Postcards from the Edge

My dear,

I am sending you this set of postcards from Rapa Nui, known by its inhabitants as Te Pito O Te Henua, the navel of the world. It seems fitting to send you these brief missives from a volcanic triangle located at the center of the Pacific Ocean, as you’ve worked with navels before: by digging into the earth, paying homage to the sacredness of place, and nestling yourself and others in it. Your art is a form of connection and so is a postcard, bridging the faraway in archipelagic form.

….

Standing at the crater’s edge overlooking the reflective waters of the volcanic lake—source of freshwater and home to some of the oldest endemic and native plants on the island, as well as more recent arrivals—I am reminded of your ceramic vessels. They have molded their own center within your practice, emerging from the simplest gesture of hands cupped to receive, contain, and offer back. Whether made of raw clay or burnished, smoked and craggy at the mouth, held up by cyanotyped sand or cuddled in mounds of soil collected on one of your many walks, their blown-up concavities raise specters of origin: of species, of colonial fantasies, of cities, of ongoing myths.

You recently said of the latest pots’ dusky burnished surfaces: friction strengthens. The clay surfaces grow tighter and glow when repeatedly rubbed up, as you have learned from cultural practitioners who carry on the legacies of molding the earth with bare hands, in Brazil, in Turtle Island, in Africa. Dancing with the clay, you say, scraping softly in one direction like Pueblo potter Maria Martinez did with her inherited stones, while you explain to me your process of listening to what the clay wants. We might need more of that in these dark times brimming with injustice—to get closer through difference, to strengthen the separate particles by rubbing against each other. Exploring how thin you could go with a bare lump of clay, the bulbous pots you made now stand as a group, their individuality evoking a multitude, not as a somber mass but a murky gathering, their upturned, puckered mouths ready to receive blown kisses and germinate into song.

Was it one of the manxs, perhaps Koyo, who saw the clay vessels at your studio and thought they were musical instruments? Or were they already calling for a song to be made?

I want to draw at those lips never mind who reached first for each other [1]

…

This is an island of caves. Everywhere you turn there is an opening. What seems solid turns into lava and gaseous chamber; cracked open, the ground is a pored skin.

An ancient metaphor for the unfathomable, the caves have offered protection and knowledge for the Rapanui over centuries. A place to sleep and dream, to escape imprisonment, to store the precious, to dwell; a place to seed. Some of the oldest cultivating grounds on the island are found in the caves, dark concavities naturally retaining humidity and protecting plants from the drenching sun and blasting wind.

You’ve been thinking of darkness lately and how to create a space for listening within. Drawing with your eyes closed, reaching towards interior shapes, you arrived at another kind of vessel, woven like a carrier bag with collected twigs and equally sturdy metal, firm like a seed’s pod, spacious enough to hold at least one person and their shadow. A burrow to shelter what emerges when one inhabits the body within the body, reaches into the forgotten pocket and finds remnants of the sea.

“Isn’t silence a kind of mourning?”[2]

…

To transit in darkness and find a dwelling in it might seem, in a time of planetary crisis, like a failure, a capitulation to hopelessness, inaction, or a strange form of escapism. Yet you recall Guaraní knowledge keeper Carlos Papá saying that this is precisely the moment to “feel one’s own shadow,” to stay with the silence. For Papá, consciousness can only rise by stepping away from the light into those opaque, mysterious spaces, and spending time in the interstices, the cracks, the places we fall, we fail, we flail, as they are also places where we dream, withdraw, ponder, and listen. For darkness is also night, deep ocean, and open sky, where “dream ideas”[3] can come into being and bloom like the swelling threads of algae.

…

Color can be deceiving. I think about your work, where the ashy looking earth holding the pots upright is cyanotyped sand, or more accurately sand mixed with two types of yellow iron salts that turn photosensitive when mixed. It reminds me of how the astounding deep ultramarine sea that cradles this mass of volcanic land where I now stand is the result of oligotrophic waters that barely sustain life and, in some areas, of asphyxiated coral reefs, covered by a mantle of algae and cyanobacteria that feed off the human residues draining from the volcanic ground to the sea like a sponge, particularly in front of the town of Hanga Roa. The cruel beauty of extinction, the plague of aestheticizing extraction.

When Nicolás García Uriburu dyed the Grand Canal in Venice with fluorescent green in 1968 as an art action to denounce the ecological crisis we are now stranded in, the uproar was latched to thinking its apparent damage would be permanent; the gesture has been repeated since in the same and other waters, yet the coral reefs continue to choke. Horace-Bénédict de Saussure published in 1790 a simple cyanotype tool to measure the blueness of the sky and test its purity, yet no one can tell us what is the color of the afterlife of any given being. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that a dying log is more alive than when upright, that nothing is ever dead, and the “living soil is both cradle and grave,” [4] but when all the forest is cut down, where will the trees’ shadows rest?

…

Devastated is how most travelers since the 1700s have described the island. They did not know that only a couple of centuries before it had been populated by a vast forest of palm trees. Could they feel their presence when they lamented the emptiness they observed in the yellowish hills? Or did they miss those they had already cut down back home?

Paleoarchaeologists have found traces of pollen, seeds, bacteria, and the imprint of immense roots of trees buried in the calcified ash and peat from the volcano’s boggy lakes. They inscribe in the land the presence of absence, holding the memory of past life, before the first Polynesian navigators settled. Yet the mulched rock was continuously reused by their descendants as ferment for agriculture, and life continued fertilized by what could be deemed dead.

…

For years you’ve been recalling the absent. Bringing back to memory what remains invisible, what seems to have gone missing or been erased from the land, the sacred origins of a place, the life that still pulsates in it, what refuses to vanish. Not by erecting petrified monuments to a bygone state, but rather by re-calling as in calling back, summoning a return, talking back by listening to the land, its stories and the beings who tell them. You confront erasure with corporeal reconnection and constellating memories, including those of the inhampabuassu, the eye of the earth in the Tupi-Guaraní language, a knoll that birthed the site that grew up to become your hometown of São Paulo, where once forests of brazilwood flourished in the red soil. That was before the bloodshed carried out by the Portuguese for two centuries, to exploit an ocean of timber and crimson dye.

Bertolt Brecht famously wrote that in dark times there will be singing, about the dark times. He may not have imagined what singing can beget into the dark.

…

Now you bring to the table how the Maxakalí people (Tikmũ’ũn) are chanting back the forest that they were forced to leave in the northeastern area of the Minas Gerais region and the south of Bahia, in what is known today as Brazil. They were displaced in their own land and relocated to small reservations by gold mining interests during the colonial period and by agribusiness since the 19th century, which left a trail of dead soil covered with voracious guinea grass. Similar to yet different from this island, where the Rapanui, who survived genocidal slave raids and settler violence in the 19th century, were then sequestered in a corner, abandoned by the Chilean state that annexed their homeland and turned it over to an exploitation company that let sheep roam free to raze the land.

Recently a group of Maxakalí have set up a forest school, part of a network of living schools, conjoining life in the village and the teeming forest as the best places for education to occur. “Wherever there are trees and shade there is a classroom,” they say.[5] They are dreaming in action the return of the Atlantic forest through a reforestation project that includes a repertoire of songs that call back the work of dozens of different native bees and animals—including the papa-mel, a mustelid that loves to climb trees to lick at honey—making space for their return. For they know, as Cristine Takuá says of the pulse that runs through the forest, that life pushes back: “Vegetable beings, animal beings, mineral beings who are alive and pulsing inside the nhe’ery, resisting all this sea of cement and resisting capitalist colonization, which has been dirtying, burying, silting up the rivers. And it is always willing to come back.”[6]

…

One must not be naïve. One returns to what has changed, and sometimes the return to the native land reveals that what remains has drastically altered and may no longer be the safe harbor it once was. In Rapa Nui, the endemic toromiro tree was so decimated that by the 1950s only one (known) specimen grew on the inner slopes of the island’s largest crater. Seeds were collected, taken to be conserved in Viña del Mar and Gothenburg, while the isolated tree dried up and the toromiro growing in the wild was declared extinct. The seeds may have been safely stored for the future, and samples grown in protected botanical gardens, but the soil itself changed over time, subject to erosion, overuse, and transformed bacterial life. Each time the toromiro has been replanted in the island, the seedlings refuse to grow beyond a dozen centimeters, perishing without producing any seeds of their own. The land has a memory, but it also reinvents itself. Who is not recognizing who?

Repair is not the same as reparation, and sometimes there are things beyond repair. And yet.

…

Your own walks around the block at Recess recalled that the area near Brooklyn Navy Yard was, still is, tidal wetland: the distinction being crucial, as part of that vibrant and decomposing life persists in the cracks and all around the cemented lot. Not only traces, but also living presence. Through words, names, songs, and also life that wants to exist, that moves from shadow into light: dawn, dusk, dawn. Some more or less visible to a more or less trained human eye. To expand the sensorium, to make space for, is part of the practice, of learning to live, which is, as poet Jaime Saenz reminds us, also learning to die and knowing, deeply, listening to each other and the earth’s own hum.

“learning to die is learning to live. And learning to live is, plainly, learning to know deep in the bone”[7]

…

As a temporal farewell, I come back to the end. I stand by a cliff facing the wind and vertigo. Hanging like the overflowing vertical scrolls at the back of the gallery at Recess, embodying cascading images of worlds beyond sight, the cyanotypes’ changing blue hues oscillate between the night sky and an underwater scene, where the tiny specks made by seeds’ and rocks’ silhouettes might be distant constellations as much as suspended silt or the twinkling luminescence of submerged bacterial life. Yet what constellates is not only stellar, but earth-bound, woven through with strings of words. There is a condensed power to song and language as articulated breath, that spreads inside like galactic intermedial gas. These glittering phrases taken from many thinkers, activists, and practitioners from Abya Yala and the Americas that, by being brought together, amplify and reverberate their billowing calls. Open pages of planetary consciousness drawing a worldly net, your scrolls threading patterns of infinite sabiduría.

everything we take care of flourishes

dream a collective dream

go to the root of the mystery

Where the gaze falls and takes repose, the patterns of support that cluster, condense, and spark into newly found brightness constantly vary. Just as a slight turn in perspective will reveal that an island is never isolated but in archipelagic relation to others, and that the ground can be the vast ocean unfolding its connective power. Whether placed on the floor or upon a table to be worked on collectively, the cyanotypes can bind the imaginations, memories, and stories of those gathered round.[8] A reminder of the connective power of art’s own bend and of our shared breath: for, Mondrian notwithstanding, there are no straight lines in this planetary roundness, as encapsulated in that other Guaraní word, jeroky, the dance of a plant that needs the dark to unfurl its strength towards the light.