Mara Ito · works in water
UNDER
TOW
This page is a single body of water, computed live. Move, and the water remembers your path. Scroll, and you sink — the caustics thin, the dark thickens, and the things I have made down here begin to glow. There are no photographs. Water does not sit for portraits.
Scroll to sink
Held Breath
A sixteen-minute performance conducted entirely on one lungful, broadcast live from the bottom of the municipal pool. The audience surfaced eleven times; I did not. The recording is played only in rooms with no chairs.
The Current Register
Nine years of logging which way the water wanted to go, written in pencil that dissolves. The register is complete, and completely blank — which the current considers accurate.
Chorus for Two Temperatures
A thermocline is a wall the sea builds without stones. I hung one microphone above it and one below, and let the two waters disagree for a winter. The argument resolves in April, every year, so far.
Lightfall
Below the last of the sun there is still weather — it is just made of bodies. This piece is a room where the only lamps are living, borrowed, and returned unharmed at dawn. You are standing in a rehearsal of it now.
The seabed is a studio floor.
Everything above you on this page is still moving, and will keep moving after you close it — that is the medium's one condition. Commissions, exhibitions and long silences are all conducted by letter.
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