An interview with Dawn Lundy Martin by Noah Eli Gordon     (page 9)

NEG: Dawn, what’s next for you?

DLM: I'm not exactly sure. I know that the work I've done recently with the Black Took Collective is pushing me toward a project that is linguistic and visual/aural. As a part of a recent BTC performance in Buffalo, I edited and incorporated text for a video that occupied center stage during the performance. I started to think about the conversation between text and image/what's read and what's heard, etc. So, recently, I bought a digital audio recorder, and my plan is to use that recorder this summer to go back to the questions of trauma encoded in A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering. What I know now is only this first step of my process: that I will visit four "sites of trauma" and record how that trauma attempts to express itself. I am thinking here, of course, of language. What the people who inhabit a specific site say or don't say. But, I'm also thinking of landscape and whether or not landscape can be aurally salient. I love the performance piece, "God Punishing" by Marina Abramovic, which is an epic staging in Thailand and a memorial to the victims of the Tsunami. Abramovic and a large group of local men and women take whips out into the waves of the ocean and whip the waves 345 times until they are sweaty and fatigued. Abramovic's attack is, although powerful to watch, also literal—the sea killed, let's whip the sea and punish God. I'm interested, perhaps, in attending to the question of speaking in what appears to be silent or healed or unaffected, and that includes the land, the water, and other elements in nature.