Pale sun

My sister, she photographs too. She roams and laughs with her young Italian lover and their friends by an Australian shore. Clicks on no more than a whim. Purity and pale sun in March.

© Ling Ang

© Ling Ang

© Ling Ang

© Ling Ang

© Ling Ang

 

 

A call to networks

Hello Post Halcyon community,

This is a collaborative project that Sarah Elliott, Agnes Dherbeys, Benedicte Kurzen and myself are working on, in an effort to use as a tool to bring this issue to sectors outside of the photographic realm. We want to bring this to the academia, corporate sector, philanthropic circles (for example) to open up ideas to a means of survival and the continuation of life after rape.

Women in the villages of the DRC are the fabric of life in the community. Without these women capable of functioning in a normal capacity and being ostracised for atrocities beyond their means to prevent, society is broken down. They are the tapestry in which all community life is woven and it is torn.

We would like to use this project to bring this issue to light in areas of the public sector that would be otherwise unaware of the steps forward that can be achieved in lending these women a helping hand to continue with their lives, either through mental or physical rehabilitation. In addition to this, the continuous call to abhor and stand against the very foundation of warfare fought on the bloodied ground of innocents.

Please share this project with your friends/network (especially to those outside the photographic community) if you find this at all important/relevant. We are totally open to communication or dialogue so if you have any contacts that you think would be useful or ideas for the project, get in touch! We would love to hear from you.

Best,

Ying

VIEW THE PROJECT HERE

© Sarah Elliott

© Sarah Elliott

Supplication

I offered my heart in supplication. I offered it up for a life that was fuller… full-bodied, full-blooded, full-flavoured. I was given everything as a child. Everything that I was told I could ever want. Everything it was written that a little girl could possibly desire in her charmed, pink, lilac scented life, in every story book ever written that made it to a mainstream bookshelf. There was only one mistake. I was never that girl. My favourite colour was green, not pink. Green was the colour of hope, the colour of the ink that Neruda used to pen his odes to the crashing sea and the long length of Chile. My favourite scent was tree, not lilac, not to be bottled and sold duty-free.

So when the time came, I made a deal. Incision of the deepest kind, slicing through the safety of story-book comforts, I cut free the most precious part of me and held it up to the world. To be attacked, to be protected, to be valued, ignored, spat upon, cherished, I held it up in supplication. As a result, perhaps it’s a little more worn than the rest, a little ragged around the edges… but it pulses in response to a beat that resounds louder and with more conviction than I ever had in the lilac-frilled life my parents had wanted to give me.

And now there is my story, not theirs, in all its complexities and simplicities, madness and humanity. An opera.

Hong Kong | February, 2011

…They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flight path.
But inside your sob-sodden kleenex
And your saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek-scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true…

~ excerpt from “The Shot” by Ted Hughes

Within tolerance

Late night bars | Siem Reap | Cambodia

These are all the words you like to speak out loud
It´s not the meaning, it´s a question of sound
You write them down in a little book
You tear out the pages when the whole night is through

Withdrawn, tangle, cupboard, strangle
I like your name, it sounds like berries

These are all the little pills that make you sleep
but sometimes sleep can be close to death
You wake up again in a white room
and something tells you everything is good

Withdrawn, tangle, cupboard, strangle
I like your name, it sounds like berries

~ Slowblow