Excerpted from Fragments (2012), MICROSCOPE GALLERY selection, Holy BOS! Film Festival
—
The voices in this vignette cell phone movie are my own, Meredith Monk, Ammiel Alcalay, and Carlos Hernandez giving me advice. It was made from scraps of a chance footage sound and video archive recorded on my cell phone in 2011. It’s as much about a period of a healing from placebo effect as it is about a period of pneumonia, homelessness, and revisiting haunts of memory. It’s a footnote to myself about when, via writing an autobiographical series of vignettes about nomadism, I became aware of how much 7 years of living in different parts of the world as busking musician, farmer, squatter, and lady flâneur was an aftershock of being an immigrant and serial migrant since before I could speak. Maybe the pneumonia that almost killed me at 29 was simply an effect of the mold and rat poison the landlady put in my basement apartment, maybe it was a valve for letting go of an old depression, maybe it was a compass, maybe it was an exorcism – it’s been suggested we get sick to ritualize healing and purging.
The music and poetry are written and performed by me, with the exception of two fragments that end and begin the vignette – the first is from a letter written by Pablo Neruda in exile, the last is from a poem by Antonio Machado. Neruda and Machado were both poets in exile. Home can be found in exile, health in illness, success in failure, wholesomeness in fragments. Fellini: The vital confusion of life is the only salvation we have against dogmatic mummifications. There are no characters, only apparitions. There are no stories, only fragments.
—
DIRECTOR/EDITOR: Mariana Luna
MUSIC: Mariana Luna
POEM: Antonio Machado
Cantaban los niños canciones ingenuas
de un algo que vive y que nunca llega
es triste la historia y clara la pena
Seguia su cuento la fuente serena
es triste la historia y clara la pena
PHOTOGRAPHED & EDITED IN MEXICO, MONTREAL, NYC by me.
MUSICIANS
Laurie Anderson
Sarah Neufeld
Colin Stetson
Rebecca Foon
Baby Copperhead
SPEAKERS
Laurie Anderson on Aristophanes’s “The Birds”
Mustafa Khaliq Ahmed on Allen Ginsberg
ALSO PHOTOGRAPHED
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Esmerine
DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR
Mariana Luna
CONSULTANT EDITORS
Ammiel Alcalay
Melody London
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Alexander Pau
CREW
Paris Reyes Mirus
Joshua Feigin
ARCHIVISTS
Mariana Luna
Anne Donlon
GENEROUS SUPPORT
Margo Viscusi
Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center: centerforthehumanities.org/
Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative: centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found
