An audiovisual experience. For best experience, please listen with headphones.
Credits: Jenny Reardon (photographs and audio recording); Anna Friz (audio recording and composition); S. Topiary Landberg (Editor)
The land that now occupies Kansas has long been at the heart of struggles—often bloody—over who and what belongs on the Plains, and how its prairie lands should be used. Most oft told is the story of the battles over the state’s formation, and the role they played in the abolition of slavery. While rightly celebrated, these official histories can also remove from perception other histories and forces that shape the land—in particular, the persistent condition of settler-colonialism. The very notion that Kansas is in “the middle of nowhere” is foundational to the colonial myth, and obscures the complex struggles of many—human and non-human—who struggle to make it home. The on-going forces of settler colonial-imaginaries, industrial resource extraction, financialization and the consolidation of capital, and the aggregation of resources into urban centers also have led to rural depopulation, removing witnesses from the land. The result is the loss of capacities to collectively sense and understand this so-called “heartland of America.”
In January of 2017, in the wake of an election that had left many in the U.S. questioning whether anything could form the basis of collective understanding, I traveled back to my home state of Kansas. After a quarter century on the coasts, I too had lost my sense of this place I call home. I returned to regain my bearings.
I decided on a deceptively simple plan: I would bike across the state. I sought the proprioceptive knowledge the bike offered. Kansas reveals nothing easily. In the popular imaginary, it is flat. On a bike, it is not. My first day found me struggling to complete 1500 feet of climbing. The eyes deceive. Other senses are required, all senses are required, to bike across it.
The bike also offered a diplomatic ally. “Midwesterners want to be left alone in worlds of their own making.”[1] So argued historian Andrew R.L. Cayton. I am not sure I would be so categorical or so certain, but when I started this project, I did wonder: Would anyone talk to me? The bike offered one response by creating an orthogonal approach to people and the land. More often than not it has proved a charismatic partner, creating offers of lodging and entreé into revelatory conversations.
Nowhere: In Particular, offers a window via field recordings—in image and in sound—made on multiple bike trips through Kansas. It reveals that contrary to the colonial imaginary of the state as empty, its land and air are thick, teeming with life elemental and organic, human and non-human, ancient and newborn. Every leg stroke of my journey was a constant negotiation with other lives and forces—from the grasshoppers that hitched rides upon my limbs, to the fierce south wind that whipped words from my mouth, to the barely maintained roads that left me searching for flat flint to scrape mud from my tires. From these encounters, new sensibilities emerged. Nothing ever happened according to plan. With nothing known in advance, it was possible to know again, anew.
There is a notable absence of photographs of human beings and recordings of their voices in this piece, but not an absence of human activity. While this is part of a larger project in which I conduct in-depth interviews with farmers, ranchers, ecologists and other denizens of Kansas about how to know and care for prairie, here I seek to follow the traces of activity on the land. My aim is to understand the deeper infrastructural and systemic forces that have no individual human spokesperson.
Nowhere: In Particular is based on the essay, “Bloody Kansas: Forging Knowledge and Justice at the Horizon’s Edge,” published in American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present (Radius Books, 2021). This project was made possible with funding from the Committee on Research at the University of Santa Cruz.
- Cayton, Andrew R. L. 2001. “The Anti-Region: Place and Identity in the History of the American Midwest.” in The American West: Essays on Regional History, edited by A. R. L. C. a. S. E. Gray. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 150