I’ve been thinking deeply about my childhood home in Los Lunas, New Mexico, a place I haven’t been able to visit during the 2020 pandemic. When I was last there, I built adobe bricks with dirt from my family’s backyard and brought them with me to California. 

For this piece, titled Returnal, I documented three of these bricks across the San Francisco Bay Area, each connected with a contact microphone to a radio transmitter. Three repeating videos reveal currents of static humming from the adobe, the transmission waves slowly ebbing and flowing. The earth’s raw material and the broadcasted sound’s immaterial quality merge, pulsing through space and time, forming a circuit of return.