Dry Spell
This video is meant to be viewed alongside an analog recording of the audio piece of the same title, out on Harmonic Ooze Records
Press play on the beginning of SIDE A of the Dry Spell tape and immediately follow by beginning the video here.
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Dry Spell
Julian Wash was once a thriving watershed that flowed into the Santa Cruz river in what is now called Tucson for thousands of years. Indigenous people lived with this water, cultivating homes and food along its corridor over many generations. Now it is increasingly a dry and forgotten place, an image of existential and literal drought.
This piece was created as a sound and video performance. With a group of people as witness, all elements come together to embody the water that once was within the wash; a ceremony for the ghost of a watershed.
How can an interstitial space become an embodied or full one? The inevitability of drought and the death of essential passages of water is already upon us in the Sonoran Desert. Rather than exclusively grieve their death, we are interested in how grief can be transmuted into other forms, envisioning and calling forth qualities that have been lost to evoke their metaphysical presence. It is in “abandoned” spaces, out of sight and deemed functionless to government and economy where new forms may be played with and begin to flourish.