Ritual Telepathy at the Relic Chamber (2019)

In the wake of decades of violence, a monastery finds a task that keep the ghosts of the past and the monsters of the future at bay.

It's a full moon Poya evening at Ruwanwelisaya stupa in Sri Lanka. Monks wrap the stupa–1000 ft in diameter with a relic of the Buddha's collarbone within its impermeable core–in fabric that represents the layers of life. Maybe they are dressing the Buddha in robes, maybe they are closing a holy book or maybe they are forming a veil for a rebirth, an afterlife. The imagery focuses on the natural tableau made by the men leaning on the stupa as they straddle their reliance on it and the sphere's equal and opposite resistive force. What happens while we wait for the cloth to come around? Can we dream collectively? Can we bear the weight together? Move, hold, wait, rest. It is in this potential that the large part of the video conducts itself.

In the meantime, a figure from the future serves as a witness to this ceremony. It is going through a private transformation as the landscape it knows so well is in flux. Even as it carries a non-natural silver coconut, the figure's reflective cloak quivers in the light, reminding us of the shimmering connection between stillness and movement: "Landscapes shimmer when they gather rhythms shared across various forms of life. Shimmer describes the coming in and out of focus of multispecies knots, with their cascading effects. To follow these rhythms, we need new histories and descriptions..." [from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Deborah Bird Rose]

The sound moves between a spaceship revving and a gong bath, sourced from found archives that balance biorhythms and regulate sleep and waking cycles.