What does it mean to follow crickets around the house while being in confinement? At first glance, my project has remained the same: I record the crickets that share home with me and create from there interdisciplinary pieces that include text, sound and other media such as video and gifs. The question is not much what I’ve been doing but from where I’ve been doing it: as Donna Haraway says, it matters which thoughts create thoughts, which stories tell stories. To mourn with, to acknowledge the ghost species that still share this wounded planet with us. This year I’ve come back to Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and through it, to Anna Tsing. The importance of generating times and places of refuge from where we may create other possible worlds in collaboration with other species, has become the central part of Seguir grillos por la casa // Following crickets around the house.
In that sense, the Otherwise Fellowship has been a refuge for me. It gave me the opportunity to pause, to take a breathe and think and imagine. But what it’s more important: it has made me feel part of a network, it gave me a nudge in a moment in which I was not so confident about my creative work and was doubting to go on with it.
During the first semester, I made a video art piece called Las plantas hablan en las horas más oscuras / Plants talk in the darkest hours which will be part of the #Franziska2020 exhibition that’ll take place in-site and online from September 24 to October 9. (My video will be premiered during the exhibition with other works, you may check for updates here)
Also, I completed the sound work Seguir grillos por la casa // Insectario feérico 3, which draft was included in my portfolio. It was also part of this radio program.
In third place, is Partitura para coro de peces // Score for a fish choir. This sound piece was built from the digital mix of one cricket chirping in different frequencies and is twin sister of a story I wrote this year for a SF anthology. Here I seek to answer myself how to gaze to the stars without forgetting I’m also compost – terrain critter. (I recommend you to listen with headphones.)
The fish sing an hymn to the sublime indifference of the magnetic fields. Their voices sustain a sweet tone during eons until they become ripples on the water surface.
Finally, is the gif called Crear refugios / Creating refuges which is also a record of my creative process. The most interesting part of this project has been all the connections I’ve done during this year. An infinite thread that takes me from the crickets in my house and my body to Lynn Margulis’ Gaia and the beauty of the fragments: to breathe – resonate with the gif-cycle of life.