Half of love is still Love
2026
On a river in Ontario
just as daylight is breaking
I will throw a rock and hope for you
Paul breaks into the sauna and emerges
with a giant, jagged stone
and I cast it, my eyes squeezed shut
Proof
Gallery 44, Toronto
June 5 - July 4, 2026
Zaynab Ghaïs-Mortada, Tommy Keith, Dion Smith-Dokkie, Parumveer Walia, Long Xi Vlessing
Excerpt from A Test's Procession, exhibition essay by Benjamin de Boer:
"A place my place interchangeable dispensable who needs
Places who my place if I leave it no one
Will conquer it place not to be occupied why then
Go full of must a place and an exit
Allotted to no one place nameless corner
In the eye the place of wakefulness nothing and here
But room armchair bed wall door and the handle
The handle going street meadow wood blade of grass even clay
Is Am - Beg for time
Is Am - Beg to be
Is Am - Beg for I
Dancing on the needle-point of breath
On the point
Balance
And then
Leap
In" ¹
This is a poem by Swiss poet Franz Wurm about losing the ability to take relationships for granted. Instead, intimacy is only found through an act of daring. My interpretation is that his displacement from Czechoslovakia led him to that other-place of multi-lingualism, the wordless nowhere that is at the same time full of the earth's intensity of nameless not knowing.
This poem and I have felt the parade, a round now, moving, moving still, living in grief. The orbit afforded by an infinite leash. Farewell city, friends, Jos, Paul. Hello raving life.
Photographs can speak two, three languages at once. They get busy in the larval time of in-between suspicion, that shadow area not covered by any single tongue. So no tongue? Or a continuity of real seconds working lightly, living everything?
This poem and [Vlessing’s] ritual devotion have seen grief as a constellation. Half of love is still Love's fragile, funny portraits of family and strangers come from a personal diary made in the wake of [his] Yeye's passing. They announce ecstasy in the face of overwhelm, "outside is where we are, outside."
[...] where more than a single language is present, all that appears identical comes close to being withdrawn. Yet the wider these unfixed bodies scatter the greater their ability to link up with the rest. Dot by dot, now there is something held in common. Tension. A bed is not a bed. A stone is not a stone. A lake is not a lake. Instead, the character swings open. Adjusting my throat to this collapse leaves me feeling as if I have nothing to say. But what is a new present tense? Immense silent self deeply involuted with self pushing and pulling. So quiet this intimacy, this belonging. It feels like epiphany, this everyday command: observe the changes in the land and the interconnectedness of beings because the stories we learn here are lessons needed to survive.
¹ Wurm, Franz. “Full of Must” In German Poetry 1910-1975, edited and translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Urizen Books, 1976.
Benjamin de Boer is a poet, artist, bookseller, and community organizer spending summer travelling the Avalon Peninsula to build the East Coast Trail.