Honora Spicer

'Attention is the most important thing we can give to one another'

In conversation with JD Pluecker

A sonic sculpture looking into the trumpet bell-end of a metal-cast hand in firs
Photo Credit: JD Pluecker, featuring a sonic sculpture by Elana Mann.

This Commentary was written through collaboration with Mellon Humanities Collaborative fellows Rebekah Patnode and Tatiana Rodriguez about our conversation with JD Pluecker on October 26, 2021. This Commentary follows Reading JD Pluecker’s ‘Swamps Fly.

Reading JD Pluecker's 'Swamps Fly'

A sonic sculpture of a bronze-cast hand with a trumpet-bell arm cups woodchips
Photo Credit: JD Pluecker, featuring a sonic sculpture by Elana Mann.

JD Plueckers Swamps Fly is a work of “halloing the wasteland” — greeting anew, pursuing in shouts, seeing/seeping pervasively amid the moor. Against the hollowing of draining, swamp is met as the listless and listened steadfast space.

Swamps Fly was published in Spring 2021, and it zapped onto my radar as I was steeped in investigations of Narragansett territory occupied by the early colonial settlers of my own family. Behind my grandmothers house was a patch of woods, now bisected by train tracks and rail yards. Biking down a road called Liberty Lane, passing lumber yards and shooting ranges, I came to Great Swamp Monument Road. At the first house, a sign: Drive as though your kids live here. Whose kids? Whose your? I wondered.

Orienting to im/mobility

This image is a screenshot of El Paso zoning maps accessed online. The ICE detention center described here is underneath the corner where the three maps overlap.

The questions came out of walks — from El Paso Service Processing Center (ICE Detention) to the Bus Route 50 stop, outside USPS on Boeing Ave. On sandstorm nights, the walk was lean and grimace, spit and hack. The wide stretches required it; long blocks zoned postwar. Required wait, corners of dust lots labelled “Property of US Government,” under the airport watch tower and the Super Guppy’s tarmac gleam.

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