Presence

Author: Brenda Iijima

Publisher: University of Georgia Press (2024)

At Treasure Island, a humanly made island in the San Francisco Bay, a performance troupe dressed in hazmat suits articulate gestures that resemble toxic remediation. As they become more attuned to the site and to its history and ecology, enigmatic presences infiltrate their spacetime. Are they from the past, the present, or the future? What is the significance of their sudden arrival? What happens when historical and geological eras converge?

Meanwhile, elsewhere, various earth scientists at sites around the globe search for the “golden spike”: a telltale geologic marker that synchronously indicates a definitive time change in the strata—a change from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. Within their data is Earth’s biography, but how is humanity insinuated within this chronology?

Throughout Presence, encounter and contact are the major elements of consequence, action, implication, and resounding significance. Encounter and contact between timeframes, cultures, ecologies, persons, intuitions, ways of living, and worlding. At these junctures are the moments of possibility—of violence and/or of budding community.