Wounded Flicker of Throat
Berlin’s blossoms burst white from emaciated trees. Limbs linked and splitting, Spring’s arrival is announced with small sticks. One by one, the shrubs on my street scuff ebullient green. It is a miracle each time, no matter lackluster sun.
I remain both impervious and weak, marred by slips of movement and faint shifts in temperature.
Just last week, I was thrusting my arms into vats of water to distribute cellulose pulp. I swirled my fists, around, around, around, to generate firm currents. Pulled paper from water and pressed water from paper. Time, measured in efforted streaks, now recedes like a bed-sheet, stiff at the edge.
On Monday, I went to my friend Sam’s studio in Neukölln to record the Jewish melodies that will be installed in the balcony as part of my exhibition. Sam is a brilliant sound engineer and producer, sensitive to the ways in which objects accumulate memory and force. How a microphone, over decades, will acquire a particular charge.
The room hums with a gentle warmth. “I’m a big believer in electricity,” Sam tells me, curling a cable around his forearm. He moves seamlessly among the cluster of equipment. Keyboards, amplifiers, and infinite metallic parts.
I had envisioned recording a perfect sound, the melody soaring from my belly with an ancient chortle. Perfectionist that I am, I wanted the melodies to sound polished. Take after take after take after take until the song was crisp and clean.
What emerged in collaboration was far more disarming. Rather than trim the sound with controlled reverberations, Sam allowed it to run wild.
We had one take.
Hearing the play-back, I was convinced that this proximity to my own imperfection would entirely unravel me. Every hint of off-tune, every rustled mistake, boomeranged back into my body with vile cringe. Breath cut in and out of my voice, and the small stomp of my clog on the rug formed a thudding beat.
And yet, there was something so available and raw in the sound. Each rupture of my voice became my voice.
Was I the rupture? Was I the moment of before and after?
I sounded how I sound, a wounded flicker of throat.
For those of you coming to Latvia for the exhibition opening, I’m so excited for you to hear these works. Sam has shaped them into their most pulsing, honest form.
R E A D I N G S
How Do You Know the Sky is Falling? by Harryette Mullen
Mystical Language of Unsaying (this one’s a poem by me!)
Three poems by Adie Steckel
My Mother, the Metropolitan Museum, and I by Lucy Ives (essay)
H A P P E N I N G S
I will be giving a (virtual) artist’s talk at the University of Delaware on April 23rd at 11:30 am EST. The talk is entitled “Learn to Live with Empty Hands” and I’ll be discussing my work in Sabile, Latvia and Lublin, Poland—two sites of Jewish annihilation and dispossession. If you’d like to register for the zoom, you can do so here! The talk will be about 40 minutes, with 10 minutes of Q&A.
My friend Jasmine is looking for a studio-mate starting June 1st in Berlin. “50sqm. PBerg. Close to the ring, U2, M1 and M12. Full kitchen and bathroom. 1st floor, facing hof, no elevator. 365€ warm, including wifi.” If you are interested, you can email her to arrange a viewing at jasminereimer@gmail.com