Tears|Ov Pluto's Return
Released on Bloxham Tapes February 2021
Pluto’s return is considered astrologically to portend upheaval, transformation and death or rebirth. It takes 248 years for Pluto to travel the full sphere of the zodiac, and as such, a return to the precise position of a person’s birth cannot be experienced in an individual’s single living incarnation as it would for quicker moving planets. For man-made systems: Institutions, nations, belief systems, cultural structures and mores, however, Pluto’s Return can usher in drastic change. 2020 marks the return of Pluto for the birth of the United States of America in 1776. And enter, Covid-19. The video is a combination of documentary footage of our experience self-isolating with the symptoms of Covid-19, combined with an improv track created remotely across two locations in London and Brighton. The inspiration for the work came from an accidental mass of fused and neglected DIY material that Lori had left sitting in the garden shed for three years. It formed on its own through neglect, mistreatment, waste. It looked planetary, and like infected lungs and crude respiratory equipment and subcutaneous drip bags: a B-movie sci-fi villain, just when our collective lives seemed to be turning in these same tides: the invisible enemy, the leveller, the great reckoning or are these already our own mythologies so endlessly digested they now invade our physical bodies, manifestations of untenable ways of being, here to strip us of our illusions of control of each other and the earth we share. The planets might say so. On the 23rd of March 2020, as the UK went into lockdown, Mars the planet of War conjuncted with Pluto the planet of Death in the sign of Capricorn. Capricorn: the symbol of business, ambition, finance, human resources, status and politics but also the sign of the initiate, the disciple, the earth. In the Tarot, Capricorn in represented by Pan, the (Queer) God of duality, liminality, rebirth and spring. From the woods and fields of revelry, they ask us to free ourselves from our trappings, our habits and yearnings and behaviours and wonts that keep us enslaved. Now we are trapped in our houses, our earthly possessions and shelters: these are our pillaged woods and fields. We wear masks to protect ourselves and each other from our very own breath. We Panic in apocalyptic fantasy. Spoken samples of Jupitor, Saturn and Pluto on a date in the sky provided by Emily Klimkiewicz.