Relation de Voyage: Ronnie Danaher: If you jump on a moving party tram, where do you land?

and it was nearly done, this frail 

Travelling coincidence; and what it held 

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again, 

And as the brakes took hold, there swelled 

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower 

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

 - Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

Looking out of the window of a moving vehicle - in transit - lulled by the feeling of being in motion and as Larkin notes, “all sense of hurry gone”, is where we land here in Ronnie Danaher’s first-person perspective tram journey through Milan’s Monumental Cemetery.

As we journey with the artist’s lilting rhythmic voice as our guide on this “party tram”, we glide past time-marked graves and into her mind’s eye. This confluence of public transport and the party might not be immediately obvious, but as Danaher made the work on residency in a former tram factory with a “party tram” frequently stationed outside her room, she began to think of this in-between space as one of possibility. She conceived of the body of the tram itself as trapped in time, a relic between epochs, functional yet somehow not contemporary. 

The outside world passes by from the safety of carriage or car seat, and Danaher conjures a feeling of doing - of moving - whilst corporeally still. We are in two places at once, a pair of eyes trapped behind screen or window. Here and there, where you once were and where you will be, are experienced at the same time. This dual now and not-now combines into a third centre: the journey.

Invoking the pilgrim’s way and the sacred act of devotional journeying, our guide remarks on the Santiago de Compostela and the ‘Souls in Purgatory’ that guard the facade of the Church of Animas. Teased and titillated by the licking flames used to depict suffering, Danaher sees them as “party gowns”, literally dancing on the way to heaven or hell - who knows, right?

This is what the Camino pilgrims see when they finally arrive after their 500 miles of walking step after step - a rhythmic meditation with a beat like a tram on tracks - or the bassy thud of a distant party. This daily passage is also a kind of limbo. Danaher posits this liminal space as one of imagination, hedonism and potential energy, seeing the in-between as the “sacred subversion of the status quo - inherently queer.” In her purgatory we encounter far-off beats, empty spaces and spotlights with no subjects, like being in the kitchen too early at a party waiting for friends to arrive. 

If purgatory is a looping tram and “limbo is a queer space”, then by her logic the party is unknowable, ungovernable and a queer rite of passage, and why not wear a flaming party gown and dance ecstatic in the fire? As a “lapsed catholic”, she draws on this fantasy landscape between heaven and hell described by many poets and artists including Dante in his second book of the Divine Comedy “Purgatorio” which describes a “journey of suffering” up a cone-shaped mountain, an ascension motif the artist herself frequently returns to after a chance encounter with a grave bearing the cone-shaped mountain.

The work oscillates in this way between received ideas or images of the consequences of sin, and the lived experience of the artist. Based on her own “queer journey” through parties, dance floors and sweaty nights, she conjures the hell-like imagery of Bosch and bodies. Reminiscent of the “Cabarets of Death” in the underground party scene of the interwar period, the work is escapist and confronting at the same time. Holding the complexity of life, existence, purity, gore and the body as a means of escape and entrapment through alcohol, sex, drugs and the rest, the body here is also a means of knowing: a portal to the beyond into and out of the sacred and profane. 

The body also exhibits a politics of freeze, refusal or breakdown. When overwhelmed or unseen it glitches, as the work does. A ritual of anxiety, the endless scroll, endless loop, eternal waiting whilst the nervous system tries to regulate itself is something Danaher explores: what are we all doing, honestly, on this mad little journey and where do we get off?

Text by Susanna Davies-Crook