How to Look at Natures? - Art and the Capitalocene
How to Look at Natures? - Art and the Capitalocene (2023)
‘Falling Deer’ is the first in a series of playsets depicting peculiar events in my life. While they are very different kinds of experiences, they share one important aspect - they provide hints of a non-ordinary reality. Major or minor, these events stopped me in my tracks and made me look back and wonder. Over the years and decades, my mind keeps looping back to these events, as if they beg to be remembered.
The Falling Deer event whispers of an intrinsic magical interconnectedness between humans and non-humans of all kinds. It messes with assumed hierarchies and suggests that the deeper knowing is not ours but that of a deer, a bush, a wave, or even a cliff.
The playset is an actual playset, priced as a toy and sold on the e-commerce site Etsy, in my store ‘Magic Password’. That specific method of dissemination is an important aspect of the project. When a range of people enact the event, or other scenarios using the various parts of the set, the meaning or purpose of the event might reveal itself over time.
The Falling Deer, September 2001:
It's early morning on a rugged beach in Northern California. Summer is shifting into fall; the sky is gray and the air is cool. There is no wind. Apart from the rumble of the large pacific swells, it's quiet.
I'm suddenly awakened by a rustle from the cliffs high above. Leaping up from my sleeping bag, I see two small bushes falling down a near-vertical drop right in front of a little waterfall. Then, before my eyes, the jumble of branches transforms into a deer.
In shock, anticipating what will happen to the deer as she hits the rocks at the bottom of the tall cliff, I scream and wake my friends up. Time is slowing down to a trickle. Together we witness the deer in free fall.
She reaches the ground. She stands up. Unharmed. Unimaginable.
The deer darts towards the ocean, past us, out in the big swells. Just as a wave is readying itself to break above her, she spins around. Unscathed by her violent fall and the powerful waves, she runs back up on the sand, towards us. She turns and lopes down the beach, quickly fading into the distance.
