BETWEEN WATER AND STONE

PI: VK Preston

 

"Falls / Chutes" (2025-ongoing)

 

Falls / Chutes is a large-scale digital installation exploring grief, caregiving, and the COVID-19 long-term care crisis through the landscape of Ottawa’s Rideau Falls. Combining 4K video, immersive sound, poetry, and photography, the work brings personal and ecological memory into dialogue with questions of how we care for one another in times of collective crisis. Across four seasonal chapters, the falls are experienced through shifting perspectives, from ice and flowing water to underwater and vertiginous views, creating a space for mourning, respite, and reflection. Falls / Chutes explores intergenerational memory, resilience, and the systems that shape how we understand aging, dependence, and care.

 

A lecture performance involving documentation from this crisis, along 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, as well as cinematography and editing by Oswaldo Toledano. The collaborative continues through a research creation cycle informed by the seasons, performance, and media, engaging with field recordings and poems as scores towards an ecology of collaboration and work outdoors. Falls / Chutes aims to bring artists and researchers involved with care work into conversation, addressing intergenerational transmission and attention to environments. Our work together engages with transdisciplinary practices in poetry, music, video, and performance.