50Things
Eventide
Citadel Hill, Halifax
Lou Campbell
You don’t have to climb Citadel Hill to appreciate this piece. Take it in from the Commons or the little parkette where Ahern meets Rainie. Find your perfect spot to enjoy the sunsetting.
Eventide is a sound installation that uses poetry, prose, ambient sound and music to explore themes of interconnectedness and collective memory. The piece is meant to be enjoyed while watching the sunset, and examines how the small, beautiful moments we take to enjoy the world around us have the potential to build a sense of community and shared responsibility. Listeners are asked to make themselves comfortable and to come into the present moment through the act of listening and watching the sunset. If we can share a moment, what are the other things we can share? A juxtaposition is set up between living for oneself and living for others. The piece examines how we can live two truths at the same time. How do we belong to ourselves, yet allow ourselves to be given over to the future, and our responsibility to it? The piece addresses listeners directly, and asks them to look at time as a shared experience that we are all living through. Rather than seeing time as linear, it reframes it as an all-encompassing force that steeps the present and future with the past at every moment. We are all subjects of time, but we also have an agency we can express through our choices, and the ways we care for one another. Our connections, the ties we have to each other, the choices we make, all contribute to building a collective memory that will live on and be passed down through time even after we are gone.
The transcript or descriptive text for this piece can be found by touching the "Text" button in the bottom right hand corner of your screen in the "View the Art" section.
Lou Campbell (they/them) is a performance artist based in Halifax, NS. Their practice traverses a wide range of disciplines including poetry, sound art, improv, comedy, and the odd clown collage when a worldwide pandemic shuts their entire industry down. They create work that unpacks the inner workings of their own gender and sexuality, usually manifesting in the open sharing of mortifying past mistakes. They also co-run a cross-province collective based in Toronto and Halifax called Probably Theatre. This collective creates performance work devised from poetry, and runs an event series called “Probably Poetry” that facilitates the creation of new work from themselves and other artists.
Open Streets is a community- building festival that “closes” a street to motorized vehicles in order to “open” it to Active Transportation. Open Streets was inspired by the maxim, “We are not blocking traffic, we are traffic!” This family oriented event provides the only temporary space in HRM long enough, wide enough, flat enough, straight enough and safe enough to accommodate bicycles, wheel chairs, pedestrians, walkers, scooters, skateboarders, roller bladers, inline cross-country skiers, stilt walkers, life-sized puppeteers and other non-motorized movers, who are generally unable to come together in the same place at the same time. Not only is this event good for physical health, but it adds to our sense of community, as the object is not to simply move from AtoB, but to enjoy the journey together. There are activities, races, educational booths and performances set up to foster interaction of all ages and all modes of Active Transportation. Listen to the audio piece and contemplate urban planning and how you and all people interact with it and through it each other.
Eventide
Sunset Song begins
Hello.
You’re here to watch the sunset, right?
Me too.
Google says it takes the sun about 150-200 seconds to set fully once it touches the horizon.
I told you to get here a little early, so we could really take it in.
Take a minute, get settled, find a spot to sit, stand, do whatever makes you comfortable.
Find a place where you can just take in your surroundings for a while.
The song plays to its end
There’s something deeply gratifying about watching a sunset isn't there?
Taking a moment to sit with time and actually notice it’s passage.
All the actions of the day are coming to a close But their ripples Still circle out out and around you Into the next day and the next and the next
Sunsets feel like a tidy, beautiful end to something, But really they are just beginnings Of things we’ve yet to name.
We bring ourselves here And for a moment, Spellbound, We do not look away.
We give unspoken things to the sun Let it carry them away for awhile
But they are not gone.
What do you bring to this one?
Are you coming to this sunset riding the high of a good day? Or is this a place to let go of something?
Did you come with someone? Are there people around you, or are you alone?
Whatever you’re feeling, whoever you’re with or not with; come into this moment.
Look around you. You are the only person On this planet Who sees the world From this specific viewpoint.
But, as you listen to my voice right now Through headphones, Someone else could be doing the same thing, beside you, or nearby, or in some other place entirely. Without knowing it, you are connected Through my voice.
Notice two truths at the same time: Your singularity, the miraculousness that you are even here at all, experiencing this, And how that fits into the collective whole of everyone else experiencing it too, From a different viewpoint.
This moment As we speak Right…. NOW This moment Is fitting itself Into the entirety the voice begins to change here and become more “Planet Earth” Of all Human Experience
BIG SYNTH (synth)
Voice of God:
FOR BILLIONS OF YEARS. this same sun, has set the same way you are seeing as we speak
What are you looking at right now, as you watch the sunset?
Take your finger
And trace the skyline.
Try to memorize it.
Try to memorize this landscape.
What has happened here,
In your lifetime?
What do you think this place will be like in the future?
What do you want it to be like?
Do you know what was here a year ago? ten years ago? fifty? a hundred? a thousand? a million? a billion?
And where were you then?
We are all just collections of cells Bones made of stardust Knowledge in our bodies We cannot name So we call it instinct. Instinct is time In action. Past, existing in present.
Our age old molecules carry knowledge From the past
We cannot access it readily.
But we keep striving, striving to understand.
Synth stops abruptly.
Hey Google: Why do people love watching sunsets?
Google Voice:
Results from: agoldlining.com
It will put you in a better mood. #Goodvibes Sign me up. It gives you a reason to go outside. It slows down time this line actually becomes slower as it gets said, leaving space for the audience to sit
Here Let’s notice time Let’s notice it’s soft Seconds On our skin Coiling rapidly round us Becoming minutes Becoming hours Becoming days When you lose focus This miraculous expansion Goes mostly unnoticed Except when you have deja vu, Or say to a friend “I can’t believe how fast this year is passing”
Often we feel steam-rolled by time We can only feel the things it takes: Our weekend Our holiday Our youth
We try to instagram ourselves into permanency But time keeps Taking Taking Taking
But what about the things Time has given us
The past flows through time Into the present And the future. We are an amalgamation Of this. Of what time gives us From the past Of what we give time For the future.
In moments like this Watching the sun go down Feeling every second of it Let’s give ourselves space To sit with time and realize It’s just a question Waiting for an answer
What will you leave to me When you go?
We are made up of Our experiences Our memories. Time is the shared paradigm that allows us To make sense of it all. Time holds onto things And passes them on But it’s us who chooses what to give it. We have an agency Reflected through our actions and reactions And the effect that those things have On the shape of the future.
What passes in this moment here Between you and i? Between you and the other people listening? The other people watching?
Without even trying We are building a collective memory that will live on Beyond this moment.
The things that we think We feel We share In the now Will be passed on Through the ways we remember And enact them in the future.
Together, right now, we are choosing something To give to time.
Take a moment to think about the kind of future you want for the world.
Leave space
What will you give to time, to make that future possible?
Leave space
Here in the light of golden hour We share this moment. If we can share a moment, What else can we share?
Levity? Empathy? Responsibility?
Another world is coming Building it is our shared task.
When we are born here On this planet We immediately become Vulnerable to And responsible for it And one another.
How do we live two truths at once?
We belong to ourselves But we are given over to one another Through our connections Through shared moments In shared spaces, That belong to everyone And no one At the same time.
The same time The same time We all share The same time.
What if we started Practicing something Together? Every day, At eventide, When day sinks into night, Let’s make a collective space for dreaming A new world into existence.
What if this space became a place
Where we acknowledged that this new world Is only possible through accepting our radical interdependency, And acting as such.
We are tied to one another And these ties make us, break us And constitute what this world is: A great big tangle of interconnectedness
Think of the people who make up who you are Who you could not be without
They too, have people, and those people have people and those people have people And on and on it goes.
These ties stretch across time, into the past, across the present, curling into the future.
The world we are living in Hasn’t been set up For us to be able to Live for ourselves And for each other At the same time.
So that when we do When we take the time To notice The ways we can It becomes revolutionary.
Our joy Our gratitude Our peace In just sitting watching the sun go down Has the potential To make a space for something new
Come into this moment. Now. Here, let’s find a basis for community Here, in this simple act. Here, in our shared memory. Ask yourself
How will you give yourself to the future, Knowing That even after you are gone You will keep living Through the things you chose To give to time
Song comes back in with “What will you leave to me, When you go?” underscoring the humming