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Wellington based curator Melanie Oliver organised a small group show in her house, a big multi-person flat on a hill whose windows overlook the sea and the wide horizon, which are both such iconic features of that cityscape, as an open home Christmas exhibition. When radio cegeste was invited to participate, I gathered some location recordings from around the long meandering stretch of the Wellington waterfront, and broadcast the sounds of the ocean on the day of the show to the radio used domestically within the house (in the kitchen), as well as a small transistor I placed in the bathroom.
many thanks to Ann Shelton for the wave-cactus-transmitter photo, and to Melanie Oliver for the others. Melanie archived the show on her blog for posterity here
in arid cities we have read as syntax flooded streets, marked tides in museums where classical shadows
build birds of dust on their shoulders:
the old tongue sleep, forgotten, in patches, but still the thirst: the sky, a desert of tiredness, without image
to drink, but almost
the memory of rain, half-tasted, like jealousy in the back of the throat; the lake, maybe eroded, or a salt, unfed
expanse, a wilted
lip dragging dust boundaries, outside the circle of light, the marble horse's pupil gilded. sight splits a line, a dry
horizon, a pen
raised to the chalky lips of cliffs, the vanishing point chewed ragged by wide skies, a seedless devouring, graced by neither coherence
nor splendor; where we live, on the edge of the letter, a view pointing stillness, behind gray glass; time ripened
under the eye's
black canopy, the plum of a newly born century, split under the hard foreknowledge of a thumb; and after the music
there will be the calm,
a relocation of light, the movement exact, a trace of anger held between hand and paper; and in the wind, where
cartographies click, and the surfaces rearrange
their notes, the desert flaring, pulling a long story from our feet, after a lifetime spent suffering the stilted innocence
of flowers, to avoid the belonging, the dull love:
to walk horizontally along the edge of a word, blinded by sun, to forget what was seen, and what there is, and
beneath real heel, to gather the fiction of a hill:
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*[first published in Australian literary magazine Cordite, the Epic issue 31.0 (2009)]
Wellington based curator Melanie Oliver organised a small group show in her house, a big multi-person flat on a hill whose windows overlook the sea and the wide horizon, which are both such iconic features of that cityscape, as an open home Christmas exhibition. When radio cegeste was invited to participate, I gathered some location recordings from around the long meandering stretch of the Wellington waterfront, and broadcast the sounds of the ocean on the day of the show to the radio used domestically within the house (in the kitchen), as well as a small transistor I placed in the bathroom.
