Thoughts on the Project from Ann Hamilton

Comments in 2005 After First Site Visit:

How will you go about finding that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you…that thing that was perhaps lost?

Islands, in general, are biologically anomalous; they are unique but they are representative. They are not mystically different from other places. An island is paradigmatic. If geographical isolation is the flywheel of evolution then the Galápagos are representative of evolution at large and also of what threatens all animal and human species.

In June, I traveled on a fourteen-passenger catamaran on a weeklong tour of the Galápagos Islands. We lived on a boat of two parallel hulls held together by a single deck. We lived at sea. We put on and off the shores of San Cristobal, Espanola, Floreana, Isabela, Fernandina, Santa Cruz…

And the trip filled my head with the physical conditions of the islands, the wildness, the uniqueness of the place, the specific biological niche of each island. There were conditions that contain many of the metaphoric dualities and the imaginative landscapes we inherit, negotiate, and live between…on and off land.

animal and human/rare and abundant/wet and dry/above and below/land and water/predator and prey/wild and domesticated/night and day…and perhaps more interestingly: the intellectual inheritance of evolution’s proofs.

We walked in proximity to the live presence of animals we knew only previously in books and photographs…the land iguanas, the sea lions, the blue footed boobies, the albatross, the frigate birds, the finches and all their many beaks…they didn’t so much acknowledge us as they did ignore us.

Our proximity could occur only because these animals have evolved uniquely in these particular locations as the result of relatively stable climate, resources, and a lack of natural predators. THEY HAD NO FEAR. Would the human analogy be a world without war? A world of resources cooperatively and equally shared? No, it is not that benign. One cannot visit the islands, the delicate precarious balance of resources and consumption, and not think about the encirclement of humanity and the scale of consumption in fossil fuels alone which allow us to be there, to be fed, transported, and laundered. If the islands demonstrate a balance, then they are surrounded by a world in pieces that is dangerously out of balance.

The Archipelago of the Galápagos Islands is a particular place, but it also represents the idea of wildness…of access to something untouched by the reach of the human hand…and while evolution was long in coming into sight, into being named, recognized, articulated, and demonstrated: “There is no escaping the conclusion that in our lifetimes, this planet will see a suspension…if not an end, to many ecological and evolutionary processes which have been interrupted since the beginnings of paleontological time.”—Conservation biologists Michael Soule and Bruce Wilcox

Island forms are particularly vulnerable. When we lose biological diversity, we lose also a large portion of our world’s beauty and complexity. It was Wallace—one of the earliest evolutionists—who in exploring the Malay Archipelago wrote with great premonition:

It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant islands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were NOT made for man.—Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 1869

As more people cut more trees for more fuel and shelter, as our consumption eclipses our resources, the world is carved up. And yet, for that series of days when we were suspended in the sea, we had a chance to experience the wonder of a piece of that world that was somehow complete.

and so the mind whirls…

Project Proposal

We voice prior voices
We name what is lost
Loss summoned
Summoned forth in speaking
In speaking

During my site visit to the Galápagos Islands, I had the privilege of walking on some of those islands that loom large in cultural imagination. Their almost mythological status has protected them, perhaps more than other islands of similar interest, but the number of people they attract makes them also more vulnerable to environmental pressures and the impact of human habitation. Species endemic to the particular bio-ecology of island forms are particularly vulnerable to risk of extinction. As I began to develop this proposal, I began to think about this vulnerability, about how the experience of traveling in the islands is one of moving continually between the rhythms and the necessities of land and water. This concept proposal extends from these experiences and from my increasing interest in the invocatory as a form of making. It is inspired by the impulse to voice, to speak, to say, to name, to account, and from the physical sensations of buoyancy and equilibrium experienced when one is suspended in a body of water.

Whereas speech is one of the primary projective extensions of the body, the phenomenon of buoyancy is less a projection than it is a condition of suspension, of being in, rather than acting on or across, the immediate environment. To be suspended is to temporarily drift from place to place, to ask little and make no claims to possession. While the impulse of speaking and floating are perhaps opposite, neither leaves a material trace. For me, suspended in the cool salty waters of the Pacific, it was a relief to experience temporary weightlessness and to wonder how this phenomenon might couple with the desire to vocalize one’s experience to become the mutual materials of this project.

During Phase One, I will develop a multipart text for a spoken vocal work. The text, which I imagine as a poetic accounting, an inventory, a lament, and perhaps a summons of what is, of what was, and what may be in the face of our threatened biological impoverishment. The words will gather names of animals, plants, and places from species lists—living, extinct, or endangered; population figures; words from the research papers of the Charles Darwin Research Center’s websites and annual reports; and my more general reading on island biogeography and related writings.

The writing will accumulate and juxtapose these inventories of naming with animal sounds and human calls in repeated rhythm and succession to produce a vocal parallel to the documented cascading effects of the broken links created by the extinction of a single species. A single word taken up by another voice, and then another, and another to build a chant of fifteen to twenty voices that varies in its stress, rhythm, and repetition to make a choral incantation.

Several voices, voices accounting
Accounting a history
Of human intervention
Of animal species
A wave of speaking and of silence
Rhythm and flux in continuity as a wave
An echo of memory and accounting

Part One would extend the work of my practice over the last few years in which spoken works have moved from the perimeter of an architecture (the vocal recording outside the windows in the tropos, Dia, 1993) to occupying the center of a work (corpus, Mass MoCA, 2003–04). The focus of this project would more explicitly explore my interest in choral and unison speaking and would make the live process of working with a group of speakers the more singular focus of the work.

Part Two of this project, the text, would be to give an aural form that would be performed from a boat floating in harbor or navigating a circle around one or more of the Galápagos Islands. To develop the logistics and live form of this speaking, I would return to Santa Cruz Island to work in collaboration with a translator, choir master, students in an elementary school, and the Charles Darwin Research Center’s education program. These voices speak a condition of grief. Grief for what was, for what is, and…

Part Three will explore how to give the live aspect of the project an independent material form. This phase would include a documentary video recording of the performance of the choral speaking in the boat as well as a separate studio recording of the multipart chorus of voices. The studio recording will be used as the sound element for video that will be made while the boat is either in steerage or in harbor. This footage will view neither the boat nor the landscape, but will be shot with close-up perspective of the surface that both boat and landscape float upon. A miniature camera will be housed in a waterproof container and suspended so that it floats just at the edge of the water’s surface to record a microscopic view of the shifting rise and fall of the horizon of the sea. Suspended at the lip of the water’s edge, the camera will record the motion of the perpetual non-repeating rhythm of the surface’s edge. In this image the line that divides wet from dry, and above from below, will fill the screen’s height to become not a line but a membrane that becomes a space.

Text Samples and a Collection of Influences

From The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen:

…at the end of the Ordovician, in the late Devonian, at the end of the Permian, at the end of the Triassic, at the end of the Cretaceous, and again about sixty-five million years later, in the late Quaternary, right around the time of the inventions of the dugout canoe, the stone ax, the iron plow, the three-masted sailing ship, the automobile, the hamburger, the television, the bulldozer, the chain saw, and the antibiotic…
…predator and prey, flowering plants and pollinators, fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds.

Excerpt of a text developed for a project at the Cabo Rojo Lighthouse in Puerto Rico, in which a spoken text was made by excerpting my underlined readings of Susan Stewart’s book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. This sample demonstrates the way an existing authored text might be fragmented for a recorded vocal piece:

the work of care / of keeping time / the ceaselessness of all ceaseless things / the unending silence and darkness / waves of sound / without limit or edge / the beginning of return to formlessness / a presence in space / keeping time the beating of waves / the present / the here / the return / beyond the plot of history / the interaction of mind and hand / emergent / writing is reading / reading is rewriting / unfolding / gain follows loss / the measures are the same / between vastness / eternity 201 / an endless series of moments / a measure applied to motion / taking time / we measure the fore in time / eroding power / material things / encompassed / suspended / time / with constant motion / driven by wave / pursued / pursues / the one before / moments flee / follow / night passes into day / morning into night / the sky passes from red to red / the moon waxes and wanes / the seasons change / bodies pass / youth to middle to old / earth and water are heavy and sink down / fire and air are light and rise up / the earth becomes liquid / water becomes air / wind air flashes fire condenses and thickens / air into water / water turns to earth / rivers appear / disappear / marshes become deserts and deserts marshes / seashells lie far from the ocean / volcanoes become extinct / bees are born / with the silence of the tom / the bottom marrow / forms a snake / the day will end / recount all things / all things sink into obscurity / the most interior view / the most extended view / measure in motion / now / the now / the now the now / from where / memory begins / forgetting takes place / a noise emitted / a sound begins / continues / to hear / it goes / it goes on / until finally it ceases / then / then there is silence / the sound has passed / it is no longer sound / the measure / the interval between a beginning and an end / a no longer in being / no beginning or end / far as far / as this internal consciousness of time / we measure silences and say / period of silence / say without opening our mouths / say speaking / say of the whole man’s life / a part / the dual work of memory / the thingness / the reportability / listen / memorize / sound patterns / the weeping and sleeping attend / the duration of silences and sounds /

From The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen, a narrative of island losses:

On Samoa, the Samoan wood rail is extinct. On Macquarie Island, the Macquarie Island parakeet. On Tristan de Cunha, the Tristan gallinule. On the Cape Verde Islands, the Cape Verde giant skink. On Wake Island, the Wake Island rail. On Guadalupe Island, the Guadalupe flicker. On Sao Thome, the Sao Thome grosbeak. On Auckland Island, the Auckland Island merganser. On Iwo Jima, the Iwo Jima rail. On the Ryukyu Islands, the Ryukyu kingfisher. On Lord Howe, the Lord Howe Island white-eye, the Lord Howe Island fantail and the Lord Howe Island flycatcher. On Reunion endemic birds are extinct. On Hispaniola, a passel of mammals. On the Society Islands, the starling. On the islands of the North Atlantic, between Norway and Newfoundland, the great auk. On Stephens Island, the Stephens Island wren.

From Hesiod’s Theogony:

Night bore hateful Doom and dark Fate and Death, she bore Sleep, and she bore the tribe of Dreams. And secondly gloomy Night bore Cavil and painful Misery, bedded with none of the gods; and the Hesperides, who mind fair golden apples beyond the famed Oceanus, and the trees that bear that fruit; and the Fates she bore, and the mercilessly punishing Furies who prosecute the transgressions of men and gods—never do the goddesses cease from their terrible wrath until they have paid the sinner his due. And baleful Night gave birth to resentment…

A fragment of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England in 1819”:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey…

From William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”:

“In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, and it is spread over the whole earth and over all time.”

From a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke to his publisher, Witold von Hulewicz, 1925:

Even for our grandparents a ‘house,’ a ‘well,’ a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things. On us rests the responsibility not only of preserving their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and laral value (“laral” in the sense of the household gods). The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here, —in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion of the visible (earth) into an invisible (earth) no longer dependent upon being visible and tangible, as our own destiny continually grows at the same time MORE PRESENT AND INVISIBLE in us. The elegies set up this norm of existence, they celebrate this consciousness.

Cities were built
Canals were dredged forests cut
And burned
And burned
Grassland fenced and the land
The land brought into use
For crops
And cattle
Native animals
Were hunted
Became extinct