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Letters to landscape 2020. Performances, various locations. Collected soils. I have always felt a relationship with land. My childhood was spent, almost entirely, in the woods. The progress and cycle of those spaces, so small, but so important. The smell of leaves becoming dirt; the sound of every leaf around shaking and filtering the golden autumn light-- irreplicable in memory. Complex and multiple.
Earth is the history of itself. And, also, its occupants. The earliest document mentioning “American Soil,” meant as a place, and not a substance, came from President James Polk, in a letter to congress about the War for Texan independence. American blood on American soil; a vernacular and political Americanism that refers to place, and not substance. But is substance not place? Soil is the history of itself, its users, its use. Nutrient rich or poor, soil is only made up of its contributors. A record of things that no longer are. And, suppose I dragged a jar-ful of Arizona red dirt to my own front yard; would it not be displaced, albeit American? And suppose I brought this jar, and some of my own soil, then, to Cairo. When does it cease to be,if not carry its history? Or, like people, will soil carry its history for eternity? And, if I stand on it, what rules then apply? The first time my mother bought potting soil, I thought it was lunacy; we had rich, beautiful black soil in the woods--we’d dig and dredge clay from the creek from which to sculpt. But, I suppose, it’s easier to find dirt in a bag. Contained, predictable, tame. It has no mind of its own.
In progress.
Earth is the history of itself. And, also, its occupants. The earliest document mentioning “American Soil,” meant as a place, and not a substance, came from President James Polk, in a letter to congress about the War for Texan independence. American blood on American soil; a vernacular and political Americanism that refers to place, and not substance. But is substance not place? Soil is the history of itself, its users, its use. Nutrient rich or poor, soil is only made up of its contributors. A record of things that no longer are. And, suppose I dragged a jar-ful of Arizona red dirt to my own front yard; would it not be displaced, albeit American? And suppose I brought this jar, and some of my own soil, then, to Cairo. When does it cease to be,if not carry its history? Or, like people, will soil carry its history for eternity? And, if I stand on it, what rules then apply? The first time my mother bought potting soil, I thought it was lunacy; we had rich, beautiful black soil in the woods--we’d dig and dredge clay from the creek from which to sculpt. But, I suppose, it’s easier to find dirt in a bag. Contained, predictable, tame. It has no mind of its own.
In progress.
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