Gathering seeds #6
10 things on my mind this month.
Hope everyone’s having a kind start to August! Also, is it just me or is every month feeling like a strange threshold space this year? A jelly-like substrate we must all pass through to get to the other side?
As I’m preparing to travel for an artist residency this month in Southern Italy, here are 10 things sustaining my curiosity about the world:
Blue whales have become eerily silent. A six-year long scientific study reveals that it is the lack of food, due to marine heatwaves, causing whales to focus more on seeking nourishment than singing. Last night, as I sat on my bed, crying while listening to whale songs, I also wondered if whales are silent because they’re grieving the state of our planet.
A pair of icebergs drifted close to Innaarsuit, Greenland. It reminds me of the ominous alien visitations from the science fiction film Arrival.
It feels like the future has run out of road. Writer and lecturer Vanessa Andreotti calls this moment “the storm where ways of knowing are dying”. ‘Where the tarmac ends, the work of hospicing modernity begins.’
In Cameroon, initiated diviners read the messages of spiders to untangle possible futures. Non-algorithmic, more-than-human foretellings for the win!
I discovered this soft space on the internet where I could lay a blanket down and have a picnic with my own thoughts and dreams.
As I think more about our relationship to technology, and our entanglements within digital culture, I realise how delicate this balance is of existing and maintaining our agency both online and offline. I’ll be exploring this deeply in a future post, but here’s something that has been helpful in navigating this liminal space.
Returning to the flow of life’s energy within us as a more truthful compass for understanding and aligning with Time, media artist Alice Yuan Zhang wrote a piece on ‘cyclical time as an antidote’, asking : ‘might reacquainting with cyclical natures be the ultimate prerequisite for livability?’
Ursula Le Guin in collaboration with her friend Todd Barton developed a soundtrack for her novel ‘Always coming home’, as a documentation and invocation of the spirit and tradition of the Kesh, the invented Pacific Coast peoples from a far distant time. It’s weird esotericism is deeply enjoyable.
I LOVE a well designed institutional website that properly archives a country’s story and heritage. This website by the government of Singapore is where my head’s at right now.
And if you ever catch yourself feeling lonely, here’s a pick me up:
xo