The salt is blinding. The provisions are half gone. There is no turning back.
Lagoon picks up where Bitter Water ends — the vault is behind her, the liquid expanse is ahead, and the white formations on the horizon may or may not be what the Elders described. The surface is hostile: quicksand beneath the salt crust, acid water, beasts adapted to sulfureous ponds. She keeps moving. Above the white formations, the sky is doing something she has no word for.
The Elders said the phoenicotterius stood still as statues in the Molentargius Lagoon, long necks bent to the water. So beautiful you felt a shiver in your bones.
She needs to feel that shiver.
Lagoon is a solo voice and sound design piece, created, spoken, produced, edited and mixed by M. Cristina Marras for the Columbia Radio Race.
Flamingo Lore
Flamingo Lore is an ongoing body of work set in a dystopian Sardinia where the surface is salt, acid water, and UV, and humans live underground. The world is consistent across pieces, but each work is an independent entry point, a different voice, a different moment in the same collapsed future.
Across the work, flamingos shift roles: they appear as myth and salvation, as creatures of impossible beauty the survivors risk their lives to find, and (in other corners of the universe) as rulers and torturers in an improbable RPG, wielding power over what remains of human life.
I have always been fascinated by the apparent fragility but effective strength of flamingos, the only living creatures that can drink water close to boiling point, among other things.
I live in Cagliari, surrounded by pink flamingos.