Now Here No Where
by Dita Kubin and March Hutchinson

Collaborative call-and-response project
Spring 2010

Our collaboration started out with March tossing a few fragmented words
and phrases about her feeling into how our works resemble each other. I then picked up her words, added my own, and made them into the formal poem, secret speaker, below.

From this poem, we ventured into our mediums and began the visual call and response narrative to the left, starting with 1/d. We never discussed what we did, only gave each other a new piece once every two weeks. We wanted to keep the dialogue purely visual. I worked with photography, while March worked with illustration/painting combined. Together we sometimes overlapped mediums, producing some pieces in mixed-media.

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secret speaker –

in the clouds
i find etched
dusty moving particles
of what was once our glorious triumph

the wind keeps shifting them
changing the record of what was done

i can’t see anymore
our old exasperated thoughts
clinging to each other
like dried-up vines
in an earthless pot

there floats the idea of perfection
and for a moment I let go
everything I keep locked inside

I breathe the perfect breath
and cry the perfect tear
and love you once again

but then a whisper waltzes on the air
and threatens to break the breeze
and tumble down the throat
and shatter the goddamned ground

your animal call raises the hair on my skin
and were it not for the beat of a wing
that pushes the wind that keeps me held upright
I would surely collapse and die