“A Secondary Swirl on Your Hardware” is a moving installation weaving together video, writing as drawing, movement, and sound. Unmarked spaces in nature weighed down by violent histories are the departure point for this project, prompting the question: how does experience that is not part of our own direct past become deeply embedded as personal memory?

The performance is based on two incidences of violence that occurred in nature: the tale of Caesar’s final, bloody battle in the French countryside and the story of a woman and her daughter who were viciously attacked while walking the trails overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York.

Through percussion, dance, and text, which is hand-written and projected live, questions about the reliability of memory surface in relation to my experiences, situated in these same landscapes and the fraught histories that they bear. As I write out fragmented recollections on a series of long paper scrolls, the stage itself becomes a type of landscape. Memories experienced and remembered, often through retelling or looping, are highlighted through repetitive movement and layered sound.

Accounts are relayed, transcribed through the handwritten word. However, like the memories they are based upon, each one remains murky, tangled, and unfinished.