Colleen Alborough
by Nathaniel Stern
This piece was originally commissioned by Storm Janse van Rensburg for the Young Artist Project catalogue, May 2006. It is re-printed on SAarts with the permission of KZNSA.
Performed through text, video, installation and sound, Colleen Alborough’s work is an invitation into the perilous depths of emotional thought. It asks us to play out the tensions between fear and loss, being and space. Night Journey, her 
Night Journey, installation at KZNSA
Crossing the threshold into Night Journey can be likened to entering a maze of foreign-but-familiar flesh. As I step through the door, it opens into an 8-meter long corridor of painstakingly hand-made felt, grey in color, and highlighted with feathers, dirt and fractured light. The walls’ softness make them ever so touch-able, but their seemingly dampened soot is utterly repellent. I’m in a meticulously produced womb that is anything but a fetal resting place.
At the end of this woolen birthing canal, I turn almost 180-degrees into another stretch of felt darkness, and the wind pushes me back, restricting my attempts to carry on. Blasts of cool air – no, it’s the sound of a hurricane – are triggered by my stepping through to the next part of the maze.
I recall Alborough as one my students in the Digital Arts Masters Programme at Wits School of the Arts; she was someone who continually strove to use her technological prowess sparingly and keep it hidden from view. Here, she’s co-opted 4 small, passive infrared rangers – the kind we use for our motion detector lights and house alarm systems – which are perched atop her long corridors. These, and a hidden video camera, all communicate with custom-built computer software that drives 2 video projections and 3 soundtracks throughout her installation, triggered on and off when participants are in the ‘hot spots’ of Alborough’s tangled space.
Night Journey, detail of installation at KZNSA
As I continue down the deserted halls, Night Journey persists in blasting me with the sonic wind of an oncoming downpour, and I see trickles of light, candles burning, behind its walls. It feels like I’m trapped in an Edgar Allan Poe story: the glowing sticks lead me down a dark corridor; the felt becomes an unbearably thick wall of brick; my heart is pounding.
Vision becomes haptic, and I’m engulfed by affection. I don’t mean affection as in love for the space, but that, like Deleuze’s time-image[i] , Night Journey gives “discourse to the body … the body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself … it is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought … obstinate and stubborn, [the body] forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought.”[ii] Body-sensations become body-thoughts and versa vice; I am, because I am “in an immediate, unfolding relation.”[iii] Night Journey “unfolds in and as [my] bodily intuition of the sheer alienness of these forms.”[iv]
I turn another corner, and I’m hit with an eerie soundtrack – Alborough has used found sound from horror films, safari field recordings, and sound effect CDs, bombarding me with connotatively rich and potent audio that invokes a remembrance of myself at 5-years-old, hiding under the bedcovers. There’s a disfigured and mummified human form asleep in a bed across the way, and a small video projection above her head reveals her nightmares to me. She’s dreaming of crossroads and forlorn paths and fire and children running. She’s driving along a dust road at night, barely illuminated by dim orbs of light; she sees barren trees, long blades of dry grass, hears the squeaking of a tired land-rover and the distant hum of its engine; speed bumps are slowing her already over-loaded journey, and the ill-focused headlights have a dizzying effect on her retinas. As I get closer to our sleeping traveller, I hear her breath, assiduously labouring in and out of exhausted lungs.
Night Journey, details of installation at KZNSA
I re-member bits and pieces of Alborough’s artist statement:
Each day we retreat to our bed … so private, so familiar, so intimate. It lures us with its promise of comfort, protection, and restoration … we can escape the endless traffic, incessant noise and smothering fog, into the oblivion of sleep, transported to other worlds beyond the borders of ordinary perception … the night shuts out our visible reality and gives free rein to our hopes, fantasies, dreams, fears and nightmares.[v]
Is that us asleep in that bed, and why such unrestful sleep? To which world do we belong, I wonder, as I stare and stare.
I eventually walk from behind the bed and towards the final turn, triggering a few too many sounds to take in at once. Is that a young girl I hear praying somewhere off in the distance? I can make out someone tap-tap-typing this story, this story I never meant to tell.
Instead of another long corridor of misshapen walls beyond the bend, the cave in front of me has collapsed into a bed of foam pillows, strips of bandages and gauze piled high and blocking our path; and in the middle, I’m watching a small film of animated text that right now reads, “the fog drifts in / you fade to the distance / headlights flash and shine / down the road”. I swear I see my self of minutes ago, the me looking at the girl in the bed; I swear I see a faded video of myself behind this text, still looking. But that was so long ago, and where was it?
I breathe slowly now, myself, hyperaware of Alborough’s continual reference to that very action. Night Journey asks us, she says, “to breathe through the moment.”[vi] There’s a droning quality to my own lungs’ rhythm; there’s something ‘felt’ in the ‘felt-ness’ of her space that, perhaps inadvertently, both frames and dampens the sounds my body-thoughts make.
My experience of the work is not one of ‘looking’ as a "continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic,”[vii] it is one of ‘perception’ as a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world.”[viii] This is a “dynamic coupling of body and space”[ix] reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s body-schema. Touch promotes proprioception, and I am touched.
I close my eyes and listen to the most-recently triggered soundtrack. I hear the slow typing, a voice praying for loved ones. Like Colleen (we are all, by now, on a first name basis), I oscillate between feelings; at one moment, I feel the “dreadful sense of being alone and being hunted by those spiritual hounds in the night.”[x] At another, I sense an unresolved attempt to “reconcile an ambivalent … physical and psychical”[xi] relationship with the world.
A calm is perhaps approaching, but not the calm before or after the storm; it’s that calm in the middle, the one where you’re wet and the thunder is loud and your muscles ache, and it’s not that you don’t care about being soaked through to the skin, but that you are part of the rain, and that the rain is part of you.
I can hear other visitors entering and interacting with the space; their shadows intensify my experience of light and dark, as they cast shapes across the walls. Their movements trigger more sound, more video, making me curious as to their experiences, and how similar they are to my own. Do they also wonder what this place is and what it makes them? Are their insides tingling with a fear of loss, worrying about a loss of fears?
What terrible things would happen if we forgot to be afraid?
I wonder: perhaps Night Journey’s mummy is not a pickling corpse; perhaps she’s just healing. Bandaged, but warm, she’s on her way to recovery, and when she wakes, it is not the scary space that has transformed, but rather, it is her. By equally perceiving and producing the world around her, she ‘is’.
Night Journey, detail of installation at KZNSA
Night Journey resonates with mystic odysseys as times of despair mirrored by times of opportunity. At its core, Colleen’s story could be considered an embodiment of Walter Benjamin’s Storyteller: it is not a present force, but only a proposal. Our ‘hero’ has had no adventures as a righteous man, preaching morals and maxims. Rather, Night Journey shares its discoveries in order to give counsel, and provides a space in which listeners encounter themselves.[xii]
[i] And Hansen’s affection-image – see reference for full quotation in footnote 4, below. Note that Night Journey would not be considered a Deleuze time- or Hansen affection-image, per se, but accomplishes affection in a similar way, nonetheless.
[ii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 173.
[iii] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (
[iv] Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (
[v] Colleen Alborough, email interviews by Nathaniel Stern (
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 99, quoted in Mark Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality: Touch and Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies,” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture Vol. 12: Making Sense (2001): 1-2. Found online @
[viii] Ibid, 100.
[ix] Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality”.
[x] Alborough in Stern.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Paraphrased from Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Trans. Harry Zohn and Ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 82-109.
Labels: Colleen Alborough, Nathaniel Stern
