Just Beyond The Fall of Grace / Behold That Ever-Shining Place (2024)
Two paired multi-site audio installations, focused on American political polarization, in Pinellas County, Florida, at Heritage Village (Largo) and in downtown St Petersburg.
Multiple co-sponsoring institutions and associated public outreach events, Autumn 2024-Spring 2025
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Both installations will present a series of recorded fictional monologues, which will be physically dispersed across a number of sites. Each monologue will be site-specific, in the sense that each will be written from the perspective of an individual who was fictively present at the exact location where the monologue will be installed. Each of the installations –Just Beyond The Fall of Grace and Behold That Ever-Shining Place – will offer a coherent, stand-alone experience for visitors. But some of the “characters” from each installation will also appear in the other; through this, and other aspects of the monologues, the meaning of each installation’s stories will be illuminated by the other, in some cases reversing a visitor’s expectations or the way that visitor might have interpreted ambiguity after visiting one of the installations only. The deployment of separate, but interdependent, audio installations at two separated locations traces the ways in which geographic context or group identities can shape human understanding of social interactions or even of basic facts about the world. A given action or fragment of a story might readily be interpreted in one way in an urban context, but in another way in a more suburban or exurban context. The project can be read as a kind of social intervention, causing visitors to both installation sites physically to cross these invisible social boundaries in search of perspective and knowledge in unfamiliar places.
more soon