Australian writer/photographer Shannon May Powell worked at torna in June 2016.
Below is the blog-diary she was keeping during her residency at torna.
And HERE is the book torna produced and puplished with Shannon at the end of the residency.
20-06-2016 / Monday
The light invades my eyes like a visible siren, tremulous with colour and pattern, a conglomeration of solar systems in miniature. A star moving through space that forgets itself in the forward motion, leaving only a shimmer behind.
That which makes visible the invisible.
- Nathalie Sarraute
16-06-2016 / Thursday
The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.
- Virginia Woolf
15-06-2016 / Wednesday
I want the shining gravel in a dark brook.
- Clarice Lispector
14-06-2016 / Tuesday
I make a holiday of sensation; traverse the bodies landscape as I would the Earth. Sounds pervade my being like a mist; voices do not come from throats but from the air itself. Red silk flags turn liquid in the still heat, volcanic hot springs that I bath in and emerge smelling of blood orange.
We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.
- Timothy Morton
13-06-2016 / Monday
Light like water.
- Gabrielle Garcia Marquez
10-06-2016 / Friday
Brief vague glints of drowned golden treasure in the wet background.
- Herman Hesse
09-06-2016 / Thursday
The colours of the scene assault me with a bruising pleasure. I feel each hue make an impression on my skin; swirls of ultra violet and moss green. The suns liquid gold multiplies its effect on the façades of walls, glass windows, and roofs. I watch as the light is siphoned through the streets until every object in its way is robbed of luster.
Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers.
- Clarice Lispector
08-06-2016 / Wednesday
The air is like snow made colour in which float filaments of warm mother-of-pearl.
- Fernando Pessoa
08-06-2016 / Wednesday
Excavate the senses; bring each one to the surface in fullness. Use the mind as a stereo system, tune carefully into one channel, eliminating the others. I wait until I can no longer think only feel.
The sky gleams solid silver reflecting light like the diamond shaped scales of snakeskin. A deep foreboding boom echoes an electric storm whips lightning across sky. A vibration low and crackling, vindictive in its nature. The air thick and heavy, weighing on my body. Sweat beads on my skin like pearls. The smell of wet earth mixed with metal and the bitter taste of pomegranates on my tongue.
07-06-2016 / Tuesday
Extract from Audre Lorde: The Uses of the Erotic
http://www.corwin.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/11881_Chapter_5.pdf
“The erotic has often been misnamed.
We are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.
It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. We have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of information, confusing it with the pornographic.
The very word erotic comes from the Greek word Eros, the personification of love in all its aspects.
There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual.
For the bridge that connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared.
The erotic connection functions as my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.”
