Toriad (from holescapes/twlldirweddau)

Toriad

Ffin Jordão

14 January 2025 | Minute read

Toriad

(from holescapes/twlldirweddau)

This text was written in response to Fel gwacter (2024), a film by Owain Train McGilvary and Dylan Huw commissioned by Mostyn and LUX Moving Image through the CELF the national contemporary art gallery for Wales. In addition to its publication through Celf ar y Cyd, ‘Toriad’ appears in holescapes / twlldirweddau, a zine handmade by the artists and Elin Angharad (@zinecymru) as a continuation of the film’s playful, transdisciplinary and collaborative research process. The zine presents drawings, collages and documentary detritus from the film’s development, alongside additional commissioned responses by Steffan Gwynn and Talulah Thomas (the film’s sound designer). Their collage-texts emulate – and take to tantalisingly new directions – the film’s associative formal logic, as a method of producing counter-narratives from Welsh and queer archives of various kinds.

Ffin, a transdisciplinary artist and creative biologist, responded to the artists’ invitation to think with their film by using as a departure point its queer-speculative approach to the history of Welsh quarries. ‘Toriad’ builds an impressionistic portrait of a journey through spatial and temporal landscapes, drawing on Ffin’s longstanding interest in the poetics and politics of their immediate ecology, the Dyfi Valley. In 2021, Owain, Dylan and Ffin all contributed to Cynfas’ fourth issue, queer looking / golwg cwiar. The Welsh translation of this response was created by Dylan Huw.

Prey, prize, chase, quest, creature ~ synonyms of quarry.

Dwi’n mynd am dro yn fy mamiaith, as though with an oracle.

The pace is real slow.

Not because my feet aren’t steady (I deeply trust this ground).

Or because the path to follow isn’t clear (slate train tracks covered in leaf mould lead straight to the tunnel).

But because I’m making myself porous to the enveloping current emanating from this place,

thick with recollection, longing, drive and desire.

There is plenty happening on the surface to catch the eye: ruined slate cottages covered in charming clumps of moss, splotches of ancient lichen, piles of random human debris: an upturned bed frame, three demijohns (do they never break) a planter, a plate.

None of this anchors my attention.

The pace is slow because there is an underflow, a structure of feeling tethered from back when to here now and further over to more entangled future endeavours in the making. The impression is of a sticky atmosphere stroking the skin, making the limbs drag, demanding attention.

Emanating from the rock body, my body, the other bodies curiosity and knowing converge as the steps compose themselves along the path I am tracking without trying. Memories ebb and flow easily commanded by single words. I daydream between here and there, opening doorways into other times and other places, glimpses of mirror worlds until that gateway is the only thing present, commanding, a sharp ledge at the end of the road.

Stretching out from the tunnel entrance, tugging at me,

dod yn ôl.

Steady, climb into lights out full on straight up wet cold moist blackness: perfect habitat for bats and moths, hidden caverns and death drops.

The hyper alertness pupil dilating quest for light is alluring, keeps me going into the dark, even slower now, with diminishing trust in this slippery ground, all certainties shed, apart from the desire to reach another blue sky.

To a visual field collapsed into such close quarters the distant gateway of light grows bigger and bigger until it unleashes an activated peripheral vision which can take everything in all at once;

to see, sharp and clear, and meet the self and the quarry with available eyes, open to possibilities - is it a mirror or a portal?

Something in the air makes you unsure, and that feels ok, existing and dissipating inside this deep silence containing all the noise. Spaciousness spelling release; the flâneur is very pleased.

Life, simply happening here in this enormous quietening lost world.

All this emptiness gathered in one place, stillness taking you out of time and feeling akin to sleep, the deeply restful kind where the best dreams live.

Language dries up, unnecessary; no-one is around to share whatever flare it would convey.

Now dissolve, pour your bones over the breathing earth, lying on a mattress of slate chips still holding onto residual parts of sunlight.

You are alone, relaxed yet feeling looked upon, hanging on the silence as though on an oracle’s word, and it breaks!

Into an avalanche of shattering slate seams, a startling revelation echoing through the magnitude of ancient seabed turned metamorphic rock, suddenly bursting with bodies of industrious men, enterprising men.

You can hear them in the crumbling of slate rock face splitting like a deep time clock. Their traces are all around.

Winches, levers, unearthed metal rods, ingenious walkways, legacies of endeavour.

For fun now, I hunt in my gut for the word that deep in my belly needs saying, to be witnessed by everything, an offering to this larger body.

A rolling rrrr word comes out a gutsy scream that echoes back quick and in a higher pitch and the pleasure turns into guttural laughter.

Maybe it’s been an hour, 3 weeks or 40 years. Lifted by easy, accessible encounters with sensation and imagination, blurring known and unknown, what a memorable prize this utterly real and tangibly magical cwar is, the way it simultaneously preserves generations of human lives and the feeling that no-one has stepped foot in there before.

Fel gwacter is showing at Mostyn until the 25th of January. The free zine HOLESCAPES \ TWLLDIRWEDDAU, in which Ffin Jordão’s ‘Toriad’ also appears, will first be available at Tyllau da \ Some good holes, an artist-curated conversation and screening event at Mostyn on Saturday the 18th January.

Mostyn