April 9, 2014
Performances this weekend of my project CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS, a collaboration with composer Andrea Clearfield (music), Manfred Fischbeck (movement) and Group Motion (performance).
I made video projections and performance poems about some mean secrets of California: a very particular coastal redwood tree that witnessed 1570’s Spanish-perpetrated genocide, 1870’s lynch riots, and 1970’s American-perpetrated femicides…and the spider witches who told me the tale.
Thanks to Montalvo Arts Center and Pew Foundation for making it all possible.
Saturday night at 8pm. Tickets at www.GroupMotion.org. Visit the invitation for more details.
A lot more information about this project on my website under CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS…including some film projection excerpts, poem snippets, and other bits and pieces.
Quintan Ana Wikswo Artist Statement / CALIFIA AND THE TRESPASSERS:
My earliest memory is of standing inside a burned-out Sequoia tree, looking at the sky through a distant opening at its top. A vision of the mythic cosmos that is eternally linked in my mind to California. Over the decades, I’ve watched heartbroken as the transcendent beauty of coastal California is inexorably destroyed wave upon wave of interlopers and trespassers who blaze new and often destructive paths through an ancient ecology and cultural heritage.
My later memories, as a small child in Santa Clara County outside San Francisco, include when the utopian dreams shifted into the nightmares of Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, the Zodiac killings, the Zebra killings, and violence that struck disproportionately at women and people of color.
While the visual and textual imagery of CALIFIA is located within the mythic ecology of my childhood, at heart this piece inhabits the cycle of ecological, racist, and misogynistic violence orchestrated by wave upon wave of pioneer ideologues who have been attracted to that soil since the Spanish conquistadores committed the early genocides against California’s coastal tribes.