Walker and Walker

Walker and Walker are two brothers who have been working together since 1989. They have recently completed a film Mount Analogue Revisited, which was listed by Fergus Daly as one of the best films of 2010 in a world poll by Senses of Cinema. The film is a reworking of Rene Daumal’s book ‘Mount Analogue’ which was Daumal’s final work and remained uncompleted due to the author’s premature death. The book is an unfinished account of a voyage to an unknown island, where the voyagers seek an improbable mountain which is seen as a means to link Heaven and Earth. Central to this book and the inception of the voyage is a text about a symbolic mountain which was written by one of the protagonists but was challenged by another as being factually based.

Walker and Walker take as a starting point for their film a short passage from the book, where the crew arrive at the shores of an island and are escorted in silence to a municipal building and asked by an official to give an account of who they are and the purpose of their visit. Within the confines of this meeting, Walker and Walker fabricate a conversation between three of the crew members and the official. They speak of the difficulties involved in making a journey to a superior world other than our own, where the truth can not exist, given the limits of reason and rationality. The events play out through pure dialogue within a single room and this serves to ground the fantastical nature of the film. Although the film holds to the book, it is not a literal adaptation, for the conversation that ensues references a broad number of writers, such as Novalis, Stanislaw Lem, Edger Allen Poe, Maurice Blanchot, Hermann Hess, and William James. All of these serve to inform a proposition for the pursuit of the crew’s objectives, a more utopian society. The ending remains unresolved as the viewer is left unaware if the voyager's arrival at this place is instigated by the inhabitants of the island or by their efforts. It is an adventurous philosophical tale, encompassing poetic passages, leading to a spiritual quest, bordering on science fiction.

They recently completed a new body of work which addressed both the concerns of the film and the two adjoining spaces, in which the film and the work were presented; a black box and a white cube; suggestive of day and night, or lucidity and obscurity. Within this binary structure, Walker and Walker introduced a third element at play, a consideration of the notion of a threshold space; which brings together the before and after in a becoming, instead of separating them.

Mounted on the gallery wall, a series of prepositions and conjunctives; ‘if’, ‘or’, ‘do’, ‘is’, and ‘to’ were hung where the center of each of these words, in sheet aluminium, opening out the possibility of an understanding of these words, creating a small circular narrative in the space between the two letters; if only this had happened as opposed to that, to take action or not, to go here or there.

Other works shown were One Night Only a neon sign of the same text, which goes on for the exact duration of one night only during the exhibition. Echoing the crew awaiting the appropriate circumstances to enable them to enter the shores of Mount Analogue, a taxidermy owl ‘The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk‘ sat perched high above. Clearly, it will never fly but as the title declares, it awaits a certain moment when the conditions are right, creating an enduring interval in the moment itself.