The Endless Hallucinatory Love of the Riders at The Long Point of Death
Earlier this year, in a state of grief combined with a down-swing of my mental pendulum, I tried to write a short story. It followed two riders who continually criss-crossed the continent of North America on horse and wagon watched over by their reconnaissance drone, after some unspoken apocalyptic event. My riders had a role. The role hidden in the patriarchal, colonial violence of "The Cowboy", a role of love, palliative, and end-of-life care for animals and humans alike (think about Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider”, think about Valeska Grisebach’s “Western”).
My riders would travel to where they were summoned, and stay with those approaching death and later carry the bodies back to a site where once long ago had existed a “Body Farm”. Here scavenger creatures still remember and that previous form of research has folded into a new kind of knowledge-making that would have been recognised by Melanie Klein or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as "The reparative". In depresion we enter a void to make new tools through repetition in darkness. Doom as production, the riders are called out endlessly.
This story fragment is my starting point for a series of diagrammatic digital drawings each with a parallel speech-audio that divines a story these same drawings. Each is an unstable constellation concerned with horror rebuilt as love. Each drawing is repeated/remade in new versions, and so is the audio. Repeated attempts at showing/telling the love/grief stories which shift in sympathy to the telling.
Uma Breakdown is a disabled artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and queer RPGs. This year they finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster and play. In 2020 they presented a plant horror RPG at Kim?, Riga; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque. They are currently researching criminality as love/writing in Genet and Cixous.
