BETWEEN WATER AND STONE

PI: VK Preston

 

Falls (2025-ongoing)

 

“Falls” is a research creation project that follows the course of the waters of the Rideau River, tracing intergenerational practices of care elaborated through improvisation.

 

This project by LePARC members Valentina Plata, Kasey Pocius, and VK Preston brings memory into dialogue with scores and modulations of field recordings from locations involved in pandemic healthcare under pressure. Developing materials from poetry, documentary, and site visits, these documents, traversing media, follow recordings of the water and shoreline: the route of family members engaging in care work during the long aftershocks of the pandemic.

 

A lecture performance involving documentation from this crisis served as VK Preston’s keynote for the History in the Making Conference (April 2025) with the installation “Falls: Winter” composed by Valentina Plata with texts by VK Preston, spatialization by Kasey Pocius, camera work by Eugenio de la Vega and editing by Oswaldo Toledano. The collaborative continues through a research creation cycle informed by the seasons, reflecting, life and practice as well as dialogue on poetry, video, and field recordings as scores for an ecology of collaboration. The work aims to bring artists and researchers involved with care work into conversation, addressing intergenerational transmission and attention to environments as well as the health care crisis as a cultural, collective and shared concern in the currents of contemporary life. Our work together engages with transdisciplinary practices in poetry, music, video, and performance.