Installation

It was a landlocked country, as in, this is wolverine country; as in, mirroring the motherland's dusky interior; as in, mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, ethnic and cultural hybridity, remembrance, forgetting—not a nation state with a coast line but a cataract, an inability to see beyond the horizon of trauma's incision. His was a conceptual dilemma. “Note to self: construct a device to simulate the socio-cultural equivalent of an ear stone.”

It was an issue of hearing. Designed to provide an auditory beacon for those adrift in a sea of water droplets, the foghorn stands in for land. A sound artist, he said. Prodding the winding folds of the inner ear, the stones resonated at a frequency capable of tricking the human brain into believing its body was in perpetual motion. What if we had never arrived, here, he said. Bio- mineralization, grains of sand like hair cells, a botched science. “What if the Middle Passage, rather than concluding on the shores of the New World, simply went on forever?” A foghorn in place of a buoy, a buoy in place of a land.

An organic matrix held together the individual particles of silica. My body secretes it, she said, a postcolonial mutation. What a body cannot produce itself it can learn to approximate. Papillae searching for a foothold: the organ as a whole is practically useless without them. Sliding along the ice floes, there were no naturally occurring features of the landscape capable of halting his momentum. All life radiates outward from Africa, he said. Evaporating into the air over the course of a four hundred year period, there was no broaching the distance effected through trauma with the naked eye, no clearing the fog of the Atlantic.

A sea of hands pulling a giant parachute over their heads: how an organism of indeterminate size holds its shape. Cybernetic loops, she said, you're just compensating in the face of the inevitable. As seen during childhood: a diagram outlining the use of echolocation in certain species of frog-eating bats, their silvery forms skirting the waters.

Nathanael Jones

Nathanael Jones is an Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer and artist currently based in Montreal. He holds degrees in fine art and writing from NSCAD University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited and performed his work in Canada, the US, and the UK, and has been published online and in print with DREGINALD, Ghost Proposal, Aurochs, Infinity's Kitchen, and Partial Press, among others.