Yaku finally calls from Yogya, sounding very far away and telling me that she hasn’t had the time before to call. It’s been almost a month since we last spoke and she was supposed to have finished the rough draught of the play weeks ago, so it can go to our gallerist, Paula, who is also our main sponsor and, I think, in Switzerland now. I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of my house with my mobile phone pressed to my ear and looking down at this years’ first chestnuts that are lying around. The wet and dirty grey of the pavement makes them look so shiny and clean that it is as if someone has been going around polishing and arranging them. I’m standing right in the middle of them and feeling this perfect kind of feng shui and I’m thinking about how what seems not so long ago ago, we were sitting in Yaku’s small house in Yogya inhaling the spicy warm air of summer, a whopping 30C, like proper summer and now it’s autumn.

‘You understand that Paula thinks the project is about Terry Riley, the musician.’
‘You mean Terrence Riley the composer?’
‘Well, they do have the same name...’
‘Ok, but there are lots of people with this name, not just the composer, there also Terrence Riley the curator who is now the director of the Miami Art Museum for instance, and you know this new band called the Terrence Rileys? Did you hear them? They’re pretty good.’

Y has spent the last half year writing on the script for the play that we’ve been working on, or so she tells me. I am in the middle of designing and constructing a stage for it,  even tough the information I have on what exactly the play will be about, is in fact very limited. This limitation is something Yaku insists will actually help me with my work. An argument she tries to validify by a quote from, I think Beaudrillard, about how a subjective interpretation of a story is actually more meaningfull than the story itself or something like that1. All I know though, is that the protagonist of the story is called Terrence Riley, an obscure photographer and poet that apparently became a minor celebrity when a suicide bomb attack left him limbless and comatose on his first mission to cover the Russian invasion in Afghanistan in the mid seventies and that I had honestly never even heard about before. But, at least in Indonesia, he seems to be quite a known figure, which is probably due to the fact that Y does a seminar on his writings on photography, (which she regards as a kind of wacky, more lyrical2 forerunner of postmodernism), for art students in the three bigger universities of Java3.

‘You know, if the script is still not done yet, would it at least be possible to ask you for some more information about Riley? Also Paula has been braking my balls over it. We talked about it before, but I’m not sure I really got it and I’m sure I can’t overbrengen it to Paula. What the play will be about I mean, and all this stuff on The Terrific Zombie-Image or The First World and the Second State,4  it’s kind of a muddle in my memories and also I’m afraid that when I just go by gut-feeling, in the end the stage might just not make any sense in relation to the play.’
‘Just associate, it doesn’t matter, don’t try to understand it, it’s really not important.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, you have all the information, me I haven’t even read any of his texts! I really wish sometimes, that I had a little more to hold on to.’

According to the synopsis that we use to get funding for our project, the play is set out to, (quote), define an illustration of a cultural shift towards information and irony versus belief in the image and first hand experience, that eventually comes together in a fatah morgana smørgasbord of eastern influenced meditations on the importance of the image in the globalised West. A kind of artsy retoric that would normally give me a rash, if it weren’t for the fact that it actually brought in enough stipend money to start with.

‘You remember when we were in that gallery and we were seeing that video installation of that, I think, French artist and this couple started to make out in front of everybody on the floor and nobody stopped them or commented because everybody thought it was part of the work? ‘
‘Of course.’

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