Recounting Lore  
Dual channel film, 5min30sec


This work documents the artist reading The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells to an unconventional audience of macaques and monarch butterflies in Indonesia. Subtitles partially rewrite the source text, constructing a speculative cross-species dialogue. Yet the address fails. The animals do not comprehend; the reading falls on deaf ears. A bosun’s chair is suspended in the gallery, cradling a small monitor. It reads equally as industrial apparatus and improvised child’s swing. Behind it, a large-scale projection plays the same film out of sync, establishing a doubled structure that operates like parent and child: one intimate, one declarative. The authority of reportage slips into fiction. The work oscillates between earnest address and absurd theatre. What does it mean to narrate planetary emergency to those already living within its consequences? The reading circle becomes a scene of displacement, where urgency meets indifference and communication falters.

May 2024