You were on a beach in your dream last night. The sky was hazy, bruise-purple; the water was brown like excrement. A pair of gigantic disembodied hands, rough and wrinkled like an old lady’s, busied themselves with building mountains, bridges, and fortresses out over the horizon. You stared at their dirty fingernails which started to turn black and splotchy, dorsal fins sprouting from the knuckles as the fingers dropped into the ocean and transformed underwater into a pod of orcas. You knew this without seeing them; you could understand from their echolocation that they were mourning Grandmother Mago(Halmi), a giant goddess from Korean myth, who was also the 106-year-old matriarch of a pack of Southern Killer Whales off the coast of Vancouver, who was also Princess Bari, who was also the mother of all shamans. Scattered along the beach all around you were conch shells – great exoskeletal beasts perfectly intact, a childish thrill at this discovery – you picked one up and put it to your ear and you could hear the orcas’ mourning song scintillatingly clear, as it morphed into a fox howl, and then a seagull’s screech…

Zadie Xa’s Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation (2019) uses the scaffolding of a Korean origin story to cross thresholds of family histories and collective myth-making. It is a speculative excavation of a marginalized shamanistic goddess and many unwritten matrimonial folktales lost to time. Korean folklore, like all folklore, is a product of power relations. Who gets to tell the stories and who gets to listen? Amid a largely hetero-patriarchal imperialist model of storytelling through written word – as a kind of worlding that’s tethered to Confucian, Buddhist, and Neo-Confucian philosophies and passed down as an education rite – the cosmogonic Great Earth Mother Goddess of Korea, Mago, is an aberrant figure, bordering on the abject.

Grandmother Mago pisses and shits the world into existence; she spits out mountains, hurls dirt to form countries, gives birth to nine daughters and herself through cosmic music – and, amid the chaos of a new world order, promptly disappears. Mago performs storytelling through entering trances in order to generate non-verbal forms of knowledge. While stigmatized and written out of history, her aged body and visceral creation demonized on grounds of witchiness, even referred to pejoratively as a crone, Mago is brought back to life in the works/worlds of Xa. The cosmic matriarch is here reborn as an orca, an animal known for its capacity to communicate a more-than-human social language of feeling.

Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and expert in animal behavior and intelligence, particularly cephalopods, observes that “orcas are the most acoustically sophisticated animal on the planet.” It could be said that orcas perceive the world in a way that we can only imagine. “If their brains are structurally and fundamentally different, then our criteria for intelligence will almost certainly be different than theirs, too. It is just as possible they see us as acoustically obtuse and primitive – since, in comparison to them, we probably are.” In a sense, this language of whistles and clicks and pulsed calls that orcas emit underwater could be understood as a kind of cosmic music, the same that gave birth to Grandmother Mago, the same that portals orcas between worlds, their dorsal fins the physical manifestation of this magical movement.

“I was attracted to Korean mythology for two reasons, firstly because it’s a bit of a sentimental subject for me,” Xa shares with me. “Because it was my entry point into Korean culture, which I didn’t grow up with firsthand. But my work is definitely meant to speak to and hopefully add to conversations and other kinds of creation myths that other people are creating for themselves. Folk tales are like a mini world; this whole place that we’re living in is a container for all these things to coexist at the same time.”

Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation is not a world to escape into, but a hybrid of world-as-is and worlds-yet-to-be. The multimedia project – which includes a surround-sound video projection of a subaquatic environment, sculptures of dorsal fins and conch shells, and a costumed performance featuring masks and textiles made collaboratively by Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo – has been presented in aquatically-attuned locations ranging from the De La Warr Pavilion in the English coastal town of Bexhill to the 58th Venice Biennale, a tentative city rich on myth and built upon the human-made habitat of a swamp.

Like every folktale echoing and rebirthing the emotion, trauma, and magic it holds as it’s told and retold, Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation remembers and carries forward the weight of each iteration: spoken disjunctively in gurgles, splashes, and other oceanic sounds, it is a nonlinear act of communication without words. As the work continues to amass layers of meaning with each performance, it fertilizes itself, entangling histories of Korean folklore and personal narratives as it builds a lens for understanding what’s going on around us in this world – and beyond.

Influenced by science and speculative fiction writers from Octavia Butler to Audre Lorde, Xa thinks of storytelling as a project of critical distance; stories can be a means of addressing, expressing, or thinking through broader social, cultural, or environmental challenges too difficult to examine head-on. But that distance can also be a kind of magic: a space of potential that recognizes our interconnected position of precarity and incites a call to action. By weaving together real and imagined worlds, can storytelling become a shared vessel for structural change? Could the figure of the shaman – for so long ostracized and relegated to the bottom rungs of (Korean) society – be a kind of ecological oracle, capable of communicating the intimate connection of the human and non-human, life and landscape, as well as the links between decolonization and environmental justice?

Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers (2020), Xa’s latest project, is a continuation of this premise. Shown in two locations separated by a gigantic body of water, in Leeds, England and Saskatoon, Canada – the traditional territory of Cree Peoples and the homeland of the Métis – it tells the story of animal kinship as a survival strategy for an ailing planet. It’s centralized around a disembodied character named Princess Bari – another shamanic figure from Korean folklore – who brings the dead to the afterlife. Bari, the story goes, was born to a King and Queen desiring a son in feudal Korea. They swiftly abandon the princess, who is adopted by a elderly couple, one of whom just so happens to be a shamanistic grandmother. Bari is happily raised by these elders, until one day, she learns her biological parents are very sick.

In the story, Bari ultimately saves her parents by embarking on a long, arduous quest to the end of the western sky, to hunt down a life-giving elixir. The parents, overjoyed to be saved, offer her rulership over the kingdom. Bari declines: she wants to be a steward for the dead, helping their souls into the afterlife. In Moon Poetics, the viewer takes the position of Princess Bari, steered by five non-human narrators: Shell, Seagull, Fox, Cabbage, and Orca. Each animal and plant lifeform has its own version of the story to tell; that is to say the story of planetary survival, the struggle inherent in that quest, the need for cross-species collaboration in the face of the Earth’s precarious ecological future. But for Xa, the exhibition is also a container to hold many different but parallel struggles:

“Yes, I’m speaking about the ecological crisis. But there are so many different avenues of pain that we need to sort out: environmental justice is social justice is racial justice. In the midst of this deeply traumatic year, I’ve been so affected by the social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, of people marching and speaking about liberation. I was thinking a lot about that interconnectedness between humans and animal worlds, between shamanism and resistance, and ultimately, reimagine in a hopeful way different ways of being, of understanding and empathizing, that can maybe direct us to alternative situations for ourselves and the many other non-human inhabitants of our planet.”