Displaced Horizons Performance Exposes Water Systems

Displaced Horizons was a collaborative multimedia performance that was co-sponsored by the Holtz Center on June 9. 

The performance focused on water infrastructures’ socio-cultural and historical complexities to encourage a re-visioning of current water systems to imagine, explore, and implement alternatives. The project attends to water systems—such as dams, acequias, arroyos, and rivers—to bring to the fore often-overlooked technological entanglements. The improvisatory and participatory structure of the work resists practices that fix water as an abstract resource and instead animates our subjective experiences of water in the landscape. By dispersing video and music throughout the space, the audience was able to move freely over the course of the two-hour performance on June 9. The group’s aim was for this multiplicity to obscure an all-encompassing experience and invite a uniquely aesthetic and experiential reorientation, making visible the values that inhere in infrastructures of water.

Performers:

Katie Harlow (Albuquerque), cello

Chris Jonas (Santa Fe), saxophones, vibraphone

Robert Lundberg (Wisconsin, Santa Fe), double bass

Dylan McLaughlin (Vermont, Santa Fe), live video

Ryan Packard (Chicago), percussion, vibraphone, accordion

Cory Wright (Bay Area), piccolo, flute, bass clarinet

Acushla Bastible, Stage Direction

Displaced Horizons is part of Currents New Media Festival and presented at SITE Santa Fe as part of its Sound and Spectacle series.

Co-Produced by Terra Incognita, with financial support from the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

Artist Team Bios:

Chris Jonas (composer, video, saxophones, vibraphone) is a Santa Fe-based composer, saxophone player and video artist. As an instrumentalist and composer/conductor, he has performed, recorded and toured internationally with many of today’s most adventurous artists, working extensively with Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, William Parker, Del Sol String Quartet, TILT Brass, The Crossing Choir and others. Jonas is a United States Artists fellow and a winner of the 2012 Meet the Composer/Commissioning USA award for GARDEN, his ongoing series of live music and transmedia works. He is Executive Director of the arts and social justice non-profit, Littleglobe and is Vice President of the NYC Tri-Centric Foundation.

Robert Lundberg (composer, video, double bass) makes music, takes photos, builds things, thinks about and drinks water. He has performed a wide range of music throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe both solo and with outfits such as JOBS, Skeletons, In One Wind, and Leverage Models. His photography, video, and installation work often focuses on the interaction of ‘wild’ and human-built spaces, as well as the line between representation and abstraction. He earned his BFA in Jazz Performance from The New School (New York) and is pursuing a JD and MS in Law and Environmental Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Additionally, he is a graduate fellow of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and a graduate associate of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (both University of Wisconsin-Madison).

Dylan McLaughlin (video) is a video artist employing the medium as a conduit for discourse and discovery in relational processes, through portraits, performance, and installation. Investigating improvisation, land-based making, and ecology through collaborative work with landscapes, dancers, and musicians. McLaughlin invites video as a platform to transcend mediums. He holds a BFA in New Media Arts: Moving Images from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.