ultraSounding 2021
moving image essay
15:42 min.
A moving image essay exploring translatability in a specious environment of a threshold, informed by mythology and folklore, iconography and colonialism, filmed entirely through binoculars, microscopes, handblown bullseye glass and in a greenroom.
Languages such as Danish, Polish, Bulgarian, English of which all feel equally native to the filmmaker, are trans-forming the text, as the story is led by a whirling girl as a seed, or
like a Samazan Sufi; Sama meaning listening, to the bouncing of the wind;
the ultrasound(ing) inside thresholds that are taking many forms:
Trans-parency with a microscope, binoculars, (glass which holds one of the most important avenues to truth about the natural world and therefor part of the human evolution)
travels, arrivals, deportations intwined in uncanny cohabitations of transit spaces; ports of entry, like souls nesting in forest trees before returning to a womb.
The Forest, Silva, threshold, a doorway. Deforestation and the meaning of the lawn; no sign of life but sharp blades of grass - this is the inside outside of your home,
and Aftermath means freshly cut grass.
Slaves lived hidden behind the Plantation Houses, in the woodlands. There was always freshly cut grass leading up to these grand houses.
“One only hears the wind in the doorway, not by itself” Heidegger.
Thank you Timothy Morton, this piece would not exist if not for you, and your cosmic support.
textile design by Bulgarian artist Lidia Cankova.
sound compositions: wind sounds by "singing buildings", the 1977 Voyager 1 “space song” : "Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin" sung by Valya Balkanska, who was discovered and recorded by the American scholar and advocate of folk music and dance Martin Koening and artist musician and advocate Ethel Rain in 1968. Curtesy of Nonesuch Records.