OUR ARMISTICE, YELLOW AS LEMONS, AS BIRDS
Project Description
Part of her forthcoming book THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR (Coffee House Press, 2015), Quintan Ana Wikswo’s OUR ARMISTICE is a suite of photographs, poems, video installations, and solo and collaborative performance. Yellow and purple, flamingos and warplanes, distrust and alliance – opposites are forced together in this meditation on peacemaking and the conflicts of trust. A collaboration in film, text and music between Quintan Ana Wikswo and composer Veronika Krausas.
Artist Statement
In this film installation/performance projection in collaboration with composer Veronika Krausas, my curiosity lay in the exploration of armistice as an emotional juncture – a kinetic pivot point in time where great loss has caused a cessation of hostilities, but no one has surrendered.
The story I discovered was one of longing amidst distrustfulness – armistice as a negotiated hope between adversaries.
There is something painfully honest and courageously human about a truce – there are no winners, and no losers, just a conditional, tenuous, unsteady movement towards something better…perhaps even healing, or peace.
Literature
excerpted from OUR ARMISTICE, YELLOW AS LEMONS, AS BIRDS
by Quintan Ana Wikswo
first performed at The Museum of Jurassic Technology
first published by Catalysis Projects
Our armistice yellow as lemons, as birds
i.
Suspension of birds
let go, slow –
Slip away –
A turn of time has frozen.
ii.
False promises
Dissembling truces
Sabotages Subterfuges
Duplicities Perfidities
Penalties punishments nearly unbearable
Pressures
iii.
Betrayals
Falsehoods
Irrational injunctions
Permissions restrictions invoked
and then denied
iv.
all of which
culminate
in a leave-taking
v.
who said to float through me
this canoe
your shoes
yellow
as lemons
as birds
vi.
do not be misled
lonesome is a door
with venetian blinds
far into the evening
after earthquakes
after your hands
folded into the arches of my feet
vii.
swimming at night
fear is taking your eyes off
things to touch when there is
nothing
let our edges go
pink
let’s just leave here agreeing
to be happy
Published in Museum of Jurassic Technology (performed March 2010)
Film
Performance
Credits
OUR ARMISTICE, YELLOW AS LEMONS, AS BIRDS
(c) 2010
film and image by QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO
music by VERONIKA KRAUSAS
performance premiere MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY
produced by CATALYSIS PROJECTS
OUR ARMISTICE, YELLOW AS LEMONS, AS BIRDS was premiered at the MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY in Los Angeles in 2009, and was released on DVD from Catalysis Projects in 2010, as part of a collection of Wikswo’s video installations.