Alan Garner’s extraordinary novel Red Shift (1973) was triggered by the author seeing a piece of graffiti at a railway station which read “not really now not anymore”. There is something so eerie, so cryptic, so suggestive about that phrase, especially when written as an anonymous graffiti.
What did the nameless author of this vagabond poetry mean by it, and what did it mean to them?
A phrase that is not quite banal, but which is certainly transparent, conversational — “not really now not anymore” — acquires a poetic opacity by virtue of the omission of a comma. Yet, even that apparently deflationary explanation cannot conjure away the eeriness of the phrase: “not really now not any more”. To say there was something fated about Garner’s encounter with this graffiti is to redouble the phrase’s intrinsic, indelible eeriness. For what does the phrase point to if not a fatal temporality? No now, not anymore, not really. Does this mean that the present has eroded, disappeared — not now anymore? Are we in the time of the always-already, where the future has been written; in which case it is not the future, not really? Suggesting he imagined it — but the phrase so perfectly captures the temporal vortices in Garner’s work that it seems as if it could have been a special message meant only for him.
The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher

With the support of the Spanish Embassy in Belgium.

Elena Carvajal (ES), Fran Martinez (ES) and Laura Iturralde (ES)

Elena Carvajal (ES) is a dancer and choreographer based between Brussels and Barcelona. Her work moves on the border between choreography and visual art, dedicated to dialogue within the writing of space and the language of movement. She develops a particular universe that rocks between reality and fiction, generating experiences that the spectator is free to create from their own relationship with the world.

Fran Martinez (ES) is a dancer trained in performance and dance in different schools in Spain, Portugal and Belgium. He currently works as a performer for Colectivo Glovoy and Natalia Fernandes, with whom he collaborates in different projects. Co-founder of the body arts company Pálido Domingo.

Laura Iturralde (ES) is a light designer and scenographer. In 2018 he received the María Casares Award for the best set design for her work in Resaca (ilMaquinario) and in 2019, 2020 and 2021 she received the same award in the lighting category for Invisibles (Redrum Teatro) and O Empapelado Amarelo (A Quinta do Cuadrante) and Bailar Agora (Marta Alonso Tejada) respectively.
Since 2022 she is a member of the Association of Lighting Authors of Galicia, an entity dedicated to obtaining recognition of the figure of the Lighting Designer.