“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, July 8, 2011

Ami Yoshida, once more


...it's the sound of air coming out of her throat. As spontaneously as possible. That's all. It's the sound you might make when slowly crushed by some large descending object. The physical, lingual voice (see chapter 1 of Ecology without Nature). And suddenly it bursts into a forest.

This is it, the most astonishing piece Yoshida on video I've seen. And there are several astonishing pieces.

Is this not some of the most frightening, haunting stuff you've witnessed for a while? HT David Reid of eco-Tone.

It's the sound of the background becoming the foreground. Hence the congruence of that forest sound—the forest is in her throat, it is the throat. This is truly ecological art, in my opinion. It's about intimacy with a threatening, because abject and weak, presence.

1 comment:

John B-R said...

Someone who appreciates this - which I do, immensely - might also appreciate the work of Christine Sehnouai Abdelnou, e g., this piece at YouTube