"Re:Future" is a review and remix of a 2019 collaborative performance called The future is a constant wake that relates ancestral knowledge with the movement of topsoil. Using live visuals, sound, and uncovering text, it explores themes of displacement, labor, and resilience, turning the scientific interest in soil into a symbol of memory and reflection.

In Colorado, Re:Future links histories, highlighting landscapes traversed under force and coercion. Aryel René Jackson, an anti-disciplinary artist from Louisiana, performs a live top-down view of shifting, sifting, and clearing soil with their hands and feet. At moments, carved text—written in the language spoken in the original film The future is a constant wake—gradually emerges. This re-staging engages with soil as a vessel of memory, a kind of performer––a kind of witness.

 Revisiting the poetic staging underscores connections to identity and labor, while logistical challenges—like integrating projectors, lighting, and sound—mirror the performance’s tension when engaging with symbols and their meanings. Achieving the intimacy of the original while maintaining the scale of a live-streamed performance adds another layer of difficulty that is navigated with improvisation and choreography. As a way of mirroring, Jackson engages with these constraints within the performance itself––envisioning the words “at the end of a kind of living,” as a constant transitioning with a sense of reflection.

Aryel René Jackson’s performance is part of Performance Art Week XIII. For a full schedule for PAW XIII, click here.