Born in the fall of 2018, “Migration Parade” is an evolving, collaborative body of work and multimedia gallery installation by electroacoustic sound artist, Danielle Savage, and sculptural textile artist, Alexandra Goodall.
This work is an act of earnest research into the phenomena of hive-mind, relational space, and collective intelligence, from the micro to the macro, starting with ourselves. Through multiple research streams and creation methods, we are using the artistic disciplines of sculptural textile and electroacoustic composition to explore the movements of personal and collective bodies. We have drawn on the field of phenomenology, philosophically and through application, and rely on direct engagement with materials (cloth/fibre and raw sonic experimentation) to guide much of our studio practice. Simultaneously, we continue to follow and nurture the conceptual dimensions of our work, tracking how this evolves and how it provides further context, shaping and insight to our inquiry.
“Migration Parade: Holon” is a work that holds a kind of luminous, safe, altered space of inquiry for feeling, thinking, and being in collectives. It explores the individual within the collective and the collective within the individual. It carves out an abstract and sensorial space to explore these phenomena, free of semantic entanglements or polarized political analyses, yet including them as a line of inquiry in the research. It explores collective trauma and healing without being prescriptive. It explores questions surrounding our humanity and intersectional ways of understanding the world without seeking easy answers or playing “find the bad guy”.
It allows us to immerse ourselves in a sense of awe about the mind-staggering complexity of collective experience without needing to boil it down to a set perspective (scientific, spiritual, etc.). It is an act of poiesis, a response to our times, that strives to make room for complexity, ambiguity, and interpretation, while owning its subjectivity and unburdening itself from the tendency to rigidly universalize experience. In other words, it aims to offer a highly relational alternative to fundamentalism.
At the same time, when dealing with large collectives, a degree of holism is necessary in order to coordinate movements: the sheer power of 40,000 people all singing the same refrain requires enough common willingness to know and perform a single action. A flock of birds requires complicit-ness in the collective experience to move in tandem. At the micro, small elemental forces coordinate within our bodies to keep our heart beating, fend off pathogens, etc. We supposedly live at the helm of this body, steering the ship so to speak, yet we are made up of a complexity of synchronized experience that defies our ability to understand.
Our membership in the larger collectives of our various communities (friends, families, collaborators, political or hobby groups, human, humanoid-animal, earth-bound, sentient, member of the galaxy, etc) is beyond our ability to label the living experience of it. In whole and in parts, the multiplicity of interpretation forms the cohesion.
“Migration Parade: Holon” is a ritual, a place outside of words – a love letter to those who came before us, and those yet to come.
