'Tracking' is a body of work about learning to track animals, and more broadly learning to become a Trails guide - someone who takes people on guided walks in the African bush. The texts that appear here are extracts from a longer piece and are randomised, meaning they appear in random order. You are invited to click through to the next text, but the panels do not construct a linear narrative, and will not appear in the same order twice.
The life of animals consists of a series of traumatic shocks. Tracking is pursuit of their trauma. We are spies on the trail of the creature who does not know it is hurtling toward a brotherhood of the devoured.
Tracking allows us to organise the confusions within ourselves. Without this we will never understand what happens in the world; coherence begins within. We must establish a sequence, a timeline along with the truth will unfurl.
Game trails lead to water. Animals know what they are looking for, but they are also prone to confusion. You can see it in their eyes. They are protected though from knowledge of the black elision waiting for us all. I am making choices which feel half –intuition, half fate. I am not in control.
Our fear is of experience, which we continually evade just as the animals occult themselves in cobalt shadows. They sense our presence on their tail, even though we are in their future.
I am too reliant on emotional experience to be a success in this strict world of wilderness. I am just another female trails guide who is not up to the job. After our third try on the rifle range Max gave up on us, we were not going to cut it. But I am frustrated with myself less because my shooting is not yet up to it, but because I can discover or understand nothing other than emotionally. There has to be love. Without it life feels insubstantial, facts refuse to accrue meaning. This over-reliance on an emotional life is a deficiency in me, I can’t help feeling. I have lost the capacity to act. I am no longer an animal.