Site Gallery Houston • The Silos • Sawyer Yards
About Still
It is a site-specific installation inside a concrete silo that once stored rice in the city of Houston.
Still enacts erasure as propagation, a text that completes itself by disappearing, where the wall's emptying is not loss but the poem's final act of translation into living matter
Each letter of this poem is handmade, fragile, casted in rice straw pulp. The fiber of the same crop that passed through the same walls years ago. Embedded with seeds that are native Texas wildflowers chosen for the bayou ecosystem that existed here long before the grain, before the concrete.
Visitors are invited to take a letter from the wall until all letters are gone. Plant the letter facing up in soil. What once grew in this site, can grow again. When no more letter remains, the words will still be in the site, held by the wall that once held rice.
Taking is how the poem ends. It is also how it continues.
This work asks quietly: what happens when we return what belongs here? What does it do to the land, to the water, to the birds and insects that depend on plants most of us have never thought to grow? What happens to us?
There is no answer posted here. The conversation begins when you carry the seed home
"Where the letter was, light remains. Not as absence.
As answer."
P L A N T THE L E T T E R F A C I N G U P
ABOUT THE SEEDS
Bee Happy Mix · by Native American Seed · Junction, TX
What might Grow
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Bluebonnet
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Black-Eyed Susan
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Indian Blanket
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Butterfly Weed
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Purple Coneflower
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Common Sunflower
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Gayfeather
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Winecup
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Lemon Mint
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Swamp Milkweed
How to Plant
01 Find bare soil in a sunny outdoor spot
02 Dig a hole just deep enough to cover the letter
03 Place face up - see video above
04 Cover lightly with soil
05 Water gently until sprouts appear
Best Time
October - November
Forgot? Keep it dry. Plant it next October.
Why native seeds?
Native plants feed local bees, butterflies, and birds in ways imported plants cannot. They need less water, no fertilizer, and they belong to this soil. One letter in a thousand front yards, sidewalk strips, and garden beds might start something.
By Zulma Vega
in collaboration with Claude AI.
T H E P O E M • S T I L L
Before you,
this wall held grain.
Before the grain, a bayou.
Before the bayou,
roots no one remembers naming.
Five hundred hands
swept out the last grains of rice.
No one recorded their names.
The walls held the weight.
The walls still do.
A vessel that holds grief.
A letter that holds a seed.
Different hands.
Different soil.
Different light.
These walls once held grain.
Now, they hold light.
Take a letter.
Bring roots...
to the light.
That is the gift.
Where the letter was,
light remains.
Not as absence.
As answer.
This poem will empty.
The wall will speak in light.
The seeds will be set free.
The work continues, in you.