Backward Walking
2025
This project exists in two forms: a 23-minute, 4:3 aspect ratio (2880x2160) movie and as a live video/audio synthesizer performance.
"Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony…"
“A specter does not only cause séance tables to turn. But heads spinning…” Jacques Derrida
In October 2024 I filmed a walk of the circular ridge trail at Olana State Historic Site. This site is on unceded land of the Muhheaconneok also known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans. The Hudson River School painter Frederic Church purchased this property in 1860. In 1866 he conceived a landscape composition and began its construction. Apparently, the land had been largely deforested. Church’s design involved the planting of many trees, making carriage trails, and opening dramatic vistas, the most spectacular being a view to the west overlooking the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains.
Backward Walking is a video/audio analog synthesizer performance of the filmed nature walk as feedback signals and noise. An electric séance, a spectral unpicking of settler colonial narratives that have been broadcast onto the land.