A revolution inside a house.

As told by me and by the house itself.
We had to tell it, we were the last ones standing.

A chronicle of the legacy of invisible, of invincible – where early punk rock, jazz and the first two minutes of the 1812 Overture are the threads of survival. Where breaking space and violent stillness trump the currency of language.

An uprising set off by Jan, the mother — she awakens like a heretic, with urgency, with the charge of nature. The house, a powerful agent that witnesses and participates in authoring the destiny of bodies and providence.

Mark, the brother.
They called him slow in those days.
It was confusing. He never spoke slow, never moved slowly.

This is so he does not go unsung.

This is a search.
This is a chase.

WILDLIFE generates a catalogue of the intricate systems, processes and costs of self-preservation. It is told as a series of visceral discursive moments that examine and embody the mysteries of relationships, inspire reclamation and emancipation from the cages of trauma and the legacy of violence.

WILDLIFE is an architecture for the possibility of getting free.

BOOK NEWS: WILDLIFE was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Zone 3 Press Creative Non-Fiction Book Award.

The object of a book is symbolic of a house, to be entered and listened into.
Books live somewhere between a self and a thing.

WILDLIFE was conceived during an artist residency and interdisciplinary research fellowship at MacDowell.

This book project comes about at the place where decades of art making ends and a new space opens. I’ve drawn from long experience and profound practice in varied modalities of creating work to write this world.

The primary force and story that I’d been deconstructing and rendering within my visual and performative work needed to be rewritten, restored and released. Erasure, destruction, invisibility, shape shifting, implosion, mutiny, hyper resilience, acute listening, precision, murder, multiplicity, endurance.

The reconstruction of this story is multi-versed. Time is fluid, structure and form transmute and shift. Disparate elements collide and align to produce their own language of space and place, of heartbreak, of flight. I built this book so its world and those within it would not go unsung. I built it as an architecture for getting free, for the house that raised me.
I built it as proof and as a monument for you and your story.

WILDLIFE generates a catalogue of the intricate systems, processes and cost of self-preservation. Told as a series of visceral discursive moments that examine and embody the mysteries of relationships, inspire reclamation and emancipation from the cages of trauma and the legacy of violence.

WILDLIFE is architecture for the possibility of getting free.

Notes On Process: Also at MacDowell, I was deconstructing The 1812 Overture. These sound drafts were developed to score sections of text and text was written for sections of sound, setting a dynamic structure for building the narrative into a book. 

Listen to Sound Drafts here.