Artist Statement: "The Poetics of Suspense"

My critical-poetic project, entitled "The Poetics of Suspense," is an ongoing series of environmental cinépoems about suspense in different aquatic sites off the coast of mainland Sicily and the Aeolian Islands. Using the influential methods of sensory ethnography filmmaking, my project particularly explores how suspense is temporally anchored in a liminal space better represented through the aesthetics of being underwater. Edouard Glissant argued in Poetics of Relation that the Mediterranean is an "an inner sea surrounded by lands, a sea that concentrates," as opposed to the Caribbean Sea, which "diffracts." This focus on the nature of the Mediterranean's purgatorial and claustrophobic interiority makes it a useful eco-critical framework in which to aestheticize the paralysis of contemporary climate despair—highlighting a form of suspense that that does not necessarily anticipate catastrophe, but rather lingers in that surreal realm where catastrophe is imagined to be endlessly deferred and time is eternally suspended.