"Even in the darkest purlieu of Morocco's underworld such men can reach the magic horizon where they are free to build their dream - palaces of delight."

– Isabelle Eberhardt

This doesn’t begin nor end with Isabelle Eberhardt, neither is it explained with The Golden Dome. These places and people are entangled in the complex story that exists for each of us who seeks and finds. Emerging is a path that opens when we peer into those deep questions that bind us to the universe; when boundaries are seamless and magic is boundless. I came to know fourteen other artists during The Golden Dome residency, where we explored The Lovers through practice, study, making, dreaming, singing, listening, and being. I came to know Isabelle through the survival of her posthumously published manuscript The Oblivion Seekers. How impossible, the salvaging of her words, the loss of her life; how impossible it always seems for art to survive.

Isabelle can only exist as a phantom. The residue of her life exists as folklore, something passed between secreted lips. She exists like so many of us—as a strange, bold light under the cover of mystic, rebel, oracle. It is easy to think of Isabelle as an anomaly—her life exalted by her father’s temperament and her absorbing curiosities, that she had an unexplainable magnetism toward wildness that wasn’t proper or even human. It is easy to explain feminine energy in this way, plainly wild and other-ed, out of control or unruly or dangerous. Isabelle is not a phantom that taunts or tangles in ghosting. She is a phantom that mirrors and reveals the similarities between our selves and engulfing desire toward the unknown. She blurs the line that rightly is no straight mark at all, and uncovers the dusty mysticism under a stringent perspective. She is a guide and spirit and form who is inside each of us, culling us closer to the edge, hovering just above the void, waiting for us to dive in. The point of oblivion is where we meet and interlace all our paths, histories, and futures into something light catching.