One of the difficulties you often have to overcome when you visit exhibitions in Guangzhou is that you have to pass by a construction site, a village in the city or an intestine noodle stall, and there is a hardware store next to the end. No matter how many times you have experienced it, this experience can still be a bit of a surprise: one second you are still trying to get around the two loaders who are making a stinging and piercing sound with sealing tape; the next second you push open the door and rise in the air, as if you have been slapped, you start thinking about some metaphysical problems. I believe the brain regions that need to be used for these two things are completely different, but their switching often leaves people with no buffer at all.
The poetry exhibition "Snake Swallows Elephant" is on the first floor of the parallel brigade. Pushing open the door in front of the front desk and the staircase leading to the guest room, there was a man sitting paralyzed in a chair. I accidentally made eye contact with him, and after an awkward pause of 0.1 seconds, I saw the exhibition in the open space and corridor on the left-hand side, and then went straight to the deepest part of the corridor as fast as I could. This narrow passage is open-air, and from the outside it corresponds to the gap on the left side of the green house. In the passageway, there are buckets of sheets to be washed on the already unsaid floor (should it be sheets?). Shouldn't it be part of the work?! ）
At the end of the corridor, accompanied by the sound of rushing water in my ears, I carefully read the first poem, called "Nausea". Soon after the sound of the water stopped, a resident came out of the shower wearing creaky slippers and walked through the passage into the door of the guest room next to him. At this time, I realized that next to it was the toilet + washroom of the hostel.
Clever layout. It's really disgusting.
So my exhibition officially began next to the men's restroom.
It takes courage to admit to being a poet in broad daylight, because it may be the equivalent of telling someone that they are sensitive and vulnerable and have strange thinking and are not proficient in electronic devices and payment codes. But it is undeniable that poetry will be positively correlated with the concentration of the night, and it will also be positively correlated with the intensity of one's own work: the deeper the night, the more saturated the work, the more you want to give a poem, and use the shortest language to express the strongest emotions in your heart. (The poet's drylands statement seems to prove this as well.)
The curator of the exhibition is Zhang Lu, and she said in her curatorial language that the name of the exhibition " Snake Swallowing Elephant " comes from the proverb "greedy enough snake swallowing elephant", and also from the "hat" in "The Little Prince". Participating in the exhibition are more than a dozen poets in their 20s. This age is quite in line with the theme of the exhibition. They were in a state between youth and adulthood, and they could faintly see the elephant in the belly of the snake. This exhibition is a kind of daily expression and timely vigilance, as written on the T-shirt that Tao Bao recommended to me at every turn: Surrender later. You need to keep doing something to strengthen the silhouette of the elephant in your heart, otherwise you will become blind in the next time if you are not careful, and you can only see the shape of the hat from now on.
So the huge heart device at the door was more like the rotting belly of an elephant-devouring snake. The elephant had been completely digested, the snake itself was a blur of flesh and blood, and some solids, liquids, and words flowed out of the ground in front of it.
What is interesting is the synaesthesia conveyed with materials throughout the exhibition. The exhibition uses a lot of red, because the curator said that she felt that poetry had a "bloody" taste. In addition to the red "blood droplets", there are also red lines, curves, line clusters, nets, and the cotton balls and candles scattered on the spot or regularly run through the entire exhibition. It's like the different thoughts that each poet (or everyone) generates, which are different in shape and texture, but grow together in this space.
Finally, I would like to share a few more poems from this exhibition, my favorite one of "Bike Sharing".