Two Garden Rocks Read a Creation Myth
2020
Single-channel video
7’12”

Many nineteenth-century scientific texts are a transitional space where science, religion, and aesthetics meet to give broad and self-assured sentences about the world. In this video, two rocks read a chapter from James Orton’s 1876 book The Andes and the Amazon called The Creation of the Amazon. The chapter is read word for word with the exclusion of footnotes and cited names for clarity; and with the inclusion of the phrase “an ancestral tree of plenty,” which links Orson’s description of the Amazon basin as a “trunk,” with many Amazonian cultures that refer to the river basin also as a “trunk” or “ancestral tree.”