In order not to have to say goodbye ~ by Sam Mountford

Sam Mountford's "In order not to have to say goodbye" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliani) at the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).

Here you will find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.

In order not to have to say goodbye

Sam's question: what haven’t we tried yet?

Sam's intro:

“What was once an individual dream can, through the social activity of engagement and translation, become a social reality; however, there is also an intermediary space—an imaginal zone in which images appear to constitute their own presence. The image itself appears to possess an agency that we would normally assume could only be the domain of the individual act of the imagination or the collective force of the imaginary. I acknowledge that the imaginal zone is an intermediary reality, but I also contend that it comes into being through friendship.”—Nikos Papastergiadis

“Seeing is sticky.”—Lucy Bleach

Grant's report: 

The installation takes place in a wooden sauna hut. It combines an exhibition of small photographs attached to the wall’s wooden slats, and ice cream cones, their ends inserted into the gaps between the slats at different levels. The ice cream melts in the heat and drops, splattering the  walls and the floor, people step out of the way to avoid it or lean forward to catch the ice cream in their mouths. The photographs are small scale and low key. The subject matter is inconclusive but many appear to document excursions, including journeys into nature. Some of the images look like the shots you might discount, the camera pointed at nothing in particular, the image blurred, or where there have been mistakes in the shooting or printing. They are postcard sized and include colour as well as black and white. They feature the photograph of a skate park, a Roman ruin in the desert, a person standing on a rock besides the sea, a section of someone’s body, a hand, an abstraction, a dog swimming, a dry river bed in the desert, a women in a swimming costume head tilted back smiling, a palm tree wrapped in a net, the facade of a building wrapped in a net, some figures in a landscape, ants crawling across the back of a shirt, an apartment building, a container of rubbish in front of a wall of barrels,  an amphitheatre, sausages in a frying pan, liquid in a bottle, a dog  with a bandaged paw. The audiences move slowly around the hut, responding viscerally to the melting ice cream. Stopping and looking more carefully at the the photographs, scrutinising them, attempting to gage their meaning.

Barby Asante found it interesting to enter the different kind of location in which the work had been installed. She thought that the  photographs themselves inhabited an interstitial space. That the ice cream disrupted the viewing, making the experience joyful for some, although for her the experience was uncomfortable and made her think about consent. She asks what we are doing as artists by inviting people into situations where they are uncomfortable. She wonders what the artist was trying to say with the images. How, to get close to them you might have to put yourself in a place where you don't want to be. That she lost the ability to understand the question the artist was trying to bring.

Zairong Xiangreally liked the work. He found it fun and engaging, licking the ice cream but not  knowing if you were supposed to lick it. First he noticed the photos and then the interaction and he liked the two temporalities together; the photography, a quest for frozen time, then the ice cream that is melting; that when they meet something magical happens. The ice cream could be a reference to the time cone in quantum physics. He found it a very clean work conceptually, both fun and philosophical which is something not easy to do.

Sandi Hilal appreciates how the work brought the three respondents along different trajectories. It made her ask - to what extent are we committed to certain things forever? Not an ice cream that disappears in two seconds, but something that you have to stick with. Something you have to deal with forever. As Palestinians we ask ourselves - even though we are now in the mainstream attention will this be dropped in the future?