibition accessible only by boat, requires me to navigate the installation either by oars or a rope on which I can haul myself through the dark concrete halls. Puncturing the dark are works either illuminated by spots, or works illuminating the space itself. I first encounter a three-dimensional spider web seemingly suspended in air. It appears out of the stillness like the physical manifestation of a memory. I breathe in its vicinity and the structure moves slightly in response to my presence. It’s beautiful, ghostly, and all too familiar, and I move through the water, away, away.

 I travel past a video installation which meditates on the existence of the water spider - a creature weaving an underwater silk web that comes to resemble a diving bell. At the water’s surface, the spider captures air bubblesthrough the hairs on its body and transports them to its silk structure, ejecting them into the web, in turn inflating it. Over the course of the day, the web collapses, and the spider must resurface to the replace the air with new bubbles. Its white weaving and the movements of body and air is reflected in Cisternerne’s black sea, splitting the moving image into two forms of reality and life, but also re-enacting how the diving bell spider collapses the separation between water and air.

I sail on but can’t not look back, and I don’t know now - in the light of reason and day - if my senses played a trick on me, but in that moment the bell seems to burst. I need to bring my boat to a halt. My comfortable position of passenger seems to be shifting as the comfortable line between presence and past collapses.

 And Saraceno’s use of Cisternerne continues to bring about encounters that I’m unable to keep at bay; My poor rowing skills bring me to numerous clashes with the space itself. This time, my inability to navigate the water can’t be kept secret though. Cisternerne has a 17-second reverberation and my failures echo through the halls each time I steer my boat into walls or pillars. 

I try to adapt to Saraceno’s world. I let the oars become extensions of my arms, I haul my body and vessel through the sea by rope, making sure to resist crashes by meeting the cold damp walls with my warm hands. If we’re lucky, we get to navigate childhood this way too; we get to meet our collisions with arms outstretched, our hands softening the blow; we get to make farewells a manageable thing, a gliding past slow enough to allow us to look back, survey the loss. 

 I lost contact with my step brother five years after the drowning; the two parents that brought us into a constellation of temporary family divorced, and we gradually drifted away apart. He still appears in my social media feeds occasionally, his life lit by the screen, and down here in the dark he appears again as I move towards Saraceno’s installation of perfect, shiny planets. Each globe is lit and collectively they make up a galaxy, each planet visible to one another, yet existing alone, separated from its sibling globes by darkness. And as I move on, they are followed by smaller shiny structures, that to me can only be bubbles. They hang in the air like the remnants of my very last breath that day in the pool, and it takes them to finally burst the thin memory membrane, to collapse the boundary between water and air, between past and presence, where the drowned part of me exists. 

 I hold it together, make my way back to the ferrywoman, climb the stairs and walk through the door to the anthropocene. As I move across the lawn I start sobbing. The fifth monsoon-like shower in a week has hit Copenhagen and elsewhere in the world, wild fires rage. Another collapse is unfolding. I’m as soaked through as the figure of the young girl who walks next to me: she followed me up the concrete stairs and won’t leave. She needs to tell someone about what happened to her, down in the water.

Event Horizon by Tomás Saraceno is showing at Cisternene, Copenhagen until 30th November

https://cisternerne.dk/en/exhibition/tomas-saraceno-event-horizon/

Photo credit courtesy of Torben Eskerod

Photo credit courtesy of Torben Eskerod

Photo credit courtesy of Torben Eskerod

Photo credit courtesy of Torben Eskerod

Photo credit courtesy of Torben Eskerod

Photo credit courtesy of Torben Eskerod