EICHA:
THE BOOK OF LUMENATIONS
Particularly speaking to this “Covid moment,” these videopoems take as its jumping off point, the Biblical Eicha, The Book of Lamentations, which laments the destruction of Jerusalem and through reflection, deflection, refraction and the fracturing of language, homophonically re-situates the original text to the horrors and hope of the present moment. Tracking through “the city” as a desolate weeping widow overcome with misery, and moves through desolation ruin, prayer and recovery, it explores ways that in rupture, there is rapture.
As a text of defractions and transpositions, “contrascription,” substitutions, it becomes an annextual discourse of contemplative hunger. A ventriloquized latticework where each phrase a kind of contaminative “lexicell,” exaltically and ecstatically dis-easing the way a virus might enter another’s DNA erupting as a consanguinity of interconstellated contingencies. And as transpoesis it acts not only (in General Semanticist terms) as a “time binder” but through a luminous, voluminous threading of light, it highlights how darkness is a form of light, how text itself is, in essence, black light on white light, and thus opens up new ways of seeing and the cyclic nature of meaning and being.
Text written and performed by Karasick, the digital music, is composed and performed by Grammy Award winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London. Visuals created by Karasick, with renowned Italian filmmaker, Igor Imhoff.