Landmarks are defining features in the land that traditionally play an important role in Inuit topographical understandings of their land and its resources. They are important orienting features to keep one's bearing while travelling and to determine where one is located at any given moment (Aporta date). As a figure in this knowledge-land-scape they perform certain findings and insights that you can gather along the way. These insights are not always obvious when you follow only the three main cuts of the knowledge-land-scape. Like this one, they rather reveal themselves to you, as you respond to specific invitations, detours and ice pressure ridges. The insight that these landmarks have to offer are always particular to the paths and trails that lead towards them, and their meaning materializes in relation to where you come from, where are you going and what decisions you have made on the way.
The way that the dirt smells at a particular corner in my city, where I have lived most of my adult life, has never felt as meaningful to me as it does after spending so much time on the move. The smell of catpee and rainwater, entangled with the life that was lived on that corner, matters. At least it matters to me. The memories that give it this meaning. This dirt - a wet, stinking clump of cheap, black mud in my hand - its memories are from a different me. A me that would leave, and return, and leave, and become other. Become other, but return. Would leave and return - to talk with my friend in the rain until three in the morning. On that corner. Even if I saw them every day - and would see them the next day. A me, that would lie in that grass. On that corner, next to the cheap, black, cat pee dirt. At night, working out a text-message to a lover. A me, that one day didn't return to that corner. After the text was sent, and my friend and I finally parted ways, I forgot about the corner. But the cheap black dirt just stayed. Never left, never became. It just was. Holding on. Patiently waiting until I would come and collect my meaning.
Go outside, and touch some dirt.
Then return to Cut 1: Voices of Thunder, or Cut 3: Wayfaring the Bearwatch project
