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Editor’s Note: Tiffany Lee Brown is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. Author of “A Compendium of Miniatures,” she is an editor of Plazm magazine and adjunct faculty at Prescott College. Follow the Easter Island Project (her ongoing participatory project of art, music, and writing) on her website at www.magdalen.com or here on the Viator Travel Blog. This is the first installment.

It started with a school movie, the 16mm kind they used to play on rattling projectors, with strips of amber film flap-flap-flapping at the ends of their reels.

I think our little elementary school in the country didn’t have much access to movies, because they showed us the Easter Island film every year (along with repeated showings of The Red Balloon and a terrifying environmentalist film in which a giant bulldozer chased down a tiny duckling).

In the woods of Oregon, a participant named Cary brought statues modeled on the famous moai heads of Rapa Nui. Photo by participant & photographer Steve Fritz

The great moai heads gazed out over a barren Easter Island landscape, as close to the middle of nowhere as you were ever likely to get. Why had the island’s past inhabitants toppled their own monoliths? Why were scientists and linguists unable to translate the petroglyphs carved into stones? Were stories of the makemake “birdman cult” true? Had the island’s tribes driven themselves to near extinction with overpopulation and by building their moai?

One place to see before you die

The movie didn’t answer these questions satisfactorily; it just scratched the surface and proposed a few modest anthropological theories. The more the archaeologists discovered, it seemed, the weirder and more mysterious the island’s history appeared. Easter Island—called Rapa Nui by its Polynesian inhabitants and Isla de Pascua by its sovereign nation, Chile—seemed not only mysterious and melancholic: it was remote, served by a single ship scheduled to dock once each year. I desperately wanted to go.

In our teens and 20s, my friend Anastasia and I kept lists. Places we wanted to live: New York, London, New Orleans. (Between us, we succeeded.) Things to live for: poetry, punk rock, patent leather shoes. (Likewise.)

Then there was the master list: Things to Do Before Dying. We managed to achieve some of them. Anastasia got married, I wrote a book. Others we grew out of: I no longer want to try certain exotic drugs or put out a 7-inch single on K Records. The jury’s still out on whether I will grow a roof garden composed entirely of poisonous plants. But I didn’t outgrow the number one item on my list. “Go to Easter Island,” it said.

Tiffany and composer Eric Hausmann are creating a soundtrack 6,480 hours long for the project. The music, which includes sounds from audiences and participants, will be streamed online for 270 days and used in live performances

Although many more documentaries have been made since my childhood — and now you can fly in several times a week from Tahiti or Santiago — Rapa Nui remains a place of mystery. I never lost my childhood fascination with ruins, cemeteries, and crumbling monuments. I’ve explored relics and temples of Mayan, Celtic, Hindu, Buddhist, West African, and Native American origin. Despite my impressive sixth-grade report on Polynesia and blatant theft of Rapa Nui culture for a fifth-grade archaeology project, despite researching in my 20s how I might drop by the island via tramp steamer en route to a writer’s residency in Antarctica, my grown-up travels never got me any closer than Maui.

The heavy part

Anastasia and I continued to bring up Easter Island over the years, hoping to someday drop by Tahiti on the way to look for our grandparents (a whole other story). We sketched out a screenplay about two women who do just that, but of course we never bothered to write it. The fabled Easter Island trip became less of an intended journey and more of an emblem, a symbol of the dashing, whimsical lives we imagined for ourselves. Now we were in our 30s, and things were getting more — ugh — serious.

Separately, we still traveled a fair amount, but graduate school and careers edged out quixotic adventures to the South Pacific. Then we both got walloped by our biological clocks.

Anastasia had always wanted children. She changed jobs and moved to a small town in anticipation of family life. I, on the other hand, didn’t intend to procreate. I wrote about child-free living in magazines and books; I was more than happy to remain a writer, artist, and traveler.

The biological clock, and marrying into a delightful family complete with stepchild, changed all that. The urgent, deep need to have a baby took me by hellish surprise.

Northwest ceramics artist Sequoia Miller offered this seed of creation to the project at a live event in Washington state

The clock strikes 40

For various reasons, it transpired that neither Anastasia nor I was likely to have children of our own. In our separate lives, in different cities, we wrestled with grief and uncertainty that seemed unbearable at times. One day we decided that if we were both still childless by the time we turned 40 — by the time I turned 40, being the elder — we would go on a big trip together, like our month in London as teenagers or our move to Brooklyn in our 20s.

“Is it time for Easter Island?” Anastasia asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “It is time.”

As excited as I was about the prospect, I didn’t really believe we would go. It would be bad enough if one of us couldn’t become a mother, but both of us? I thought I could accept that grief for myself, however torturous and never-ending it felt. It seemed horribly unfair, though, that Anastasia might not have children. Unlike me, she had done all the right things to set that up for her life. I hoped she could fulfill her biological imperative and that particular aspect of her loving nature. If she did have a baby, maybe I’d go to Easter Island all by myself.

The Easter Island Project is born, so to speak

Delving into the subject of childlessness in my artwork and writing brought me to a larger question: Why do we create? What compels humans to make babies, art, poems, and atom bombs? How does this relentless generative urge affect our environment?

Printing the project - The artist and friends create hundreds of serigraph images on cloth and paper, which are used at Easter Island Project events and installations

Thus the Easter Island Project was born. In it, I invite audiences to become participants who explore these questions with me. They do it by making creations and generously offering them to my project, knowing that I will gestate these “seeds” of creation and make something new out of them. Nobody knows, yet, exactly what the resulting artworks will look like. I ask participants to trust me. It’s a big thing to ask.

Some people participate via Internet and postal mail, but mostly, I meet up with them in person at events around the USA. People bring objects, make music, offer dances, and join rituals. In some form or other, these seeds of creation will come to Rapa Nui itself with me and Anastasia. I invite you to join in, and follow the Easter Island Project’s journeys on the Viator Travelblog. We could end up just about anywhere.

In the meantime, you can check out the project live in New York, March 26, at Synthetic Zero. Details here.

-Tiffany Lee Brown

Planning a trip to beat your own 40-year clock? Browse Viator’s Chiles tours & things to do in Chile, from things to do on Easter Island to Santiago day tours.