else__begin ends with something __follow hair__follow grasses __throughout__then within__then shape of becoming__emanates spasms__hair holding wise__ holy be plastics by mean__come before __rests unfolding__As __ lay open without knowing__In a parallel sphere of tangibility__Receiver is the gait of __ feet and the verse between metal and stone__This moment waiting for __without __ One water bucket is lifted with millions of hands and: steam, blood, sweat, breath__Accordingly, __ can be a space of sacred symmetries, of stones and stars and tones__In a parallel sphere of tangibility__Hand __ of single sand__Of __ love is in movement charged__ ominously__as its been new

You enter the room that is also a page: Napé okíčhiyuspa okáwiŋȟ wačhíuŋhíyayapi. (Holding hands we encircle each other in dance.) is waiting for you and listening. The braid is a seer and a guide, failure and prophet. A call that is answered but also interrupted. Over that threshold is a space of unknowing, you are both touched and touching on encounter, and as you proceed, the space proceeds with you. And here we have a braid that leads us to another web: Wóolowaŋ wakáǧe. (I composed this music.) A story set in stones, a story in Lakȟóta semiotics. It is in a center that holds space together like an orb, the tones of each piece are organized in spheres.  

In Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road), Kite suggests that art objects are always combinations of human intervention amidst  arrangements of nonhuman beings. These relationships pulsate and flow, bridged by language, by spirituality. Here we build communication with nonhumans and with one another in a Good Way, an ethical way. Within this framework, Kite tells me, “water becomes steam, fabric becomes electricity, they’re transformed just like our usage of metals. We transform one type of electricity into communication between beings, we take all these metals and then we get to communicate over long distances. In this, at some level of this, we have actions that are protocol. The things we do in order to enact these relationships with the unknown and the known, the stones and the stars.”

My understanding of Kite’s methodology of dreams and art is through my own body, and through our conversations, which in this case, do not situate me in the space of the gallery. So I have a story. It is summer in upstate New York and I am walking home late at night. There is a skunk standing in the middle of a fork in the path. I come from one direction and have the option of three. The skunk sits in the middle. Crisis instigates a fourth path when suddenly, I see spheres. A golden light takes over. The spheres vary in size and speed and density, the density varies by what matter it entangles. The spheres radiate through and beyond the form, but the intersection of spheres demarcates the edge. Spheres oscillate to hold a flower petal’s edge. The grass burst with wheels of light like sparks. Gravel and rock hold a hum of light like a cloud. In other words, I follow the skunk to nowhere. Where it was is now a shudder whose wait has been long. I am failing but must keep trying to be the scribe to this vision. Manners of animacy. The skunk appears. And thunderbolt. I am struck. By light. Hundreds of thousands of droplets of lights strung together by speed in spheres. A ratio of light density to speed, a vibrational frequency radiates manifest forms. Beads of light are held together in circles. Tiny tiny, little pieces of light, strung together in circles. Hundreds of thousands of circles of light moving at various speeds, some bigger, some tighter. The circles grow brighter in the grass, longer in the flowers, they hum over stones and chatter over gravel. Like the energy generated by the magnetic poles that springs doughnut-shaped around earth, the edge of a flower petal is taut at the intersection of circles of light. This song is one of curves. This is not about time, it’s about space. The moment of vision is always sudden, a call from the unknown into a set of relations. It is sudden in its irreverence for sequentiality. It is sudden, like a thunder-bolt in its instantaneous undoing and redoing. A thing by old definition is that which passes through a court, an assembly, an arena, that which passes through a system and is manifested. That which exists in a system of relations. A system is made of points that uphold relations. Reality is malleable, the points are untenable. The empire is made with right angles. This song is one of curves.

If this is not about time__but about space__if it takes time to go distance__but we are letting go of time__because decolonization is not a metaphor__and this concerns space__then I is let loose__the subject is situated along a line__but we are in the spiral__there is a quality of experience within the field of love__there are many shades__we are free to travel through it__there are rules for entry__there is a cornerstone of reality that is skinned alive and reupholstered__the situation we are in is shared no matter the distance__while still particular to place__So I might ask, who are you?__And have you ever carried a bucket of water?__Taken a bucket to a source of water__filled it__steadied yourself as your shoulders arch from the weight and walked?__Have you ever felt the millions of hands within your own?

Napé okíčhiyuspa okáwiŋȟ wačhíuŋhíyayapi. (Holding hands we encircle each other in dance.) is three hundred feet of hair, braided, moving through the floor with sensors that listen and digest the movements of your body, the rhythm of your feet, the sway of your hips, and translates this movement through the fluidity of rocks, both as computational material and visual metaphor.

The metals in the braid’s sensors are in concert with the metals of the projector, the computer bits, the molar fillings that facilitate the image of movement, of collective movement. The movement between human and nonhuman, between metal and flesh is synthesized into the dripping of rock. The rocks are and have always been moving, in process, even as a momentary solid, a durational liquid. Napé okíčhiyuspa okáwiŋȟ wačhíuŋhíyayapi. emphasizes the space between fluidity and solidity, elemental transformation and the relation of subjects by imaging its own properties of viscosity. Geography in the Middle Ages defined a body by longitude and latitude. Within this a body could be anything: animal, sound, plant, taste, idea, place. The longitude of a body is the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it from this point of view—that is, between unformed elements. Latitude is the set of affects that occupy the body at each moment, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). In theorizing on viscosity, Arun Saldanha describes it as “how an aggregate of bodies holds together, how relatively fast or slow they are, and how they collectively shape the aggregate…” An aggregate of agate. Viscosity isn’t the body, but what comprehends it, the textured sensation of affect. What “is” the body, belongs to the unknown, it cannot be encompassed in language, but it can be interacted with. 

Agate takes millions of years to form a single stripe. They layer, and radiate, and shimmer, and speak. The witness of these stones is in an acute silence to the life of a human. The movement of these rocks, which is constant, which is slow, which is waiting, and always wise; the movement of these rocks, which is not not the cooling of stars, which is not not the waiting of the sky for you to remember your necessity of being; the waiting of these rocks for you to move through them, with them, and in them is a hum for each song. The braid leads the visitor through the show back to where they started, but now in an altered state. We touch and are touched. There is something non-consensual, but ultimately kind, that happens when one encounters and is touched by There lies the road. The visitor is pulled into a system of relations that suggests a Good Way of relating. The experience, though slow, is urgent. 

I first encountered Kite’s work as an audience member of Everything I Say Is True, a multi-media performance that considered the concept of truth in relation to Oglála Lakȟóta knowledge systems. I was drawn in by her stuttering of proper nouns, a sonic refusal of the system of modern grammar, a vessel for formulas of truth as designated by scientific western empiricism. Trinh T. Minh-ha writes, “every illness is a musical problem.”  Shirking the vestiges of colonialism, Kite’s work resituates the ground of knowledge in a vibrancy of becoming. These themes are consistent in her work. Reclamation of culture and self is at the core of Kite’s artistic practice. She performs a glitch and the recourse to better action. Kite’s artistic practice is rethinking, reformulating, enacting, and remembering. She tears down the gauze of modernism that seeks to name and classify, muddles the modern subject’s eye, and listens to the world, making space for its own animacy to speak and be felt. The future is remembered, not for what did or did not happen, but for its potential to happen again. 

It is the relationship to the unknowable that, in Kite’s work, instigates the experience of being different but inseparable. What is the medicine for the failed system of the world we didn’t choose? Kite’s There lies the road is a proposition for a Good Way of being in relation. It is an open ceremony, an invitation into this Way, an invitation to prayer, like a string of beads. A series of forms that hold open the space for thought and intention. As Fred Moten says, “…gathering in call and response is who we are and what we do.” A practice of listening and responding, of listening and pausing, of listening to the contours and singing back the shapes.  

The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky. 

The possibility of the braid leads us from the false world into the void, the unknowing, and the potential path of a Good Way. In this proposition, there is something personal about entanglement, a will to share a piece of the whole. Fern-like and greening, the work culminates not like a pinnacle or an exemplar, but rather like a drop of dew as it falls from the edge of grass about to splinter into thousands of more drops.

Riel Bellow (Métis/Scottish)  is a writer, visual artist, and radio host. She grew up between Santa Fe NM, Chiapas MX,  Edmonton AB, and is usually on the move. Riel’s work cradles their idée fixe with systems of time keeping, rosemary,  seed syllables, latitude, medieval angelology, and somatic subversions of Modern Grammar. They hold and MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery School for the Arts. Riel’s bi-monthly show on radiocoyote is starting soon.