A Future Language

‘A Future Language’ is a project and a process that weaves together somatic practices, walking pilgrimage, poetry making, performance and visual art, to encounter and transform personal and collective trauma, grief and history. This project began unexpectedly in the summer of 2022 when a routine errand in a city I once lived in became a compulsive walk through the memory of an act of sexual violation that I had experienced there. That walk instigated an interest in other routes and poets who sought something in the connection between themselves and the landscape. I turned to Chilean poet Raul Zurita who begins his introduction to Purgatorio with the laceration of his cheek, and also the words: As if poems were the earth’s dreams.

My walks became a method of surfacing loss and violation, transmuting harms so they became something like dreams. On a bright February morning, on the 31st anniversary of his death, I set out on a 21-mile walk from my home to my father’s grave to probe something about the texture of a long-standing grief. This experience was registered as a poem entitled The Holy Rood. A year later, I repeated the route inscribing it with lines from the poem on metal stamped brass. Not long before that inscription, I found myself alone in the middle of a remote valley of the Atacama desert walking the longest poem on earth – Zurita’s ‘Ni Pena Ni Miedo’ – neither pain/shame or fear.

My manuscript, Sea Above, completed during my time as an MFA student in poetry at Brooklyn College, begins on this line. The work’s title refers to the blue shimmering effect on the desert horizon and is an inversion of Zurita’s ‘sky below.’ It is also a textual play on ‘see above,’ looking towards memory, history and archive. It draws strongly on the audiovisual archive of CADA, el Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, a group of activist artists including Raul Zurita, Diamela Eltit and others, who sought to blur the boundaries between life and politics, and open up spaces of critical imagination under dictatorship. I imagine the route lines from my walks as pictographs in the ‘alphabet’ of a ‘future language’, an as yet unknown language to speak towards and as yet unknown justice. And I imagine ‘A Future Language’ as a growing, open library where others can embark on their own walks and contribute their own writings, images and route lines – a simultaneously embodied and symbolic effort at creating a future language, collectively.