The Long View [La Amplia Vista]

A four-part video fugue on strangers in a strange land, The Long View [La Amplia Vista] centers Arctic rurality, queer transfiguration, and the dismantling and reconstruction of queer feminized bodies. Rural Alaska is all-too-familiar, but between environmental change, gender dysphoria, and tricks of light and memory, it is now a looming, alien landscape.

Leading with the collision of poetry into land and poetry into self, the work’s four parts, I. Ptarmigan Creek; II. Blackstone Glacier; III. Matanuska; IV. Ptarmigan Creek; use geography as a fulcrum around which the nonbinary speaker navigates confusion and copes with drastic personal contradiction. The aura of Arctic landscape is changing everywhere. Inherited stories about winters and glaciers have become less believable. Community histories are beginning to fracture. Vernacular knowledges that once held truths have become just stories. This work takes a close look at three places embedded with deep personal and community narrative, and illustrates the dismantling and re-piecing of the queer-trans self in the context of a place that, for better or worse, is changing, too.

Note: The video link below is for the first segment: I. Ptarmigan Creek.