Imaginary Explosions, Broken Dimanche Press, Berlin (2018)
Imaginary Explosions is an artist book rich with images, poetry, and synthetic photography. Its pages explore geological ruptures, the immense scale and deep time of sexual violence, and the reverberation of traumas through bodies across multiple generations of relationships and families. It is an experiment in sequential, narrative poetry. Sparse, material language combines with synthetic landscapes based on the computational radar topography of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.
The book is a time-based passage through a volcanic landscape devoid of referential scale and texture. Dilations of tone darken and lighten between the spare, imperfect dimensional descriptions that narrate fractured timescales of geological metamorphosis and landscapes of human violence, holding space for affective resonance. Landscapes are protagonists who can act as intimate interlocutors, and who can offer capacious inhuman kinship—especially when human brutality renders relationality incomprehensible. Can we begin to grasp the scope and scales of both geological change and the deep time of patriarchy, by becoming mineral ourselves?
It can only be described in a number of imaginary explosions.
I can’t blame it on the volcano.
Stalled airplanes, wingless people.
A century of progress halted.
The thrill of isolation. Hemispheric negation.
I am untouched by these clouds.
