Knees to Stone, Three Secrets,
Tsarino AiR Foundation
Bulgarian Eastern Rhodope Mountains | Sept 2024
Before each embodied workshop, I send a “letter of address” that outlines the affective terrains we will traverse; an invitation for each collaborator to enter the space with the freedom to come and go as needed.
At Tsarino, we crafted these letters collectively, translating them into Bulgarian, Greek, Dutch, and English so that every language could speak its truth into the air. These letters await on our shared dinner table, a tangible part of our durational practice that carries communities along with “histories that hurt.”
The stones holding these letters—shown in the image above—are from an abandoned village, some sculpted by local residents involved in the artist residency and weathered by the elements. They stand as silent witnesses to our ongoing embodied circular readings, where we reclaim, re-read, and re-breathe our collective past.
“In the second session, where the film and guided meditation took place, I felt as if I was really diving into some childhood memories, particularly connected to water and the river where I had some of my earliest father-son memories. It was deeply emotional and cathartic.”
Embodied Circular Reading moving through the air at Tsarino
We begin in our communal outdoor kitchen,
the plates returned cleaned and dried to the wooden shelves,
the vessels that once held the Irish stew I cooked.
We find ourselves surrounded by cows
that roam the Eastern Rhodope mountains;
we dance gently past their curious eyes.
We move together through the abandoned village—
inside and outside houses,
climbing down toward the waterfall,
passing pine and oak trees,
while our voices cling to the leaves.
Our bodies feel the cold welcome of water held in the stream.
A large beetle dives down into the depths and back to the air;
the water weaves, flows, and trickles on its way to the waterfall.
We climb.
We share two cars.
We find ourselves at the vitrine,
which holds fragments of our words
from the reading and listening group that came before.
The sun is setting.
Our communal fire crackles into the night air,
mingling with distant Bulgarian music and chatty crickets.
The timbre of my voice joins the chorus—
our communal voices tangle.
Our bodies respond to filmic breath between the firelight and our head touches.
My body disorients, orients, and reorients between the filmic body and my own.
Bodily and Filmic Breath
A new filmic body, forged in conversation with Tsarino, was screened during the workshop.
