resurge/alight/burrow Action 2: alight

My share today is about the camp’s second modular action: alight. Where the camp’s first action, resurge, is intended as a sprawling, organic permeation with many facets and tendrils, alight dances in and out of sight and earshot, pollinating wigwam walls and rumbling the earth as it flits through. If resurge is a thickening moss blanket, alight is a dragonfly zipping by, touching down briefly before lifting again.

Its implementation in the camp is subversive in the worlds of photography, fine art, and archive culture. Ubiquitous projectors, speakers, and cameras flavor its layered world-building as at once familiar and unexpected: the light and sounds utilize the curve of lodge walls, the framework of the poles, and chronological and spatial sleight-of-hand to build their own language in the space.

In a brief nod to fine art display, image lands on canvas, and just as quickly it abandons that rigidity, soaking through the translucent membrane as it shines through the lodge wall. Short transmissions pop through from a fluid timeline, utilizing swiftness and free motion to push back against the anthropological gaze. The precious nature of the family photo is tenderly held in contrast to museum artifact: images hold the same people, doing the same things, with the latter trapped behind glass and the former calling out to cataloged relative.

Sterility is massaged out of crisp archive: wrinkles appear and holes punch through a surface or two. A plastic horse, cartoonishly ridden, gazes back against expectations of romance or performance.

Kitchens are cooked in, skateboards are ridden, naps are taken.

Lives are lived in a collection of photos and videos shaped to feel un-curated. Images of relatives retain their freedom from glass displays. They keep their agency in fleeting visits upon lodge covers and human skin. Their light-speed travel into and out of our plane is at their own accord.

Following the blueprint of pinhole photography, transmissions of light and sound are ushered through small channels into this nesting space, and here is where resurge becomes more visible. Without direction, alight risks confinement within the limits of that pinhole camera: an empty box; a mirror; an amplification of an already noisy world. But shoulder to shoulder, resurge and alight invert that noise, compressing it into a quiet, darkened canvas for imaginings of an Indigenous future to whisper into. For reclamation of an Indigenous past, and a way to hold it softly. Here, resurge insists, “We return,” and alight joyfully dances past to add, “On our own terms!”

Dream-led and ever-shifting, alight is fleeting, ephemeral, a pathway of information with a multidirectional flow.

It is a kinetic bundling. A distillation. A peeking through of future moons and holograms of the camps blooming underneath them.

Syllabics hop through portals, pulling the names of flooded communities forward into the future.

alight can appear as a letter from a future descendant, sent via generational correspondence. It embodies the notion of time-hopping, leaning toward ancestral shoulder to borrow medicine-sugar; touching foreheads with a descendant and filling their palms with seeds for safekeeping.

It is fire and vibration, a call to action in a transforming world. It beckons in, and through, and lays a map in which forward motion abandons linearity in favor of spiritual footprints. Snowshoe-shapes mingle with paws in packed-down trails; these sturdy, ancestral bridges becoming more visible as the untrodden drifts melt away: here, alight is disappearing/reappearing ink. The air, freshly churned by wing, carries the scent of rain and germination. Under a waxing crescent moon, we rebuild.