“Shroud”

One of my favorite Greek myths is the myth of the Minotaur. I think a lot about Ariadne’s thread and how Theseus used it to navigate the labyrinth. I like to think about how the thread moved through the labyrinth, how it was pulled and bound and woven around the architecture. How the thread was taut in some areas and loosely folded in others.

I like to think of the subconscious as a place. A door, a room, a city, a labyrinth, and when I’m looking inward and moving through these places, it seems I’ve also pulled a thread through. Sometimes the thread reminds me that I’ve been there before; more often, it reassures me that I can find my way back.

As I began to weave my thread in this new space, I realized I was letting out more thread than I expected. Instead of one, hundreds of threads spooled out from my chest. As I watched, they began to weave themselves into shrouds, gently laying over the site, enveloping it.

A feeling of concealment came over me — as if I were wrapping the bones of this place in my threads, weaving shrouds to cradle its relics and hide them away in unseen rooms. This act of covering and revealing has left me reflecting on the strangeness of Arcosanti — how people are also houses and places — and on what else Arcosanti keeps tucked away in its heart’s jewelry box.

Read more about Arcosanti here: https://www.arcosanti.org/about/