Collaborations
Chris Barras, Emma Bolland, Madeleine Campbell, Jennifer Spector
sand susurran shadow stone cros (sings):
a video reflection on places of dwelling
Artist Statement
sand susurran shadow stone (cros)sings is an exploration of forgotten dwelling places and elemental pathways. The voices of Susurran reach across the Atlantic releasing old structures, discarding uninhabitable grammars.
From cave dwelling and rock paintings to structures of stone, thatch and wood, this video essay journeys through habitats re-membered. In a dissonant bricolage of undated images and sound gleaned over time through eclectic recording devices, voyagers from the Anthropocene stop and start, pause and listen. Their voices speak of places they once encountered, bearing witness to their ephemeral nature as they were shaped, carved and reclaimed in turn by organic life and the elements. Drawing from a collectively writ script and photographic archives and locations, the fractured transit of Susurran is punctuated with what has been absented. In reimagining what might constitute shelter, material from the unfixed, more fluid arms of the elements is utilized to layer linguistic and physical artefacts with scattered braids of voice, glitch and elision in a contemporary mnemonic of dwelling and place.
In a return to the perennial ways of stone, sand, light and wave, what gives way in dissolution leaves an asemic tidemark of textual encounters. In this precarious archive, scatter is rummaged, rustled, reconstructed. Touch, sound and image are disrupted, reframing copresence. What shape will future embodiments take in geophonic dislocation?
This 4:49 video essay sand susurran shadow stone cros (sings) is a provocation to reflect on the shape of future embodiments in a post-Anthropocene age.
This project was sparked by Caroline Bergvall’s virtual experimental workshop ‘Solitary to Solidary’ in September 2020.—JS, MC & CB
Gillian Parrish & Gene Pfeiffer
Some of Us Burn
No matter what our armor, these days we may find ourselves a thousand miles north of where we were born. We dig in and then we leave, because the grass is greener across the highway, the soil easier to work in the cooler air of earthworms and tunnels. No matter what our armor, Missouri weather is a pleasant surprise for blind gardeners who jump at the opportunity. We who jump for joy even under the heavy weight we carry. We feel the low pressure slipping under the high sky pressing us further and further up the map, where ice sloughs off into the valleys like the skin and scales from our backs. Only a few lifetimes ago, we endured the fire falling from Brazilian mountains, and then surfed the sandhills as they crawled to the Texas state line. The wind there gutted the gullies and dirt of our births, convincing us to move this far from home. But what good is it for migrants, no matter their armor, to dream of a welcome, or a home, when the fire of the other rolls up against those childish windows. The long walk has delivered us from right to work, and as we roll into regulated soil, even the regulators call us invasive. Still we jump, startled by 18-wheel commerce moving perpendicular to the change in temperature and wind, and the burning rain of trade agreements. No matter what our armor, we jump, and the road still kills before we can get ahead, before the rancid remuneration appears, even before the death of our destinations.
~
Some of us travel light, bird-boned or chitin winged. Some blown off course by wind that just bent metal flagpoles in Tulsa in a storm heading east to the fast-heating sea. Some of us starve in the south as fish flee the warming waters. Some carry our babies on our backs. We flee on intelligent feet formed for climbing sixty million years ago. But these trees are torches, and a long walk is farther on charred ground. Some of us go north from our drought-stricken fields. Or we leave after the rain takes the land our families lived on for lifetimes, our future gone under the mud. Elsewhere tornados touch down. Hurricanes churn. Half a million drowned in a single spill of oil. Thousands of us lost with the ice. A billion bodies of light killed in the chemical mist of well-coiffed lawns. Some of us trade us, billions for billions, for blood-money yachts and rockets. Some die of hunger in the dust where a lake like jade lived last year. Some of us burn with our trees, green just last week. Some perch on our roofs above the floods. Empty handed, we watch the water, hope for a boat. Time running out.
~
We travel on light, hang in the dome of syrupy Missouri blackness, and watch the visitors below. They are on the move, and they are hungry. But our taste is bitter. We sit on the light for only a few days, maybe a few weeks. Once we outnumbered the glass jars and twist-off lids and nail holes for air. Those children are gone now. They followed the red county DDT trucks to the edges of each subdivision. They plowed the streets of play. They followed the magical mist that erases dreams. And we are beetles with no dreams. We are dwindling constellations that offer less and less direction to the refugees below. Wet or dry we will stay. Our generations have seen the grass grow into brush grow into evergreen soft wood grow into the dead hardwood that we are born of. Now we search for synchronicity. We burn each night for love, and the one more life after each of us.
~
More life, we sing, more life, and dance our feathered dances, down the generations. So many chances for change. So many of us going, going, gone. Some of us can’t breathe in the cities. Some of us can’t breathe in the sea. So we lose a thousand thousand thousand dreams: Octopus dreams fast changing shape, the herons dreaming their careful walks, the tigers dreaming meat, firefly dreams of the dark, aquamarine dreams from the deep seams of the glaciers, slow dreams of the elephants, ferns dreaming of ancient days, migrants dreaming safe passage in their mother tongues, the shimmer of peacock dreams, the human children dreaming of flying and falling, as armadillos dream of north. But the map where they’re headed is red. Drought in the heart of a heartland, just west of the Mississippi. The wind picking up. The water running out from sea to shining sea.
~
The sirens sing their deadly song. Tornado alley is moving east. And the wind shears bigger and bigger slices of the lost and angry water. What are the chances we pass safely from watch to warning to all clear? What are the chances we fall featherless with our mothers’ tongues and ears full of beeswax? We remember how the crows were caw and cackle this morning. Twenty million years of crows calling before the storms. So we fold ourselves into the darkness of a closet. We wonder if the childish dream will come true: our houses flying, falling, landing in some other world. Outside the flimsy walls, the crows in the catalpa sit passerine; it’s easier for them to hold on than to let go. They listen. All warnings expire.
Notes on the Form: The Renga Essay
Elsewhere, Parrish has introduced this idea of a “renga essay”: linked prose poems as a vehicle for multi-eyed and many-handed thought on a close concern shared by the collaborators. Climate emergency shines a stark light on life as a web of interconnection, which fits the renga essay form, a form made of generative links and leaps of enlivening variation, reflecting ecology and evolution. In this piece, which dwindles in lines reflecting our time and our water running out, Pfeiffer wrote sections one and three, Parrish two and four, with the fifth written by us both.
We have not forgotten the orcas dreaming of yachts; we salute them here.
Given some of our focus on migration, we share a link with an Arizona-based grassroots organization No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, folks who are working to ensure that migrants have water and other aid in their hard desert crossing:
https://nomoredeaths.org/about-no-more-deaths/
Some brief remarks by Parrish on the "renga essay" form can be found here. —GP & GP