Lost in the Reeds
2023
8:25 short film
“Categories have no place here, but there are many patterns.”
– Distance Underthought, Mel Baggs
“When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement.”
– On Difference Without Separability, Denise Ferreira da Silva
This work explores the nature of difficulties in translation between certain neurotypical and neurodivergent sensory and relational experiences of the world, told through the entangled histories of myself and the ubiquitous Common Reed/Gewöhnliches Schilf (Phragmites australis).
Based on a blog series in which I engaged critically with the ideas of communication and (mis)understanding through the lens of Damian Milton’s ‘Double Empathy Problem’ and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva’s thinking on quantum nonlocality, the short film puts their work on disability and anti-colonial thought into communication with my own lived experience of neurodivergence and reflections as a white settler.
What embodied neurodivergent knowledge is not (or perhaps should not be) translatable? What kind of relationships might we build if we begin from the assumption that we will not be able to understand one another? What might happen to our patterns of communication, if understanding of the other is not our ultimate goal?
This project was realized thanks to support from the Canada Council for the Arts.