returnal

Materials: Pocket radio, transmitter, contact mic, adobe made with earth from the Gonzales family home in Los Lunas, NM Year: 2021

“The dirt back home had a heartbeat, so we packed it in the car and brought it with us. We amplified it, broadcasting out into space. Air filled with static and every night, we dreamt of traveling across the earth to see each other, boundless. The noise promised sleep, as if it too remembered what it was like to run through the backyard. Like a circuit or a feedback loop, it always seemed to return home.

If the radio can do it, why can't we?”

When I made this piece, I'd been thinking deeply about my family home in Los Lunas, New Mexico, a place I hadn't been able to visit at the time because of the coronavirus pandemic. When I was last there, my father and I made adobe bricks with dirt from my family's backyard, and I brought them with me to California.

I documented three of these bricks across the San Francisco Bay Area, where I currently live, each connected with a contact microphone to a radio transmitter. Three repeating videos reveal currents of static humming from the adobe, the transmission waves slowly ebbing and flowing. The earth's raw material and the broadcasted sound's immaterial quality merge, pulsing through space and time, forming a circuit of return.