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Resurgent Earth (2024)
in collaboration with Kelsey Chen, Nicolai Dorka and Lauren Violet Marshall
Resurgent Earth (2023), built upon Φ with the addition of Lauren Marshall, was an observation of the insurgent movements of the earth, operating on its own geological timescales despite anthropocentric desires. Kelsey describes these rhythms as “recalcitrant, excessive, spilling out of containment.”
As my contribution to the collaboration, over a period of three months, I documented Lake Lagunita and its nomadic, transitory ecology that transformed throughout the summer of 2023 as the lake slowly dried up. Lake Lagunita was filled up for the first time in a decade following a megadrought in California, and reconjured a debate on water management: should it have been filled or drained? We partook in the centuries long tradition of projecting desire and assuming authority onto an inherently transformative geomorphology, like when Leland Stanford fenced it into a 115-million-gallon reservoir for crop use in the 1870s, when students constructed pit fires and dumped sand into the altered land. Despite all this, the lake wells up on its own timescales, sudden, unknowable.
Using microscopic films of algae that formed around the lake, I find myself suspended between the scale of vast blue sky, caught in between the practice of looking. Immersed in the scent, sight, sound and skin—sheddings of a dried riverbed in the form of algae sheets—Resurgent Earth is a start of a ritualised practice of documentation and caregiving as carving out restorative time in collaboration with artists and the earth.
(This description of the work has been adapted from a much more eloquent, thoughtful version on Kelsey’s website)