Remains
Echoing the oracle of Dodona in Greece, a bronze basin suspended beneath a hanging tree is filled with black water. The audience reclines in a circle, half-lying at the edge of the roots and leaves. Remains is a writing of nature’s disappearance through human action, followed by its metamorphosis and re-composition.
The intention behind this project may be an invitation to step outside our own prism, through which we often associate our disappearance with the disappearance of nature. Yet on the scale of our planet, where time is measured in tens of millions of years, the potential disappearance of humankind has little to do with that of nature. After a period of profound destruction, nature will recompose itself and give rise to another form of life.
We are not at the centre, and Remains is an invitation to experience a scale of time in which our beliefs, gods and civilisations, which seem so tangible and self-evident to us in the present moment, will have become remnants in a world that, a hundred million years from now, will have probably changed without us.
Remains is the third chapter in a trilogy that began with Deep are the woods and Je suis une montagne.
And so unfolds the first movement of Remains. As we meditate, something shifts in our experience as spectators. Without human presence, without words, dwarfed by a plant that reminds us of our modest place in the human scale, we almost forget ourselves. Might we finally become part of the furniture (organic, of course), or even of the Earth’s crust? […] More than a different relationship with nature, what is offered here for us to experience as a prototype is a different form of writing, a different visual language and a different way of « being in the theatre »..
Thomas Corlin – Mouvement
