Ekstasis & Enstasis
From a talk given at the Jan Michalski Foundation July 6, 2023
Extremely lucky and glad to be writing to you from the Jan Michalski Foundation where I’m spending this month working on a very strange new book that I’ll hopefully tell you more about soon. In the meantime, here is a talk I gave yesterday as a part of my residency.
In May of 2013 I went on a weekend road trip with my then-boyfriend, later-husband, and even-later-ex-husband through upstate New York. Our main destination was a massive sculpture park called The Storm King Art Center, a place we had both wanted to visit to see work from Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois and Alexander Calder and many others.
Right before we left, we realized that the brood of cicadas that live in that part of the country were set to emerge after seventeen years underground. There are other cicada broods in that area that have shorter cycles, but Brood II as (I believe) they’re known, are estimated to have a density of around a million insects per acre. Being so plenteous, they are especially noisy as they emerge from the ground to sing and mate and lay eggs and die en masse over the course of a few weeks.