ANN HAMILTON – KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY

with Yeechesh Cha’alk (A Woman’s Heart) by Alexandria Hunter and Eva Trujillo

KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY, an 800-foot-long stone path of words, is the twenty-second public artwork commissioned by the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego and was built in conjunction with the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System’s (MTS) extension of the Mid-Coast Trolley line north to the University campus.

Constructed with basalt pavers and composed word by word and line by line, KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY’s surface of raised letter forms lays a tactile chorus of language and material as a new threshold and entrance into the campus labyrinth of libraries, research facilities, and encyclopedic disciplines. Its east-to-west promenade is organized by a central spine of rhythmic keywords (step by step now becomes then gathering time …) repeating and running in a continuous line through the center of the site. The intersection of these keywords in over 300 written works form the project’s horizontal north-south lines and draw upon the writing of authors and scholars with ties to UC San Diego and its history.

These include David Antin, Rae Armantrout, Nancy Cartwright, Patricia Churchland, Francis Crick, Angela Davis, Alicia Garza, Fanny Howe, Herbert Marcuse, Linus Pauling, Roger Revelle, Jerome Rothenberg, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lesley Stern, Harold Urey, and Shahrokh Yadegari, among many others. Each line is a fragment of a larger body of work, and a complete listing of the line’s sources is available here, on the UCSD Library website.

Although the concordance composition is built with discontinuous lines, rather than as a singular continuous narrative, clear themes emerge throughout the 1300-line opus. The threshold between land and water, particularly California and the Pacific Ocean, is made present, as is an attention to the micro world of particles and atoms and the macro world of the cosmos and protoplanets. Themes of social justice and revolution, environmental activism, technological advancement, and cultural mythology are interwoven with the words of poets affiliated with the University’s Archive for New Poetry.

Yeechesh Cha’alk (A Woman’s Heart), a commissioned composition authored by Kumeyaay scholars Alex Hunter and Eva Trujillo, is the only continuous narrative within the work. The story of Sinyahow, the first Kumeyaay woman, is written in English and Kumeyaay and begins on the eastern end of the site with the phrase, “We were born of her yas (breath), created from the lands that intersect with her deep hasilth (ocean)…”, and winds westward toward the setting sun and the ocean, placing this origin story on the unceded lands of the Kumeyaay on which the UC San Diego campus resides.

While the larger field is made from embossed, dark letters on a light ground, the lines of Yeechesh Cha’alk are debossed, light letters on a darker ground of flame-finished stone. These bands occur at regular intervals throughout the entire 800-foot-length of the piece and create their own cadence and rhythm within the larger whole. The complete narrative is also available here, on the UCSD Library website.

Whether traveling north, south, east, or west, the myriad sources and the alternating direction of the words, set in Gotham font’s legible geometry, mirror the disparate crossings, arrivals and departures, comings and goings that pattern campus culture. Just as each student entering the University threads a unique path within its many resources, the ongoing life of this concordance is in the compositions that will be newly made and remade, composed and recomposed, with each crossing as its tactile ground of words, both read and felt, are stitched into relation at the pace of the body moving in space.