Ash Tower, Samstag Scholar, speaks about the work he has produced during his residency at the BSR ahead of the Summer Open Studios 2025.
From their lofty seat on the firmament, the stars could see very far. They could even see over the horizon—before space and time separated—while it was still just a vast cloud of… immanence. The stars spoke to each other, you know, they gossiped about the comings and goings of everything.
Figuring that they had a better vantage point, the people in the city asked the stars for advice. The stars turned their eyes downwards to the people as they asked for all sorts of fates and fortunes. But when they looked down from such height, they were suddenly beset by a great vertigo, and some of the stars lost their grip on the sky. As they fell, they settled into the minds of the sculptors, who dutifully laid them into the floors of the cathedrals and the walls of grand houses. Even fallen, the stars had a gravity—they attracted meaning, significance, profundity. Even fallen, people still poured their world into them, and found that the stars could take it all, and more. Even fallen, they could accommodate as much hope as a person could possibly produce.
Exhaustion was their undoing—but it wasn’t the stars’, it was the peoples’. They had given all their hopes away, and now had to make their own fortunes, toiling away with eyes cast downwards. The stars were slowly consumed by the hungry city where they became familiar and invisible, set to a clamour of signs underneath a shroud of distraction. Over time, most people forgot about the stars, but a faint stellar chorus still hummed in the peoples’ minds, like a spiderweb in the sunlight.
One day or maybe one millennium later—through a disaster, a miracle, or some furtive chord—they re-emerged. They became magnetic and irresistible. It was a plague! A star-sickness had slithered into the minds of the people, who now saw them everywhere. They awoke in a graveyard of stars—worm-eaten and petrified, but stars nonetheless. The star-sick people captured them, shared them, and chortled at their own sorry state, because they had forgotten the ways to speak with them.
To this day, the star’s chorus is still threaded through the minds of the star-sick, as a filament of light, a kind of lonely rapture or a private myth. And the stars persist, above and below, leering down on the city and its listless folk.
Having forgotten how to speak, most people ignore the stars—but some of them still go to the roof on warm nights, and stare upward in silent communion.
