writing/index
absence of confirmation leads to speculation
Unconformity time is the geological phenomenon where layers of sedimentary rock – sometimes, millions of years of recorded time at once – disappear from the geologic record due to erosion and other factors.
This "missing time" – these missing bodies of time – did exist, and do exist, even if they are not visible, or physically present in the layers of sedimented rock matter.
I am fascinated by time that is considered lost, missing, or absent; the ways this absence affects what is seen; and how that absence is imagined.
Unconformity time is a way of thinking about visible and invisible time.
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Film is a durational composition, one that oscillates and undulates, growing and eroding over time. The composition process reflects the process (dis)integration: the movement — the material — builds, breaks down, and is (re)built through cycles of erosion and accumulation.
When I make films, I think about the images that are lost to over or underexposure; to "mistakes" in the development tank; to erosion from scratches, abrasions, and repeated contact with other materials; to cutting away in the editing process.
When I make films, I think about the gaps of the image-record, and how they hold presence and absence at once.
I work in a dying medium and make work about, or at least informed by, species dying (and re-emerging through death). I work in film because it has a finite lifespan: its bodily quality disintegrating over time, refusing preservation.
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I am thinking about film's capacity to transform; its nature of change.
Film is meant to change, to transform, to transmute.
The emulsion is laid on the skin with latent potential to unfold image, to unfold layers of color/light/darkness, light and shadow.
Chemical matter is etched away, washed away by contact, in order to reveal something lingering underneath. Something from the past, something that has been waiting to be revealed.
The image needs touch – contact from other elements – in order to show itself. The material elements of film are vulnerable to processes of manipulation, weathering.
Filmic practice is a subtle, slow, imprecise unearthing of layers, an excavation of images. I study how time and movement dis/appear. Bodies emerge and recede.
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I am, by training and practice, a being who works, thinks, feels, and moves through the body, through movement that falls within the fluid field of what is considered dance.
I think and make with my body, about the body.
The body expresses itself subconsciously, through an embodied knowledge that precedes rational thought.
While informed by muscle memory and layers of training, the movements flow out of the body in ways that could not be reproduced through fixed choreography.
Structured improvisation, and the practice of allowing the spontaneous to emerge, is in the present moment, which is always leaving.
This kind of performance is its own unconformity: existing momentarily and then eroding, often missing from the record due to absence of physical residue.
Improvisation is becoming that which immediately disappears. Movement is generated in response to stimulus and is sensitive to specific time and place, to present surroundings.
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I am in a state of respiration; osmosis with my environment. Movements enter my senses, are agitated and moved around in my interior, through interactions of my bodily fluid, blood, tissue, bone, ancestral spirit, wind, water, heat, sweat, desire, death, and then come out as gesture. The gesture comes out through movement, surfacing through the skin, because the skin is where the body makes contact with its surroundings, with its exterior.
I wonder about the tactility of intangible touch: how the body touches shadow, image, space. I reach for this seemingly impossible touch, which I find palpable in the skin, in the nervous system, the cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, heart rate, breathing, goose bump, tensing of muscles, the position of the skeleton.
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"How did you get here? How did I come to have you in my hand? How did we arrive at this place where such a handling is possible? How do you feel now that you are near? What does it do when I do this with you?"
- Sara Ahmed
Unconformity is a queer(ing) of time: slipping out of fixed form, present through felt form, even if no longer visible to the eye. Maybe gaps in the geologic record are called unconformities because they don't conform to linear form, to what is expected in processes of sedimentation and fossilization.
I am moved by unconformity time, and the way it withholds, the way its withholding simultaneously represents a profound loss of what which cannot be recovered whilst also creating space to imagine possibilities for what was (once) there. A kind of ghost.
I am haunted by repetition and return. To return to a river, a canyon, a path, a routine, ritual. (The) geologic formations (here) are half a billion years old. Five hundred million. A million, five hundred times over. And over. Talk about repetition, layers, loss. Mineral landing, becoming hard dust.
I wonder how sunlight landed then. How sunlight has changed. The moon is clearer without haze. I am swallowed by the grief of being a body, of being a planet, changing.
I wonder what is being birthed now. What will geologic formations (here) look like five hundred million years from now. It is hard to imagine what will remain.