LoopCurrent is my response to a climate catastrophe occurring in real time. This research-based performance installation envisions humanity's environmental impact on the planet and the irrevocably altered future. The project uses interactive textiles, movement, sound, and seismology to construct a world dug up by archeologists long after we are dust. This future relic appears now as a transmitted warning, as time-traveled evidence of a disaster, or as a cry for help.

LoopCurrent's structure is determined by sound and seismographic measurements of the earth's vibrations relative to human movement patterns. This data will be recorded with portable seismographs and specialized microphones at the United States' southern border, Italy's Mediterranean coast, and Poland's Baltic Sea, locations experiencing high occurrences of human migration and an influx of refugees due to war and extreme climate change. The seismic measurements, rendered as waveforms and spectral frequencies, will inform the work's improvisational movement score and textile design.

Other critical aspects of LoopCurrent are its garments and woven tapestries. Constructed from fabric printed with designs comprising water and migration pathways, these garments are survival suits engineered to protect our future bodies as they navigate an increasingly treacherous world. LoopCurrent's woven tapestries will hang throughout the space surrounding performers and viewers. The tapestries tell a story of future cities with collapsing infrastructure entwined with artifacts from the extractive industry: oil rigs, transmission towers, and the earthly wounds left by mining.

To complete the work, monitors will play a looping video depicting individuals moving in the landscape while wearing the survival garments. The locations and bodies will shift in an infinite loop between the sites where the sound recordings are made.

LoopCurrent examines our relationship with the future by imagining the relics of that time. LoopCurrent returns these future relics to us and asks, in a world rocked by a climate crisis, war, and political upheaval, what new, fantastical spaces can we build from the residue of destruction and loss?

The first iteration of LoopCurrent was developed during a residency at ART LAB Wyspa/Wyspa Progress Foundation and was made possible thanks to the Between.Pomiedzy Festival and IKM (Urban Culture Institute, Gdańsk, Pl), the New York State Council on the Arts and The Canada Council for The Arts. LoopCurrent received a 2024 grant from the Map Fund, and will be further developed during a residency at Baryshnikov Arts in New York City, May 2025.

Maya Ciarrocchi

Maya Ciarrocchi