Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus – Hand Axe

Back in 2020 writer and artist Holly Childs collaborated with composer and sound artist Gediminas Žygus on a series of works entitled Hydrangea. Culminating in an album for James Ginzburg’s Subtext, Hydrangea explored political conspiracy theories, post-internet theories of history, and both artists’ lifelong experiences with rave culture. For their follow up, Gnarled Roots, a contraction of the title of the original performance of the work, Hydrangea 2: Gnarled Roots of a Creation Theory, Childs and Žygus follow these threads, mapping out an intricate account of 21st Century mythology, taking the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 as its origin story. The album and performance take this title from the infamous PhD thesis of Australian businessman Craig Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, who in 2016 made the spurious claim that he was, in fact, the creator of bitcoin, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s in this space of online artifice and reality-bending that t