(with my ears) to my feet’s heels
Bachelor’s Thesis.
“A scene is sketched out for the reader—a landscape transformed as a vast technical apparatus is installed there, pointing towards the stars, in the hopes of discovering the origins of the universe. Directed away from the ground upon which it stands, and around which lives a small population that “carries a much adapted, but nevertheless living version of the culture and language of the Ixam [one of the area’s indigenous peoples],” the radio telescope array is deployed in search of origins, yet this deployment seems to endanger, or further impoverish, those very people who carry on the traditions and culture of the area’s original inhabitants. The search for one origin is caught up with the destruction of another. This brief scene, which appears toward the end of this thesis on rock art research in South Africa, suggests one of its central questions: how to situate oneself in a landscape, a tradition, a practice, in which cultural preservation, and the search for origins, seem to be inescapably bound up with destruction?”
Text by Zachary Formwalt.
PDF available for download:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fsTinBiEhaZBJI1x_JqYfQQyASXlzfKj/view?usp=sharing
Bachelor’s Thesis.
“A scene is sketched out for the reader—a landscape transformed as a vast technical apparatus is installed there, pointing towards the stars, in the hopes of discovering the origins of the universe. Directed away from the ground upon which it stands, and around which lives a small population that “carries a much adapted, but nevertheless living version of the culture and language of the Ixam [one of the area’s indigenous peoples],” the radio telescope array is deployed in search of origins, yet this deployment seems to endanger, or further impoverish, those very people who carry on the traditions and culture of the area’s original inhabitants. The search for one origin is caught up with the destruction of another. This brief scene, which appears toward the end of this thesis on rock art research in South Africa, suggests one of its central questions: how to situate oneself in a landscape, a tradition, a practice, in which cultural preservation, and the search for origins, seem to be inescapably bound up with destruction?”
Text by Zachary Formwalt.
PDF available for download:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fsTinBiEhaZBJI1x_JqYfQQyASXlzfKj/view?usp=sharing
2023
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