Geograpologies (Gore-chewer, Drone-catcher, Night-dredger)
Geograpologies is an ongoing, multi-year work realized across exhibitions, performances, and publications. It aspires to rethink imposed world views by repurposing land, wind, and other visual matter from old colonial and imperial cartography in the context of experimental musical scores and speculative sculptural objects and environments.
Geograpologies started with a commissioned artist project for Art Papers’ Summer 2022 issue “The New Commons”, a call to rethink public and shared space post-2020. I began with the questions: how could we create public space with sound? Could we usher in a new commons by making a geography of sonic action? A sonic geography that rethinks our inherited positionalities, orientations and ways of delineating space?
With this in mind, I produced a set of graphic scores with drawn line, poetic text, and distorted visual elements extracted from Martin Waldseemüller’s ambitious 1507 map, the first to name “America,” as such. I unloosened chunks of land and wind from the map, reshaped them digitally, and inserted them into the scores along with text that suggests collective sound-making in collaboration with ecological murmurs. The elements in the scores exist for open interpretation and use, asking performers to respond emotionally, archaeologically, or in any other manner they design. The 1507 map was the first to introduce the idea of the “West” and it was my hope these scores cast a kind of sonic spell of “un-westing.”
Out of this grew Geograpologies: Gore-chewer, Drone-catcher, Night-dredger, an installation and performance environment of wall works, mixed media sculptures, and light transforming Lubov gallery into a subterranean grotto-like space. Here, the four original Art Papers scores appear in fluorescent laser-cut and etched acrylic versions with custom-made frames. A series of “geo-creatures” also appear throughout the gallery. These “gore-chewers,” “drone-catchers,” and “night-dredgers” use the same elements from the 1507 map (land and wind) as the scores. To me, these animal-like beings are time travelers navigating past traumas and violence: figures hailing from the 16th century map whose unusual material being is very much situated in our present. Some combine drawn elements with laser-etching on fluorescent plexiglass. Others mix resin and Mylar with melatonin, Monster energy drink, highlighter ink, mp3 players and earbuds playing original audio that I recorded with semi-modular analogue synthesizers. The color scheme references subterranean phosphorescent animal and mineral worlds as well as the hues of safety gear so prominent in our ongoing climate of emergency.
click here to read Mira Dayal’s exhibition text
click image to enlarge
June 23, 2023 Performance by The Afield
July 14, 2023 performance by Scarcity