[vc_section css=”.vc_custom_1579170657650{margin-top: 20px !important;margin-right: 20px !important;margin-bottom: 20px !important;margin-left: 20px !important;border-top-width: 1px !important;border-right-width: 1px !important;border-bottom-width: 1px !important;border-left-width: 1px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;border-left-color: #000000 !important;border-left-style: solid !important;border-right-color: #000000 !important;border-right-style: solid !important;border-top-color: #000000 !important;border-top-style: solid !important;border-bottom-color: #000000 !important;border-bottom-style: solid !important;border-radius: 1px !important;}”][vc_row fullwidth=”has-fullwidth-column”][vc_column padding_left=”30px” offset=”vc_col-lg-12″][vc_empty_space height=”40px”][agni_section_heading heading=”Theophany’s Thirst” heading_size=”40″ divide_line=””][vc_empty_space height=”40px”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row fullwidth=”has-fullwidth-column” content_placement=”top” border_top=”1″ border_color=”#000000″ border_style=”solid”][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Alma G. Ferrer ´Mim´+ Chris Christou
Alma G. Ferrer ´Mim´+ Chris Christou. Alma is an art historian and consultant dedicated to the development of alliances, strategic planning, communication, and cultural management for a diversity of artistic projects. MitamineLab, a long-running contemporary sound archive, and curatorial platform, is one of her outstanding projects with which she has carried out activities in places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), The Centre of Digital Culture (CCD), and Ruta de la Amistad México 68, among others. She was a radio host on Ibero 90.9FM (MX) for almost 6 years and is currently on Resonance Extra (LDN).
Chris Christou is a storyteller, culture activist, and chocolate maker. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, he moved to Oaxaca, Mexico in 2015 where he founded Oaxaca Profundo, a deep-learning organization focused on food culture and radical hospitality. In 2021, alongside friends and strangers, he organized and launched the End of Tourism Podcast.
This story was written/recalled as a confrontation with memory, migration, and in the midst of having completed a four-year commitment to fasting. It reflects the sonámbulous and sonorous arising in the places of disappearing peasantry, both in Mexico and in Europe. It is a plea as much as it is a warning, contending with the disappearance of water and our ability to care for and conjure it. Taking to task the often self-righteous self-absorption that cradles modern identity, the poem-narrative asks its listeners to consider that the lack/loss of roots, glorified, is of dire consequence to the world we live in, as it is for the worlds we wish to live in.
Contemplating voice, sounds, and music as a medium to reflect on our own acoustic consciousness, this musical storytelling takes inspiration from visual and sound poetry from the mid-70s, attempting to use these sound sources out of the domain of physical tangible reality to reinvigorate language as a passionate poetic tool that commemorates memories of the past, memories of people and fading memories.
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Esta historia fue escrita/recuperada como una confrontación con la memoria, la migración, y en medio de haber cumplido un compromiso de ayuno de cuatro años. Refleja el sonambulismo que surge en los lugares de desaparición del campesinado, tanto en México como en Europa. Es una súplica tanto como una advertencia, que se enfrenta a la desaparición del agua y a nuestra capacidad de cuidarla y conjurarla. El poema-narración, que cuestiona el ensimismamiento, a menudo santurrón, de la identidad moderna, pide a sus oyentes que consideren que la falta/pérdida de raíces, glorificada, tiene consecuencias nefastas para el mundo en el que vivimos, así como para los mundos en los que deseamos vivir.
Contemplando la voz, los sonidos y la música como medio para reflexionar sobre nuestra propia conciencia acústica, esta narración musical se inspira en la poesía visual y sonora de mediados de los años 70, intentando utilizar estas fuentes sonoras fuera del dominio de la realidad física tangible para revigorizar el lenguaje como una herramienta poética apasionante que conmemora los recuerdos del pasado, los recuerdos de las personas y los recuerdos que se desvanecen.
Alma G. Ferrer ‘Mim’ (musical storytelling) / Chris Christou (poetry)
Tracklist
Blank Wall Season – Spell D.D.I
Yutaka Hirose – Soundscape 2 Nova
Pataphysical – Dream Reveal
Jerry Hunt – Transform
Nyokabi Kariuki – home piano
Nico Georis – mirror iii
Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker – Demented Skies (For Alejandra Pizarnik)
Andy Stott – Missing
Paul Schütze – God Box
Sam Gendel – Nakamura kōshi (中村格子, plaid design of the Nakamura family)
Theophany’s Thirst
Alma G. Ferrer ´Mim´+ Chris Christou
lost
in a dark copse, where the creek’s course forked
i came
a cross
a man
here, he
hear he,
was
inclined
to speak:
stranger
where i come from
we wear memory on our sleeves
stitched by hand through warp and weft
a pattern language following food
and forebears
embroiled and embroidered
((he stopped and slowly stretched his arms outwards
his hands turning downwards
as if pouring the remnants of two chalices
onto the forest floor))
seasons tinted
the dead, dyed and woven
donned and dressed
our royalty, our reality
here, stranger, we mummify memory
and clothe ourselves in her blessings
((from crown to sole, he was harboured by regalia
the coloured courtship of birds, the curled locks of flocks,
the thermal husk of his people, the evidence of village))
on our saint days
we dance to goat and sheepsong
the shimmering coins shake and shuffle, sonorous
echoing the bronze bell barn orchestra of singing land
following orbital ancestors
and telluric tracks
we comb the plains
and iron the amulets
following four legged noses
attuned to blood and bone
compassed on the path of predecessors
parading the procession of time hitched to place
a death march
in.
other.
words.
masticate, migrate
compost, commune
they are family
they
our food
tutors of tale, travel, and tradition
apprenticed by hoof and hearth
a covenant, contained (from the Latin continere, “to hold, together”)
the Grand Mystery of Dreams
like the Great Mercy of Life
is that such things
their re-membering
is not guaranteed
and so it must be learned
and so it must be taught
kneel, stranger, and sip the syrup of life at the river of your days
that your inner visions might properly serve outerworlds, otherworlds
water
is the wombmilk sacrament of time longing to be remembered
the dendritic veins of a dreaming body
water
is the memory of the dead, manifest
the wellspring of olders, of elders
water
feeds the soils that fertilize the seeds
that root and remember
a chorus of angels
the katabasis of culture
Thirst
Thirst is our way of being claimed
by all of this
by all of them
by all of
us
an earthly insurance
that the living practice
laying alms in the riverbed of the dead
the architecture of the underworld
the tide of amniotic uprisings
all fed by Hunger and Thirst
to forget this is to allow the umbilicus to run dry to capture rain and intubate dreams
to fabricate fire and fleece food
Hunger and Thirst are slender Gods
the only of their kind to get fat off of neglect who, if feared and unfed
go looking for ways to starve
Hunger and Thirst are
not the absence of Flesh and Flow, stranger but their twins
the elder brothers
the guides and guardians
orphan the invocations for one and all are famished not a failure to cook, but to be cooked
and the memory of how this has come to pass
sit, stranger, and pray over your last sip, that it might serve the sap of memory.
drink
the afterbirth
the umbilical cord
the deerskin we draped over our days the antlers that carved our remembrance the leaves, the bark, the bone, the blood
to live sewn to the nape of the world
to remember these things
one must be a village
one must be many
to forget these things
one must be themself
and nothing more
with-out village
all you have is identity
with-out the world
you are divided among your poverty and become a people out of bounds
one for whom a question becomes a cancer: who are we?
fill in the b l a n k s with
ancestral geography burned into the skin
imposed tongues
monomyths
biology
racecraft
nation
states
of mind
all aliases of exile
all examples of
falling
out of love
out of place
when where we are is undermined by where we are from… when the dreams of the dead are forgotten… when the tears for their lives are forsaken… Flow and Flesh will wither
Thirst and Hunger will return
and all will be remembered
one way or another
on the eclipse of the fourth mourning
i
rose
awake
and couldn’t tell
if I was a prayer, a flower, a teardrop
or a great dream being spun by an old man.
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