The exhibition was held at the Palazzo Imperatore – a gorgeous and lightly decrepit space that was popularly compared to a set from Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive – opposite Palermo Cathedral. Built predominantly in the Catalan-Gothic style, the cathedral’s proportions are exuberant. Huge, palm-spiked grounds stretched out in front of it, and tiny figures, who paid extra for admittance to the terrace, crawled against the darkening skyline. The exhibition space at the Palazzo Imperatore consisted of three rooms in sequence. The third room had a balcony that looked onto the cathedral. It was a vaulting juxtaposition. One that precipitated a minor experience of the sublime: to be pleasurably cowed, before returning to the interior with a heightened sense of its interiority. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space states ‘The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ Palazzo Imperatore was that house for the four artists and their visions, realised as part of Res:In #2. The first room contained Withstand the Fall of Time by Alban Adam and Jordan Hemingway.

I think it’s indisputable that a log wearing chains is more naked than a log not wearing chains. In this sense, the draped log in this piece is like a classical nude in drapery, wherein the cloth begets the erotic. The log became a body. On top of the body lay a black warlock guitar. The guitar was played by a chain that swung in pendulum motion. I want to say that the chain played the guitar in a manner that was syncopated, from the root Latin syncopare, to swoon. The chain played the guitar swooningly, returning as if cursed to do so. The animation of the chain seemed to imbue meaning to the object of its return. The log, no longer a log but body, more naked for being clothed; no longer object but in relation; no longer inert but, in response to the chain – prostrated. Prostrated in a manner of devotion? Honour? Yearning? Grief? Withstand the Fall of Time is named for a song by Norwegian black metal band Immortal, fond of black leather, corpse paint and outrageous weapons. It seems fitting that the guitar, a trapping of this scene of camp excess, is locked in a melodramatic tryst with a log and a chain.

Easy to overlook: on the floor in front of the log were a pair of neatly folded over-elbow (in fact dog-handling) leather gloves. Alban called them ‘the hand of the artist’, to which, thrilled, I rejoined ‘Like a threat!’ In terms of the work’s theatricality, I enjoyed appending the show with its after party, hosted by L-Y-O-N, wherein the artists played as Sissies of Mercy and Alban, shirtless, brandished his new twin-balled, spike-headed flail.

Our ill-fated lovers are bang in the centre of hard stage lighting, which is usually a contract with the audience that something will happen. On the one hand, it was enjoyably problematic, in an arch fantasy kind of way. It seemed to present a task or riddle – an Excalibur in the stone. It begged the arc of an epic, while withholding the quest. On the other hand, it was like Waiting for Godot. Except the tree was lying down and there were no people involved. I think, for me, the closest energetic counterpart was that of a forest in which dead wood gives way to new life.