Interruptions in the Everyday

Catalogue essay to accompany the work RIMA by SQUIDSILO (Ashley Scott and Julie Vulcan: The experience of torture is inevitably particular, inescapably singular: RIMA aims not so much to represent it as to communicate it with all the immediacy of contagion acting directly on bodies, on our bodies. We are affected, even contaminated by these tweets from a space of segregation, that recall, without at all pretending to replicate, the torture of the solitary confinement to which prisoners, especially political prisoners, are all too often subjected. RIMA calls this form of torture to mind, recalls it from the forgetfulness of everyday life. These interruptions in the smooth everydayness of the screen world recall to us the obligation to try to imagine what can only ever remain, strictly speaking, unimaginable. ‘To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt’, Elaine Scarry famously writes. If to represent the torture of solitary confinement is to betray it by subjecting it to doubt, to communicate something of it in this way, directly to another body, is to affirm the reality of pain itself, even if this can never be the same pain as that undergone by the one being tortured, nor in any way equivalent to it.