Sourcing the Stream
Sourcing the Stream
Sourcing the Stream
Exhibition Video
April 2017
It’s spring, three months after the inauguration of Donald Trump. The mood is still dark and somber even with the coming of new light. How to find some reassurance that the world will go on, despite the pervasive feeling of despair? Bella, the dog, signals it’s time for a walk. I’m tired of the usual paths. So I take her to water, to the stream. A long winding dirt path laced with thick entangled roots and winter’s debris. We walk for hours at the water’s edge. The rhythm of the walk and Bella’s delight change the mood, and the voices in my head begin to sing in a different tune. Stream song. I decide to spend every day walking with the stream, looking and listening for solace.
I am wanting to know
some truth.
I can hear myself thinking
I want them
these truths
to be like feathers
falling from the sky
in flight or in flow.
Celestial songs
voices from
the deep
temporary timbres speaking
in tongues.
The central motivation for the Sourcing the Stream project became a desire to learn about stream environments, as well as to draw on associations and memories about water from diverse individuals in the particular locales where the project is developed and exhibited. To date, the project has two versions. One, an
and the other, a one-channel exhibition video, shown here.
Video and text: Wendy Woodson
(with additional text from Rainer Marie Rilke, Moving Forward and Ueda Akinari, Mountain Song)
Music and Voice: Zeina Nasr (with excerpts from John Cage, Prelude for Meditation, Peace of Mind, Distant Storm, Meredith Monk, Dark/Light 1 and Traces, John Grout, New England Forest, Nadia Sirota, Live Water, and Joanna Newsome Only Skin)
Exhibited at Brown University and the Origins Theater, WITS University, Johannesburg, SA (2018)