fundament
Rolf Nowotny, Ben Sang, Annie Swiderski
December, 2019
A visitor enters and pushes palm to dust, raising earthy plume, peering into colonies and patterns unintelligible to one from another realm. Lovecraftian mass at pulverized-to-dust scale. Monumental waves of sediment, pressing upon one another in an uneven, debris-ridden floor that sends spores of rot to the boards supporting its sky. Shards of warm, refracted light beaming like the small, burning sun's rays into Plato’s eternal pit of misperception.
A pre-Vesuvian carpet of violent starburn dust beckons for contact with the world above as it stretches past its own material to hear echoes of currents from the higher plane.
Bedrock is the only pillow for a spirit enshrouded in a blanket veil of foundation. But the world is always asleep in this place. Its architecture is a cast shadow of the structure it supports: walls, floor, and ceiling, steps leading up from the small entrance, fractal relationships between soul-given, layered sediments - dust clinging to the invisible lines of reference and sight. The streets of this stretch lead a visitor to wander, removing surface tension from navigation in a carving, fossilized pathway. A navigation and negotiation between ontologies and their dirty subjects spirals within the gnostic, zombified storage space. This space’s earthly bounds are in a constant fever dream, fantasizing every particle making up their unintelligible organs.
The visitor is pressed into sediment as they are enveloped into the dream-stuff of old and jealous walls. Their cells and life experiences diffused into fine, pulverized dust. Mounds and marked materials surfaces absorb and reflect their lonely companions. Shaky breath brings warmth and moisture to long forgotten deserts, forming a microscopic oasis. Fingerprint ridges carve landscapes left to be explored for years to come by the still, lingering air. What is making a mark, but being? What is being, but leaving marks against expansive, psychedelic fundament?
text by Ben Sang