Infinity States: The Palace of Humming Trees

The Palace of Humming Trees was a collaborative exhibition shown at French Street Studios in August 2021. Spanning visual media, sculpture, audio and print publication, the work experiments in voicing the more-than-human through lyric practises of ambience, attunement and field poetics. The accompanying publication — a compendium of essaying, poetry, illustration, playlisting and experimental epistolary — teases out the lyric ‘I’ which suffuses into a hyperdream of proliferating states of entangled being. Language acts as an alchemical and architectural process: pushing beyond the human sensorium through ‘arts of attention’ (Tsing 2015) and assembling portals to a more hospitable ecopoetic thought.

Featuring a visual presentation of exhibition matter, alongside an artist’s talk which draws from the book, this paper asks: how can poetry register forms of presence and absence in the anthropocene, an epoch of accelerating extinction, human planetary intervention and awareness around climate crisis? How can formal strategies of lyric, field poetics, citation and artist collaboration engage with im/possible strategies of ‘voicing’ the environment, and what is ethically at stake in expressions of personification, enchantment and ecological reciprocity? Who is speaking in the poem; who do ‘we’ write ‘to’ and ‘for’ in anthropocene lyric?

In this talk, I will propose a methodology for ‘ambience’ in anthropocene lyric, perform samples from The Palace of Humming Trees and reflect on the process of its composition and context within a collaborative, multimedia exhibition. Engaging with Timothy Morton, Hélène Cixous, Kay Gabriel and others, I’ll consider how the unique, spatial and intertextual format of the exhibition poem makes space for readers to enter into the space of a lyrical and material ‘hyper’ realm whose intensities register questions of ecological intimacy, knowledge and reparation in the present, permeated by multiple futures.