f.r.g.s.

Noelle Janaczewska recited from behind a laptop, which is the modern pulpit. But she wasn't reading the text, it was ingested and recited, a formidable task and one she did evenly, with a schoolmistress demeanour. Quizzical, wry, faux-naive. Occasionally she would touch a key and images would change, grainy shots of the Royal Geographical Society, idealised Victoriana.

It was a beautiful piece about the doors that are closed to us. It was like a W G Sebald poetic essay....she meditated on escapism, on the way isntitutions colonise travel, on the way imperialism had its own psychology, with its own neuroses...without ever really talking about these things directly. The Royal Geographical Society became, in her narrative, a sort of council of righteous elders, determiners of what constitutes the margins of our experience. Its doors would always be closed, its library always full of books that could never be opened, its maps destined to fade on sight, like some (perhaps dreamt) Borges story.

And then, just as I was comprehending the rhythms of the piece, she was gone, with a quick, Japanese bow. But I had been taken to Conradian blackness, Mawsonian tabula rasa, Sturt's Inland Ocean, deep up the Sepik, and into those weird institutions of colonialism, and was cruelly wrenched out of them! It reminded me of when I went to the Anotomical Institute in Bologna...rows of skulls from all parts of the globe, staring dumbly from racks. The dead rest of the world, bemused by European neurosis of naming. Catalogues, lists, narratives.