Adeena Karasick

The Book of Lamentations V

—Poetry Video

Artist’s Commentary: Calling attention to the ecology and concerns relating to physical, emotional, psychological historical and environmental disaster, Eicha V, is the last, in a 5-part series and takes as its jumping off point, the Biblical, Eicha, The Book of Lamentations, which laments the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Tracking through desolation, misery, hope, lament and prayer (repentance and recovery, the 5-part suite homophonically re-situates the original text to the horrors and hope of the present moment.

Like the previous installment, (Eicha I), published in the last issue of Chant de là Sirène, through a luminous, voluminous threading of light, Eicha V highlights how darkness is a form of light, how the swirling fragmentation of text and bifurcated, shadowed identity mirror an ever-disintegrating environment, and speaks to aspects of hope and recovery in an otherwise fraught time.

The entire text was recently published in Ærotomania, The Book of Lumenations, (Lavender Ink, New Orleans, 2023), and this multidisciplinary translation of a translation which includes such markers as covid maps, election stats, and shards of alchemical cosmographies, topographies, ecopoetically highlights the “creative-critical edges between making and writing.”—AK

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This video was created and performed by Karasick, the music was composed and performed by Grammy Award winning composer and trumpet player Sir Frank London. Visuals created by Karasick, with vispo by Jim Andrews and Jim Leftwich.

Alan Sondheim

Spent / Bindings & Collisions

—Video & Sound Texts