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| RECIPE (EVACUEE
CAKE) |
2008 |
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Recipe [evacuee cake] consists of a series of traumatic inventories: video
clips and voiceovers, as if to list the ingredients for a recipe to consume
and discard excess humans and animals, AKA persons ‘nobody’ wants--
migrants, prisoners, persons without identification papers, persons in
the crosshairs of the scary borders. The recipe starts with the unfolding
listing of clips from performances in the remote California landscape,
from a series called ‘naxsmash/memoires of a cyborg’ and ‘nax’,
in which I am breathing while tied up, or out in the dirt beside a lake
where bad stuff happened long ago, a place called ‘nacimiento’/
nativity. The performances involve breathing and stillness and waiting,
traumatic, and imply what it feels like to be hunted, trapped, and consumed.
I made them in the aftermath of escape from sexual trauma. To have your
subjective consciousness hang on by a thread. To be evacuated. To lose
your home. To lose your citizenship: to live on in ‘bare life’.
There are three visual elements. The littoral zone of beach and estuary
provides a setting in which the recipe is concocted, like a seaside “Walrus
and the Carpenter” (Lewis Carroll). Repetitive clips of remote landscape
performances from the naxsmash series form a recursive, aphasic topography.
Stills of activists in 2007-2008 are blurred as people are protesting the
Guantanamo prisoners’ torture and loss of rights. The ocean crashes
over them, the foam swirls, white stuff like maybe the ‘brains of
words’ in dissolution. The sound design clashes raucous street noise
and drumming, the sound of a military snare, against layered voice. The
voice is speaking a poem, “evacuee cake” : an aphasic fugue.
The poem inspires the association of traumatic memory performance with
the idea of evacuation. The film protests the political systems which feeds
on humans, rendering them outside citizenship, ‘put into pies.”
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Dimensions:
HD video 1920 x 1080 pixels
Duration: 05:38 |
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