project image
Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap
WE ATE LEAVES FROM A MOON TREE

first performed on January 12, 2014
artist’s studio, Chicago, IL
performed once in 2014

SARAH BELKNAP / JOSEPH BELKNAP

Chicago, IL
info@sarhandjoseph.com
sarahandjoseph.com

WE ATE LEAVES FROM A MOON TREE
SARAH BELKNAP / JOSEPH BELKNAP

Humans have different responses to the actual vastness or complexity of many situations. Handed a tool and asked to perform a task, a signature can be distinguished. We all have a signature, a fingerprint, a biometric. Inside that biometric is knowledge that stems from a singular source, DNA—a score layed out into infinity. But is mathematical poetry still poetry? Was it always meant to be that seed of a tree on Earth that traveled to the Moon?

We ate the leaves of a failed experiment. NASA sent seeds of trees to our Moon to test this or that—relative to germination atmospheres and gravities. Then a seal was broken and the seeds no longer were viable to the experiment. A certain astronaut did not lose the poetry of that situation and took the seeds as a pet project. He planted them around this country, in some of the most humble places. We are tracking them down. They are Moon Trees. This plant has BEEN there. We consume the plant—as in the parable of Adam and Eve—to inherit the knowledge of the plant. Knowledge through ingestion. Knowledge of the Moon. What the Moon knows. The stories the Moon knows. The Moon in our body.