Stillness

Nik Gaffney & Maja Kuzmanović

stills from a world in motion.

with excerpts from: afterimages and stillness (book)

Seek out that which hides in shadows, flickers in refractions. Unassuming, abandoned, forgotten things. Peer beneath the surface to discover the unseen and ignored.
The world dims and shivers, only to reappear at an oblique angle, in unexpectedly crisp detail. The figurative image becomes a distant abstraction. The stench of street litter dissolves into eerie textures. The howl of tyres on cobblestones melts into hushed silence. A glitch is glorified, a stain noticed, a crack revealed. Spectral glimpses of the magical in the mundane. Gritty and grainy, blurry and vague, subdued but no less present. Just stop and look.


A thunderstorm is composed mostly of silence.


Silence. The stillness at the centre of the cyclone. Repose. The roaring silence when noise ceases and pain ebbs, when warmth spreads through frozen limbs. The billowing stillness between breaths. Silences in between, underneath and beyond. Quiet instances amidst the whirlwind of life. Unheard, yet always there. In the earth. In the rain. In the stars, the sun, the moon.



Time's harsh violence exposed in a gentle dripping of water on rocks. Trailing a delicate veil of shared stories and textured memories. Quiet, barely perceptible in their stillness, existing as liminal distortions of the present. Sheer, queer, quivering textures of entangled lives.


Patience. Still. Still here. Still, not quite there. The scratched surface, the cracked pavement, the bent branch, remaining still as the world moves on.
The sharp contrast of radiant weathering, celebration and contemplation, feast and famine. Seasonal cycles pierced by non-linear movement. Oscillating. Pause. Observe… the ‘still…’ of paths not followed, the ‘still…’ of possibility, the ‘still…’ of doubt and hesitation. The ‘still…’ of waiting for the next revolution, perfectly timed.
Stillness. Suspended movement. Balancing on the precipice of motion. The taste of intention preceding action. The aftertaste of movement coming to its end. The electrified stillness of a missed heartbeat. The weightlessness of acceleration, freefall and unravelling gravity. Change of direction. Deceleration. A slow approach to what is already here.
Dwelling on botany at dawn and dusk, revelling in the vulnerability of inception and subsiding. Plants growing from cracks in the pavement. Overgrown urban decay. Liminal life, sprouting into existence or fading into nothingness. Gnarled roots, fragile shoots, entangled vines. Vegetal resilience in extreme temperatures. Multiple greens swallowed by twilight.

🍂