Sin Sol, Forest Memory
Sin Sol, Forest Memory, made in collaboration with micha cárdenas, is a site-specific installation created for Between Bodies, a group exhibition at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington (2018-19). The work is comprised of a 3-channel, 52 x 10 foot immersive video installation in front of which hang two iPads running custom augmented reality software.
"Sin Sol, Forest Memory is a collaboration between Abraham Avnisan and micha cárdenas that brings together their shared interests in the critical and creative potentials of technology and experimental writing. A video installation and work of augmented reality poetry, Sin Sol, Forest Memory explores the memory of a landscape blanketed in the smoke of forest fires through an exchange between Aura, a future ancestor, and an interlocutor of an indeterminate space-time. In this work, time slips between past, present, and future to sketch a story in which the demise of Earth’s ability to sustain the human species is the result of long-ingrained structural violence against the planet and each other. It is a landscape haunted by the loss of possible futures, and as such invites ways of imaginatively considering adaptive forms of being and survival.
Visitors encounter the poetic texts and the figure of Aura within the space of the installation using iPads equipped with an augmented reality application. This “lens” reveals another layer of the landscape that is otherwise invisible, opening questions about which narratives of species life and death may lie beyond that which is immediately in view."
--Nina Bozicnik, Associate Curator, Henry Art Gallery