PROMISE LITTER

In his story Quaestio de Centauris first published under a pseudonym in 1966 alongside a series of short fiction entitled Natural Stories, author Primo Levi describes a reality whose origins are rooted in “a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos” and how some surviving hybrid species are still tethered to its latent residue.

The word ‘litter’ points towards a poignant set of meanings in the English language, containing regenerative and degenerative energies under one term:

1
i. a covered and curtained couch provided with shafts and used for carrying a single passenger

ii. a device (such as a stretcher) for carrying a sick or injured person

2
i. material used as bedding for animals

ii. material used to absorb the urine and feces of animals

iii. the uppermost slightly decayed layer of organic matter on the forest floor

3
i. the offspring at one birth of a multiparous animal

4
i. trash, wastepaper, or garbage lying scattered about

ii. an untidy accumulation of objects

– Litter (definition, Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Promise Litter finds a confluence between these references & engages with it, mapping onto it the photographer’s felt experience.

. PROMISE LITTER at DATZ MUSEUM OF ART 2025

“…….. When the waters retreated, a deep layer of warm mud covered the earth. Now, this mud, which harbored in its decay all the enzymes from what had perished in the flood, was extraordinarily fertile: as soon as it was touched by the sun, it was covered with shoots from which grasses and plants of every type sprang forth; and, further, its soft, moist bosom was host to the marriages of all the species saved in the ark. It was a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos.

Those were the days when the earth itself fornicated with the sky, when everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the earth’s cold, prudish face, was one boundless nuptial bed, all its recesses boiling over with desire and teeming with jubilant germs.“

FROM Quaestio de Centauris, PRIMO LEVI
TRANSLATED BY Jenny McPhee