the witness — Laura Burns

“The Witness” - elder(berry) coat | Uncertain Unities, Ponderosa Dance, Germany 2021.

“The witness” emerged from listening to the elder - elderberry - tree in rural Brandenburg, imbuing its medicinal properties through practices of embodied listening, painting/drawing and dying, to stitch together the witness coat, a mediation being through which to encounter the land, it deep time memory and future dreaming.

Over the course of some weeks, the stitching together of the elder coat emerged, a living archive of the garden and land that supports Ponderosa Dance community. Through collective dying sessions, solo plant meditations, drawing, movement and sounding, the land is encountered as witness, elder and propeller of “otherwise” social futures.

The elder coat emerged as a response to the imagining of community futures

the elderberry tree called for attention and a journey began

being-with, dyeing, digesting, staining, imprinting, stitching - the elder emerged as a figure of reciprocal witnessing, an invitation to meet the land and ask first -

the elder tree was also reflecting a longing in me for elders where who and how they might be as well as how - if my life is oriented towards one day being an elder to another generation - would my decisions be shaped and formed differently

longing to collectively re-orient to the more-than-human elders and the otherwise pathways they open up - otherwise from what we know and therefore can imagine

an otherwise route or root running like a river underneath asking for listening attention and attending

the land is inscribed with coloniality and also the more-than-human beings run alongside this with another possibility. What if every organisation or institution and all its infrastructural apparatus were oriented towards this listening? what infrastructures would emerge from this daily practice and what would they make space for? how can the attendance of the more-than-human be integrated at these structural and systemic levels? how can we practice a daily re-orientation to witnessing and being witnessed by these elders?

The elder coat is a mediation-entity portal-being to facilitate meeting the land in multiple ways ... for wearing walking dreaming lying on resting listening adding to... the messages that are received are stitched on as symbols to this living archive ....