Songs For The Standing Still People

One of my elders taught me that my oldest ancestors are the rock people and that we use to call them, “The Standing Still People”.  She also taught me that long ago the people would go out and sing to the Standing Still People and that they would sing back.  In the old days, we would sing to everything as a way of saying thank you to the world and connecting to Spirit.  The elder said that when regular people stopped singing to all the other beings of the world everyday, something changed. The other beings - the rocks, the plants, the animals - they all stopped singing too.

I created a room which sings. As you enter and move through the space, the room is designed to create sound. To begin, a ball chain curtain drags across a tin floor as you enter, traditional jingles bump together as you pass through the space, your footsteps against the tin floor echoes and crinkles.  The room designed to sing to the rocks at the very center, by its very nature, creates a limited unified vocabulary.  We joined together as community to create a song to the rocks, to engage in an old way of being, to say thank you to the natural world.

Photography by Mel Carter and Sunita Martini