Author Gethan Dick: ‘I'd make it illegal to buy or sell water. Everyone would adapt within a few weeks'
Water in The Desert, Fire in the Night
It's about hope, hunger, gold, wolves, Streatham, Cuba, post-apocalyptic feminism, pregnancy and bicycles. It's about the porousness of the female bodily experience, the challenges of being an empiricist with a sample size of one, what's worth knowing and what's worth living and the necessity of irrationality. It's about an underachieving young woman, a retired midwife and a charismatic Dubliner who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. And it's about the fact that the thing about the end of the world is that it happens all the time.
You did a master's in creative writing at Goldsmiths in London more than 20 years ago but did not pursue writing fiction. Why not?
I disliked the distance you have in fiction between making something yourself and having an acknowledgment that it has been made. After my master's I continued working with writing, but I wrote for spoken-word performance or for zines that I or other people edited, and I studied visual arts at Camberwell College of Art and started making text-based visual works, because those were all ways to feel like what I'd written was 'made'. So writing was usually in there somewhere, it just wasn't in the form that writing usually comes packaged in. When I moved to France in 2011 the bit of my brain that deals with language was occupied with assimilating French for quite a while and I didn't write anything made up for a few years, but stories and text still held a place in our visual arts projects.
What prompted you to turn to writing as opposed to visual arts to tell this story?
During all that, I'd talk every now and then about writing a novel about the end of the world – so I guess I always thought I'd get around to it one day. But I definitely never would have if it hadn't been for [my partner] Myles saying, when we got back from a slightly survivalist two-month stint in a stone shepherds' hut during the first Covid lockdown, 'Stop talking about it and write it now.'
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You have been working as an artist with Myles, first in London, and for many years now in Marseilles. Did this influence the novel?
Definitely, but in silhouette. Myles and I make the visual arts work together, so at first I kept trying to get him to write the book with me, but he stuck to his guns and got me to do it for myself. Instead he became the motor for our other projects so that I had the time and brain-space to write. He wouldn't look at it until I felt I had a full first draft – he didn't want to contaminate it and our working practice is generally so meshed that it would have been impossible not to. When I had the draft, he did the initial edit, so he definitely had a hand in it, but it's just my name on it and it's unusual for me to have a 'solo' project going out into the world – that hasn't happened in a long time. Also, our art projects are usually multilayered, many-headed things: dozens to hundreds of participants, a cultural institution, a noncultural institution, local groups, in-situ installations, municipal permissions and so on. To be able to turn my back on all the logistics of whatever tentacular art project we were working on and, for a week or three, do something that just involved me, a notebook and a pencil, was a lovely counterpoint.
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Modern technology and infrastructure no longer function in your novel. Was the pandemic a prompt or was it something that you had begun thinking about before?
Well, this question assumes that modern technology and infrastructure currently function, which I'm not convinced they do, or, if they do then you have to examine pretty carefully who they function for, to what end and at what cost.
If, like Audaz, you survived an apocalypse, to where would you make a pilgrimage?
To misquote William Gibson, the apocalypse is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Audaz has an exceptional memory. Do you have any such skills?
I have a special talent for not hearing somebody if I'm not looking at them, which is fantastic for making it really embarrassing for anyone who tries to get my attention in a crowded public space.
Will there be a second book or is it back to the studio?
Both I hope. But in the immediate term back to the studio.
I'd make it illegal to buy or sell water. You could start by banning producing and selling bottled water in Europe right now
Which projects are you working on?
We're towards the end of Acqua Lambro, in Milan, where we're creating an impossible luxury mineral water brand: we built a machine-sculpture from detritus gathered from the Lambro, one of Europe's most polluted rivers, and it transforms the river's water river into pure drinking water. It works – we've had the water it produces analysed. We showed the machine and a prototype bottle – glass, but made to look like the crushed plastic water bottles that fill the river – at Milan Design Week last month. We're about to restage We All Fall/Récit, an immersive performance piece we co-created, inspired by the stories of people who have made the journey to seek asylum in Europe, in which a choreography creates large-scale cyanotype prints of people's bodies. And we're mid-production on Espèces Humaines/Fides for La Monnaie de Paris (the museum attached to the French mint). We're making an installation, inspired both by imagery related to economic collapse and by indigo cloth-money, about the fact that money is, at its origin, an act of collective faith.
Who do you admire the most?
Palestinian Red Crescent workers and journalists.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I'd make it illegal to buy or sell water. You could start by banning producing and selling bottled water in Europe right now. It would have so many benefits and everyone would adapt within a few weeks.
The best and worst things about where you live?
Marseilles is chaotic, grubby, ill-disciplined, unprofessional, heel-dragging, short-tempered and nothing, absolutely nothing, ever happens the way it's supposed to. I love it. I'm not even going to tell you all the other things that are great about it – there are already way too many tourists.
Water in The Desert, Fire in the Night is published by Tramp Press
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