A publication produced and distributed in the summer of 2019 was made in collaboration with Ayham Ghraowi and Matt Wolff. The publication comprises materials that includes family and documentation photographs, drawings, and blueprints, interwoven with an interview conducted by Kara Jefts with Matty Davis, Bryan Saner, Eryka Dellenbach, and Quinn Turley.

In addition to serving as a record of the performance, the publication contains an intermittent dialogue between the designers and the artist about the decisions made in its production. By including this dialogue and additional material related to a re-imagined, final performance that took place in July 2019, the publication offers a reflection of Wood Bone Mill and the history that made it possible: a nuanced portrait of a place and its people.

Annotated artist edition, Matty Davis. Wood Bone Mill in handmade mulberry case. 2020.

Wood Bone Mill, 24 x 26 cm

HOW SHALL THOU RESOLVE THYSELF

Jesse Zaritt
at the site-specific release event of How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself 

Matty wrote in Knee Balance, a previous performance arranged for print: “I realized that there wasn’t a choice but a distinction to be made between that which you decide to hold and that which has a hold on you.” 

And then Holly wrote in How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself: “it was clear to the spectator that my hand was cradling my foot rather than my foot crushing my hand, I agreed”

How should we perceive what is happening to us as we move through this relentlessly living, changing, unstable world? From moment to moment do we see ourselves being cradled or crushed, holding or being held, or both at once?

I was reading a text my boyfriend Niall Jones was working on for publication and in it he used a quote by Octavia Butler that I can’t get out of my head; it feels increasingly relevant with each passing day. The quote is from her 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower: She wrote: “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.”

There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.

In the 2019 printed booklet that accompanies the performance project Wood Bone Mill, Matty is quoted as saying: “I’m often interested in risk, in the terms of what we can survive together, not in this macho way but in this way that requires everything you have in terms of care and sensitivity and deep listening.”

I see Matty’s work and the work of the collaborators gathered here as asking this question - How might we survive the demands of this living world? Or, how can we create strategies to help us survive the demands of this living world?

I’m thinking about the survival strategies that this work proposes.

There is an alchemy of language and gesture and effort in How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself. There is a kind of magic to the distributed and then condensed sociality of the work - from the solitude of embodied practice to the intimate social space of the photo shoot, the social space of the text (the publication) and then the social space of our gathering here … all aspects of this project demand that each participant enter into a state of extreme presence.

Poet CAConrad speaks about magic as the result of practices of extreme presence. They write: “Magic is discovering how things bend and then bending them for results…” When I think of bending in the context of this project, I think of the bending back of the toes - forced arch, I think of pressure, the extent to which you can’t be anywhere but where you are as your flesh and bones press into each other and into the ground. I think about what pressure yields: when does something - our joints, our words, our coming together to see and be seen by each other - get pressurized to the point that it yields a something else… When does something get bent into an elsewhere or otherwise, when does this pressure and bending create a portal to a kind of magic? 

How do you think about or understand the potential magic of this project?