How can ritual serve as a tool that cultivates human entanglement with the Earth and her future?
Earthwomb Work is displayed as a 2-channel projection on loop 30 minute performance, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” by the Ink Spots 2019
Earthwomb considers how we may create meaningful spaces with land to illuminate our reciprocity with the Earth and developed from a ritual I invented while I was living and working in Seydisfjordur, a small town located within the east fjords of Iceland. The work responds to the questions— how can creating new rituals that engage the ground generate entanglement with the Earth?
Played to the ghostly lullaby of “I Dont Want to Set the World on Fire” by the Ink Spots, the two-channel video references a child in a womb and weaves this intimate relationship into the surrounding fjord. The work explores the ground’s ability to heal, protect, and sustain, while exposing our fragile and vulnerable interdependence with Earth.
performance video excerpt
– accompanying poetry below –
Earthwomb
Listen to the plants sleep. They don’t mind the cold. Sink into Silence and the world comes alive, as honey in a tree. I dream I am the size of a pebble or a seed. To explore their infinity— in my house that is round as Ymir’s skull.
I am killer.
Warm and empty in my mother’s womb. Cracking to pieces we are still. Glued together by the space between them, the space that once held them together, the space between that broke inside them. That broke inside them. The water broke inside them. To pieces into dew.
MONROE ISENBERG 