Parachute Games

Growing up in rural Washington state I remember playing the “parachute game” during physical education classes at school; it was my favorite day of the school year. Something about watching the ripple of our gestures pass through the fabric taut between us made sense to my 8-year-old-gut. This “team-building” activity has since been co-opted by corporations at “retreats” to train compliance in their adult employees. Now in an age of rising extremism and fascism, globally, I am making my own uncanny versions of these parachutes. Through these textile installations and their linked performances with the public, I wonder about how the promise of belonging has been historically and presently weaponized against a people to maintain systems of domination. Or how this distorted team-mentality is used to erode the transformational collective action of people fighting together across perceived differences.

Performances are structured around poetic directions that participants choose or don’t choose to follow. By activating the parachute the metaphorical potential of these directions is held in the bodily memory of each participant where it might call up past patterns of assimilation to a group ideology. Across the fabric of these parachutes are painted and beaded allegorical characters whose actions tell open-ended stories of Hammerhead people burdened by their agency to create and destroy. At times, we even see them trade their Hammerhead hat for a crown of Chattering Teeth, another symbol I use as a stand-in for the various propaganda tactics deployed by authoritarian leaders. Ultimately, this series makes visible what collective action holds up, and also what it can tear down.

Parachute Games: A collective nonsense, our exquisite corpse.

2022

Looped video

5 min 9 sec

In this video we see the Westfield State University students working as a team to make sense from the nonsensical images on the parachute pieces. Overtop their search we hear the words of Carl Sagan describing black holes and a computer-generated Carl Sagan mimic reading postings from the sub-Reddit r/QAnonCasualties (this is a forum for the friends and family members who have “lost” loved ones to conspiratorial thinking). 

Parachute Games: How Good Are You At Following Directions?

2021

Looped video

2 min 10 sec

This performance took place the summer of 2021 at McColl Center in Charlotte, NC where the community was invited to join in the activation of the parachute that I created during the residency. Volunteers were tasked with shouting from a poem I wrote into a Chattering Teeth covered megaphone, while other volunteers were trained to move the parachute in response to specific keywords heard in the poem (like “utopia” and “volcano”.) In the video the narrator is created by making a “collective voice” from overlaying all of the high school summer interns-in-residence at McColl Center who volunteered to read the poem through the megaphone.

Parachute Games: 6 Feet Enough To See

2021

Looped video

9 min 28 sec

In this video two people are dressed in costumes and acting out synchronized gestures on the grounds of an abandoned Girl Scout Camp from the 90s. The costumes/masks they wear are drawn from the German festival of Fasching, a Spring festival in which citizens don absurd masks and costumes to critique those in power (originally the monarchy) and scare away the demons of Winter with the jingle of their bells. This video was recorded during Winter 2020 just prior to the second spring of the Pandemic.

Parachute Games: And then it stopped and we saw our shadows. Run under anything nearby.

2022

Safety vests, beads, found and reclaimed fabric, paracord, thread and fans

10 FT x 10 FT

Hammer Head people and shadow puppet motifs haunt the surface of this parachute; like stories told through generations they suggest our involvement in propagating narratives from the past and our collective denial and insistence to not-see the hand (just as much a part of the shadow image) that massages the story into a specific outcome.