Music for Turtles
Music for Turtles
By SD Holman
This is a transdisciplinary project on Turtle Island, presenting the turtle as a metaphor to explore ecological grief, interspecies kinship/Interbeing, and humanity’s slow-motion response to climate collapse. A forest frames curving trunks that meet at the centre. Suspended in this portal, a green sea turtle occupies an unstable space.
Turtles are unimaginably ancient. In their 230-million-year history, turtles have outlived 3 mass extinctions—including the one that preceded the dinosaurs. Yet turtles may not survive this sixth, human-caused, mass extinction. The magnificent Pacific Leatherback —Earth’s largest and second fastest reptile is the most pelagic of sea turtles and diving as deep as whales—will be extinct in our lifetime.
Music for Turtles is a love song to our many-speciesed siblings, a series of works inviting us to shift from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene: a futurity reviving the old knowledge of kindred beyond the human, reflecting our interdependence with all life.
SD Holman (pronoun art/art/art’s) has been blazing a trail for queer artists since the 1990s. Holman was the first out lesbian actor to portray an openly lesbian recurring role on network television—on Global TV’s Madison, 3 years before Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out and decade-long blacklisting. Holman started the Queer Arts Festival (QAF) and SUM Gallery in Vancouver because, as art said, “There was no place for me as an artist, so I wanted to make that place for other artists.”
