Sutra for Belonging is a multimedia installation integrating audiovisual projection, my own writing, and handmade sculpture. A live performance of the work was presented on March 20, 2025 at They Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY.
The duration of the projection is 28 minutes and is presented as a loop in the live installation. The video above is a 3.21 minute distillation of the work. The full length video of the work can be seen here.
A 'sutra' in Jainsim and Buddhism is a spiritual teaching. In Sanskrit it means 'thread' as in the threads woven into a wisdom teaching. In Arabic 'sutrah' means 'covering' and in Islam, it is what protects the one who is in prayer, something physical holding the space of liminality.
Belonging is a place, a sense of being, something begat of symbiosis, of need and desire. Ecosystems, cultures, lives, dreams end in the absence of belonging. The abrogation of belonging runs through every dimension of extinction we face and that we as humans are the face of.
The poem that threads through Sutra for Belonging is a love poem to the world, just as we are, now, in this moment.
PROCESS NOTES The script that appears in the projection is a language whose translation is not known. A form of mark making I have incorporated in my work for decades, it arose out of meta questions about what language is, what it records, and what happens when meaning split from form. Human language is place based and records experience just as geologic layers hold the story of telluric forces. Or as place remembers those who travel through it by the marks they leave. Where is human experience held when our language fails?
I made the video and audio field recording for the projections on the land where I live and the nearby Shawangunk Ridge in New York from winter into early summer in 2024. Gathering and editing the many hours of recordings was a revelatory rather than documentary process.
Timothy Hill made the music for Sutra for Belonging. The unedited soundtrack was recorded in one session in my studio in the presence of the sculpture in June 2024.
I shared the audio recordings, video footage, and storyboarded outline with multidisciplinary designer Wes Milholen. Timothy's music was the warp around which we wove the moving images, graphics, and poetry to create the projection.
Millicent Young Cinematography, audio recording, poem, graphics, voice, sculpture.
Timothy Hill Voice, tanpura, lyre, guitar.
Wes Milholen
Video editing, temporal composition.
