Max Purdon

Like most things, like me.

 

I’m trying to be serious here, I’m really trying to be earnest, I’m attempting authenticity without irony because this work is sad; well, it was. It comes from a sad place.

 

The sad place is an architectural and institutional residue of settler colonialism, like most things, like me, the boy: Land in the South African hills worked into obedience by some Christians in the hopes of realising a factory where boys would be forged into a metal they might one day strike the world with, or something corny to that effect.

 

After five years on that land, folded into its communal violence and the wrath of the ways of dead men, the boy returned to be with a world that had left without him.

 

He looked for some time, and all he found was, all he finds is, this theatre, his dorm room—once upon a time— with form in folds, stable surfaces and nothing too soft. This theatre is the facade that governs his comfort and keeps him away from the camera, and that which returns to fail him.

 

Maybe it is an indulgence in the grief of his adolescence, a mechanism of driving the knife into the belly but letting it pop out because time has passed and he can look back on these memories and sigh, “oh no,” and that is, for now, enough.