Hello, hello! Good afternoon. Welcome to my thesis proposal. I’m honestly a lotta bit sad that we can’t be doing this in person, but I guess this is going to be a very sort of meta situation, in that we are all stuck in a void now. It's obviously not my preferred kind of void, it's not my Void, but it'll do fine, I guess.

I am here today as the only human official representative of the Void, along with the official canine envoy, the Admiral whom you may have met and who may pop into this meeting. And we also may be joined by the feline emissary, Montag the Magnificent, as he's been meowing about some import paperwork that wasn't signed.

Since what I’ve been calling the Great Loss of 2018, it’s become more and more evident that I needed to sit down and write WHAT the Void is and WHERE it comes from, and really just kind of indulging in my need to be the centre of attention given that I failed at being a middle child by being born first, and then really embracing my love for anthropology and history. 

So we’re going to start with a little bit of contextual history because nothing comes from a vacuum! You've probably heard me say this a million times, but I'm sticking with it! As a lapsed cultural anthropologist, I could spend hours talking your ear off about creation myths and death rituals and traditions. But in the interest of keeping this brief, we’ll begin with some quick facts. The Neanderthal were thought to be one of the first human cultures to consciously bury their dead as opposed to leaving them behind and moving on, by virtue of being hunter-gatherers. No one really wants to drag grandma's carcass along while they're picking berries or hunting deer. It wasn’t until the late-Pleistocene, which is a fancy way of saying 12,500 to 9,500 BCE, that the Natufian people of the Levant in the middle east, who were semi-sedentary, were discovered to bury their dead with colourful and aromatic flowers. This was the first evidence that burials had become planned processes that were embedded with social and spiritual meaning.

So once humans started to settle and become sedentary, that’s when they started creating stories and myths about what happens when we die. There’s this metaphor, right, of a curtain falling, it’s all very theatrical. But these stories are stories, they’re theories. A belief is not the same as knowing. And what we fear is not the unknown, but rather the negative assumptions associated with it. This unknown can be broken into quarters; what awaits us after we die is 25% good, 25% bad, 25% both, and 25% neither. If there was 100% certainty that the outcome was positive, no one would need these myths and stories. We simply would not fear death.

Travelling along this timeline, we’ve arrived in 4th century BCE Greece and the Orphic Mysteries! The Orphic Mysteries were a set of philosophies based on the myth of Dionysus. Just quickly, a mystery school is not a religion, it’s typically a set of philosophical tenets derived and attached to a certain set of religious beliefs, in this case, the Greek pantheon. Dionysus, was one of the many, many illegitimate children of Zeus. Hera, his legendarily jealous wife, had Dionysus killed, except a piece of him was saved and then sewn onto Zeus’ thigh, from which he was reborn. Initiates of the Orphic Mysteries took this myth to show that the death of the physical body does not necessarily mean the death of an individual. The human soul is immortal and goes through many reincarnations after death. Life in any incarnation was ultimately one of discomfort in the sense that we hunger, thirst, feel pain and are forced to labour all our lives. The only way out of this purgatory-like state was via asceticism, which is essentially severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, and knowing how to navigate and properly commune in the underworld between reincarnations. When I say "purgatory" here, I don't mean it in the Christian way of "hell" but rather as a way to describe it as an in-between place.

Now we're headed to the Asian continent! In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodöl, the belief in reincarnation and toiling is very similar with the exception that this text is used to guide the dying and recently dead through various experiences during the 49 day interval between death and the next rebirth with the goal to NOT be reborn, but to attain Nirvana and break free of the cycle of rebirth and death.

I wasn’t really conscious of how much of the The Void’s lineage could be linked to the majority of humanity’s afterlife myths; how similarly even cultures across the world explain the afterlife, how the human soul goes through some sort of purgatory state with all kinds of obstacles to endure before reaching the final destination. The Aztec underworld was called Mictlán and had 9 regions that the soul had to travel through over a period of 4 years to finally sort of be left alone. It remains one of my favourites because morality had no role in determining where your soul went after death, but rather the manner in which you died. Warriors who died in battle or as sacrifice went to one, women who died in childbirth went to another. Then if you died by any kind of water incident, be it illness, lightning or drowning you went to a lush paradise, and then for everybody else, rich, poor, old, young there was Mictlán.

The Void’s mythistory exists at the confluence of cold-hard facts and dramaticized fiction, like the Mayan Popol Vuh. It contemplates what happens to those people, things and places we lose and long for. It’s a universe where the sum of the world’s ancient philosophies meld together to create a new macrocosm that provides respite from the anxiety, grief, and unknowns of these tumultuous times. And selfishly, as somebody who’s never really been able to call any one place home, or had a sense of belonging, it only made sense that I would create a mythology of my own, a place that is based in truth but based in the fantasy that I long for and where I’m the secret main protagonist. 

So WHAT am I doing?

The Fata Morgana Café is the first of the Void’s localities to be built on this plane. It aims to share the Void’s lore by inviting life travellers to process their feelings and thoughts, and break from their chaotic lives; a place to pause and reflect on things lost, vanishing landmarks, people most missed, and this seemingly never ending cycle of doom.

As you sit in the space, and start noticing maybe the symbolism used, or the peculiarity of the objects, and even the sounds surrounding you, the hope is that as your curiosity is piqued, and that it would generate even more interaction with the space, like actually playing a game of checkers with yourself once you realise that the coaster can be put together and the boxes on the side contain pieces. Or thumbing through the lotería + oracle book that will eventually make its way into space. I even have the lotería itself ready to roll here, and you could flip through the cards as you’re playing the game, and really spend the time and acquaint yourself with yr surrounding.

I’m really considering the best place for this installation to live, at least, for now, would probably be some kind of retail space because I want to encourage people to engage with the work. It’s important to me that they feel comfortable exploring their surroundings and handling objects without feeling like they may break something or that they’re not supposed to. In a place like a gallery, people don’t tend to feel like the work is to be engaged with, unless explicitly told to, and turning this specific location into a public installation makes me a little squeaky in terms of longevity and people having an opportunity to interact with it in the full intended manner, due to theft or defacement. Not that I don’t think it could work, I like the idea of it being a sort of unintentional collaboration, but that’s not the intent I have in mind with this particular install.

And, as you can see, construction has already started! I’ve been testing out a range of goods and have had several “soft openings” to get feedback. The next few phases are going to involve a lot of writing, expanding to the other half of my studio and doing some research into directed audio. I have a few ideas about what I want and know the Void to sound like, it’s a matter of figuring out the technical side and mixing the audio. And then figuring out the lighting situation. I need this space to feel cozy and warm which is difficult to control at Glass, so I want to explore ways to add a little more control, like making some lamps, some overhead temp covers, etc...

Now we've come to the HOW, WHY, and WHEN.

The Void’s earth-bound presence is self-funded, self-sustaining, and fivever generating. Five because it's bigger than four, so it's bound to last longer. The quality and existence of these ephemeral builds allows them to function as both art installation and their own sort of museum gift shop. While each location in the Void may not get physical build, the aim for growing the influence and presence of the Void and its story will be made via the creation of locality-specific collections of goods and a locale-based subscription-type box. So you’d buy a box related to the Roadhouse and each season through the year, would receive one or more objects from that place, like a series of motel key tags, “ashtrays”—excuse me—trinket dishes, a publication, things like that. I’m also rebranding my French Fury post slightly to be more of a News From the Void type of newsletter that will go out to Void supporters.

I currently have a separate budget that is funded in part by the sales of Void-related goods. I currently have blankets, zipper cases and all manners of other odds and ends that are performing fairly well so far although I do intend on upping the production and working concurrently to populate my installation. And when I say "performing well", I'm very aware that my metric for "well" may differ from someone else's! So working concurrently on the more retail side and the conceptual aspect is really streamlining my process quite nicely, because these goods are also used as a way to spread the Void’s foundational story and lore.

The Void's story is constantly changing and evolving. To that end, the Void also operates its own imprint called “les Éditions du Néant”. The aim for this imprint is to publish the writings from the Void to further expand its lore and further inch at removing the fear out of the unknown equation.