A Series of Infinite Relations

When the first nuclear bomb was detonated near White Sands, New Mexico in 1945, the entire sky lit up. For those who witnessed it – human and animal alike – this flash was forever burned into their retinas. Fallout like white ash floated gently down from the sky for days afterwards, burning all that it touched. And the heat from the blast produced a new mineral: radioactive pieces of molten sand, quartz, traces of calcite and clay, fused into glassy clusters called trinitite. Even now, you can buy small pieces on the roadside, with dubious labels declaring their safety, their radioactivity allegedly sealed beneath a layer of clear nail polish.

It is against this backdrop of shifting white sands that Emilija Škarnulytė’s video work Circular Time: For Aleksandra Kasuba 2021 begins, and it starts by subsuming New Mexico’s nuclear age within the geologic one.

In Circular Time, the desert’s patterned waves ground new signifiers: a series of white, tensile architectural shapes. It’s clear that something is holding them in suspension, some invisible force stretching them taut. Some of the forms are familiar – resembling gills, eyes or even the double helixes of DNA – while others appear otherworldly. These shapes look like buildings and bodies at the same time – but whose bodies, what structures and in which lands? The animated forms that punctuate Circular Time are 3-D renderings based on the late artist Aleksandra Kasuba’s Shell Dwellers 1989, a series of collages featuring shell-like architectures in fantastical landscapes. In Škarnulytė’s video, detached from their fixity in the artist’s studio, they begin to move and take on new dimensions.

Kasuba framed her work in dialogue with mathematicians, astronomers and quantum physicists; it was from her mind and through her body that she began to think deeply about new possibilities for spatial relationships and about time. For Kasuba, time was not a thing to be strictly adhered to, but more like a tether or a string – a theory, like many others. It is in this malleability of time where she envisioned her buildings, her tensile topologies, existing. In her book The Mind Gazing at Itself (2016), she explains: 

_{Scientific enquiries, aided by digital technologies, were interpreting the data recorded in controlled experimental situations by looking at what they observed from the outside in, while I, looking only for inklings of an answer, plunged into the source itself (my body), relying on drawings (a tool, a medium) to track the paths the energy took within me.} 

Škarnulytė cites Kasuba’s propositional buildings as a way to begin a dialogue with them. In Škarnulytė’s hands the tether of time is cut and these structures begin to twist and float in space, their insides and outsides morphing into one another. As time stretches, the dwellings draw nearer – as though we might gently touch them with our hands, tracing their sleek edges with our fingers. Perhaps this relates to what Kasuba meant when she described how she would ‘track the paths’ of energy by first trailing its circuits within her own body. 

The Shell Dwellers, now animate, become beacons. They accelerate across infinite horizons, they traverse dry creek beds, they crest along the steam of ancient volcanoes and they hover above the parched earth. These layers of time and space, like a collage, recall Kasuba’s habitual practice, particularly late in life, of cutting up pictures and placing image upon image. In doing so, she opened up infinite relations, ones that Škarnulytė’s Circular Time continues to expand.

Kasuba was drawn to the high desert of New Mexico for its open spaces. It was here that she felt she could realise some of the dwellings imagined in the Shell Dwellers collages. No longer propositions, they became places to inhabit, ideas materialised in tandem with the land. Near the middle of Circular Time there’s a rupture, and for a moment we are brought down to earth. We see a car travelling along a paved road with lush green pines on either side. When it reaches the top of a hill, there is a white pole in the distance and the faint outline of a road on the left. The car turns down the drive and forms emerge: buildings, these ones planted firmly on the soil. As it approaches them, the camera lingers on the ratcheted aluminium cladding of the buildings’ roof lines, admiring curves that are punctuated at moments with cut-out hands. It is as though the building has sprouted fingers that are reaching towards the sky. As the lens moves to the outer walls, we see cracks in the stucco like parched earth. This place was Kasuba’s home and studio. Yet these pod-like buildings, like her hypothetical structures, are also shells, which sit on the rocks like clusters of barnacles.

Škarnulytė’s video leads us on concentric paths that make frequent returns to White Sands. Made up of crystals of pure white gypsum honed by wind and the dust of time, the desert resembles an inland sea, its wave-like dunes slowly swelling and retreating. This path is a deliberate one, mirroring a foundation in Kasuba’s own thinking: 

_{In the mapping of these events it became evident that the mind functions in concentric layers. At the core there is the Primal Union, wherein energy and matter are bound in a state of equilibrium present in the elemental states of all things in existence.} 

This sense of equilibrium – of being held in suspension – is a reminder of the geologic age underpinning all of this, as well as the binding of energy to matter. It also recalls Škarnulytė’s earlier works posing questions about the half-lives of minerals (uranium in particular) that extend far beyond the lifespan of humanity and into the billions of years. What is the half-life of Kasuba’s concepts? In Circular Time the answer might be found through the opening up of a series of infinite relations, relations held in a state of equilibrium, if only for the duration of the video. 

_{^{Candice Hopkins is a Carcross/Tagish First Nation curator, writer and researcher living in Red Hook, New York. This essay also appears in the Emilija Škarnulytė exhibition book, published by Tate Publishing.}}