Helices

Movement

7

m6-jenny - Emerson Tattoo

provocation

In her Movement 6, Jenny wrote a song entitled “The Body and the Story of the Body”

response

BINDA

When Jenny played me The Body and the Story of the Body, I was deeply moved. It was such a juicy response to the installation! It brought so many moving images into my mind’s eye. Shortly after hearing it, I went to Mass MOCA. I saw a couple of video pieces that included bodies in motion, in collaboration and in rest. (Free Fall – Brendan Fernandes – 2019. Baliza – Nibia Pastrano Santiago – 2019) They immediately connected to Jenny’s song for me. They had the sensation of Jenny’s sliding sounds and invitation to allow the body to suspend in dream state. (Recently, I read about Nibia Pastrano’s work and discovered that her work is focused on rest as a radical anti-capitalist, anti-racist anti-colonialist act NYtimes magazine). I filmed the moments that felt like that as well as other things I saw in the museum as a sort of visual diary of my thoughts on the song. Slowly over that first week, the idea of creating a video to accompany the song cohered into a humming that i could not ignore. I was not sure I could pull it off, but I could not stop the compulsion to try. So, following the red thread of aliveness, I pieced together visual images both still and moving into this music video using the Splice app.

Notes on some of the imagery: 

All video (other than Free Fall and Baliza) and drawing made by me.

Water images from the canals that form an eye shaped ellipse around MassMOCA and from the incoming tide on the bayside in Wellfleet MA.

Tattoo photo courtesy of Jenny Katz. Tattoo freshly inked on her son Emerson’s arm.

Thanks to Phoebe LLoyd for letting their hand be filmed while drawing lines.