What's the present-day equivalent of a prehistoric Indian mound? Writer John Capouya posed the question to scientists and laymen during the course of his research on the mysterious structures, and he got some surprising responses. Perhaps Burning Man, the annual week-long ritual-cum-performance-art festival in the Nevada desert, where groups of friends and strangers converge abruptly, build a community, celebrate and disappear. Or a football stadium, where passionate tribal affiliations are worn on shirtsleeves and tailgate feasting takes place.
Playful as these analogies may seem, the abiding mysteries of Indian mounds require imagination as much as history to understand them. These unanswered questions attract visitors today to locations from Philippe Park in Safety Harbor to Sacred Lands in St. Pete.
"They're full of stories, and we're adding another layer to that — our story," Capouya says.
On Friday, Capouya and photographer Suzanne Williamson unveil Shadow and Reflection: Visions of Florida's Sacred Landscapes at St. Pete's Morean Arts Center. In the exhibition, the two present a series of photographs and textual musings on some of the state's 165 Indian mounds: massive deposits of earth, shells and other materials that functioned for pre-colonial inhabitants as sites of burial, ceremony and trade (among other practices) and which remain in existence today, in conditions from lovingly conserved to virtually destroyed, across Florida. The exhibit showcases the outcome of three years of road trips (often to visit the same mound at different times of the year) and an unexpected collaboration between the photographer and the writer, who are married.
Their project, documented online at flmoundsproject.org, began with Williamson's fascination. After the couple moved to Tampa from New York City in 2008 for his job teaching journalism and non-fiction writing at the University of Tampa, she began seeking out the state's Indian mounds as subjects. Shooting in black and white with vintage cameras, she composes intriguing compositions of the sites, using selective focus to highlight certain facets of the landscape, and pushing others into comparative obscurity, to dreamy effect. The images are often as mysterious as the mounds themselves, offering a glimpse of a downy grass-covered hill framed by tree branches (an intact burial mound in Ormond Beach) or a portrait of spindly pine trees at Mount Royal (a mound site north of Ocala National Forest named by famed botanist John Bartram in the late 18th century).
The craft of Williamson's ethereal vistas conveys a newly discovered love for the landscape of her adopted home.
"We knew and loved New York, and I think we want to replicate that relationship down here," Williamson says. "We want to know a place and love it."
For his part, Capouya was initially lured to the mounds out of concern for Williamson's safety on rural road trips, but in the presence of the structures he found himself wanting to respond through his own medium: words. The self-appointed assignment pushed the writer out of his comfort zone; his work typically takes the form of narrative journalism. He began writing impressionistic, short-form responses that function as textual pendants to Williamson's elusive photographs. In one titled "Monster," he muses that a 4,500-year-old shell mound resembles a massive creature inhaling or regurgitating thousands of clamshells and half oysters.
When I spoke to them in advance of installing the exhibition, Williamson and Capouya had settled on a method of display designed to transform the Morean's gallery spaces into a landscape of image and text. By printing some of her 20-plus images on translucent fabric scrims, Williamson plans to bring the photos off the wall and enable viewers to see through them to other images (an experience analogous to observing a landscape in situ from various perspectives). Other, wall-mounted pieces have been printed on panels of brushed aluminum, giving the photographs a metallic, faintly reflective ground that evokes the daguerreotype as a historical technique of capturing time on a silver-coated plate. Capouya's texts are projected onto intervening walls.
While the exhibition has no stated mission to "save the mounds," the pair hopes to raise awareness about the sites. The aesthetics of their endeavor make a tacit plea for these places as artifacts of human belief, providing one of the best ways we have of knowing ourselves — by understanding, or trying to understand, those who have come before. For Williamson and Capouya, the possibility that mound-building (a social practice that crossed cultures from the Tocobaga to the Calusa) may have functioned as a symbolic gesture of renewing the world has profound resonance in light of environmental crises today.
"I guess I think this is a good time for us to be thinking about that. We need to be thinking about restoring and remaking the world for us," Williamson says.
"And we can only do it together," Capouya adds.
This article appears in Oct 6-12, 2011.