The Crying Mountain (ongoing project)
Multi-channel film installation
Variable duration (loop), Super 8 4/3 color, earth, candles, and seed paper.
The Crying Mountain is a sound and video installation calling for the audience’s participation by accomplishing a collective ritual. Dealing with themes of mourning, ghosts, and rituals, which have been recurring in my practice, it aims to create a space for mourning via an intimate and collective gesture. This work engages with the difficulty of truly making the experience of grief, processing loss, remembering, and honoring our dead in our contemporary epoch.
The film on the right depicts a mythical evocation of a woman saint’s martyrdom, showing a naked woman’s body seemingly endlessly tumbling on a dune of hard white sand until the repetition of that movement eventually leaves the skin bleeding, and plunging her hands into an animal’s heart. The film on the left shows a desolate landscape of burned forest as an organic and ambivalent depiction of loss, as fire also has regenerative power. They are accompanied by the sound recording of two poems, one telling the myth of that fictional saint, the other, a sort of agnostic prayer about loss, bringing attention to random gestures of kindness and expressing the hope for a new, symbolic home, away from capitalist ventures.
The ritualistic gesture accompanying the installation invites the audience to write a note to a deceased loved one on a seed-embedded piece of paper and bury it in a pile of soil in the gallery space. I bind myself with the audience through a social contract as the installation operates as a constant exchange. Pinned on the wall, is a handwritten letter to participants where I promise to replant the notes they have entrusted me with in nature so they can bloom.
This installation also addresses the gallery space it transforms into a provisional space of communion for strangers, offering a moment of mental rest, for one’s pain to be acknowledged and shared, and a suspended moment of introspection when we can take the time to think about and speak to our dead.