HILL AS CACHE, AS INVISIBILITY, AS STRATEGY

At Fresh Kills, double to Mannahatta, with Kathy Westwater, Seung Jae Lee, Leigh Draper, and Raj Kottamasu, gearing up toward our residency for PARK, a view of the East Mound of solid waste becoming laboriously yet strategically a mountain by way of 280 gas extraction wells and plastic and other geosynthetic, permanent or impermanent impermeabilities: vulnerable effigy of tragedy becoming speranza, or outlook, manifest in the upcoming Park's name:

an elision of the old topos's Fresh and Kills to soften the latter's blow.

The mound's bareness, its absence of apparent human intervention or trash, precisely the reminder of our rummaging with it: as otherwise, it would have been developed: as is, what's left of our adulterated but feasible postEden.

Working, walking toward a trail, a score: my track seeks to dramatize the process of tuning to the landscape by long-distance transfer of remembered and immediate images and sounds. My partner has trouble with the immediate, wants only to voice the remembered in orientation: is this his peculiarity, or the site's?

Traffic stuffing the Verrazano Bridge this Mother's Day amplifies the sense of Staten Island's status as a long-exasperated waystation for the paradigmatic, conceptually unsullied City's gluts.