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In late July 1995, we ended up in Manzanillo, Costa Rica.
We had no intention of even overnighting, yet ended up staying for a life-changing week.
I knew the stars were aligning when I walked into Maxie’s for a beer, only to be greeted by the music of South African reggae star Lucky Dube.
It was also during that week that I developed an appreciation for Salsa music, and an enduring love for Columbia’s Grupo Niche – whose music was on permanent rotation.
I realised very quickly that the only game in town, was dominoes, and spent many hours watching the people play. Such an immensely grounding experience of ritual, play, being and belonging.
This is my only video which doesn’t have any sound. I did so in an attempt to create an empathic resonance between the images and the viewer’s sense of touch… The tactile materiality, the pure joy of manipulating domino tiles, the proprioceptive weight when laying your hand on a tabletop, or smacking a domino onto the table – the sense of agency that such a primary act of being affirms. This intention runs through a lot of my video work. One thing that has always bugged me about video, is its lack of physical materiality1. Indeed, this is one reason why I always strive for my videos to generate some sort of bodily resonance in the viewer. More on this later.
I recorded this video on the 28th of July 1995.
1: I often joke that I will be a stone mason in my next life.