Breadcrumb #547
MANDY-SUZANNE WONG
Cornelia paints bugs. Dave sounds out their memories, nightmares, premonitions.
They aren’t just any bugs. These are bugs born broken.
In 2016 in Switzerland, Dave Phillips and Cornelia Hesse-Honneger collaborated on a bizarre hybrid artwork. Half painting, half screaming. Half nightmare, all reality.
Mutations starts with a scream, something like a power drill, whimper of a small thing, a thing mewling in terror, and then bang! This is “Mutations 1.” Long exhale from great jaws stretched apart to breaking point, stumbling and fluttering, and then a piercing siren puts me in mind of a torture chamber. And Dave wouldn’t mind my saying so.
He made Mutations’ audio, he said, by “layering, condensing, stretching, distorting” his recordings of wild insects. Some of them, especially in “Mutations 2,” sound to me like groaning lions, captive cows clamoring and clanging, or like cruel machines. Like death. The sounds of agony and death. Maybe it’s just me. Or an evocation of ecosystemic dependencies. “Entomologists give humans, after the hypothetical extinction of the invertebrates (of which insects form the majority), another ten years,” Dave wrote.
Like an extra ear or seventh leg, Mutations’ audio grew out of Cornelia’s watercolor paintings of morphologically disturbed bugs.
“Like death. The sounds of agony and death.”
Housefly with legs growing out of its head.
Little green bug with six legs and six feet.
Yellow bug born with a hole in its left eye, and why? Because their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents were born where the folks next door had a thing for nuclear power.
Over the years, Cornelia has visited about thirty nuclear disaster sites, atomic testing sites, working plutonium factories, and operational nuclear power plants in Europe, the UK, and the US. Chernobyl. La Hague. Sellafield. Gundremmingen. The “National Security” desert once called the Nevada Test Site, renamed “N2S2” to incorporate a cutesy Star Wars reference. She’s studied 16,500 individuals and painted about three hundred. She agonizes for months over every portrait. She sees each of her subjects as “an important person,” she says.
Scorpionfly born with a crimped stomach near Leibstadt power plant.
In recognition of her efforts and the insects’ martyrdoms, governments and scientific institutions ridicule Cornelia and do their utmost to suppress her research. They want a prettier truth. For the fact is Cornelia’s insects come from working nuclear facilities, not just defunct or damaged ones.
Larva born with broken wing.
Firebug’s left wing half the size of its right wing.
Flies with malformed glands, congenital blindness.
Dreaming through the voices of healthy bugs, Dave sounds out the reality of irradiated ones. I strain to hear a healthy bug in his sonic hallucinations. I strain to listen past the sounds’ tortured deformities, hoping with all my might to hear someone like the crickets who sing outside at night. I hear a pretty chord at the start of “Mutations 3,” but no sooner do I hear it than it’s as if impaled by a giant drill, and anyway a chord isn’t a bug. This chord is the voice of a bug bleeding out into the nightmare voice of some machine whose insatiable hunger breeds lifelong torment in generation upon generation.
Healthy-bug-voice twisted into growl-of-colossal-turbine.
The sound of human ravenousness oozing into nonhuman voices, rending them from within.
Screams of “contiguous bodies…as they turn into messages that foretell of a prescient world where everything suddenly matters.”
Even if it was just Chernobyl. Or Hiroshima. Or Fukushima. How long will that error take to fade out of the bodies who suffer it? Even if it’s only one of our minutes, surely a nuclear blast feels like epochs to the flightless fly condemned at birth by a tattered too-small wing to die slowly of starvation.
The poet Lital Khaikin called Mutations “an archive of anatomic duration…that traces the dispersal of a disaster — ... [t]his blurring of matter, the falling out of bodies.”