hmོmm

ALL THE BIRDS WE HEAR IN TREES BUT NEVER SEE

when a child is born, everything is sense.
engulfed, buzzing yellow, forms amorphous.
until, through a rapid process of pruning and parsing,
she associates touch with the edge of herself, sound/gesture with the calling of meaning.
the language of ekphrasis – of solid pulled through the mouth, of mouth pulled through the thick of the solid,
a woman’s voice behind a fence, recounting – straddles this self-world gap.
at the resonant tone of a child’s first loss, someone’s first self-encounter in the possibility of an object,
it thrums, shy, with the hope of a meeting point.
that our voices, speaking the love of a portrait, the ankle of memory, might meet.
that humming the song of what we can no longer see might turn us, together, to look.

a solid not an object

ALL THE BIRDS WE HEAR IN TREES BUT NEVER SEE 𓅪ོ𓅪
Sanna Wani + Elizabeth Mudenyo
hosted by EJ Kneifel
Saturday, March 16 2023 :: 1 pm mask mandatory / 5 pm
@ XPACE Cultural Centre
with generous support from OCAD
food design by ... ej :)
poster design by Nik October
documentation by Philip Ocampo and Daniel Huszar

a solid not an object

special thanks to nik, emily, avalon, philip, agnes, ariana, danan, ramolen, ghislan, andrew, kathy, and olive.

ALL THE BIRDS WE HEAR IN TREES BUT NEVER SEE comes from the art writer Durga Chew-Bose’s 93-page essay, “Heart Museum,” in which she catalogues a childhood of memorizing faces, paintings in books, the smell of a movie still, in order “to repossess,” “to confuse repossession with the distraction it allowed,” to repeat repossession, like her father repeats his stories, until “memories develop their own rhythm.” The title of her book, “Too Much and Not the Mood,” is itself a line from Virginia Woolf’s diaries.