more installation study stuff by sid branca
For this second iteration of this scavenged materials study, I tried taking myself out of it, and working purely with an assemblage of scavenged objects. all of the objects in this installation study (by no means a finished thing, just some more experiential sketching towards a future plan) are things that I acquired rather than bought—gifts, hand-me-downs, things taken from the trash. (except the paper on which the “scavenged” text was printed on, and the paint used on the cardboard— ideally these would also be scavenged in a later iteration.)
The text is from Sophocles’ cycle of plays Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, recomposed through erasure via blacking out with marker, and then further obscured by the pouring of peppermint oil on the pages, running the ink. The room was filled by the very strong smell of peppermint. There was also a short audio loop playing, the voices of my mother and father trying to work an audio recorder.
The above are a variety of details from this installation study; please see this post as well for more images of this iteration, and this post for the previous iteration.
As I continue this, I think I need to reintroduce human bodies as sculptural objects, just not my own, so I can continue to compose from an outside perspective. I also want to push harder on the audio and olfactory elements. I’d like to fill an entire small room with various stations, altars, sites, bodies, that are all continuous in a sort of horror vacui way, and with further explorations of erasure writing techniques working with ancient greek texts in a more contemporary (but still somehow existing not in the present) visual environment.
From this moment on, the number of people you have loved who are gone will only rise. The blacked-out lines in your telephone book, the songs that sting to hear, the memories whose blurring focus frighten you. Rising, rising.
Our job, our mission, our only item on the deepest, truest list, is ensure that our love, alongside, rises too.
Before I go to sleep, we are enjoying each other and saying goodbye. In my dream, we are enjoying each other and saying goodbye. I wake up, and we are enjoying each other and saying goodbye. I love you, and will always, always hold you in my heart, awake or dreaming. Bon courage, mon cher.
I’m arriving late, everyone I know seems to be there, in elaborate costumes. We’re rehearsing for something. I walk through the space, looking for the corner that’s mine. I pass many friends and lovers in the first few steps, the men in dresses and the women in lingerie and wigs. I move to another room and settle on a stool to watch performances rehearsed. A very tall man in a monk’s robes performs with a video monitor, telling confusing jokes that come out funny in the end, when he strips of his robes to reveal glowing beads.
You’re there, waiting to perform, and as you walk just past me I grab your arm. You grab mine back. We stay this way, muscles tensed and bodies close. A count of ten. You kiss me, long and slow and then again, as we move through the crowd to a tiny kitchen, built into the room, where some of the women are practicing their dances. A song is playing, one we both know. We slow dance, wearing matching white keds. We are very close, I can feel your hips and your cock and your ribs against me. I look at our feet. Our shoes are white but I’ve stepped in rust, or orange paint, and every time I step on your feet because I’m bad at dancing, I can see the mark left. I do not mind, because you do not mind.
The sensation of slow dancing in a dirty white sneakers in a crowded kitchenette is making my heart bloom, my body fall apart. You kiss me again, and then I see a girl do a backbend right behind you, almost hitting you, and I laugh, and we let go. “I’m gonna go pee,” you say.
“I’m gonna go kill this boner with a notebook,” you say. “I’ll meet you back here later.” You are grinning at me in that way I like. I nod. We walk off in separate directions.
I head to the swimming pool in the basement to cool off, and get entangled in an argument about racial politics with some teenagers, and I wake up before you and I meet back up in the kitchen.
I realize that in my dream you were clean-shaven, but when I saw you last you had a beard, and you look better with a beard, I think. I wanted so badly to take your photograph.
I have been trying to write a poem about you for weeks. I imagine your name on the dedication page. I imagine the way you don’t look at me when I hand it to you. I imagine you reading it aloud, alone, in your bedroom that I have never seen. The work of my heart is largely one of fiction.
I am clinging to a cup of coffee, my limbs are tangled in the door. I look at the place where you were. I am falling apart. The bird in the head is making new song, new song. I try to look at the counter, the sidewalk, the outlet hidden near the ceiling.
Every room holds secrets, blossoming out from the depths of them, ivy unfurling in bright light unnoticed. My body is displacing secrets with every movement. You see them, because you see. I am learning to look.
Learning the ways of silence is its own method of speech. My mouth is filling up with lake, with wanting and inarticulate touch. I will code and code and quiet. I will let and let and listen. The mystery is worth the mystery.
Today I have been too occupied with frights.
The frights of the world and of the head, the slick panic that crawls up through your chest in that ecstasy of ruin. The hand that shakes and shakes and the desperate voice that asks unceasingly questions without sense.
Help, and help, and help, and the refrain continues, and help, and help. The refrain continues. The body knows nothing. The body is raw, and the mind is simply meat set in all that bristling.
Time passes, and I am afraid. The bills go unpaid. The lights inside my skull flicker on and off. I sit behind my eyes in blind panic. Hold, hold, the moving of the self through sheaves of water like a bladed fish and I cannot control the currents. The one that I would call to me is gone, resting before battle, recovering in softer lands.
My name is Sid Branca and I am depressed. Hold my hand in the night.
An ant crawls into the ear, and the recollection of a body blurs in time to music. Put my heart upon the wind, because I cannot stand to house it here. Put my tongue upon the sea, because it grants no wisdom to these teeth. The collapse, the assemblage, the discarded part. The balloon that lifts the woman to the sky.
Sometimes, I think, things could have been easier.
I could have crawled up from the sea, no father and no memories, a blazing fire in a mussel shell, slowly grinding into sand.
I have, as ever, unlearned the ways of sleep. I spend my nights slowly turning into sand and digging my way through the mattress. The dawn licks me with her fingers and I am finally comfited, sweet and dry. You were in my dreams last night.
We had set up desks in the mud alongside a pond, old fashioned desks of blonde wood, arranged in columns and rows. You were leading us in something. You made your way to each desk, down the line, and as you paused at each the person seated there would count to three, one two three, each in a different language, some even blending two or three or more. It was not terribly hot, but the sun was bright. You came to me and I was crouching in my desk like an animal, all predator and grace. I lifted myself up on my arms, raising up from the seat, one, two, three times. The counting of time in the strain of the body. I wanted so badly for you to be pleased, so understand exactly what I meant, but when I tried to look at you the sun was in my eyes. So I looked down, and I saw a stream winding its way around our desks, and the sunlight playing on the water.
Somehow it was much later and I was in a rehearsal room in a vast building, done up to look like a boy’s childhood bedroom. The lights were off, the only light came through the windows looking out to the hall, where busy looking people passed by. The man I was with (not you, but he reminded me of someone we know) had lifted me up into the air, and I raised myself up higher one, two, three times.
It was later again and I was navigating through a crowded event, looking for a bathroom, not because I needed one but as an excuse to keep moving through the crowd, to see the whole space despite the many acquaintances I passed. I finally found it; the sign was a woodcut of a woman, dressed as a cowgirl. I looked around for someone to point out the lovely sign to, and you were right next to me among a throng of people. I couldn’t speak, and tried to convey how I was feeling by pushing scraps of torn white paper into a trash can, but wound up dropping my telephone in as well. I got flustered, tried to reach it, and then I looked at you, and you looked back, and I realized I didn’t need it, that I was better off without it. You leaned toward me as if to finally speak, to whisper something to me, but you stayed silent and pressed your mouth against my ear. The corner of your mouth was on my neck. We stayed this way a moment, and then you stepped back and we walked in separate directions, not looking back. I held my hand to the place where you had touched me in your silence, and it was so hot it burned my fingers.
Sid Branca - Jolene (Dolly Parton cover), quick & dirty demo version
look you guys I made a thing? glitchy karaoke murder ballad covers of everything alwaysssssss.
reblogging from my main tumblr because I made noises for the internet.
anonymous answers to “what makes your nervous” and “when has a part of your body felt outside of your control”?
v = = = ~1
+11 v!!x
- x + 2 ~1-
crushes make me nervous
I don’t like the mole on my back being pulled
spitting blood in the cvs parking lot
my clit during orgasm is out of control
At 3:34pm on February 1st, I was surprised by someone, a person I didn’t want to see. I felt invaded. At one point, we became engaged physically, and rage began to direct my body. I felt unconscious. Out of control.
“This could be our last night on earth,” he said. “I thought I’d wear a tie.”
sometimes i am dicking around in fauxtoshop late at night for no reason and make something that feels like it’s from a comic I wish existed.