A walk is a form of contemplation in which internal and external realities come together. Threads is an audio walk drawn from experiences gathered while traveling and from encounters with people whose stories revealed their personal, political, and environmental realities. It also considers places changed or destroyed by climate events, including fire, flooding, rising sea levels, and the loss of familiar environments.
Stephen Blumberg (composer), Margaret Barrett, and Diana Clarke for their contributions
These experiences raise broader questions: how people live with political oppression, environmental threat, displacement, conflict, and uncertainty; how local experiences are shaped by national and global forces; and how individual lives remain connected to conditions beyond their immediate surroundings.
The work does not present these experiences as a single narrative. Instead, they form a network of intersecting threads. Places, experiences, memories, and current events overlap, moving between the personal and the collective. The act of walking becomes a way of moving through these layers—between what is encountered directly and what is carried inward through memory, empathy, and imagination.
Beginning with specific lived experiences, Threads gradually becomes a meditation on human interdependence: where we come from, what we are, and where we are going.
Threads was presented during the Border Control Symposium and Exhibition at the Stamps School of Art in Ann Arbor in 2019.