From a certain perspective, it’s reasonable to say that not much happens in “Bodies of Weather,” the 50-minute video installation now at Space on Congress Street (through April 6). Five women watch waves breaking and a tide rolling in. They lie on the sand, dance around a bit and gaze out at the water some more. They walk into the sea until some are waist high in it, then retreat back to shore. They bend over to splash their hands in the water, sit on the beach and trace lines in the sand.

But consider that the person who feels nothing is happening for almost an hour is the self we know all too well and often long to escape: the human soul trying to keep up with the demands of contemporary life – the rushing around, chauffeuring children to activities, keeping pace with office intrigues, answering emails, doom-scrolling through the circus of American politics, the constant low-level stress of defending against our sense of helplessness, taking out the trash, puzzling over how to dispose of our waste responsibly at the multiple receptacles at Whole Foods, dreaming of a future when we will be retired and have more freedom, worrying about COVID-19, RSV and god knows what other infection du jour?

That is likely the self who will become impatient with “Bodies of Weather,” who will get up after 15 or 20 minutes and grumble, “I don’t have time for this!” Which is a pity because it is exactly that soul who desperately needs “Bodies of Weather.” For that self – and for all of us, really, no matter where we find ourselves – this video installation is, first and foremost, a generous invitation. It beckons the viewer to just …

Stop.

And then it asks us, not insistently but lovingly, to touch into our own innate stillness, to shut off all earthly concerns and just sit, listen, observe and be. The benevolence of this offering is so simple that it can feel suspect and almost hedonistic. But if we allow ourselves to rest there in its (and our own) quietness of soul, we discover not only the intention behind “Bodies of Weather,” but also that a great many things happen during the course of the video.

The work is the product of “the (stillness) collective,” which has been around, in one form or another, for almost a decade. “We arrive, we make agreements, and together we listen to place,” reads the group’s bio on the website. “We slow into, attune to, attend to, and are directed by what happens.”

They exist, one could say, to arrest the mundanity and automaticity of daily life so that we might welcome ourselves back into a more fundamental consciousness that nourishes and replenishes us. I kept thinking of my first spiritual teacher while watching “Bodies.” She used to say that spiritual work was a “radical intervention” in human life. Nothing in our society supports stillness and non-doing. We are compelled to strive, effort, compete, succeed. Whoever buys unquestioningly into that is probably not going to like “Bodies.”

The “core” artists here are Susan Bickford, Anne Bailey, Fletcher Boote, Katherine Ferrier, Robin Lane, Heather Lyon and Luke Myers. For this project, they gathered for a six-day “intensive making” retreat at the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area in Phippsburg. They came with the group’s usual intentions, including to “Walk lightly, listen for messages from guides, and ask permission from all entities native to the places we work in to receive the medicine of place and presence.” There, they shared housing and meals, sewed all their garments, researched the geological and human presences of this spot and, above all, listened to the landscape.

This level of immersion into place comes through vividly as we sink deeper and deeper into our own stillness while viewing the video. We become aware of the women’s subtle gestures – the surrender implicit in the opening of palms to the elements, their bows of reverence and gratitude, the fullness with which they absorb the rhythms, sounds and smells of the ocean – and we understand those gestures as spontaneous relinquishments of everyday life and complete surrender into the experience of this specific place.

As that sinks in, we can begin to sense the immense weight of history accorded this geological spot. We might not know what happened here over millennia, but we can discern, viscerally, so much: the glacial movements that formed this land, the perpetual cycles of tides that smoothed and altered it, the early humans who occupied it, the other humans who asserted dominance over it, and the way that it always returns to what it is.

This stretch of sand today, known as Seawall Beach, was home to the Chuwaponakiyik, “the people who live on this land where the sun first looks our way,” according to the (stillness) collective site. It was also, in 1607, the first English settlement attempt in New England – “attempt” because within a year the men and boys who landed there, driven off by the harsh conditions and the Indigenous population, beat a hasty retreat. This transpired 13 years before European pilgrims landed in Plymouth. So, Bickford told me, we could look upon the Popham Colony, as it was called, as a more accurate date of what would, eventually, devolve into the genocide of Indigenous people in the region.

The specifics of this history are not essential to the experience of the video. But there is a way that the more we submit to the quietude of what is happening on screen and the “deep listening” of the artists, the more we can feel a mournfulness of place that, in part, records and acknowledges the memory of these conflicts and subsequent ones.

On the beach, as the women go about their spontaneous responses to place, cellist and composer Lane and interdisciplinary artist and vocalist Boote respond musically to it with an original score. Lane plays his cello, and Boote plays a singing bowl while intoning incantations that seem to arise through her from the land.

The way Boote’s voice seems to be inextricably linked to the land blurs further distinction between geology and human form. We might next become aware of the liquid content of our bodies – which are approximately 55-60% water – and find the separation between ocean and human form harder to concretize. Everything, including life, consciousness and all manifestation, seems to be welling up out of some mysterious source.

At one point, a quilt is laid on the sand and one artist rests, soaking up replenishment from the sand. Others stand, alone or in pairs holding hands, still others dance. Eventually, the five artists join hands and begin an unchoreographed chain dance. Initially it mirrors the constructed separateness of human experience as some move this way and others that way. It is slightly comical and endearing, a bit clumsy. Slowly, however, a kind of gracefulness settles into their linked bodies, bringing more coordination and fluidity of movement, and they entwine in a communal embrace.

By then, if we have opened ourselves fully to “Bodies of Weather,” we can feel immensely relaxed. I walked through the rest of my day after seeing it in a kind of imperturbable peace, embodying a statement Bickford later sent me embedded in a presentation about the video:

We value:
Stillness
Wonder
Awe
Slowness
Embodied Knowledge
Consensus
(more recently)
Vulnerability
Equanimity

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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