A part of the exhibition Telling the Future Through a Portal.

For this work, I set up construction scaffolding in a space previously used as a mall department store (note the black security camera bubble) and placed Bristol paper sprinkled with water-soluble powdered graphite beneath the scaffold. During the performance, I climbed the structure and spit from the platform while whispering portentions, worries, promises, dreams, intentions, and anxieties.

There were three iterations of this performance. One of them resulted in the video documentation. This iteration used six sheets of paper instead of one, and I spent about five minutes on each. The whispering clustered organically into themes within the realm of future and climate: one revolved around my siblings, another a lover, a third the location of my birth. Once I felt finished with a subject, I hung the paper from a clothesline and let the saliva and graphite drip.

In this space, the future is down. Though in the United States we conceive of the future as ahead of us, horizontally (Lewis), here, I situate time as a vertical plane. The whispers are sent on the saliva, arrive and accumulate; explode. Marcel Griaule in Documents vol. 1 quipped, “Spit is soul in motion. We use it to […] deposit our will in an object” (381). Saliva travels on the pneuma (breath/spirit) and is impregnated by it. One could say we are a history of impacts and interventions, much as the paper amasses forceful contacts.