A walking-in-time performance with donkeys from Kultivator’s farm and donkeys from the Rural Alchemy Workshop (RAW) in Oregon, US, over shared planetary horizons, as the sun sets and rises at the same time. The donkeys from each art collective walk in the company of small groups of children, along with the artists Karin Bolender (US) and Malin Lindmark Vrijman (SE).
The two parties move simultaneously on different continents–one into the sunset, one into the sunrise–to meet and mirror each other at distant but always connected shores. When they reach the shores, they lower a saddle into the waterbody and watch it slowly submerge.
Reflecting back on the long walking journey of Karin Bolender and the donkey Aliass nearly twenty years ago, and on the countless pilgrimages made in companionship with donkeys in humankind’s history, this walk looks both forward and backward and frames an intergenerational movement that aligns time, climate, and global waters in a shared moment of attention. The sinking of the saddles could just as well be the rising of waters globally. The witnesses, children and donkeys, could be all of us.
In the Explorations of Now manifestation, the sunrise walk in Huddinge departed from the site of a video installation that documents another Mirror Shots performance-exchange across these same time zones a year earlier: this piece, made by Karin Bolender and Agnese Cebere in the RAW donkey pasture during Kultivator’s workshop in Sweden in fall 2020, took place at the edge of massive wildfires that began that day and raged across the Western US, bringing smoke-hazed skies to Sweden weeks later. Both the video installation and the sunrise/sunset walk invite those in Huddinge, humans and equines and others, to join us in this collective moment of planetary reflection.
