While Absent
by Elizabeth Murphy
and Adrien Hester

On what would’ve been the last day of Glasgow International 2020, and in lieu of Teneu Radio, a radio play originally commissioned for and reflecting on the festival, Adrien Lester and Elizabeth Murphy reflect on the experience of absence, and the gaps left in the city as it’s in the process of reimagining itself.

Listen to While Absent

Elizabeth and Adrien are both artists and writers based in Glasgow. They make work separately and collaboratively and will be producing Teneu; a radio play for the postponed Glasgow International in 2021.

Elizabeth and Adrien would like to thank Bobbi Cameron, Sean Patrick Campbell and David Scott for the patience and support in putting this together and Free Peace Project for allowing the use of ‘November’ within the work. Lastly, special thanks the team at Drouth for making ways for artists work to continue to be commissioned and supported during this turbulent time. 

Audio Transcript for While Absent

Elizabeth: Go 

[Piano music] 

Adrien: Absence is the state of being away from a place or person or the complete non- existence or lack of something or another. How do you write about absence? How does absence manifest in words or how does it sound? Is that silence or is that called something else? 

[Sounds of voices in the background] 

Elizabeth: We are together now, my dad’s girlfriend would say by being together doing this we are murderers. What we are doing is deeply, rampantly illegal. You’re within your right to ask what powers they are acting under if there is an absence of logic. How would we unpack this, if required. You are far away. Enough. Which is how we have justified it. 

[Sounds of a street in background] 

Adrien: I looked up the definition of absence because it was something easy to hold onto. Something which in the case of the word absence, the definition has little changed since it was first penned. Cities aren’t like that though. They are extensive systems of interrelating factors — of land- use, of population, housing, business, commerce, pollution, transportation and so on. These things change and cause shifts in the other. Both good and bad ones. The boundaries of a city can change too, either consuming more or being consumed by something else. 

Elizabeth: This has been hard to write – I think because we are living in a time we didn’t plan for. It’s like someone has lifted a giant silver kosh off our lives and we are the exposed meal, steam rising and evaporating into life’s dining room. Confused that this roofless space offers freedom but just means we will be consumed in a way we didn’t expect. Time is suspended dripping in, swishing out. Expanded, expansive, immediate. Imagine lots of different weather sounds – they all seem to demonstrate time in their own way. 

[Sound of rain in background] 

Adrien: Absence. From the Latin absentia. In absentia is Latin for ‘in the absence’ or ‘while absent’. I am struck my this at the moment and the word ‘while’ in this phrase. In its most basic definition, it means — a period of time. Time is just a series of movements, the sun across the sky, the earth on its axis, in its orbit, a walk around the block, the bus journey to work, a nights sleep and so on. It is just a different kind of ongoing. 

[Sounds of voices in the background] 

Elizabeth: It’s 15 years ago today since my grandad passed away. It is amazing what lasts in absence. The enduring matter. What sticks to the sides when things are put in the bag and shaken up. What lasts. When he got older he would cut out articles from the paper for the relevant person in the family, but without the context of the rest of the paper, he would sometimes forget who it was meant for so you just had to work it through, negotiating the relevance that piece of information had to your own life. My mum does this now, posts me articles in reused envelopes. No context or explanatory note. I am left with this floppy piece of information – shrouded in absence and thin between my fingers, walking around the flat – trying to work out how it fits into my life. 

Adrien: In a time when time itself seems strange. Something that goes hand in hand with absence is longing. At the moment in the city, there isn’t an absence as such, it’s something else. I’m not sure a city longs for the pound of feet on streets or for buildings to be put back to good use. 

[Sounds of a street in background] 

Elizabeth: I have a friend who is doing a PhD in Black holes. An investigation of absence. He can spend hours talking about voids. Matter, strength, continuation, cycles, facts. When he asks me what it’s about I say, lasers in the desert – he said – that is actually more accurate than you could know. It’s an endless thankless task – chasing a void. It has a lot of temperature and very strong wire. A lot of stretching. Checking on experiments at 4 am. The room looks like it was made in the future that they imagined in the 70s. Everything to try and lift the curtain. See what happens inside the nothing. Physicists describe a vacuum as a free space. Absent then, I guess from any societal structures. 

Adrien: The city is not abandoned, the city is not empty, the city is not dead. It is a time perhaps to see the city for what it really is — to see the city for its streets, buildings, its parks, its rivers, its river banks, it’s alleyways, its estates, it’s empty plots, and all the bits in-between. The city is not empty. You just can’t see it. 

[Sounds of a street in background] 

Elizabeth: I was thinking about the absences in thinking, the pauses, the stutters, the trips – the gaps. Though it’s hard to have those gaps at the moment, the people on the ground floor are drumming repeatedly, in the breaths within this. The man downstairs screams for as long as his lungs allow – we’re separated by floors but we live on top of each other like children standing on each other’s shoulders in an adults raincoat. I can only wish for absence at this point. Or ascension.
Or the ability through sheer determination to gnaw my way into my living room wall with nothing but my teeth and to fix my head into the hole I have made with cement so it is trapped in there forever and all I will hear for the rest of time is mice running around in the cavity. Anyway, trips and gaps. In thoughts and speech. I noticed that when bumping into friends during lockdown it is too hard to communicate. Everyone talking over each other or not talking at all. At the same time. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The absence of social cues has taken its toll. 

Adrien: We shared a room for a number of years in which we made space for one another. Not space in the sense of an area which was unoccupied, but space in the sense of setting our boundaries open for change.
I was in a museum sometime a few years ago and I saw a painting which I have thought about often ever since. A painting of four faceless figure, all sat, waiting. Unfinished. The rest of the painting was complete and quite the usual for an 18th-century European painting. I don’t often have an interest in that sort of thing but the absence of faces was the most remarkable thing about it. Where the faces should be just small off-white ovals of primed surface, ready for features. 

Elizabeth: People always say we have the same voice, others have said they are wildly different. Depending on who is right there was perhaps no need for us to be in this room together. 

Adrien: When we spoke recently via video call, I was reminded of this painting when watching your hands. The top of your head had been slightly obscured due to the computer screen is at slightly the wrong angle, so all I had was top lip to lap. I watched your hands as you began to talk, mimicking your movements. It’s been a while, but I don’t think either of us will forget the strange choreography we have as friends. 

[music]