Black Dirt

Does all land have a troubled past? Black Dirt is an experimental cinematic essay that utilizes reflexive, subjective poetic narration to personify the now-disappearing Midwest prairie. Visual methodologies layer, reveal, appropriate, and obscure the history of a landscape once rich in biodiversity and now colonized to build a body around a perpetually inaccessible narrator. The work was shot on site at farms around the Midwest United States and appropriates footage and partial phrases from the 1936 propaganda video The Plow that Broke the Plains, directed by Pare Lorentz. The text, spoken in first person, appears only on screen, inviting a viewer to insert their own ideas of voice, intonation, and cadence in speech and pattern. Black Dirt asserts overarching questions of who speaks for the land, and what might she say if we could listen.