It takes many ghosts to touch the ground
Description
This talk traces the evolving threads of my recent projects around polyphonic, participatory nonfiction artmaking—works in which the voices of human, geological, and vegetal actors intertwine. The collaborative feature length installation “Chronicle of a Fall” foregrounds to the displaced and destabilized voices of immigrant artists in the contemporary United States, immersing visitors intimately in expansive sonic and digital worlds constructed from scans of the places and people they call home. “Humble Monuments”, an augmented reality collaboration between several MIT Open Documentary Lab researchers, features the voices and likenesses of wild and nurtured plants—and their human associates—reclaiming sterile spaces across the country. These will lead up to and connect with a recent solo exploration of the ways we can imagine and give voice to the being of rocks and networks of organisms acting within and through it across deep time in my recent multi-pronged project, “No Horizon”. Together, these works compose a conversation about memory and trauma, but also about layered existence, growth, and intimacy. They seek a ground of listening—a moment of coherence within the instability of the present—where multiple beings and temporalities may coexist. In this sense, the projects do not document a single reality but instead propose a shared field of sensing and voicing: an expanded nonfiction practice that listens to the world as something alive, porous, and plural.
Artists