Text samples
In my practice video and text live side by side intersecting and influencing each other. The texts are written in a performative voice, and make their way into moving image fragments in audible form and as experimental soundscapes.
The written fragments are influenced by the sites of their creation. Until now they have been written in Norway, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and The US. Language and culture weaves into the fragments.
Below are various fragments from 2023 –
“Am I seen?” (Written in Upstate New York 2023)
The migration of geese1 is over.
I’m down by the river. What does it mean to sit on stolen land numb by the violence
faced by children on the remaining land of what is being stolen from them? Where is their pavilion of asylum? Watching souls come to rest on burning beds, on dusty roads, in collapse.
Loss. Damage. Corpse after corpse, dehumanized. Like a pyroclastic surge,
they bury, incinerate, and destroy upon impact. Smoke in the air is making it hard to breathe. I looked for safety, you showed me guns. An historical account of what was and what is. What will be? What will be? Pause – there is no time to pause. Cease your fire, cease your violence. Desperation cries in a cascade of ruins. Talons clawing from above, ripping away what is most precious.
Behind the veil of a total blockade, she asks “Am I seen?”
How can you claim what isn’t yours? Suffering will never justify its deployment. They are failing us. He looked at you and said, “His brain was falling out of his head”. There are scars on bodies, on hearts and minds. A generation traumatized, reduced to pawns by narcissistic heads of state. “Human animals”2, he called them. Did your past teach you nothing? Did you forget your own history?
On the pontoon above the frozen deep, I think of you. Numb. Neglected. Flatlined.
Remembered.
1 “Migrating geese represent teamwork and continuing on the current path” https://a-z-animals.com/blog/goose-spirit-animal-symbolism-meaning/ Acessed November 15 2023 2.50 pm
2 https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-po wer-food-or-fuel/ “Defense minister announces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: No power, food or fuel”, 9 October 2023, 12:26 pm for the Times of Israel. Accessed Nov 9 2023 12.27 pm
prologue (Written in New York City and Upstate New York 2023)
Silence. Or was there noise? The vast darkness seems endless.
Within the incubator drones a loud rumble.
Can we find new nutrients for growth to ameliorate the socioeconomic structures
and geopoloitics currently forming and moulding?
Are you comfortable in the Unknown? Is ephemerality a synonym for humankind?
As both the cause and recipients of the Climate Crisis, who do we look to for rescue? Improvement? Salvation? Astronauts or archaeologists?
As we are flesh, so we are transient and ephemeral. Or are we?
Will I be a fossil? Will I be fuel, as we know it? What will become of my bodily
remains? Of my spiritual ones?
Apocalypse, he says. Burnt to a crisp.
Have you ever chanted from the depths of your soul?
A cicada is singing out its mating call. The sound of a waning summer? The
cusp of a new season? As our planet heats up, fatalities rise and our constructed environments suffer. What is the way of water? Or wind? Earth? Fire? Have you felt the silver sheets of rain? A horse is grazing. Will we forever be skating on the razor edge between the cataclysmic progression of the natural world and our own annihilation? The end of forever doesn’t seem too far away.
Would you like to play a game of Nature?
Madrugada (Written in Lisboa 2024)
(stream of consciousness excerpts from two early mornings, and a late night)
New, yet distinctly familiar. Water is flowing down the middle of the pedestrian
street. Jesus is staring at me from the balcony. The humidity is encapsulating, frizzing my hair and nourishing my skin. I sleep well here. The cappuccino foam sticks to my top lip, and a myriad of rom com scenes flood through my head. “A month is not enough”, the thought keeps creeping up on me. It is not the downfall or the remains of a colonizing power, it’s the moving on. 50 years ago, Celeste handed out carnations.
Adeodato, were you here? Did you traverse these streets? More dirt rushes
past me, now in a gush of water. This city is infested with tourists, like rats. I am one. Let the old lady with her bent back and net of fruit take the tram amarelo. Here you should wear out the soles of your sneakers.
The dirt covers the tiles. Infinite drawings stare back at me. Clinck, clinck.
The droplets pitter patter. I hope the rain will uncover the colours below.
A siren is blazing. 1920s music is playing in the background. I am drinking
my morning tea. Cha. Chat. Cha cha cha. Blinking neon lights are hanging outside tourist shops. The sky is blue, not a cloud in sight. Friday. A marvellous, cartoon-like house sits on the hill beneath the castle. A castle hill whose presence has been held in Lisboa for millenia, inhabited decades B.C. There's a man in a green shirt having a smoke on his balcony.
Men. It is men who occupy the streets below. Rarely have I seen a woman.
I look down as I walk to and from. Down at hand carved stones carefully placed one by one in patterns of black and white.
Tin foil wraps around the roof opposite me. Mouraria. Home of Fado, home of the
Moorish people. Home of immigrants. Beautiful houses covered in laundry hanging from balconies. The weather has been mild this month. Allowing for summer dresses, shorts and sunglasses. Still, Lisboa is no vacation spot in the slow sense. Lisboa has a high driving energy. A social energy. An eventful energy. I came looking for roots and a sense of belonging. I am not sure what I found. I found myself in the middle of hustle and bustle, and feeling like time was rushing by and simultaneously standing still.
Someone is rummaging in the kitchen. Cooking breakfast. The sun is making
its way around the corner of the house, sun rays bouncing off the tinfoil on the house opposite me. I am squinting my eyes with a slight smile on my face. Many mornings here in Lisboa were foggy. Dense fog blocking all views of the castle. All days but one the fog dispersed after noon. I assume it's the city's proximity to the sea that gives way for the nevoeiro.
I wonder what this city was like throughout the years. It's such an epicentre of
history. So many lives and fates were decided here. Fado, fate. Saudade, the longing of. I keep thinking that I should have more time alone in this city, and the city keeps telling me that this is not a city where you are alone. My solitude is puzzled.
I had a beautiful day in the countryside. Seeing the small town of Evora with its
Roman ruin and historic library. After lunch we Bolted away deeper into the farmland to visit a vineyard below ground. A modern architectural gem hinting at Guggenheim and Kim K’s patio, loosely speaking. Brown cows were grazing as the car sped ahead. Goats were jumping around. And later, as I stood by watching sheep and lambs feeding he pulled up in his pickup truck.
Ancient futures
Necropolis
Artifice
Reality is the grand stage where we perform
A memoria
Ego sapientia
Poesia, poesia, poesia
Conhece todos os segredos da magia antiga
Interiority
Socio-fiction
L’Occident / L’Orient
A receptacle for the consecration of the instant
The intense sounds from the street below fills my hot room. Chatter, outdrawn
honks of frustration, vomiting, laughter, singing, and the heavy base from the party drowns the silence. The melancholy sound of saudade. As I look out of my window, the castle is lit in colour.
It is both the old and new Lisbon.
The Town in the Pines (Written in South Carolina 2024)
Apocalyptic seeds float in the air, like snowflakes at the brink of summer.
The bamboo stands tall over me as I walk down a dusty road. I think of the magic of alchemy – transmutation pursuing perfection – science fiction, or science fact? A season of amends, in the town in the pines. Far from salt air. Here the magnolias bloom. A mockingbird sings a prophetic-divinatory chirp. The cottage behind the house with the two palmettos is my fugitive home. Life here feels far from predation, yet its roots grow deep. The live oaks were here to feel it.
Twenty Five Shade of Green (Written in Finnskogen and Hardangerfjorden 2024)
Peering into the woods, I wonder what is hiding in the dark. Is the naked man
by the lake playing his violin?
An eerie atmosphere surrounds these parts, even so it brings me stillness.
This room was built to imitate a chapel, it lifts your eyes towards the sky and
lets your energy swell. Its windows shield the inside from the cold whilst submerging the room in the woodlands. How many shades of green can you count?
Birch trees stand as tall beacons of light in the dense forest. The white bark
brightening the gloomy murkiness.
What a bizarre place to be. At the cusp of past and future, in a moment, in a breath. Dread fills a prolonged space of silence as tears press on. And as fleetingly as the melancholy set it, it has evaporated. The sound of the creek raises my gaze, it’s hidden somewhere beneath the layers of leafy green.
A whiff of lavender is making its way through the air. A calf is calling its mother.
Sparrows dance in the air as a single crow is making its presence known. Where is the murder? Whose fate is being decided today? Farmers built this land. Farmers and fishermen.
Like wrestling with clay, I shape the blip, the fragment of time, that is my life.
I walk into a blanket of white fog, in hiding. North? East? South? West? I look around. Houses stacked on top of eachother appear to be upside down. Where am I? Is my life appearing through a kaleidoscope? A glow is floating above the fjord, rays of sun behind the blockade.
Is my simulation glitching?