Composing Quarry (2024)
Thank you Prof. Danielle Vogel
“I continue to be with Portland Brownstone Quarry and the river that always floods. The sites where I have been investigating fiercely. Tales, military operations, echoes of industrial disasters, relational linguistics, body/memory aches, imagination.
For a Siberian grandfather who I’ve never met but I am him/his reincarnation, who writes in a language institution that is grafted in my body.
For another Han Chinese grandfather who was drafted but has never been to the battlefield during the Korean War. His handwriting was so beautiful to be killed by bombs, the officer said. The high pitch explosion reincarnated in the bombastic of his writings for war.
Colonial language quarries the archives of displacement within its internal violent explosiveness.
Mandarin and English, my language stays in the everlasting wayward movement in/between these colonial structures. This project documents this process.
My language floods the cracks of language institutions while the 1936 floods continue to fill in the quarry, void its economical value, resurrecting the ecosystem surpassing emptiness imposed on this Wangunk river valley land. Linguistic cracks opening up as brownstone cracks opening up. Shredding, pulling, but building with a gentle slowness. Words of memories freezes and melts, expands and shrinks following the season of the land.”
East Village Zine Fair, 2024 (with Art Against Displacement)
Collected by Nathaniel Otting
Full text and physical book avaliable upon request, please email ywang14@wesleyan.edu
