EOP Exchange: Alex Stubbs and Lucy Grubb
Electricity sits underneath things, not cleanly, not evenly, held in tension across land, across bodies. Pylons carry these feelings, these upright forms cutting through industrial, and strange fields. A bit exposed (but not really). They read as markers.
Marker-structures. Structures as marking. As structure.
Holding something, transmitting something, but never quite keeping it (together).
The underbelly of this system isn’t just a hidden layer, but a structuring condition. A condition that attends to the material and social infrastructures enabling electrical flow: labour, extraction, maintenance. These are often taped-over in favour of continuous supply, but remain insistently present. “Underbelly” here becomes a way of tracing uneven distribution and embedded histories and how communities are shaped through proximity to these systems, how those conditions persist, shift, and are carried forward. An epigenetic register, where environments impress upon bodies, and those impressions continue to modulate across our timelines. Life-lines. The current doesn’t just pass through; it lingers, it alters, it’s a rogue poetic of space.
I navigate you as a passing water tide, warbling against the stony white cliff.
We are finding, in the smallest gaps, the space to roam freely and make as much noise as possible.
(an interlude: something like dancing, a break in the circuit, a loosening)
When the earth moves on, forgetting ourselves out of memory –
waves redescribing their presence, every time they touch us.
ALL THIS PANGEA. A holding-together and pulling-apart.
A mountainside dance: she starts to speak, and falls back to gesture.
There’s a sensitivity here to rupture, to encountering the languages of others and yet misaligning. Transmission feels partial, and delayed. Strange games of proximity and distance. Lo-fi static between points that almost <> meet.
Regenerative practice sits inside this as an orientation rather than a solution. Not repair as closure, but as return. To repetition. To re-touch. Processes that remain open, slightly unresolved. Small accumulations of contact-fingertips tracing figure-shapes in the air, gestures that don’t always complete but still register. Electrical channels reimagined through softness, through delay, through our bodies.
Somewhere nearby you are busying yourself, face pressed into soft, rubbery plant life
(the earth is still moving)
trying to settle your body in the clearing.
I look at you: red-faced, windswept, careful and gesturing.
We keep our home warm to the touch, don’t we?
Even as the pylon heat source shifts somewhere out of view.
Home tasting faintly of magnesium.
Geological forms echo throughout <dikes, fault lines, pressure systems>. The land as both conductor and archive. Energy moves through it unevenly, just as it does through us. There’s a thickness here, a stretching between use and excess, where labour and material fold into one another, like Dough (2006).
Energy spheres < connecting > diodes in cosmic space.
Terminals: boundary, contact, fatality.
No endings
just charging,
waiting to slip.
