between stars and quarks
2022

The creatures known as quarks live across irreconcilable scales, between subatomic and interstellar space. Everything that exists is held together by the dance and chase of these infinitesimal beings. They are everywhere around us; they compose us.

From what is known, they like to connect through flavours, some strange, some charmed. They mostly cohabit in communities of three: one up, two down; two up, one down (combinations of two are known, but they are never found alone). Though difficult to reconcile, they simultaneously occupy, practice and incorporate contradictions: the material and the immaterial, positions of existence and non-existence. They are in constant collision and exchange with each other as thing and anti-thing.

To notice them, you have to look anew at time, space and substance. To pay attention to the smallest connections, at the intersections, at the spinning and charge of the almost imperceptible possibilities that make worlds. When they meet, quarks make this entire vast universe - even as they inhabit a microcosmos so tiny we can barely imagine it.

How can we use our connection to different scales of space and time to recalibrate our place in the cosmos?

It can be difficult to understand science and particularly physics, can we access this knowledge through story and form?

In quiet moments, does thinking about your relationship to deep time reshape the way you feel and what you think is important?

Does shifting the ‘what is this’ to ‘who is this’ make it easier to relate to entities we call ‘things’?

Right now you’re reading these words on a screen, but who and where else are you at the same time? You; a collaborative multi-species assembly, made from matter that came from a sun before ours exploding and providing the stuff that our solar system formed from. The same stuff that has always been a part of the exchange of matter and energy on the planet.

We’ve been here for a long time...

First shown through Desert Festival, Megafauna Museum, Mparntwe Alice Springs 2022

Funded through Project Seed, Red Hot Arts

Sound with Edi Donald

Words with Jennifer Mills

From Designing Mythology

Designing Mythology is a questioning and proposal for old ways / new to exist as humans, using the process of 'mything' to reorientate back towards the planet, and recalibrate our value systems by dismantling the current shadow metaphors of the Western-colonial worldview. It proposes the restorying of scientific perspectives to offer a cosmology that includes humans as part of the living world whilst simultaneously removing us from the centre. Thus a recognition and return, via a circuitous route, to the worldviews, deep connection and sustainment of the first peoples of our planet.