Karla Zurita

Pedagogies of Site Fellowship | Field Notes

Marking time with footsteps, lifted nothingness wailing

from the seagulls,

fear stumbles in

 joggers remind me I’m close to the city where

barricades keep

people in and animals out I’m

close to the city

the coffee is in a perpetual

state of refill

respilling into salt

 The salt is my barricade.

Spiraling Inside the Tunnel is a durational performance where I activate both Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. I’m interested in language manipulation, since activating is in action, I thought the Spiral should become spiraling.

Both of these works are mainly experienced through images due to their remote locations. When the sculpture becomes an image, a process of translation begins. Translation is a process of subjective picking. I translate daily from Spanish into English and English into Spanish.

Forcing language into this process strains it therefore a loss and a gain is incurred.

When at the Spiral or the Tunnels a trance-like magnetism moves a visitor closer, inside or on the Spiral and the Tunnels. This is what is lost through documentation. I sought to figure out how to embolden this magnetism.

I read Smithson’s, The Spiral Jetty (1970) from his collaborative film with Holt, where he orates the coordinates and materials of his artwork from the viewpoint of a circling helicopter. At first, I thought I should use his materials list: rocks, water, salt crystals, and mud. I began searching for water, the closest water to Dia Chelsea is the waterfront a couple blocks west laid the Chelsea Pier on the Hudson River.

Here, I used a camcorder to document a process of spiraling. I liked Spiraling because it is colloquial. The overwhelming presence of technology and content leads people to a state of spiraling. I’ve heard my best friend say i’m spiraling countless times. At the waterfront, I spiraled my view of the

Hudson

Edgewater, New Jersey, joggers,

buildings,

seagulls, and snow by physically spiraling the camcorder. I also spiraled using my footsteps. I held the camera at different points of my body and spiraled from there. Images of sculptures are subjected to the point of view of the photographer. I used various points of views in motion to reinvigorate the still landscape image to create Spiraling at the Chelsea Waterfront projected on a wall during my upcoming performance, Spiraling inside the Tunnel on the opposite wall, SALT will be on loop where I draw with salt from my point of view using a table surface like a land artist using the Earth’s surface.

On my Spiraling at the Chelsea waterfront wall, I scribe my failed attempts at plotting Smithson’s spiral from his lyrical poem:

East by South — Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Southeast by East — Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Southeast by South — Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water South by East — Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water

Images courtesy of the Artist

Light and video is obstructed, filtered through a transparency film tunnel echoing Holt’s narrowing. As I run and walk across the room orating coordinates and listing my materials.

Field Notes from the Fellows share provisional mappings, poetic fragments, visual fieldnotes, and digital captures generated by participants of the Pedagogies of Site Fellowship ahead of their culminating event on June 7, 2025 at Dia Chelsea. To learn more about the program and event, please visit the Dia website.