X-TRA’s Artists and Rights is a conversation series exploring what art can do at the intersection of Los Angeles’s most urgent issues and artistic practice. Each session brings four artists together around a table.
Episode 3:
Weaving Tight Enough: Forming Solidarities and “Fixing” the Situation
with Cog•nate Collective, Vishal Jugdeo, Patrick Staff, and Elana Mann
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One of the underlying concerns of this conversation is identified by Amy of Cog•nate Collective when she says, “How can we knit together our capacities? Can we stitch together, or weave tight enough so that we can catch the people who are falling through?”
When these artists came together for this conversation in the hills of Echo Park on February 13, 2020, we knew about the virus and all felt something coming but the magnitude and roller coaster of the events of the past five months was unimaginable. And yet, this conversation intersects with the present in so many ways. For one, the artists struggle with state definitions and institutions that limit humanity, that diminish and displace humans. They also talk about how the process of beginning to undo state violence and institutional racism, for example, requires not a speeding up but a slowing down, to assess points of alignment with others and to form solidarities. Their exchange sheds light on the role that art and artists can play in these processes.
Learn about the Artists
Cog•nate Collective, Vishal Jugdeo, Patrick Staff, and Elana Mann
Keywords
Praxis, relationships, nomadism, slow process, human/non-human, labor, citizenship, borders, displacement, collectivity, kinship, teaching, art history canon, sustainability, reciprocity
Reference Links
Learn more about Paulo Freire’s theoretical text “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”
Cog•nate Collective advocates for social-systemic change and healing alongside youth advocacy and immigrations rights groups like Resilience Orange County.
** Scroll down for full transcript**
(L-R) Misael Diaz (of Cog•nate Collective), Patrick Staff, Mario Ontiveros, Vishal Jugdeo, Elana Mann, and Amy Sanchez Arteaga (of Cog•nate Collective), photographed after the recording session on February 13, 2020 at Catasonic Studios in Echo Park.
Acknowledgements
Executive Producers: Shana Lutker and Mario Ontiveros.
Recorded at Catasonic Studios in Echo Park by Mark Wheaton.
Production and editorial assistance from Sara Ellen Fowler and Theo Greenly.
This series was made possible by generous support from California Arts Council Art and Public Media Grant, the Michael Asher Foundation, and KCET’s Artbound.
Thanks to all who contributed to the development of this series, including Ellen Birrell, Andrea Bowers, Ian Chillag, Neha Choksi, Poppy Coles, Justin Cram, Gilda Davidian, Juan Devis, Sara Ellen Fowler, Harry Gamboa Jr., Theo Greenly, Kara Hart, Carren Jao, Anuradha Vikram, Brica Wilcox, Matty Wilder, and Lindsay Preston Zappas.
TRANSCRIPT
(Session Recorded on 02/13/20)
Amy Sanchez Arteaga: Hi, my name is Amy Sanchez Arteaga. My pronouns are she/her and I work with Misael Diaz as part of Cog•nate Collective.
Misael Diaz: Hello, everyone. My name is Misael Diaz. I work with Amy Sanchez Arteaga as part of Cog•nate Collective. Yeah. Pronouns he/him/his.
Vishal Jugdeo: My name is Vishal Jugdeo. Pronouns he/him. I work in video and installation and I teach at UCLA in new genres right now.
Patrick Staff: Great. Hi, I’m Patrick Staff. Pronouns they/ them. Yeah, likewise, I’m an artist based here in LA but from the UK originally. Currently not teaching anywhere.
Elana Mann: I’m Elana Mann, pronouns she/her, and I’m an artist here and I just had my second child two months ago. And yeah, that’s me.
Mario Ontiveros: Well, welcome everyone. As we discussed a little bit ago, one of the opening questions that we’ve been dealing with in these various conversations have been about the urgencies that we’re facing today. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the issues that concern you most and how your work or the spaces that you work in address some of those urgencies, and concerns.
PS: My immediate response was to try to parse out the difference between urgencies on a broader political scale and then personally in my own life, and then also urgencies within my practice. And I sort of found myself sitting there thinking: Oh, I don’t know actually how to measure out where one begins and another starts, that sort of thing. And often what feels urgent in my work can be incredibly selfish compared to broader urgent political concerns that maybe also can produce a certain feeling of helplessness, maybe apathy, maybe anxiety. You know. I mean, I think in my work most recently the kind of urgent question, I suppose, has been around the kind of contours and limits and definitions of the human. And within that focusing on what produces the nonhuman or what the kind of project to define the human subjects or the sovereign subjects renders non human. And thinking about it I was like, okay, that, yes, that’s a sort of maybe potentially hermetically sealed question within the work. Like I actually think on a broader level with, like, a move towards ethno nationalism and increasing of border states and things like that. That question for me of who gets rendered outside of the sovereign subjects and who gets sort of reified within it does feel kind of urgent and across those arenas, you know, if that makes sense, everyone.
EM: Like who’s considered human?
PS: Yeah, I mean, in the simplest sense and to define the human, what then gets pushed outside of that category.
EM: Yeah, that’s so funny because I was writing about that too. And I was brainstorming about urgency today just thinking about the lack of the crisis in conversation and the lack of discussion and the rise of extremism. But also just how there’s so many parts of humanity that aren’t viewed as human, like aren’t valued and are seen as less than. So that was something that came up for me too, thinking about, like, urgency and what I’m working on in my own work and then like the forces from outside that are pushing me in different directions.
PS: But I’m also, I think it’s interesting to think about urgency in relation to speed or relation to like a temporal thing, because often what feels urgent is my immediate surroundings. On some even keel or something, right. Like, for me, the urgency in the morning is like, Okay, my partner, my cat, the house, and then I can sort of move outwards from there. But anyway, that was sort of a tangential thing about temporality and urgency.
MO: But I do think that that’s one of the things. I mean, we were thinking of it as a very open-ended notion around urgency, and I do think that those overlaps between the pressing political concerns but also some of the issues that I heard earlier about just sustainability, right. Just how do I sustain my practice is an urgent question in Los Angeles, for example, today or Southern California with the housing crisis that we’ve been dealing with. And so, I do think that the overlapping of those urgencies are really difficult sometimes to sort of parse out. Like, what comes to the surface today might be different than yesterday. And tomorrow.
PS: What is urgent for you guys?
VJ: I don’t know. I mean, I guess for me the question of urgency. In a way, it’s sort of easier for me to think outside of my practice, because I don’t know that I’ve ever worked artistically around urgencies, actually. Like I think that the way that things occur to me and happen sort of intellectually/artistically unfold so slowly anyway, that this kind of question of urgency, I don’t know. It’s maybe something that I haven’t applied to thinking about work. But then in terms of thinking about teaching, which is kind of taking over a lot of my life at the moment, I feel like there’s a lot of questions, that sort of urgency. Just as, you know, teaching in a city like Los Angeles with that kind of housing crisis and also seeing the doors of the institution really open up to a type of student that might not have appeared five or 10 years ago. And then really feeling even this higher kind of urgency in questions around sustainability, like we’re constructing new kinds of conversations and new kinds of dialogues. But is there sustainability outside of the institution, outside of the kind of protected space of the classroom or something? When I’m thinking about urgency, you know, honestly, literally this week, I feel like the questions are kind of more centered around teaching. And some of these questions about new new types of citizens in the classroom and how do we situate their citizenship or selfhood, which is, you know, which is different across, you know, within the body of students. But situate them within histories which are actually sort of unprecedented–they’re yet to be. We’re in the process of building new histories. So it’s a funny kind of moment in that regard.
EM: Can you explain a little bit more what kind of student you’re talking about?
VJ: I can be specific with an example actually. Yesterday, something that came up in a class that I was doing: He was a student, a Latinx student that is making work that refers to a kind of futurism or a futurity. A big kind of conversation came up in the class as to the fact that part of what their work was birthing was a new discourse, which is a new kind of conversation. Which I agree with. And then, immediately after class, that student came up to me and was like, I need some help with some historical work because I actually feel like I’m getting lost in not knowing how to actually move forward with the work because I don’t know where to situate myself in history. So I was like: come, let’s go to the new genres video library. And then I was like: I could pull these things from, quote-unquote “art history” and they could hopefully be helpful, but they actually are not. They’re going to fail you at a certain level. And, especially with regards to the specificity of what that artist was working with in their work, which did actually connect more to certain practices that I could see from maybe, you know, ‘60s or ‘70’s but were primarily made by white artists. Or I could find examples within black artistic practices, but I actually couldn’t with what was available in front of me, give them the kind of trajectory, situate them within a trajectory that they were trying to build. And in the end, I was like, we’re building this history so feel free! But you know, that actually did feel like a slightly…. I sat with it all all night, and I was like, did I fail them?
MD: Questions that keep you up at night as an instructor. All the shortcomings.
ASA: That reflection kind of launches me into another question. I think, rather than speaking to the question of urgency, but I think maybe I’ll try to respond the question of urgency and then I think I have thoughts about that. What it asked me to do–that question–was to think about priorities or how I prioritize in my life, which then brought me to a question of scale. I think also, as Patrick mentioned temporality and thinking about, like, what are the scales of time that I inhabit in a day? And how do I shift in and out of different scales of time? Maybe? And how does that speak to ways in which I’m embodied and disembodied in a day? So I think it was funny how that question took me to a really like, meta-discursive place that was interesting. Like the question itself. And the way that I think I chose to embody the question. And so then I was also thinking about a question of embodiment and a question of, like, the limits of time and how I place energy in a day and like to whom I’m devoting that energy. So I think on the one hand, there’s been a lot of like… so we moved recently. And we had a really, like, rich network of folks that we were working with in Orange County, and we just had a different network of people. So I think in moving I think seeking out, like what are the communities that we would like to be in dialogue with now that we’re in San Diego. And how do we think about the transporter part of the practice and of the praxis that that undertakes, like being back at the border. And I think maybe, that’s like the response or like the echo that I felt with the reflection that you were having around, like, how these students and these moments in the academy and institutions–we’re finding like these gaps in knowledge or like gaps in the archive, or like these invitations to be interdisciplinary in ways that we haven’t been before. And I’ve been feeling that as well. Maybe a new genres library wouldn’t have it. But like the Chicano Studies Research Center may or you know. And by necessity, the urgency to be interdisciplinary and to be, like, promiscuous in how we inhabit time as a political necessity and agency. I think as an instructor and just like as a person who has a body and like… Yeah, I think so. For me, it’s like, oh the urgency is around, like trying to just create capaciousness–just like to make capacity and in thinking about disciplines. How do the disciplinary boundaries go away, but also around like the subject and around time, like how do I make capacity? And how do we knit together our capacities in ways that can…? Yeah, I had a professor of mine once used an idiom that was really beautiful, where I think she said something like, Can we stitch together or weave tight enough that we can catch the people that are falling through?
MD: To echo some of that, anything to relate it to this question of the human project that Patrick introduced into the conversation, I think we have really been thinking about how part of the issue at hand with the human project is that it’s often undertaken as an individual project or as a project to build the self. And what you’re speaking to as kind of the necessity of the other who is always excluded from that, but also the necessity of that exclusion, right? To build the self, to understand the self. And I think that that process of recognizing that in order to begin to undo it through collectivity becomes something that is an urgency in our work. How it is that we can weave that fabric closer together between one another. And I think that that has been related also to this question of citizenship recently. And how it is that citizenship has increasingly become this technology or this tool to dehumanize folks where it’s like, oh, you’re not recognized by the state. Therefore, you will not be recognized as human and your rights and your presence as a physical body will be denied entry, will be denied recognition, will be denied protection, will be erased and subjected to violence, essentially. So we’ve been thinking about this question a lot in relation to migration, in relation to the kind of crises that are taking place at the border. And I think to speak more broadly about a political urgency that I think we’re feeling a little bit in our work is how those types of problematics that we’ve been researching and trying to contend with and trying to address by building transnational transporter networks of solidarity between communities–that kind of project seems like it will only become more and more complicated by the fact that the crisis of displacement seems to be getting worse and worse, at all scales. At the scale of the city, in relation to the crisis around housing, but also on a larger scale. In relation to climate change, and to climate refugees, and how that is, in a sense, creating like this massive crisis of displacement that is only going to further compound the need that certain states feel, that need that certain subjects feel, to erect borders, to erect boundaries, to delineate a sense of who gets to be recognized, who gets to have rights and who doesn’t in a way that is much more militarized, that is much more violent. And I think that, yeah, like the question of how to begin to undo that at all scales, across scales across time, is something that is definitely an urgency in our work. And also just how that sometimes feels like it requires not necessarily a speeding up, but maybe a slowing down, right. Like thinking about like, study, thinking about historical research, situating ourselves— all these things that require time require a different sense of engagement that oftentimes feel like maybe aren’t responding to the immediacy of the crisis of the political situation but I think are necessary in order to begin to imagine those new worlds that aren’t just building upon the current moment or I’m just imagining something out of thin air, but are actually potentially, like, rescuing forms of knowledge that have been, yeah, forgotten, that have been under visibalized, under appreciated. So this question of also like sometimes of urgency feeling like a need to slow down and to assess and be like, Okay, wait, what’s happening? And like, what’s the best way to move forward? And that kind of question then opens up into a question of dialogue and the kind of need and like, the need that dialogues require both like space but also time, to build into process and these types of things.
EM: I’m fully in the slow down mode. Yeah, just like becoming a mother twice,(…Thank you…) has really just made me think about time and care and labor and just like and also coalition building in such a different way. Because, you know, so much of my work is and has been about resistance and protest and voice and collectivity, conversation, getting together, but then there’s all these barriers now, for me to fully embody those principles outside of the house. And so that is something I’ve been thinking about a lot like: how little support there is for mothers and for families. And just the insanity of these, of the way that our society is built in these individual houses where everyone’s like, doing these individual tasks over and over again. You know, whereas like, oh man, if, you know, I could cook a meal for like, three families at once, it would just be so much easier. And but then to like, you know, truly live communally would mean to have to separate, like my family out from society in a way and like, move into a totally different social structure, which my husband’s totally unwilling to do, which I totally understand. But it’s really, you know, it’s brought these larger questions that I’ve been asking more like philosophically or socially, politically into the domestic. And, like really thinking about like, you know, how is my life functioning, like, domestically? And even, like, how is the education of my children and what are they being exposed to? And like, how are they learning? And how is that education producing certain subjects to and certain individuals? And it’s, wow, it’s a huge challenge. Like you think about a student, you know, and feeling like: I’m failing them, and then thinking about your own children…. You’re just like, oh my god, you know, conversations that I’m having with my son about things like gender, or things like death or things like community or poverty, you know, it’s it’s like a microcosm of these larger questions that we’re talking about. I think when we talk about the urgency of, like social structure, it’s also like, you know, how do we bring that into the urgency of our everyday life, I guess
PS: There’s two different things that I’m reflecting on in this conversation and one feels about legibility. And the other feels somewhat about kinship. And on the one hand, I find myself thinking a lot within my own work about the structures of legibility that we might reproduce but also produce. I mean, I think about this as a visual artist in some way, but often, making work around queer and trans subjectivity. Often being invited into institutions as an advocate for that while simultaneously trying to undo or even question the very terms that the inviting institution sets up to begin with. And I was thinking about that Vishal, when you were talking about the student, like, in a way, what what you’re doing is, is sort of being the interlocutor between a student who’s being asked to make themselves visible or legible within a certain history or a certain set of terms, what UCLA sets up, what art history sets up. And what I can imagine or what I would feel is also like, how do I, how do I be that connector but how do I also kind of question or undo the very terms on which we’re working with to begin with? And you know, particularly as a trans person and working around trans subjectivity, it has such an intense history in relationship to visibility and the visibility of the body that I find I don’t want to completely write off or completely act as if it’s meaningless. I feel the same maybe about questions around citizenship. Like it can’t be underestimated how important the things that come with citizenship do. But at the same time, I want to question the nation state. So how do you sort of simultaneously balance those things? Yeah. And so that’s like playing on my mind in this conversation. And then, early on when you were talking, just now, I was also thinking about kinship and maybe the unruliness of kinship. Like I was in an interview recently asked to talk about sort of my reflections on queer kinship and what that is and what that means. And I kind of really found myself saying like, well, anything I do now, kind of would, create a false picture, maybe of a certain solidarity or is an idea of a well-behaved kinship, when in reality, I find it’s very unruly and very unpredictable. And we are often sort of in kinship with, like, people who we don’t agree with or don’t feel with. And I was reminded that the one time where I’ve sort of lived in a communal familial structure it was a friend who was raising a child as a single parent and was stuck in the country that we were living in, in the UK. And so, you know, I’ve often thought about in reflection, to me, it felt very utopian. I was like, oh, we’re having this queer kind of communal child-rearing situation, but it was born of necessity of someone who could not leave and could not work. And for her, that was a point of crisis. That was a point of real urgency in her life. You know, in a group of us who lived and worked together and sort of helped with her childcare and things like that where there for a period of time that she ultimately wanted to leave and move on from. But I think that often in these moments around kinship or desire to live differently I maybe in a selfish state might have tried to fix that situation. Fix it and fix it in time. To me, I was like, Oh, this is a moment where we’re redefining the family structure or something. But for her, it was a transitional moment born of necessity. Does that make sense? And it’s interesting, these kind of push and pull situations, you know. I think I’m often challenged by situations of needing to recognize their impermanence, or their movement through to become something or someone else or a different situation rather than. Yeah, for me a desire to often, like, fix that situation as a different model or something.
EM: It’s just so interesting because right as an artist, what we do is like take a moment or take an idea or take a situation and we fix it, right, in time. We create it, we create some sort of object or image or moving image or like situation, workshop, conversation event, whatever.
PS: It’s a crystallization.
EM: Yeah. Yeah, and that process is slow. So then it’s like, oh, I have this idea. I have this vision. And then through the process of creating and presenting, it’s like, how does that relate to that initial moment or something, if that makes sense. So I think about that a lot too, because it’s like, you know, there’s so much change, but then how do you keep what you’re doing still fresh and relevant and meaningful? Like for an audience?
PS: Yeah, and I think similar to that question, I tend to often–particularly when working in, quote, unquote, kind of “community” contexts–a question of like, on the one hand, how do you allow something to be open and fluid enough and changeable enough and reflective? While at the same time, there’s often a desire to batten down the hatches or like close the gates for an act of self preservation. You know, and often I find you’re kind of juggling those two impulses. Maybe on the one hand to open something up to the point where it stops being what it originally was, it feels scary. And on the other hand, that getting to the point where we say like okay, you’re in, you’re out, this is how we… this is what we do inside. These are the rules. This is the …You know, at that point, I’m like, well, now I’m reproducing really scary paradigms that I’ve learned from somewhere, you know. And that’s been a returning question in my work, I think, which I can imagine being very difficult in an educational context.
ASA: Yeah, this weekend I’m teaching a graduate theory seminar, and we read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which like I hadn’t read, cover to cover and like many, like, you go to, like, moments, right? But when I read the whole thing, I was like: Oh, that’s why I like this so much! Because I like the practice, the model of reflection that leads to action that leads to reflection, that a text like that offers was so instructive. But it was interesting, because in the conversation we started having was about just the way that we internalize the oppressor. So I think part of some of the work that we’ve been thinking about has been, like this is also part one of our questions. So maybe better, maybe I’m gonna pose now: but it was around kind of, like, spaces around public grief or mourning or loss or something. And it’s interesting because I think when we were having that conversation last week, I kept finding myself thinking about: oh, like maybe there’s something around like finding space to mourn the kind of oppressor or like, like that there’s like a loss thing that happens also. And I think creating kind of effective spaces where it’s okay to have also mourning around the loss of a structure or something seems important or generative or like, part of a sustainable space or practice.
EM: That the spiritual, emotional aspect of humanity is also given space and time and care.
ASA: Yeah, but I think even like… So the example that I can think of is the way that there are certain protocols in my family, growing up that I can now realize were like, deeply machista, were like, deeply, determined by patriarchal structures that I now kind of have like a disavowal of. But I think moving on from that practice was still hard and it was still sad and it was still a loss because it was something that I had practiced collectively with family. And so I think creating spaces just to grieve around those like… that before I think remaking works is important, and there’s like an act of genesis in that moment in that disavowal, but I think there’s also like a loss or a grief space.
VJ: I’ve been thinking about that in relationship to one’s own process of decolonization, which is this, like, ongoing process and, and then in throughout that process I am constantly sort of, like looking back at the ways in which I’ve been indoctrinated into certain ways of thinking and the ways that certain histories that might have actually resonated to me so hugely as I was growing mind–because I was seeing them through a framework that was delivered in a sort of– and then now to see things again, through my eyes, which are my… the lens has been shifted by my relationship to a younger generation and seeing certain historical moments through their eyes. And then actually yes, like, feeling that sort of sense of of mourning or something for… and it’s funny, it can actually happen as quickly or as slowly as you want it to in a way. And sometimes it’s nice to just be like, Oh, yeah, you’re right. Fuck it and like, yeah, discard. But then there’s other, you know. And it was sort of something that came up recently just again with a student. They were also asking, like, in a way that what they were expressing was like a desire to be able to see things through an older lens or something, which I thought that was really interesting and that they that they actually felt a kind of loss or like a sense of grief around not being able to, to go back to almost to a kind of blindness or something. And I thought that was a really interesting thing. And realize that I actually can feel that in my own way. I mean, again, we don’t want to be blind, but these processes sort of movement or progression are complex.
MO: Can you talk a little bit about what you mentioned about building, sustaining a dialogue? Or because of the different movements, the physical movements that you’ve had, how do you maintain those? How do you maintain your capacity? And then how do you start those conversations as you shift from different locations? Because we’re all working in different spaces in different mediums, and how do you sustain those conversations and allow them to also transform given the changes that you’ve experienced physically, emotionally?
ASA: Yeah. So we began our collaboration actually in Tijuana, San Diego a few years ago, and then mostly because of schooling, but then also like residency opportunities that emerged, that then led us to these collaborations with Youth Advocacy and immigration rights groups and now it’s one group in Orange County. So just I think the path of the praxis, the practice, and I guess, like that’s become a praxis. We’ve ended up just having, like the nomadism of our practice has just become like part of it. It’s just like a facet of it. So moving between Tijuana and Santa Ana for a long time and kind of like triangulating histories of gentrification in Orange County and in downtown Santa Ana and displacement of historic Latinx shops in the downtown, for instance, and triangulating that with the kinds of gentrification that are happening in downtown Tijuana and throughout the city. And the market space that we worked in, I think initially which was at the border crossing. It’s been there for over 100 years, and formalized around the 1980s, which was also the moment when it was the kind of heyday…. And so I think one of the ways that we do that is finding those kinds of conceptual echoes in the different communities in the kind of greater Tijuana-LA-megalopolis kind of territory that we find ourselves in. But I think also looking to community organizations and folks who we know that will be able to sustain dialogue even past, like, the scope of a project to try to create networks or try to create, yeah, like long term…
MD: …relationships.
ASA: Yeah, yeah, I was like trying to find like a better word, but I think that’s just it because they’re just like our friends now. And so…
MD: Yeah, but I think related to that, I think the question of sustainability for us is often a question of reciprocity, and ensuring reciprocity that seems aggressive, like ensuring reciprocity is a good way of building long term sustainability. Because it’s a model that allows us to connect or to try to connect with the community organization with a community group on terms that feel mutual that feel reciprocal. So that allows for a project potentially to emerge or maybe not. But it’s a relationship that we could potentially return to, understanding that those are the terms that have been set. And I think the politics of that has also been made clear for them. So then it allows us to, in spite of not remaining in one place for a long time, it really leaves open the potential to return. And to continue activating that dialogue, continue activating that collaboration at times from afar or by physically returning to that site and to continue those. The dialogue to continue the engagement in a way that, again, may lead to a visual art project or might just look like us supporting something that they’re doing that they need support with. And I think that being open to those different scales of engagement that feel reciprocal is what has allowed us to maintain this nomadic practice and to maintain these connections in spite of moving back and forth.
ASA: Yes and I think importantly and maybe to your part, Elana, about like intergenerationality, I heard you talking a bit about intergenerationality, I think also that working with folks who are sometimes older, and then trying to build in projects where young people and everybody sort of like the gamut around age also feels really important to the politics of the work.
MO: I think also what’s really fascinating just about your collective is that so many groups will deal historically with the border, with San Diego, and then they jump to Los Angeles. And so the fact that you’re dealing with Santana or Santa Ana, depending on where you’re from in Southern California. But it’s such an important region right along that Orange County area that is really lost in the larger artistic world. And so when I learned about your collective my thought was that it was so anchored in that middle point that everyone overlooks because they’re of the rush to get to Los Angeles at five miles an hour on the freeway. And I think the issue around reciprocity is something that each of you have sort of talked about reciprocity with the student, reciprocity with different notions of I want to fix this but I also want to keep it open ended, reciprocity with your children about having sustained dialogues, reflection and action.
PS: Yeah, I wonder if this resonates with other people, but it took me a long time to be able to just sit with the fact that these forms of reciprocity are not necessarily equally balanced or equally measured–particularly if I’m working as an artist with someone who does not have an investment in an artistic practice. Or within, again, like what becomes legible within an artistic context within an institution or whatever. I think for a long time when I was younger, and as a younger practitioner, my desire was always to try to almost flush out those uncomfortable complexities and try to sort of just establish a context or a condition where we’re all on an equal playing ground. And it took me a long time to just be able to accept the fact that it was not an equal playing ground, it was not always necessarily that what I could offer and what I wanted to take were evenly matched, or evenly balanced. And that was a little bit of a like grieving process almost, of learning that things cannot be that simple, right?
EM: Do you feel like a certain obligation to your collaborator or partner? Or, like how do you negotiate your own like inner sense of, like ethics or morality around that?
PS: I mean, probably just like an ongoing process, like self analysis, but also the kind of openness to being held accountable by others. I think a lot of it was about learning to undo the things that I had learned within my arts education, which was that the terms of artistic production: always win, always come at the top of the pile. And that whoever succeeds within the context of an arts practice, art institution or whatever is the ultimate gain or the ultimate winner or something. And actually, once I realized that other people might be able to just use me and use what I might be able to bring to the table via funding or a context or just a room or something like that, and actually accepting that their priorities were not going to be the same as my priorities and just being able to sit with that, and let it be what it is, you know–but that actually did require, I think, a certain unlearning of what had been taught in an arts context.