Slowly and carefully, I enter the space. There is white smoke and its usual smell, and
a continuous sound. A machine sound. There are three rectangular structures placed
on the ground. They are inclined, resembling solar plates. Maybe cliffs. Their surfaces
are covered with metal plates. Not much light enables me to continue walking on the
black floor. There is sunlight, but the sun is still below the horizon.

On a metal surface I read an engraving: “why so binary?”
I do not know what time it is. I feel a dilation of the moment in time, like a transition
is being looped.

I see a creature on the cliff. Both horse and human, they have strong hoofs, and their
delicate hands hold an engraving machine, where the sound comes from. They
engrave messages on the metallic surface of the world, messages that will last forever.

I get closer to the creature. As they move, gravity pulls stronger, I get closer to the
ground. With soft and precise movements, their hands reach hundreds of meters
above and pull rays of sun, just like strings. As if to define how the world is seen.

As they gallop through space, they direct the rays of sun to illuminate the path they
will take. To clear the path to the horse-human’s eternal gallop, I turn around my
axis, lie down, crawl, deviate, rise, squat, slide, lie down again. The other visitor-
creatures around me also find their way. We travel slowly, for thousands of years.

When there is too much light, it’s hard to see. Sometimes it’s easier to see in the
dark.

Amidst the fog, we see another cliff. The creature begins to climb. When they reach
the top, they become enormous, a giant. By the edge of the cliff, they look down.
When they open their mouth, a waterfall begins to flow from their insides. And
where there was nothing, a lake takes shape.

We travel slowly, for thousands of years.

A few days later, I’m sitting in my living room in Johanneshov noticing which
dimensions of the performance remain in my body. It’s 21:21 now, and it started to get
a little too dark in here. But not dark enough for my lamp to make a considerable
difference. I’m thinking of dawn and dusk, of the sun below the horizon. Dawn is
the first appearance of light in the sky before sunrise, when the sun is still below the
horizon. I remember the analogy between the horizon and utopia, as both recede
when you move toward them. Both keep us walking (1). I really like the idea of the
horizon as desire, a moving force. But utopia is unreachable because it can hold only
one world. And a world with only one set of belief systems, when actualized, can
only be a dystopia. But in Dawn, Adam Seid Tahir invites the visitor-creatures to
move through a world that can hold many different worlds.

A dawn is also the beginning of something yet taking form, a phenomenon, the
beginning of a favourable period of time. A myth is a story that talks about the
beginning of time, but it affects the present of the storyteller and the listeners. Myths
determine what is "given", and give form to the relations between human and more-
than-human entities.

Myth. Story. Belief. Place. Engaging with mythmaking, Dawn already proposes a way
to be seen. Departing from the Nordic rune Dagaz, which symbolizes light, hope, and
positive transformation, Adam becomes a horse-like creature. They summon the
light, but just enough for the mythic movement to be drawn in space. As Adam
works, dragging the chariot of the day, crawling, walking, and showing the way, I
follow them.

I turn around my axis, lie down, crawl, deviate, rise, squat, slide, lie down again.
The other visitor-creatures around me also find their way. We travel slowly,
for thousands of years.

As I follow a creature, not a god, I realize we are all supported by the same ground.
The landscape widens and mutates, I can feel the light on my skin. Sometimes it
blinds me. There is also a pull toward the ground, and it does not reassure the world
as we (think we) know it.

As I follow a creature, not a god, I travel to times when there was no separation
between humans and non-humans. Matter becomes a source of power.

As a mythmaking practice, Dawn may be seen as a portal between times, materials,
bodies, and spirits, a spell for queer and racialized experiences to transform the
myths that form the world’s ground. In many native Amazonian cultures, myths are
stories from the times when there was no separation between humans and non-
humans. Their philosophies and myths talk about the possibility of being captured by
other species–the others, when crossing the border between them. Humans could
live among other species for a long time before realizing they had gone through a
metamorphosis (2). From this perspective, humanity is not special, or central, it is
shared among all beings who have a spirit. The only human able to cross borders
between species without being captured is the shaman–a cosmopolitical diplomat
who can step into the others’ perspectives.

In Dawn, a journey happens around the other’s horizon. Matter is ridden,
engraved, dragged through space, and I can see a weave of light, as time
spirals and we inhabit past, present, and future (3). A landscape is emerging
from a weave of light, bodies, and Adam’s braided hair. It’s a landscape of
immanence, where gods exist within all matter, rather than somewhere beyond the
world. This relational unfolding makes me smile. The place becomes filled with
eroticism rooted in dimensions of bodily power that have been suppressed by
coloniality (4). It all becomes cosmic; in this new mythology multiple voices belong.
Voices that define themselves through difference, rather than similarities. What does
it mean to belong to a place?

On a metal surface I read an engraving: “Fuck being Swedish, I’d rather
identify as Viking”

I begin to think of the myths that inhabit our bodies, those which hinder their power.
Stories about values we should conform to, about god-like forces we should follow
and obey without question. Maybe, a weave of matter, bodies, and forces can
identify these myths–and even exorcise them.

Encounters with creatures moving together, in the light and in the dark.
Creatures slowly turning, laying down, carefully crawling, squatting, deviating, rising.

______________________

1 “ Utopia is out there on the horizon. I move two steps closer, it moves two steps away. I walk ten steps forward, and the horizon runs ten steps aways. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach it. What is utopia for? It’s for this: to keep me walking.” Fernando Birri, cited by Eduardo Galeano in As Palavras Andantes (1994), my translation.

2 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a post-structural anthropology (2009)

3 ‘Spiralling time’ - a concept by Brazilian artist and scholar Leda Maria Martins. She proposes time as interweaving cosmic and philosophical perceptions, ancestry and death, a conception where the past inhabits the present and the future, being simultaneously correlated and in transformation, and challenging the linearity elaboration of time. Performances do tempo espiralar, poéticas do corpo-tela (2021).

4 ‘Erotic’ as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Audrey Lorde, y“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, in Sister Outsider (1984).

BY KORINA KORDOVA

DAWN, BY ADAM SEID TAHIR, 18TH OF MAY 2025, MDT, STOCKHOLM

BIO: Korina Kordova (she/her) is an artist working within the confluences of choreography, dance and performance. Her practice meets the public as live choreographic works, dance performances, scores in both written and aural forms, installations, and workshops. Her work has been presented in performing arts venues, festivals, museums and galleries in Europe and South America. Her practice adopts decolonial perspectives and resonates with feminist new materialisms and ecological thinking. She’s interested in non-Eurocentric ways of knowing, decolonial aesthetics, mythmaking and magic. website: korinakordova.net