ywnhx

Nate Dorr | 2023 | 5 min

We have intervened in the landscape, reshaped and fragmented it. Yet it outlasts us.

Along the tide-swept shores and marshlands of a once-major city, people have gone but the artifacts of their era linger: rusted vehicles, heaped tires, crushed cement and glass. Old structures fall. Mechanical observation systems glitch. Wildlife roam these derelict lands anew. In the absence of human perception linear progressions falter and time moves in loops and skips, unpredictable. And over geologic time, even our most impervious creations will degrade and cease to exist.

ywnhx hovers in temporal uncertainty: told from beyond us yet amidst our physical memory, shot on New York City shores marked by human activity but abandoned even in advance of their inevitable inundation due to climate change. We are here yet not here, already come and gone, outlived by junked cars and microplastics, under the alarm cries of foxes and fragmentary birdcalls. Composed of documentary footage and sound painstakingly processed to pry apart the assurances of recorded time, ywnhx considers the legacy of our species from the vantage of an ambiguous post-Anthropocene.

Featuring Maya Edelman as Vulpine Chorus.
Spanish translation by Isam Prado.