I woke up last night feeling an earthy kind of melancholy1; a feeling captured by a black and white image of a summer meadow at high altitude. Silent sunlight shears across delicate wildflowers, punctuated by a steel signpost; a street sign made of unfired clay is mounted to the post, into which a name is carved. It's an image you, [salutation][first name], gifted me.2 I began this as a kind of fragment of an epistolary novel, but the writing dissolved and transposed upon its realization.
Why is it that celluloid film is so prone to self-ignition? Or that light, which is necessary to produce an image, also corrodes it over time? Circulating through your installation the signs are collapsing, and no longer certain (2023) I wander amidst images and text captured from what feels like a colliding of eras. The hanging paper photographs, acrylic, and steel manifest misty, evidentiary traces of what has disappeared or will be disappearing. At once archival and imagined, the work smells like material reenactments assembled from fading generational memory and fragments of official records interrupted by marginalia. I am remind of a passage in Lucy Lippard’s Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, in which she quotes William Least Heat-Moon’s recounting a “tour” he was given of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County3: “Until those hours... I had never really known what it is to travel into a country, to go bodily into a topographic dreamtime.”4
Édouard Glissant writes that Faulkner, in his oeuvre, rarely ventured beyond Yoknapatawpha county: “discovery” in his work emerged through expanding the borders of the local rather than moving to conquer the world beyond.5 You told me, before I arrived here, about toponyms (the cartographic practice of naming geographic features)—a practice often rooted in local knowledge of landscape, produced by continuous traversal, occupation, and cultivation.6 Later, after we spoke, I began to think that toponyms are vestigial organs. Over time, as a land and its occupants shift, a name becomes a forgotten pivot point in the folklore of a place: an unmoored container into which the current inhabitants might project the dreams and stories of those who came before them, and of those who will come after. A name as much suggested as said.
15th century Greek philosopher Empedocles proposed a cosmogony of four elements (earth, water, fire, air) to describe the effects of natural systems, theorizing that Love and Strife would align or generate frictions between these elements. Melancholy, one of the four “humors” systematized by 6th century Greek medical theory, is associated with “black bile,” the season of autumn, and the element of “earth.”
What do site-driven research and Romanticism have to do with one and other? Or real estate advertisements and grief? Meditating on your work, I skim through Alexander Kluge’s Drilling through Hard Board (a documentary-esque staging of European politics), and come across: "...what Hegel calls the WORLD SPIRIT... is here the network of places, the marriages brought about and the setting down of documents—including stone coffins and burial inscriptions..."7 I feel your work speaks to, and pushes against, linguistic forms of capture that carve lines and drill indelible, yet often imperceptible, holes into the landscape, like mines into the side of a mountain. I am reminded of an old English practice of “beating the bounds”: a ceremony in which, one day a year, all the young boys of a community were assembled by the priest and parochial officials to perambulate the various boundary markers of the community; upon arriving at each marker, the boys were beaten with willow sticks, inscribing the memory of these various official lines on their flesh as if it were paper.
A map of what is forgotten is not a map of nothing, but one that is described by the holes left in it—holes that become frames [here Lewis Caroll’s Bellman’s map]. Starting at images I have taken of images you have taken, I am struck by the idea that your dissolving earthen signs, and their steel holders—which frame what is absent—speak profoundly to both the poetics and the failures of the modern world to see and manage itself in relation to the land is has decided it must simultaneously extract and cultivate in order to sustain its current machinations. Technocratic states will hunger for ever greater descriptive information, clinging to any sign or signpost they can, as they attempt to chart and manage their position amidst a sea of ever-encroaching crises. A collapse then, and its ensuing opaque uncertainty, might be as disorienting as it is liberating, for in the words of Glissant: ”...despite seeing the political leap that must be managed....and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another—from forest to city, from story to computer—at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry.“8
2 /
From Juri Veltman’s installation the signs are collapsing, and no longer certain (2023).
3 /
Yoknapatawpha County is said to be based on the real county of Lafayette, Mississippi, US. Faulkner states that the word is of regional indigenous origin (Chickasaw) and meaning “water runs slow through flat lands”
(https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE_bxElDhrk).
4 /
Lucy Lippard, Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, (New York: New Press, 1997) p 76.
5 /
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) p. 34-35.
6 /
“Toponym” is an overarching category for the naming of geographic features, and is constituted of numerous subsets of naming geographic features, such as “agronyms” (proper names of fields and plains); “dromonyms” (proper names of roads or other routes by land, water, or air); “econyms” (proper names of inhabited locations such as houses, villages, towns, or cities), “helonyms” (proper names of swamps, marches, and bogs), etc.
7 /
Alexander Kluge, Drilling through Hard Boards: 133 Political Stories, (p. 89)
8 /
Glissant 8-9.