Sweet Songs Never Last [alongside Sawangwongse Yawnghwe]

Flowers follow us from one place to another” in Mars da Silva Saude’s vivid contribution to beside/gerllaw. The artist-filmmaker’s roving, border-crossing spin on the first-person essay emulates the “memory banditry” at play in Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s flower paintings, currently showing in Aberystwyth as part of Artes Mundi 11. Beginning with the California poppies blooming in their garden in Aberystwyth, their adopted hometown, Saude pursues disparate lines of psychogeographical association, which emphasise the ways inter/personal relations are defined by macropolitical currents. ‘Sweet Songs Never Last,’ like every text in this series, is haunted by archives of different kinds (official, anecstral, “junkie”), weaving song lyrics, family history, anecdotes from Saude’s social world and art-theoretical coordinates. The effect is less to “ground” Yawnghwe’s work in any one place or context than to provide one singular artist’s impressionistic activation of the personal-political potentialities contained in another’s.

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