Photograph of data collection station at Base Ecológica Serra do Japi (Jundiaí, BR). © Luiz Zanotello, 2023

A knot in motion (2023)

web-poem (archive, code, voice, rain data)
https://webresidencies.akademie-solitude.de/knot-in-motion/

The growing archive and the web poem are born from a research on the material, ecological, discursive and poetic accidents around an object of interest: the tropical rain. Based on the fiction of a knot tied between the two tropical lines along the Atlantic Forest in Jundiaí (BR) and the tropical desert in the oasis of El Kharja (EG), the project gathers and connects the voices of artists based in the tropics who speak with and about the tropical rain from their local perspectives.

On the side of the tropical desert, the rain bounds with scarcity in drought. On the side of the Atlantic forest, the rain bounds with abundance in flood. Though seemingly dichotomous, both sides are connected by the indeterminacy of rain amidst of the climate crisis in the colonial aftermath within the tropics. Beyond the verticality of North/South, could tying the tropical lines in a knot turn the axis horizontally instead? What forms of wet knowledge, poetics, and practices emerge from encounters with rain? How can tropical/global justice be (re)imagined through the lens of rain as contingency?

Attempting to approach indeterminacy from the perspective of chaos-monde (Glissant, 1990, pp. 94-95), a plurality of languages (Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, English), vocal timbres, textures, and speeds come together within a chaotic attractor system that is transformed into a meteorological map driven by rain forecast data collected at both sites.

Preview of the generative online poem. Access: https://webresidencies.akademie-solitude.de/knot-in-motion/

"Pointing the camera at the periphery of events", an audiovisual survey of rain in the Atlantic Forest (Jundiaí, BR). © Luiz Zanotello, 2023

Acknowledgements: Web poem developed together with Islam Shabana. Project initiated as part of the "Magical Hackerism" residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude and SAVVY Contemporary, 2022/23.