Longing

Ulrich Loock, Porto, 2003 - 2004
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Photograph by Izabel Jedrezjczyk

Ten years ago I travelled to Northumberland in north-east England, for the performance of a piece by Bethan Huws. I had never been there before, nor have I been there since. I don’t remember the journey. It was a bright day, but without the shadows cast under a cloudless sky. I arrived in the small town a few hours before the set time. There were few high buildings, as is to be expected in a place near the sea. Without stopping in town, I set off on foot and soon came to a rural area. It was the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen. I followed a path between low, close-set hills, which were nevertheless high enough to limit the view into the distance. I crossed a stream; everything was covered with grass, the colour of which I could no longer name. I seem to remember thinking that what I was looking at was the epitome of a meadow. In the green pastures sheep with light-coloured, almost white fleece were grazing, and there were solitary, quite tall deciduous trees. I don’t know whether I actually saw a dark grey castle there, or if it was somewhere else, maybe even in a picture. It wasn’t all that far away, but still too far to go and take a closer look at it.

For a long time I thought the piece was called Singing to the Sea[1]. In a catalogue containing Bethan’s descriptions of her works from the period 1987-1991 there is a concept entitled Sea Piece. Now I know that the performance is entitled Concert for the Sea, but the film - which I have only seen on video - is called Singing for the Sea. It could be that everything I remember and thought about - and I certainly haven’t thought about this piece very often - is shaped by a title that never existed. “Singing to the Sea” like “Ode to the Night”: towards this thing that isn’t a thing but merely bears the name of a thing, with no way of knowing or even expecting that the singing is registered in the place it is aimed at. This is slightly different to the dedication ‘for’ with its implication of an economy of exchange. Strangely enough, I cannot remember the singing at all; I cannot recall having heard any of it. I didn’t go down to the beach but instead remained sitting up above in the place where the overgrown land ends before dropping more than ten metres to the level of the sea. The sand was a dense, yellowish colour and rather coarse-grained. I didn’t want to go down to the elderly women on the beach; I didn’t want to see them at close range: that would have seemed brazen. I hadn’t expected the place for which Bethan had searched for so long to be so unimpressive. The bay formed a wide arc; in the distance there may have been some simple beach reinforcements or buildings with no recognizable purpose. The sea was almost motionless, shimmering and grey like fresh lead. “The sea lay there like lead” sounds like a sentence one has read somewhere before, but that is what it was like. As if at reduced speed, the long, small waves spilled onto the beach. I know the sound exactly. The women, with their stout figures - ‘stocky’ is not a good word to describe women but is good in that it makes one think of plants - in colourful, heavy clothes, the traditional costume of their home country, were moving neither slowly nor quickly, gathering together then drawing apart again, wearing shoes on their feet on the beach. One could look everywhere, see everything. The women had come from far away, from the centre of Europe, yet they belonged where I saw them. They set a kind of weight, a movement. It was not necessary to watch them: their presence was such that one could have turned one’s back on them; it wouldn’t have changed anything, just as nothing changes about the sea if someone who lives nearby doesn’t go to see it for days. I do not recall having heard the singing, but I am sure that with their singing the women turned the sea into something familiar. The sound of their singing carries a long way, enveloping everything within its reach; it is transported all around like a wind blowing in every direction. It has no borders, yet there is a place where it can no longer be heard. The women are singing the sea.

It is an extraordinary, almost incomprehensible quality of Bethan’s works from this period that they give one the feeling of having arrived in a place where one can stay. Somewhere to stay ... staying there ... being there ... being. In the presence of these women with their colourful clothes, with the perfect, inexplicable certainty of their measured movements and voices, one could be by the sea, one could have stayed longer, one could leave and one could also return.

[1] Sea Piece was a first description mentioned in Bethan Huws - Works 1987-1991, catalogue Kunsthalle Bern / ICA London,1991. The leaflet for the Artangel project announced it as The Bistritsa Babi / Bethan Huws - A Work for the North Sea, while in Antwerp the title Bistritsa Babi , Concert for the Sea, was used for the event itself and Singing for the Sea for the film stills that were reproduced. From the beginning, Bethan Huws referred to the project as Singing to the Sea an the film as Singing for the Sea.↩

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This essay is taken from the publication Singing to the Sea available from Cornerhouse.