Be Thinking About Nothing
05/05/20
by Todd Diederich
Meditation is easy and meditation is hard. You think about nothing, then you are thinking about life, then you think you got to do better at meditating and you repeat this hundreds of times with the goal to collaborate on a higher emotional vibration with your past, present, and future selves.
During quarantine, on a sunny morning, I recorded my voice in the backyard of my apartment in Humboldt Park, a luxury that millions of city dwellers don’t have during lockdown. My apartment isn’t big and it feels smaller with the onslaught of news and the emptiness outside, but this patch of grass my roommate grew is my connection to the sky, as far as my mind's eye can see. It’s divine; I have space to lay down to feel Earth and her warmth, to expand my inner space through meditation. I’m nostalgic for a life I used to live, but also that life we all used to live is what got us to this virus. Is it gone for good? Can I control my thoughts for the better?
I lay on the grass, face to the sun, and opened and closed my eyes slowly. I pressed them tightly together to give birth to those black diamond gasoline sparkles that swim beyond your sight and in your thought. I meditated on these shapes… What did they want to be? What did they want to show me? I tried to keep my brain focused to describe the shapes and colors I am “seeing” with my eyes closed.
My audio recording, a dreamy stream of consciousness, was combined with footage made from a pre-quarantine Chicago with its spirit in full bloom. It’s a feedback loop of remembering and forgetting and remembering to forget. Past, present, and future. Somewhere it all meets at a single point that is hollow on the inside, holding everything and nothing at once.
Todd Diederich, Be Thinking About Nothing, May 2020. A montage of an energetic Chicago and the artist's relationship to light .
The only thing I want to communicate is that if we could envision a better world and emotionally reside in that space before it's actually here, the world would change. If we had been doing that to begin with, we wouldn’t be “here” with our new roommate, Covid-19.
Todd Diederich is a cultural producer, artist and teacher. His work, grounded in photographic and moving images, has also manifested as multi-media sculptures and light installations for various events and site-specific spaces. While at Columbia College Chicago, Diederich won the Jack Jaffe Award for Documentary Photography. More recently, he published a monograph titled Luminous Flux. Currently Diederich is an artist/instructor with the National Museum of Mexican Art at Yollocalli Arts Reach and conspires with RuPaul Drag Race contestant Naomi Smalls on the series “Smalls World” and her music video “Pose”. @BeOdd.png
Todd Diederich worked on this piece with Stephanie Manriquez, the Quarantine Times Tuesday editor. Each week, Stephanie selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.
