akin to lista from lysnan akin to lust

Dual channel video installation on multiple hung cloth screens, scent, 10-channel spatialized audio, with porcelain, wire, fabric, and skin sculptures throughout, 2 performers.

Though this work is primarily languageless, it grows out of a deep exploration of language, as connoted by the title, and a long engagement with several texts. The poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt, from which the title is derived, was allegedly written to Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I, who was not too long afterwards beheaded (presumably for infidelity). It is a keystone text in a constellation I work with that explore hunting, desire, exhaustion, embodiment, gender, and death and includes the stories of Actaeon, John Lyly's play Gallathea, and the speeches of Elizabeth I, among others. Wolfgang Behringer's Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, a history which uses mainly witch trial documentation from the Bavarian region in the 16th century, offered a look at a particular folk belief about bones, which anchored an exploration of medieval beliefs about the body in relationship to death and resurrection. Remains of bodies are often granted magical properties; how strange we would visit the finger bone of someone long dead, in hopes of healing or redemption.