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“In the beginning of performing [music], I needed to keep things very small, because that was the only thing that felt fully honest,” she explains. “Now I understand that there is a role of a performer that isn’t just completely personal and ordinary. You can choose to play a larger-than-life emotion.”
Lindeman appears in Ignorance’s first three music videos, which also mark her debut as a director. As with the emotional cartography of her songwriting, the videos feature subtle movements in the periphery of the frame, visual choices influenced by arthouse icons Agnès Varda and Andrei Tarkovksy. Again, she’s found herself committed to a sense of candor. “The camera wants to convince you that it knows everything, but it doesn’t,” she says. “I just wanted to open up a little portal for people to understand that there’s more to see.”
In the videos and on the album’s cover, Lindeman wears a suit jacket and pants covered in mirrored fragments—garments of her own design. Surrounded by trees and fallen leaves, she appears and vanishes with every move, attracting a gaze and immediately bouncing it back. As a performer, she says, “People project themselves onto you and want you to reflect back what they feel in their hearts, and that is a good and bad thing.” She adds that in the months since she shot the videos, her mirror suit is already starting to fall apart.
Though climate change somehow remains a political issue to this day, Lindeman doesn’t consider Ignorance a protest record. “I wish that I had the guts to do that,” she says, instead emphasizing that the record serves vulnerability and acts as a mutual acknowledgment of tenderness. “The sense of a little soul recognition is like spiritual food.”
It’s growth, not despair, that drives Lindeman’s efforts to alert her listeners to a crisis, and she even sees room for some degree of redemption for those who have struggled to face the truth about climate change. “I believe that people are fragile and delicate and complicated, and can be easily misled,” she says. “It’s not like a Pollyanna view of human nature, but I do believe that most people want to be good.”
Back at the Leslie Street Spit, water laps at the edge of the refuse, a quiet and ceaseless insistence of nature’s long memory. “We are connected to the nonhuman world in profound ways, whether or not we acknowledge that,” Lindeman says. She knows the rewards of undertaking a survival effort that seems impossible. In a few months, springtime will start to restore the area to a booming refuge for insects, waterfowl, and people alike, the sprigs of vegetation once again pushing through the concrete debris around her.