Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation

Inspired by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (1962), a composition for one hundred metronomes, this film features dozens of the mechanical devices set amid the dramatic geological formations of the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico, Armijo McKnight’s maternal homeland. The metronomes which make repeated clicking sounds at different tempos, evoke a choir or a chattering crowd of competing voices or ideologies. As the devices slowly wind down, the film descends sonically into the stillness of the majestic landscape, suggesting ecological precariousness, the transience of human existence, or the contradictory demands of speech and silence. 

Armijo McKnight often cites as an influence the French philosopher Simone Weil, who believed that the onerous act of eclipsing one’s own ego—becoming silent—allows for a more attentive and compassionate way of being in the world. She wrote: “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.”