Vestige - Connie Svabo

As part of the Ineligible project Connie Svabo made the prose poem Vestige.

Vestige

We don’t talk, we hardly text. I am here on the white sandy beach 54, 59, 44 degrees North by 14, 4, 30 degrees East and you are there, displaced, in the Greater San Francisco Area, chewing pumpkin seeds and wearing your electrically circuited, pink padded, golden handcuffs.

The Big Bad Wolf roars and puffs and blows and blows and tries to blow down your house, and you stay put, hiding away in the corner with all the bottles corked.

I feel the gust all the way over here. I hear the heavy breaths as I lie on the sandy beach, looking at the soft, grainy surface, thinking of a word you have taught me, vestige.

The seeds are in my mind.

I place my hand on the smooth, white grey surface, lift it and look at the imprint. A trace, disappearing. I place another one next to it. Two hands, almost touching.

We do it often, send each other such hands, emoji palms folded against each other, an imaginary lotus blossom nestled in cupped hands, a flower that grows in murky waters.

Seeds. When we meet another, we bid welcome the divine potential.

We send blossom-holding digital hands across the globe in transnational vibrations. Flows of energies carried through Silicon Valley networks.

We are all connected.

Some of us.

Next to the imprints of the two hands that are the same, I poke my finger into the sand.

I make deep holes. They fill up immediately, but not quite. My finger leaves small indents. I create 81.

A grid. A square area of 9 by 9.

I imagine putting the remaining pumpkin seeds into each of the holes. And maybe not only the seeds, but also the cork bottle tops and the wooden fibers from the disintegrated house. Charred, splintered.

The ruination seeps into all crevices, all openings and soft spots, creeps up my nostrils.

I inhale it. A scent of burnt surface.

I feel like licking the wood, obsessively, like a hurt animal licking a sore raw, to the bone.

I lie there on the soft blowy sand surface and keep my mouth closed and my tongue on a lead.

I lay the traces of us out in a grid, put them to rest on a bed of the most delicate sand. The finest sand in the world. The sand that is used to make hourglasses. (The sand that an Arab Sheikh wanted to buy up and fly off to make a beach in warmer weather and closer to home. They wouldn’t send the sand to the sheikh, but someone else did sell the State Vaccine Institute to another sheikh, including health data from one of the best documented welfare states in the world.) (I used to get my shots there, when I was an expatriate child nomad living by the Sahara and all sorts of waterways.)

You voluntarily wear your mandatory Silicon Valley tracking accessories and submit your data to a cloudy sky which believes that numericals are the key to insight. 1,2,3.

How much sand does a flow of timespace consist of?

Blockage. Congestion. Stoppage.

Wood floats on top of sand. Wood is a floating material. The cork bobs on the surface. It has the capacity to flow, a bottle post, connecting us, flowing from my light grey white coast to your rugged blackish grey one.

You burn your bare feet waiting for it, unaccustomed to standing fully disclosed on the hot black sand.

Big Black Wolf blows and the surface ripples and the cork top bobs up and down. Maybe we could build a house from the fibers of ruination. I could sit inside, right next to one of the walls with my sore tongue out, a suspended organ constantly tempted to lick.

The sun is emerging and I am thoroughly scrutinizing  everything. I am seeing pastel colors in the blacks of the wood and the browns of the cork. Light rose and pastel blue.

There is an impurity in the wood bag. A fragment of a seed, misplaced, out of category, trying to make a life among the others. It hides, but when I shake the bag, its light surface stands out.

Maybe someone will build a large brick wall around it. Keep it to its own bag.

I lied when I said I poked 81 hole 

My body is cocooned in a crevice and I am covered in hourglass time.

I lay my head back on the sand and look up to the sky. Pinks and pastel blues sweep by above me.

The huffs and the puffs of Big Bad Wolf cover up everything. A grain of sand blows into my left eye, leaving it sore and swollen for three days.

How many grains of sand can an eye contain?

For more information about Connie and her work, follow this link

https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/csvabo

The Ineligible project is a large collaboration among many artists, archaeologists, designers, and other creators. One part of the project appeared in the Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/archaeology show co-curated by Doug Bailey and Sara Navarro at the International Museum for Contemporary Sculpture in Portugal. For more information about Creative (un)makings, follow these links:

Museum exhibition description

Portuguese TV spot about opening of Ineligible

Other Featured Work from Ineligible that have been featured on www.artarchaeologies.com include the following:

Door Knob (hand held) (Ilana Crispi)

José Pedro’s Toolbox (Rui Gomes Coelho)

Remember Wounded Knee (Laurent Oliver)

Omission: Sterile Landscape (Tiago Costa)

Decadence (Jéssica Burrinha)

L OST and FOOUND (Shaun Caton)

To pre-order either of the following (the exhibition catalogue or the volume of essays for the conference that accompanied the exhibition) please email Doug Bailey (dwbailey@sfsu.edu) and use the subject-line “Santo Tirso Catalogue/Conference” publication:

Bailey, D.W., Navarro, S. and Moreira, A. 2020. Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology. Santo Tirso: International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture.

Bailey, D.W., Navarro, S. and Moreira. A (eds). 2020. Art/Archaeology: Beyond the Archaeology of Art. Santo Tirso: International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture.

If you are interested in participating in the Ineligible Project and using disarticulated (former) archaeological materials to create original work that has disruptive social and political impact, then email dwbailey@sfsu.edu with the subject line Ineligible Contributor Request.