A video essay.
'To/ fir understand' and 'Outside a pen jiggles' present two site-based, distributed works, travelling out from a fir hide on a village edge in rural Northwest Germany. A fir branch sheltered from rain, provided plenty of space to converse and a site to move, resonate, refract far and wide.
Employing a simple instructive PDF to print zine as vehicle to travel, I invited others to join in building drawing machines off plants, bushes, trees. Delicate and determined, these marks on transparent paper then travelled back to the village edge.
Along the drawn lines left by plant matter (and pencils, string, wind, rain along with our judgement ), the site of the fir hide also functions as depository for a range of contact methods and a concern of when it is time to archive. And does the task of an archive not simply expand the making in any case?
The two works speak, sometimes with my own notes, sometimes with quotes from Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (which was read along, slowly, over winter and far into early summer), to our involvement: in social organisation, contact and collaboration, its edges, and its vertigo too.