 Thank you very much to all of you for being here. My name is Andrés Raque, and I'm professor here in Columbia in GISA. And I'm very happy to be moderating today this session that it's got the name Performing History and it's part of the Preservation Lecture series. Super happy to be here with you with a clear view here and to discuss precisely performing history. And I'm very happy to have all this public to also participate in the discussion. I think it's a right moment, the right moment to discuss performativity and history in regards to architectural and artistic practices. We're involved in a moment in which all practices are renegotiating their status, their political status, and the way they intervene daily life. And in the middle of this discussion, in the middle of this evolution of many practices, regard or in relationship with recent political transformations, I think it's the discussion of what is the performative dimension of architecture, what is the performative dimension of art. In architecture, this discussion is got a long trajectory. It's a long trajectory that, of course, is impossible to summarize here. But just to give some glances, some things that are in our discussion now, I would like to remember now the work of Georgi Kepest in the 1940s and the way that he was announcing the relationship between humans and art and architecture as something that depended on the performativity by which they would acquire mutual awareness. But in the 60s, this discussion grew immensely from a different perspective, from the inauguration of a new way of looking at buildings as entities that perform themselves. And it's probably the first moment that, in architecture, the non-human devices that are resulting of architectural practices were recognized as entities that perform themselves. In the 60s, of course, it was the time of big movements in architecture, like, of course, all know this, all do know them, from metabolism to behaviorism, in which basically growth changed, evolution, adaptability was something that was understood as embedded in architectural materiality. The Situationist International, of course, was shaking totally not only the notion of performativity in architecture, but the notion of architecture itself, and was recognizing that performativity itself could be architecture. And I want to now also read the words of Bernasso me in the 1960s when he was saying that there's no architecture without events, without actions, without activity. Of course, this got also, this is something that in architecture was negotiated with other movements, theories, knowledges. In 1980s, it was Michel Callon, Bruno Latour in Jolot, who launched the idea of the actor network theory. And with that, there was recognition that daily life was produced in the association of humans and non-humans. And that precisely was performativity what brought things together. Architecture was started to understand the people that followed these ideas from the architecture of film, people like Albena Yaneva, or people like Norge Maris, as actually the making of that performativity that made the association between these humans and non-humans possible. That was something that, of course, was happening also in philosophy. And what is a dispositive was the text by which the lens was recognized that society was the production of this constellation of entities, of heterogeneous entities working together that was in 2003 retaken by Aganberg, what is an apparatus that has been immensely influential both in architectural and artistic practices. But the question of history is also a question that we have to bring in. Precisely now, because history has been also a way for architectural and artistic practices to engage politically, to receive or to review, to rethink history as something that is not completed, it's also been the source of a number of performative works both in architecture and art that have made those practices engage politically. Talking of history, Randall Collins called for a history that did not separate the history of monuments to that of the history of eating, the sleeping, making love, where the links to the collective are constructed. Performing history has often used its capacity to call for an inclusive notion of the social. In 1989, architects started to, we could call for a number of, we can remember a number of example, just to mention some that were working already with rereading the history of cities of communities, of continents. The 1989 work by Toyoito, Tokyo's Nomad, was actually rereading Tokyo as a place that was containing histories that were never told and few performance, those other parts of history could emerge. Or for instance, the work of Stolkes in Europe was also using performance to claim the importance of the gypsies communities that were mostly forgotten and not considered in the development of public policy. We could go on and on and on. There's a long history of practices in which also architecture has negotiated its boundaries with artistic practices. Or Corneton pointed out that social habits are essentially legitimate performances and if habit memory is inherently performative, then social habit memory must be distinctively social performative. This is the frame which I believe, together with what is happening now out there, where many of the works that we're going to be discussing today gain a huge importance, not only for the world of large, but also to our discipline, to the discussions that are happening here in DISA, the discussions that are also happening in the Department of Preservation. Priority, Robert is going to be the first speaker, he's a designer, scholar, professor, he's actually a PhD professor now here in DISA, as all of you know, since he was a professor before in Syark, in RISE and School of Architecture in Oslo, but since he's developed together with her office, the Briani Robert Studio, very important and well-known body of work that includes a number of significant and quite famous performances that have been broadly discussed. I'd like to remember now the work that probably many of you saw at the Chicago Architectural Biennial, we know how to order, a work that was developed in association with a choreographer, Arthur Waldhorn and a number of people from South Chicago that brought to the federal buildings a new way or a different way of ordering and a number of practices that were mostly removed from the evolution of the city center, or worse, like Corpus Caneo and Piaceca Pidolia and Rome, that in a way are reclaimed in that the urban and the ground for architecture is never a tabula rasa, it's actually like in the name of the book that she edited with Lars Munnar, the tabula plena, forms of urban preservation, already constructed in the work of architecture and as she claims for her practice, is always intervening on existing structures. Her work has been published broadly and she's published a very interesting piece that I would encourage you to read on how is architecture political that is actually a neighbor review, the super important ecosystem in which many of these things are being discussed now and she's going to start and I'm very happy to be introducing today, Brianne, that is well known for all of you. The second speaker is Kate Gilmore, that is here, Kate, of course, is also well known for probably most of you and of course Kate is an artist and professor of art and design at Parchus College, her performative work, Operating Intersection, I would say, of the material with the collective production of subjectivity and the way shared spaces are institutionalized. Actually, I was very impressed to see last week her performance came in your bid, which a number of women coordinated were actually transforming and bid by bidding a number of metal podiums and it was very impressive for me and I would encourage you to try to attend her performances but just to give some glimpses of her work, her work has been included in many artistic venues, of course the Whitney Biennial, the 2011 Moscow Biennial, the 2005 and the 2011 PS1 Greater New York and is part of some of the most important American art collections, the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, I went to stop not to make it super long and kind of take all the time. And the third speaker is going to be Sabira Simons, that is also well known probably for most of you, her work is included in an ongoing investigation of sensory experience, memory and abstraction within present and future histories as cyclical, rather than linear. Her work is actually in a way an endeavor of breaking these linear narratives and introducing this cyclical aspect that enables other actors to emerge. Working in the weight class, racial and gender tensions are embedded in time, locations and institutions. Her work is often based on interdisciplinary associations like the ones that we're probably discussing here today and brings together sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance. I understand that probably you talked today of the archive as impactors at MoMA and I'm very happy that this is happening is a long running or kind of long term research that ended up with a multi format setting that probably some of you had the opportunity to see at MoMA. But of course her work has been shown at MoMA, the studio museum of Harlan, the contemporary art museum at Houston, the sculpture center, and right now Sabira is research scholar at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the history of women and American at Harvard University. We're going to start right away, basically the format is that each of the speakers is going to give a short talk, a 50 minute talk of their work and then we'll have a discussion that will be open to your questions. So please take notes of all your petitions, doubts, questions and we'll go to them afterwards. Thank you very much. Okay, well thank you Andres for that fantastic introduction. You really nicely set the stage of a lot of the questions that we can talk about today. So as you heard in that bio, my work combines strategies from art and architecture to deal with historic sites. And I work across a range of media, but today I'll be focusing on the more performative works. And since we are in an architecture school and I'm teaching in a preservation program, I think it's important to address the question of how does performance become relevant for architecture and preservation? And to address that, it's useful to go to this moment when performance art really kind of came into its own as a medium in the 1960s and 70s with pieces such as Yoko Ono's cut piece. So for this famous performance, she sat on a stage in Kyoto and she invited the audience to one by one come up and cut off a piece of her clothing. So one by one they would walk up on the stage, pick up the scissors, cut and walk back down in silence. And the aim of this piece among others was to talk about the relationship between the viewer and the art object, that this is not a neutral relationship, but actually the viewer and the artist are themselves both individual bodies motivated by a range of interests, including the psychological, the sexual, political, racial, economic. And that all of these sort of experiences of the viewer in perceiving and valuing the artwork are informed by these biases, by these interests. So this was, and many other performance projects are really influential in shaping how we understand art and its reception. You have writers such as Amelia Jones writing about performance art saying as the artist is marked as contingent, so is the interpreter, who can no longer claim disinterestedness in relation to this work of art. And the projects are surfacing with desires and forming interpretation. So I think the art world has really sort of expanded and grown around these ideas of interpretation with a lot of theory and work being produced with a self-awareness of how the producers and the consumers are themselves interested in bias. But what about architecture and preservation? This is a very similar scenario, I would argue, because again, we are dealing with aesthetic judgment with viewers assessing, valuing, and acting on objects, in this case, buildings and spaces. So we have a lot of very sophisticated theory addressing this sort of political and economic interests that shape preservation, a lot of it coming out of this program, in fact. But I would say that it hasn't yet fully impacted practice or changed the processes by which we analyze and act on historic spaces. So I would propose that we consider performance not as just an end result, but as a process that can be used for analysis, for design, and for preservation. And that's a way of broadening our methods, but also getting historic spaces to connect to current critical discourses around social use and social identity. So I'm gonna talk about a couple projects in brief, since we're doing this really quickly, and that are sort of bridging both analysis and design. So the first is a sort of parallel research and design project that I've been working on for the last year, focusing on documentation and how documentation itself is a form of performance. So if we look at the surveys of existing buildings, the act of measuring, drawing, notating, building, it's actually a kind of complex choreography of interaction between a body and a site. So I've been looking at these Renaissance drawings from the 16th century, which are considered part of the sort of formation of the discipline of architecture and showing that actually there's this alternative history of movement and choreography and content embedded in these drawings. And that can be seen moving through the present. So in the 19th century methods of documenting existing buildings, there were these sort of almost acrobatic acts of climbing on stairs and measuring and grappling and even pressing into buildings. So on the right, we see wet paper squeezes that were applied in order to pick up cuneiform and voluminous in a ramp. And even today, I would argue that in 3D scanning and photogrammetry, the position of the viewer is still notated in the final three-dimensional model. And so even in AzureSoft, you see the position of the cameras and this is part of our understanding of the representation. So as a sort of ongoing experimentation, I've been looking at what are the tools and the methods for this interaction between bodies and buildings? How do we measure space with our bodies? And working with this dancer, Melissa Loma, this was when I was in Rome at the American Academy last year, that we developed a set of tools, a set of props that would make visible this act of measuring scale with your own body and measuring, for example, the changing height of a wall along the street. And also these different objects that map the negative space between bodies and structures and start to look at the sort of tactility of measuring space through touch. And this is a sort of continuously evolving project. But it did feed into a larger scale performance at the Campidoglio in Rome. And the Campidoglio is this really fascinating intersection of architectural form and politics. This design you see here is Michelangelo's design for the piazza, which combined renovations of the buildings and this pattern on the ground. The pattern was actually not implemented until 1940 under Mussolini. So there's sort of many layers of architecture and line being used to inscribe a sense of unity, authority and power. And the site is the center of civic government in Rome. It's the head of the city authority. But it's also a complicated place where identity is sort of being hashed out. So when I was there sort of the year and then into the summer of 2016, it was a time when Rome was electing its first female mayor. So you had these public debates in the space with Virginia Raji, who was arguing your case. You also had the ongoing performances of weddings in the piazza, which is a sort of day-to-day occurrence, often extremely sort of archetypal for titles of relationships. And then you also have a lot of protests since it's the place where you come to express your grievances to the city government, often women's rights issues which are often overlooked in Rome. So I was interested in how this project could be a process of mapping and measuring that would also be transformative of the site. So it originated with the choreographer and I, Melissa Lohman, looking at how the dancers themselves could move through the pattern and kind of map out its growing scale, that the many patterns within the larger radio patterns of the piazza. But then it was important for us to also have the actors or the agents and the tools kind of push against each other in this process. That there was a real awareness of the physicality of measurement and how it impacted the body. And also to ask who is doing the measuring, who is doing the sort of inscribing these lines in space. So we developed this project with a group of five Roman women who were wearing these sort of almost worker-like outfits, indicating, and in the beginning the performance starts through the sort of very rote mechanical work of measuring the space for these long white rods. And as they move outward and scale, they sort of pick up pace and start to really jump around and kind of fly with these rods. The piece has a sort of interlude where the tools themselves are shaping the body and they managed to balance their entire weight on these different configurations of the rods. And then at the end they become compasses that measure and rotate through the space. So the idea is that it was about not only exposing the sort of bodily dimension of measurement and analysis, but also it's a form of preservation because it's showing not just the architectural value of the space in its sort of geometrical complexity, but also the sort of many social layers pointing to this issue of the movement of women in that space and how that's kind of been a controversial and constantly evolving condition. And then lastly I'll just touch on the project in Chicago that Andreas mentioned, which I also talked about in the fall in this room, so I don't want to repeat too much. So I won't show the whole video, but maybe just a little clip of it. So this is the project done for the Chicago Architecture Biennial last year, actually now it's 2015. And so this project was again looking at this intersection between architectural value and social value of the site, how performance can kind of tease out the tension between the two. And I proposed doing a project at the Federal Center, which is this sort of incredible space of total design. It's a plaza and 3D buildings that are representations of federal authority and they're all united by this grid from the paving stones to the facades and through the interiors. And so the project was partly about how a set of dancers can kind of map out that space. Again, this is the sort of form of preservation of some of the invisible elements of the architectural design become visible. But it's also about asking again, who is doing that drawing? Who's doing that inscribing? And introducing the kind of larger social history of this place. So the Federal Plaza, like the Cavidolia, is also a site of protest because it's the sort of seat of power. And it's been, it's within the loop, it was sort of built in isolation from physically, from more diverse parts of the city. And yet it's a moment when more diverse populations can come into the center and be heard. And I was also interested in how there was this sort of relationship between the development of the interloop and of this site in particular under Mayor Daley and a disinvestment in the south side. So this sort of investment in architectural value, disinvestment in the real sort of social healthiness of Chicago. So this project was in collaboration with the South Shore Drill Team, which is this incredible group on the south side of Chicago. And I worked with a choreographer, Asher Waldron, to develop this project, which starts out with the kind of militaristic dimensions of the drill team. These routines with rifles and flags that follow rigid grids and kind of make physical the gridded nature of this space. But then also become increasingly, oops, sort of expressive and individual as each of the performers starts to interpret the space in their own way and combines the sort of militaristic movement with hip hop. So I'll just show one minute of that. Okay, so I think I'll just wrap up there. So I'm just trying to let everyone have some time. Hello everybody. It was really interesting seeing these roam pictures because I was there probably 10 years before you and Berlusconi was elected. And that at a company earlier, I'm saying terribly wrong, was not a place of, you know, of women's rights. It was Nazi students. So it's really interesting how this site can change because you were in Rome 10 years later and I was in Rome at a different time. So super interesting. I wish I could crop my room pictures. They were not as positive as yours. Okay, so my name is Kate Gilmour. Thank you, Congress, for such a nice intro. And you were like, I think you compiled like so much information in five minutes. That's like an amazing skill. So I am not an architect and I'm not gonna claim to know a lot about architecture. I'm pretty, I'm mostly a performance video sculpture installation person, that type of a person. But clearly architecture is a big part of that conversation and you know, I probably enter it in a different way than most of you who are architects enter it. So I didn't, because this is a short amount of time, I didn't show you, I didn't bring a lot of video. I didn't bring any video because it's like 10 minutes we're supposed to talk or something like that. So I mostly brought documentation of live performances that are in more public space. Oh, good, they have a time in the future. So I'm gonna just show you a bunch of different performances and talk about how they're made and where they're taking place and what happens. And then I hopefully in the panel discussion we can kind of get a little bit more complicated and answer the questions that you're most interested in. Okay, so she told me how to do this and of course. Okay, so this is a show I have up now. It's at Ansteller Rays Gallery on the Lower East Side. There are performances every weekend. This weekend is the last weekend. It's Saturday and Sunday, four to six p.m. And what happens is for two hours and on Sunday if you come it's definitely free but it's also a benefit for Planned Parenthood. There's booze, there's sherry items and so come and hang out and watch performance, get drunk, give some money to Planned Parenthood. So basically these are steel cubes. They're enamel painted steel cubes and for two hours a day, Saturday and Sunday these women are stomping on these cubes. So they're stomping at a beat. So they're on a count of five. One, two, three, four, boom. One, two, three, four, boom. There's a leader and everyone's following that particular leader and they choose who this is. They're wearing clearly combat boots and brass knuckles. So they can make sound however they wanna make sound but they have to keep it on the same beat. So it's pretty ominous. It's pretty dark. It's loud and obnoxious. But in my opinion it was fitting for the times just to give you an idea of how I work. This show was not supposed to be this show but because of our political circumstances the show changed. So the initial idea, I don't even wanna go into it but I do a lot of this pottery stuff and there were gonna be performances but like women and pottery and like for blah blah blah. Anyways it was supposed to be like a lot nicer than this. And then we, you know, America has turned fascist so things changed and I felt like the show needed to get a little bit more, a lot more aggressive. To reflect not only the way I felt personally but to kind of instill a call to action as much as possible. And I don't even know what that call of action is. I just felt like there was some sort of need for aggressive behavior that sort of somehow instilled this idea of work and labor and that we had something to do. So this is beat. Do we direct it here? Yeah. Okay. How, why is it not working? Okay. So this is just a detail of the brass knuckles and the boots. But this is another piece that was made at the Everson Museum in Syracuse and you know, you guys are gonna, don't ask me in an architect's game, I'm sorry. I'm gonna give you a heads up right now, don't do it, ask them. But the architecture was like really dominant and scary. And I teach at Purchase College. I don't know if any of you guys have ever been but it's a very similar architecture. It's a very imposing. And so basically this is a piece where it's about a 36 foot long structure and there are women on top of this structure for the entire summer. So I think it was like five hours a day, different groups of women on top of the structure and there were holding pieces. I hope I don't do too, I didn't. And they're holding pieces from the collection. So they're holding ceramics from the collection. So the museum agreed to lend me ceramics that are, because it's a big ceramics institution. So the women are sort of caring for the object during the summer. And they picked, they decide which piece they wanna hold on to. And the only rule is that they have to be in somehow engaging with it physically. But they can walk, they can sleep, they can do whatever they want, but they do need to be touching it in some way at all times. This is a piece that was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan for this crazy thing called Art Prize. I don't know if you guys know what this is. But my friend owns an organization there called Sight Lab, which does site-specific projects. And Habitat for Humanity donated these houses to him to do projects with. So he asked me to do a piece. And I was like, yeah, sure, of course. I have a whole house. So this was a former nunnery. And the house is painted pink and inside is this bright red. And these women swing out of the windows. So you see these kind of bodies emerging from the house, moving back and forth from the house. This was a piece at Bryan Park. This was actually my first live performance in public art piece ever. This was in 2010. This was through the Public Art Fund. And they asked me to propose a public piece. And I was just like, I don't, I mean, I make these weird videos where I break stuff. How am I gonna do a public art piece? And, but then they were like, we can do it. We doesn't have to be a traditional public art piece. So we designed this piece where, so the structure was up for an entire work week. So the women are in two groups, walking five hours for one group, five hours for the other, 10 hours a day. And the rule was that they couldn't talk. They could only communicate their where it comes. They could only communicate with their heels. And they couldn't follow each other. So they had to navigate their own pace throughout the whole time. So it was kind of like the subway in a way, figuring out your own way to get somewhere. So there was no like circular activity. It was really kind of like maze and navigation. The public could enter the space. And then it was like a very strong echo of the women walking. And this became like some kind of strange phenomena in New York. People were engaged there. I think someone got married and it was, I thought I was making these like angry female peas and like getting like yellow flowers. I mean, people got into it in a way I hadn't expected. But it took on a life of its own, which was interesting. Here they are walking. So then they brought this piece to London and this is the financial district. And it became like actually people were really mad at me. So these are all these white dudes that come out all the time in, I'm sorry white dudes, but they were white dudes. They were white dudes in suits coming out. And they were so mad because they thought I was saying like, that there are no women or women of color or anybody in their offices. And I was like, well, are there? But London, there's supposed to be a lot more polite that did not happen. So it was like I was constantly attacked for this piece more than New York, which was really interesting. It was a similar structure. People could walk in and out. It was more along. But it became like people were very angry about the piece. And so it was this constant conversation and sort of having to defend myself that I guess like same political thing about like women in the workplace was not a conversation people really wanted to have. This is a piece that was made at the ICA in Maine in Portland, Maine. And this is a woman of war. And this is just stairs around the structure. This is in the Maine. I don't know if you guys have ever been to Portland, Maine, but it's like this big. But this is the Maine area in Maine. And Maine area in Portland. And so these are stairs. And so for a week, the women are walking the stairs. Again, in these shifts, but it's a lot of work. And so I always try to have a diverse body as much as possible. Physically, size two to size the biggest I can get. Age, I try to have a spectrum raise. I mean, for me, it's supposed to sort of encompass a variety of usually female bodies. So this is minus square. This is a piece that was made at PACE. Am I doing okay? Okay. This is a piece that was made at PACE, which is a hoity-toity gallery in New York City with a ton of money. And I was like, yeah, I'll do something there. That sounds good. But then you start thinking about the place where you're showing. It's the same thing. You think about the place you're building something and you also think about this. The politics of the place that you're showing. And as a female artist doing what I do, that's important. So this is a 7,500 pound cube of clay, wet clay. And through the duration of the show, the women are throwing it at the walls, at the floor, at the ceiling, and at the audience occasionally. So there's shit all over the walls basically at PACE. But it was like probably one of my best performative experience because the energy of it became really intense. And they just, we thought the sculpture was gonna sort of be there afterwards, but it just completely disappeared in two hours. They just, you know, oh, there you go. There you go. It became sort of renaissance looking in a way, and then, but also just the anger of these women really came out in this way. I didn't expect it because I don't tell people how to perform. They perform in their own bodies. This was made at the Milk of Cleveland. I wish I had a better install shop for you guys, you architects, but I don't. These women were stationed throughout the museum, and they're on these just traditional art bases, and again, they're holding ceramics. So they're there all day in different parts of the museum, and they can hold these ceramics however they want. They can lie down, they can sleep, they can stand up in any configuration they want to. This was a piece made at Art Basel in Miami. These are men and women that look alike, and they are just sledgehammering these steel bases. So it's again, it's a pretty hoity-toity affair. It's at the Bass Museum, and it was, you know, I don't know if you guys know about Art Basel in Miami, but that's where a lot of money happens. It's a lot, it's a complicated political place for artists and dealers and everybody else in our world, but everything sort of comes together and it's very clear when you're there. So, you know, for me, I wanted to do something that again still is about art-making, because I'm a lover of making art, but also the politics of art-making is complicated, and where we show and the politics surrounding that was something I wanted to deal with. So these women and men are sledgehammering the cubes throughout the evening, and it's very loud and emotionless. This is again, this cube piece, a public art form piece again. So this is, these are plaster cubes, and they're a little bit wet, so plaster is flying everywhere, so the public has to navigate this kind of flying debris that's all over the place. This was a piece made of the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina. You walk into the museum, it just looks like a regular museum, it's white walls, you turn the corner and then these women are built inside the walls for the duration of the show. So for three months, different schedules, they're built on the backside of the wall. I think I did it in like 14 minutes. Okay, cool, thank you. Hi everybody, I'm a flight, so I need your assistance. Can I have the lights off please? Thank you. Is it possible? Because of what? Of your recording, okay, sounds good. Thank you guys all, thank you for that little light dimming. Thank you all who came before. To talk, I always show Kate's work in my lectures, when I usually make a longer lecture, it's always, I always show you work, I love your work, and we also are in the same gallery in Miami, big fan, and so it's fabulous to be here. And I took my classroom for fun, so it's pretty cool. So I'm Zyberia Simmons, I'm actually, I've been giving studio visits to a lot of graduate students here for the past half a year, so it's been fun to be at Columbia. I, my practice is really diverse, and it's really difficult for me to just talk about this one aspect of it, but I'm gonna do my best. I normally make photographs, installations, performances, and videos, and sound works, and my studio really works cyclically. But anyway, I tried to isolate some things. So we'll start with some photographs. I really started out as a traditional four by five large format photographer, and I really, really, really was obsessed. And given the political climate that we're in right now, I'm sort of revisiting that obsession. I kind of had left this body of work behind for a little while. This is works that were made in 2010, 11, 12. This one is called composition one for score A. Really thinking a lot about the American landscape or really the sublime in photography and landscape photography and painting, and inserting a diverse group of characters and actors to sort of subvert that conversation. That has a lot to do with my personal history of walking. I spent two years in walking pilgrimage with Buddhist monks, so I don't know, I have a real, I work a lot, but I think about space in a really small scale in a way. Like I kind of could really make a work about like a square inch of a space and kind of try to explode that space in some way. So that's these landscape-based large format works to kind of try to do that. Think about a small area and how to magnify those spaces. This is a work called maps. I'm an actor in some of the works, not all the time, but I'm really interested in mapping. As I've continuously used maps in my work, it's kind of, it keeps evolving, where I used to use real maps, and now I make my own maps as a way to, the maps that I make now, which I don't think I have images of those works, but the maps that I make now are really about trying to take away architecture in some respects and to think a lot about a diverse vocabulary within a map, so letting go of some aspects of traditional map making, which is very subjective, and really putting in a lot of my own definitions into the map. This is a really early work. This is called Denver. Most of the time in my works, I don't really name the place except for this one. I really like landscapes to feel open-ended so that when we are having a conversation, you can say to me, oh, well, that reminds me of that landscape there, and that character could have existed there, and I had a more relational conversation. So I guess where, this is, it's so strange to present this work because when I presented it at the time, I don't think it was really that cool, you know what I mean? In the sense that the Museum of Modern Art asked me to make a work, but they said, I don't know the time, but I'll just keep talking. The Museum of Modern Art asked me to produce the work, but they said, you cannot put anything on the walls, which is like, hello, like it's MoMA, you're like, oh, fabulous, I'm putting things on the wall, no, they didn't want my fabulous photographs or whatever, so, but they were like, you can do anything else. So I thought about it, and I decided to spend a year in their archives looking for the political line in MoMA because MoMA is a very, this is, before I did this project, I had one vision of the Museum of Modern Art, which was this bastion of modern art and contemporary art, and while it is that, and it's also probably one of the most famous museums, architectural spaces to look at art, it's also, it's a tourist attraction, it's a very multicultural space. When I performed there, I performed and I would ask questions, we'll get into the performance, but I would ask questions. I speak very little French, I understand Spanish a little bit and Italian, but I would come off of the performance platform and ask people if they had any questions about the performance, and, well, it was every other language that I did not speak, you know what I mean? And most of the time, we couldn't actually have a real clear conversation from my end, because I couldn't speak the languages that were in front of me. But anyway, so I spent a year inside of the archives and looked for the political line, and what I mean by the political line in the Museum of Modern Art, and this was in 2013, were works, either works, that were in the museum's collection, so I had a criteria of three. Of three, one was the Museum as Instigator or the artist as impetus or the artist as instigator. So it's really difficult to instigate things at MoMA, really, if you think about the history of the museum, it was founded in 1929 by women, and it's, but it has guards. It's always had some form of protection, so a lot of the artist intervention, you would think, oh, there's tons of people been doing things forever, but actually, no, the museum is really, pretty guarded, so things do happen, but not at the rate at which I thought that they would have happened, and I was in the archives looking at firsthand accounts. There's also the Museum as Collector, so we would, I spent the year, and then I basically combed from the museum's archives a text using the museum's language to describe the works, and I chose works from every decade, so from 1929 to 2011, which was Occupy Museums in Wall Street, so I chose three works per decade that could sort of show how either the museum collected politically or artists intervened politically, so these works are from, and then we presented those works three days a week. Again, it's interesting looking at both of you guys' works, thinking about how we put our women in these worker clothes, which now I'm like, I know more worker clothes, my ladies are gonna have to get sexier for my own, but we were in our worker clothes, and it was very kind of, I wanted it to feel very interventionist inside the museum, even though I'm using images from the collection and I have a megaphone, I have an amplifier microphone, but people really thought that we were some sort of guerrilla group, and the piece was performed with about 10 different performers, two hours a day, twice a week, and then five hours a day on Fridays, so every hour on the hour, we would present another decade and speak about the work, so this was the 1980s, and these are all works in the museum's collections, that's David Wainerovich, A Fire in My Belly in the Middle, General Idea, A-12 Paper, and Felix Gonzalez Torres, Perfect Lovers, and how we would present this project would be, I'm gonna go back to that one, would be to describe the work and then describe its relationship to the museum and the museum's politics, so the most, I would say, political act that MoMA had done from my perspective, until now, is the, I mean, many other MoMAs done lots of things politically, but in terms of, was the acquisition of this work, David Wainerovich's Fire in My Belly, so I think it was, correct me if I'm wrong, because I can't remember every date, but I think it was in 2009, I want to say, the National Portrait Gallery in, does everybody know David Wainerovich? No, oh wow, okay. Okay, I can't give that history lesson, but I will say he was a queer homosexual artist working during the height of the AIDS epidemic in America, he very, I mean, his work is phenomenal, must, must view, amazing. Anyway, he made a piece called, a film called Fire in My Belly, and one of the images in the film has ants crawling on a crucifix, amongst other assorted images, and this was shown at the National Portrait Gallery, which is our, you know, it's funded taxpayer dollars, I think, pretty sure, and a Christian group protested the showing of that video, and immediately the Museum of Modern Art, when the National Portrait Gallery took the video down due to pressure from the Christian group, and I can't remember the group's name, and David Wainerovich, the Museum of Modern Art immediately purchased the work and put it up. That was like, whoa, when I found that after thumbing through 1929, it's Jackson Paula, who then all of a sudden we got to this era, and I was like, oh my God, it's amazing, like they're fabulous, and it was really inspiring to see, and it's, so this was in 2013, which at the time people weren't as like thinking about like museum, I'm sure people were thinking about it, but I felt like, whoa, this is kind of out there, because people would, you know, a lot of these pastors buys would be like, politics has no place in the museum, but I'm like, this is all works from the museum's collection that are not on view, but anyway, okay, but the entire piece is called Archivist's Impetus Not On View, which I find so interesting because now, you know, MoMA is showing works that were not on view from their collections and archives. This is a set from the 1980s, you have the 1980s, actually this is like the war set. You have the Art Workers' Coalition protesting the museum, so there are a lot of artists who wrote letters, made posters against the museum's administration, against the institution of MoMA. This is just to give you another view. This would be the Friday view, where there'd be four or five of us performing every hour, performing for the five hours. This was probably the most popular, I wanna say, which is really interesting to me, which the most popular set group, which were all the quote-unquote feminist interventions, so, you know, the Guerrilla Girl started because of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. You have an eraser, I don't know if you can see it up there, the first one. It's called Erase Sexism at MoMA because, and then the middle, the middle, there's the third image is a poster from the Guerrilla Girls, and the Guerrilla Girls started because the Museum of Modern Art had an exhibition in the 80s that was all men inside of the exhibition, and the Guerrilla Girls were like, we're not having that, so they started protesting and they also started writing letters, not only to the direct, they started writing letters to the Museum itself, but also to the director specifically. And that one says, let me see if I can remember it. Dear our collector, it has come to our attention that your collection, like most, does not include women. We hope, it's something like we hope that you will remedy that situation immediately, all our love for Guerrilla Girls. And so for the performance, we would intervene inside of the space come out and read the poster literature as well as the historical context in which the artwork came into the Museum's possession. This is just, and interestingly enough, there's a Yayoi Kusama intervention that happened in the 1960s to protest the Vietnam War, and also to sort of protest the lack of women inside of the Museum, and the Museum actually did not remember that it had, that had happened until she gave, she was having a retrospective in like 2010, I think, at the Museum, and she reminded the Museum like, actually I did something in the 60s and they found the clipping inside of the archives buried in, where she had naked swimmers intervening in the Museum's sculpture garden. This was like 1969. And then just let them play and frolic inside of the space to protest the Vietnam War and also to protest the lack of women showing the Museum. And I'm gonna fast forward. This is the precursor to a work that I just produced at the kitchen last month, or in December, called Coded. This is a piece called Number 19. I was commissioned by the High Line in New York to think about the High Line and the Peers, the Hudson Peers, which are on the west side of New York. I don't know if you guys have been, have you all been to the High Line? Okay, that's great. So before the High Line was the High Line, it was also many things in the 80s, 70s, and 80s. It was a cruising site for homoerotic activities. And it was a sexual activity, relationship activities. It was a very open, closed space, I wanna say. But I got really interested in those peers and the history of those peers and also the photographs that were made in the 70s and 80s of men loving each other. That was really, and being physically engaged on those peers. And so I got so enraptured that I started to make works thinking about the photographs, thinking about island culture, because Manhattan is an island, and then the peers are on the water. And I started thinking also about gesture, this sort of male to male gesture, and then how I could take the language of this gesture and place it on other bodies and sort of start to choreograph with that. So I started making photographs first that sort of talked to the gestures that I found on the peers in photography. So these gestures, the original photographs that I was looking at were mostly men with men. And I decided to use that gesture to see how a woman or a women, a group of women would embody those male gestures, how would it change, how would it feel. And also I wanted to think a lot about the sheer pleasure of looking. Like how can I, I'm not a man, I don't identify as homosexual, but how can I find pleasure in looking at queer and homoerotic imagery? And I really, really kind of felt into it as something, a way of working. I'm gonna fast forward. And so I started working with these dancers to make the initial photographs that worked on the peers, on the same peers that the history was happening. But then I've taken it to another place where I'm looking at the gestures of the peers and the homoerotic, but I'm also thinking a lot about physicality and the architecture of the body and Dantel culture, Jamaican Dantel culture and the physicality of that and kind of combining those two. And so that would be, I hope, this is a still from, this was sort of the origin piece. And then a year later I made a video work that kind of brought, choreographed and brought a lot of the gestures that I was looking at brought to pure movement that then resulted in a work that I just premiered. I don't know if there's extra sound. And what I wanted to say, so the foundation for this project, again, is looking a lot at homoerotic gestures and male to male sensuality and sexuality. And also breath as cause, breath as a break between physicality. Thinking about how to take gesture and physicality from one space and embody within one group and then transfer it to another and tease it out. And that's it. I propose that whenever anyone wants to do something, just raise your hand and we can start right away. Meanwhile, I'm going to propose a first, maybe, question. I mean, if we read the connection between the three talks, I think there's something that all of you share. And it's this moment in which the solemnity of the body at some point can somehow react to modern spaces, that are constraining as an archive a huge amount of realities to become visible, to become accessible. I'm thinking, for instance, of the cube of clay and how you mentioned, Kate, that there was so much anger and that you didn't tell the women what to do. They were just throwing the clay and that was something that was somehow maintaining a reality that was already there, this anger. But for instance, in your work in MoMA, it's pretty amazing the way that the collection was actually not working at something that was including art, sensitivities, concerns, but was actually making sure that some of them would never be seen. And your work is also very solemn in the way that these even working clothes were performing with the people where the women were using it also in a very almost military way to bring these realities back. And for instance, I'm thinking, very only in the work of Campidoli, in the way that all those geometries and practices that were overlapping and that the Campidoli Square was actually archiving were brought in in the Mussolini pattern, let's say, through the use of bodies, also in a very solemn way. That's something that really strikes me. I have the feeling that there's something going on there that probably makes your work different to works that were very different to things that were done before. That's to be the first one. Do we offer? Later. Can you, do I need this? You can probably hear me. Or do you need this for a reason? Oh, okay. I have this like opera voice, it's crazy. I guess for my work, I wouldn't say my work is solemn, like looking at your, you know, they have like a calmer energy, like it's still within that same, you can tell, you know, I know her work very well, and you know, it's coming from rage, but she seems to, she has more filters, I believe, like it's harnessed differently, differently. It's almost choreographed more. I don't want to talk about it, but so this solemn thing I would say, it's a little bit different for me. The piece that's up now is, it's of sad beats, you know, and solemn, I don't know if I would say the word solemn, but I would say that it's sad and sort of, it's stuck, but there's a sort of a refusal. But it's interesting the way the two of you, you know, you guys use this like this harnessed body in a way to like control a situation, and I think with me it's sort of, I don't have any control over the situation, it's like I get a bunch of people who I know can do it, I build some stuff, and I'm just like, to see what happens, you know, and I think with them there's like, it's more choreographed, it's more choreographed, and that's what I think is really interesting with, or maybe not with photographs as much, but the performances have this like more systems, and then there's an organizational system, which with the solemnness, maybe because it has this order, the solemnness comes to real, I don't know. I don't know if this is all amusing, I'm a direct, I don't know, I think I'm a director, you know, I'm really, I'm kind of a sculptor director, I really have my hand, I'm like this, any photograph that I make, anything with my hand, just like turn your head this way. I'm a little bit of a control, controller in that, I mean, in all ways, and I think that probably has to do with, I don't know, childhood, it probably has to do with, you know, as in terms of my art training, I worked with a four by five, which is, you have to, it's like a machine gun, if you don't like, you know, control it, it's gonna control you, you have to, you shoot the photograph upside down, it's film, you got it. So, you know, that's one thing I'm also trained as an actor on purpose so that I could be a better director. So, you know, I'm really into everything being prepared, you know, I mean, it's such a cheesy thing right after it prepares, but it's true, like I really prepare, and I've been doing that since I started making works with, you know, driving around, making works with photographs in landscapes, I had to have the characters right because that was one less thing to worry about. So, there is a certain amount of control, but I will say, with the Museum of Modern Art piece, it wasn't, I mean, I didn't play video, but it wasn't very somber. It was pretty, I mean, we were with, we were with, you know, amplifier and microphone, and I mean, people were looking at their, you know, Rodin right there, and the next thing you know, here we come, and we're like, yeah, let's go, I understood people were just like, whoa, like, we came here to have a solemn, introspective moment, and at that time, it was really about not mimicking, you know, what, let's say, Occupy did or, you know, but it was like, wake up, people, like, you know, yes, this museum's fabulous, but it also has like a political connection that we really, that now is really there, and I'm so glad that they've taken some sort of really clear stance along with a lot of institutions at this point, so, but at that time, it felt like really important to bring that out. It's also to have the bodies that you have at the moment, I mean, that in itself, in 2013, if that's when it was right, it didn't seem that long ago, but actually a lot has happened in that time, so those particular bodies and those particular spaces was kind of a big deal. Yeah, yeah. I think the question of order and solemnity in all the work, it seems to be this way of, it's almost an allegory for some sort of system that is being resisted, that it's sort of a stand-in for another form of control, but I do think that there is a kind of playful absurdity in all of the work, too, that makes it either that system of order is in the wrong place or it's coming through, like, in the wrong color, you know, wrong in quotes, but like, there's a sense of displacement and sort of alteration to a system that, I mean, I hope my work is funny and is absurd and surprising, and maybe it's partly that these things are shown and, you know, assigned them, but I think, you know, if you are against a great disruptor of people's expectations in their daily lives, so. Let's talk about politics, right? You wrote this piece that I found very interesting of how architecture is political. I'd like to bring back this question because that's something that you all mentioned in a way, like, that your work was political, that you were intervening in political situations, that you were actually defining what's the kind of relationship that you want to have with your peers, so, but politics is very polysemic, so maybe I could bring the question that Rani was doing, her piece, and say, how your work is political. What is the way that you see your work performing politically? No, I don't think it's political. Well, and I feel like I can't, because in this past month, I just feel like my life has completely changed, so I just don't even remember the past 20 years of making work anymore, just like we don't remember, like, although Obama was president only four weeks ago. Fuck. But, so I feel like, I can't even, like when you say like humor, I used to be funny, but I'm just like so not funny. Like I just, you know, I used to believe in that like humor, come, be funny, look, I'm cute, be funny, and then look, punch him in the face, right? Someone's comfortable when there's humor, right? And then you can like do an undercut. But now, I mean, I just am so filled with rage and scared and, and, you know, they're happening to probably a lot of us. So, okay, so the question of politics, how's my work political? First of all, just in relationship to what I was saying about bodies, my body in space, in a certain configuration, in a certain space that carries information, regardless, like we just walk into a space, we have information, like I walk into Columbia, I'm like, oh, it's so fancy, you know, like, information, right? It's like the ivory tower. Here we are, like, let's fuck it up, right? But, I'm not saying shit, but I'm just saying, like, we've got to admit, right? But, everywhere we go, whether we're going to like the food store or, you know, we're going to Columbia, we just carry this information and this body, this history, coming into that space and just sitting here with you has political connotation without me even bringing my solution, you know? So what happens when you decide to intervene on that space, either sculpturally or performatively, with this particular body, with these particular experiences? So, I would say inevitably from the beginning of my work, just because of me putting my own experience and my own history into the way I make work, it's just political. I come from that, I'm not, you know, some artists are like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, it's like, it is, I'm from DC, it's political, you know? And, but now it's become, it's a confusing place for me right now, honestly, but at the same time, it's just everything seems so, every move I make in terms of art seems like much stronger and it's kind of, I've started to edit a lot out because the politics just, and it's more than politics, it's like survival at this point, like survival is politics. And so, yeah, I would say everything, every gesture I make in terms of performance or sculpture or art making is framed with some sort of political conversation. If that answered your question, I'll open it up. Yeah, I mean, I don't think any, if I really got into your deep subconsciouses of each person in here, you would see me as a political agent, as an artist now. I'm really, I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I'm trying to just be real. Like, I really don't see how you could not see my particular body in a, I mean, everyone's body's actually political, but I think given this presence where I am, it's, you automatically assume a certain politics because that's the history that I live through. I will say that my work has pretty much always been political. I've never, since I started making works, landscape-based photography with characters in them, I mean, you know, I chose which characters, how? You know, how they looked, what they did, and where. I mean, it's been a, I'm also very, you know, right now very confused. I'm like, wait, what, huh? I'm so confused. I have so many projects, honestly, and I'm so confused because actually I was in Atlanta yesterday, which I don't know if folks have been there. I felt even more political there. I'm from New York, but my body in Atlanta landscape feels even more political because of the disparity of wealth there. It's just so, like, present in a way that New York can kind of hide. In southern atmospheres, you see it, it's clear. Like, holy shit, that's what happened, and that's why these folks are like this. So I feel extra political, and I also feel political for folks beyond myself. That includes, obviously, immigrants right now. You know, even though I'm everybody's hands immigrant, it obviously includes gay, lesbian, trans, queer, what have you. Like, I'm fucking pissed and political about that. I'm pissed about, you know, I'm pissed for white folks because I'm just, and I'm political for white folks because I'm like, white folks have to figure out their conversation, you know what I mean? I'm pissed for Asian folks, so I'm just like pissed off. Right now, even though I make really beautiful items, I can hide that because I can slow down and I can just breathe and also think that I'm an artist, right? And there's a whole history of beauty, aesthetics. I can go there, you know? So I just work within those two things like that. Oh, it's a really powerful answer. I don't think I can follow that easily. But I think for, I think just the current situation makes it so clear that our picture, well, since we're within this context, architecture and preservation have to be asking that question constantly of what is the level and really making the tools. Because I think what I said in that text you're referring to was that so much of how we thought about it before was through representation that architecture can symbolize political ideas through its form or through its organization. But I really believe that it has to be so much more specific now, like specific to the complexities of specific bodies and that places and bodies carry immense political power and we have to find new methods of engaging that, of letting that lead rather than having everything kind of stuck in later. It's like, well, this is a historical form for democratic institutions and we can just program it later. It has to start with bodily interactions and understanding. It's interesting because in the three cases you mentioned bodies as the, let's say, vehicle for politics, it was not part of the question. So it was basically a, it was part of the answer. But the way that you're talking about this is bodies as archives, bodies as constructed, bodies as part of collective trajectories. Like for instance, I'm thinking of the queer gestures that were used in the work or for instance, I'm thinking of the choreographies that you were bringing to the federal buildings. And I'm thinking, for instance, of the coordination of these people breaking things or beating, in all cases, the architecture that you're using or is hosting your work is architecture that was very much looking at the future. Like when you think of, for instance, the federal buildings, they were kind of promising a new beginning. When you think of alumni, it was meant to be the modern thing, new things will come here to see things that will surprise you. When you think of the basis that you're using, for instance, I had the feeling that the basis were also kind of promising that they were neutral, that they would be hosting whatever, that it kind of, but you're insisting that there's a possibility of bringing the past and that the past is very important to construct a person. So I think we're kind of witnessing a shift in the way that we think politically. And think politically is probably bringing those other loaded trajectories that are removed from daily life. But that comes from progress and from jester, so jester I think is something that we could discuss in a way. That's such a powerful way of putting it, I think that's true, that bringing the politics of a situation involves bringing its history and sort of making the place, today is that history. And I love that you were talking about jester as being something that could be transferred or an appropriated or sort of carried. That often you think about and at least in architecture, if you're referencing history, you often reference form. You reference a capital or something. And that jester is a sort of very different vessel for bringing a history that is always going to be differently interpreted by each body. Um, but I don't know what else to say about jester. Um, political jester, hmm, I know, I don't know. I mean, I think I really started, I'm gonna riff off, I really started thinking a lot about it's, you know, you can't divorce a figure from a time. I think I'm gonna say it like that. And so when I was looking at a lot of the homoerotic imagery from the peers, that was like right before, you know, we had this epidemic, this AIDS epidemic in, you know, and it really changed people's bodies, right? Like, and I was really, I really, this is when I first started choreographing. I'm now, I guess I can call myself like partially choreographer, but you know, so I'm looking at bodies. I've always looked at bodies, right? And like you can't divorce like, you know, the time period that you're looking, you know, when those bodies were captured in the photograph. And so for me looking at, you know, these photographs from the peers, these like really sensual, gorgeous, like men loving men, I mean, and their bodies, they were pre, they were just right before, you know, we had this, I can't even, it's kind of decimation of a group for a while, you know, and a whole host of other people, but they were the ones that kind of had to hold this disease process, I don't know. They were labeled that, you know what I mean? And so you see these bodies and you think of that history and then you think, well, but life hasn't, you know, we moved on. Like bodies have shifted where this disease has gone, where it's how we've been able to help people live and stay alive. I don't know. I don't know if I'm running off on a tangent. I guess I'm just thinking gesture when it happens, who it happens to, how it happens, it's really loaded and political and it's, I can't be devoid of the time, when you're researching, it can't be devoid of the time in which you're capturing that moment. I think I probably got lost. No, no, no, it's like bodies are historical. Yeah, bodies are just a receptor, yeah. I'm sure there's so many questions, but what's the first one? Not ever. Hi, thank you very much for your amazing work. Write down my question a little bit to make sure it makes sense, but I was interested in the, so the very choreographed nature of your work and especially some of the kind of repetitive choreographed nature, like even in bringing your work, not some of the clay piece, but some of the more, oh, sorry, so not some of the clay piece, but that repetitive work and how kind of like artistic production, you know, I think it's, things become more automated in the economy. Artistic production kind of, I think, is taking a larger and larger portion of the economics and how kind of directing this repetitive movement is related to like the old history of Taylorism and efficiency of movement and controlling bodies of space. Obviously the content is completely opposite and the agenda is humanist versus being just fully productive, but I was curious how you maybe grappled with the issues of kind of directing the movements of the performers and maybe deal with their agency in the performance, like I think in some of the work there was varying degrees of control or openness. It's interesting that we all have this sort of the laboring women figure in the workers' clothes. And I think there's definitely these two sides to it, like in some ways it's articulating a system of control or a repetition that was maybe not chosen, but then I think in, at least in my projects, there's also this moment of like appropriation and turn where then that's where the sort of surprise comes in that these movements suddenly become something else. And what I was so drawn to about the South Shore drill team when I worked with them was that there was a sort of very intentional self-inflicted system of control that the drill team, not only in its movements, but in like the intense scheduling rehearsals was this sort of control that was a tool for liberation because it actually protected these kids, gave them like tons of services and job training and tutoring and all that stuff. And so it was a control that came up from like expression and actually it's like it's a lot of them to thrive. So it's this sort of interesting double-sided thing that I think I've always drawn to in all of my work for how like repetition and precision is also can lead to some surprising outcomes. And I think if you have a set guideline, I mean, they're much more detailed in terms of their choreography. And mine is like, you know, bang something on a countertop, you know, or like throw shit around and don't talk. You know, like, so there's very like simple rules. But when, I'm like, I just completely lost what I was gonna say. But I think when there is some sort of structure, like a very, at least in my case, like a very small amount of structure in terms of like what the body can actually physically do, that allows, I know you were talking about agency, that allows the agency to happen because in one sense, it's like everyone wears red or we wore red, that's very, but it's our new communist government. We vote, Russia! But, I can't focus, I'm a mess over there. But you know, with this sort of set guidelines that it allows like people to do, to act the way they would act within like sort of like a very loose structure. And then with doing that, you actually start seeing personality more, you start seeing action. And for me, I would say, yes, I mean, I think, I don't think anyone who knows me would say like that I'm not a control, a control freak. Like, I think I'm not, but I think most people think I am. But my idea is that I would like, people just lose their shit. Like, I'm not interested in control right now. Like, I'm interested, of course, in my art and there's all these things that come into play, like, you know, but aesthetics, you know, like you were talking about, but really at this point in where I am right now, this kind of set structure to just tear the shit up. You know, that's really where I am. This idea of control and this idea of like sort of playing by the rules or, and even like, you know, sticking to choreography to a certain extent. Like for me, right at this particular moment, at these, you know, 28 days that we've been experiencing, I feel like there's sort of no, like for me personally, that control feels imprisoning. And I am gonna try my best to break that even though it might not, it might go against every sort of aspect of my being. But at this point in terms of where we are and we have this way of communicating through art, this idea of breaking that moment is something I'm incredibly interested in. It's so interesting because our leader is not, he's not very in control. Which is so, you know, he's actually the messy Marvin of the group. And like, we're actually trying to gain control of our sanity, really, because we, I'm not speaking for everyone, I'm sure there's a few folks. Maybe just for me, that's okay. Yeah, but it's interesting that you talked that way because actually, like, we are trying to reel it in, even to the point where you have your Fox News recorder, which is, I don't know if you guys saw that on the news, which was amazing. And he literally looked into the camera. He was just like, you're trying to take us for a fool. Like, he's trying to, this Fox News recorder is trying to, so we're talking about architecture, right? He's trying to reel in a wacko, like, you know what I mean? And like, we're all trying to control a very wild beast. He reminds me of, ooh, this is gonna be recorded. He was like, I have, I have, and this is totally off topic, but I'm gonna go for it. I have a poodle, she's red-headed, sorry. She's red-headed, she's fabulous. Her name's Zaha Hadid, she's fabulous. But she's not anymore, she used to be out of control. She's a beast. This dude here, he's out of control, and we are all like scratching our eyes because we've never seen it before. We've never seen this much disorder from someone who's supposed to be leading 300 million of us, right? And then we have, we even have to the point where we have your most conservative wacko new station looking at the president in the face via the TV and being like, you taking us for a fool. Like, we are not crazy, you are, but somehow we still have to live in this delusional state. I'm traumatized. That's interesting, actually, maybe, no, you're right, this idea of raining it down. Yeah, that's super interesting. It's a new idea. I might steal it from him. It's basically audience and participation of audience. There's only a brand new year showing the upcoming piece where actually the performance, it was the narrative between the contestant and the audience, and the performance, they were making the performance together. And we'll reach with that piece and your work because I had a chance to be at Chicago and there was a moment that I became an anti-racism public, but I don't know. I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, that's definitely something that I really want to do a lot more with the next projects, that all the projects take place in a public space where it's sort of in the middle of somebody's day. So you're leaving work and then all of a sudden you come across this thing, and particularly if you're a government worker, you come across this thing. And also the body props were done in public spaces. So there is some idea that it enters into otherwise continuous reality for other people. But for the next projects I really wanted to be much more of a less of a staged sort of fourth wall situation and even just basically less of a frontal view. And I'm working on a project with Mabel Wilson at GSAP with Star Front. And so we're working on a project that'll take place in Harlem that'll be this sort of longer duration sort of collaboration slash educational project with a younger group of performers. And then it will also involve the public in this sort of extended experience of talking about the site, learning from their experiences of the site, bringing in our sort of historical knowledge. She's going to do all this archival research that will feed into it. And then this can become more of a feedback loop and less of a sort of performance audience because I think that's really not as conceptually interesting. I just saw in the times that you and I was doing all these... Did you guys see that these performances are happening now? Because you know the spectacular nature and stuff. But again, I wonder how... Because it was a cool performance. It was a choreographed performance. But it was like you go and you look at the performance and you can walk up. But it wasn't like really sort of breaking that. You know, that's what you did. The Momo one did because you're forced in... You have to deal with this. Whether you want to remember those things. No, we weren't. Yeah, exactly. When you can't go in. Right, so it's a real different thing when you're viewing from there or you're like, you know, you have to be in someone's space. You're demanding that kind of space. It changes the whole thing down. But anyway, this conversation is very important with discussion of that. I only was proposing on preservation. Because in a way you're describing Trump administration and what that is... Kind of destroying systems that already exist. So it's more like retaining a huge social capital to be, let's say, removed from daily life. And I think the discussion that you're bringing on preservation is basically recognizing that an environment is not just materially produced. Let's say it's materially produced as it expands in the association with humans, with plants, with gestures, with traditions. And the actual work of preservation might be also taking care of all these different layers. And I believe that there's something here that is very interesting. Whereas in the past, emancipation was meant to be coming from, let's say, freedom. Emancipation might be coming now from preservation. Stopping certain forces to destroy what is important for certain diseases to remain. I've never thought about that until now and I'm really happy you brought that up because I'm thinking, obviously, about thinking about archives I've been for a long time. But certain, at least for me, certain parts of my own practice that I thought were like, I don't have to think about that anymore. You know what I mean? I've always thought about migratory stories, but now it's becoming even more... I think this idea of, quote, identity politics, right, that was so big in the 80s and 90s and kind of went... It's not that it went underground, it's more like the title changed and it went to something else. But I feel like now it's all coming up. Everyone wants to... We're screaming. But as an act of preserving because we've actually seen... I still actually take a whole city in Palmyra and destroy it. It's not there anymore. The remains are not there anymore. And this Trump is doing the same thing with what we thought were fundamental. They would never know. I feel like that's just there. I don't know if these raids are the same. They're not real. They're real. I don't know. We don't even know what we have no idea what is going on. And all I'm doing now, I think as an artist is trying to preserve sanity but also aspects of the culture that feel like they could actually lead us. It's a very strange moment. But it's also, I think, this preservation, of course, and also keep in mind we're New York. That's a whole different thing. But I do think what has happened revealed that it actually wasn't... It wasn't what we thought also. So preserving these things and actually wasn't necessarily there. You know what? People hate when it's just a thing. Hillary was not going to undo it. People aren't into black people. It's just not a thing. And New York, I am not... I don't know if you guys saw the Chappelle Life of David Chabelle. I was that girl. I was like, I mean, because race is oh my God, you know? But what we thought about our country, I mean, I'm pretty convinced of this at this point, like it's revealed to us that what we think that we should preserve actually, it's all kind of fucked up. Like it was fucked up for a really long time. And so I question this idea of preservation because I don't... What are we preserving? New York City? God bless New York City. Yeah, but... Well, I think about writing social histories to preserve. You know, acknowledging that any effort to write for articulate history is limited and biased in all these things, but that there are sort of cultural worlds that are threatened by current government and by previous governments. It's actually a new problem. It's been going on for a long time. And so how do we... Obviously, you know, things have gotten much, much, much worse. But, you know, how do you sort of articulate the richness of social and cultural worlds and not just preserve their material incarnations, which I think is what we've been focusing on for a long time? You know, it gets complicated. I know we're talking in an academic setting and that's my, you know, I'm a professor, but it's complicated when we do that because we intellectualize culture. You know, it's... But that's a performance. I know, I'm basically... You know, this is not about culture. This is about, like, giving shots. But, you know, it's a... The archiving or preserving past is complicated. It's very complicated. I have sort of a related question, which is that while looking, you guys are most often on a very serious point. You just said... Because, like, I was looking at the review and I was listening to you talk and I was looking at this big screen behind you that says Performing History. And there's nothing in that title or even in the description of today's event that indicated in any way that you would all be women, that you would all use the body, and that you have. I mean, other than this relationship to performance art, which is quite old and emerged out of feminism, but that's what we're talking about like a half a century by now. So I guess my question is about that, is about the role of women, but particularly in preserving history. So, like, historically, humanistically, like, evolutionarily, have the role of women in preservation. So, I mean, yes, you can say preserving history, but also just, like, you know, survival as well. As Kate, you've been talking about it. And also, I don't know, maybe also thinking, I guess, it's timely because a new police show is coming down, I guess, this weekend, but thinking about maintenance and the role of women as maintenance workers and keeping the dust off, as she says, in preservation. So just about the role of women and the role of preservation in history. I have a complicated relationship to history. So, you know, I feel like I'm talking all the time, but it's just like you're hitting all the things that I'm pissed off about. But, you know, and this preserving history thing, it's just like the plexi, you know, it's like the glass case of history. You know, history is problematic. You know, it's like, you know, there are missing faces in history and, you know, minimalism didn't just have one woman artist, you know, and there were, you know, lots of different people making art. Of course, I'm speaking about art history, but, you know, so it's this, you know, this re-contextualizing history is something that I feel more comfortable with or, and I think, I don't want to be like a fake news person here, but I do look, when I look at history, I look at it very suspiciously. And with those things that are missing, those missing pieces are the things that I'm focused on. Well, when I'm looking at history, I'm not that interested in it, because I get it, I'm getting it for my whole life. I'm interested in who has been left out. And that's preserving, but that's also redefining and understanding and it's having people do more work quite honestly. Yeah, I was, that was the thing that I wanted to add is having to do more work, and I guess I'm just taking that back when I just came back from Atlanta, which, and I kept asking, you know, my hosts, which are art-related folks, and then, because I drove around the whole city and then into all the different areas and I kept asking my art-related folks, like, but how is this still like this? Like, how is this still like this? And how come, like, what am I supposed to do? Because it's still like this. You know what I mean? It's like trying to, so it's not, yeah, it's not like preserving history. It's like really reworking the narrative that people have really deeply embedded in our psyches, all of us. And like, how do I like try to pull, I literally just want to pull the grass or like the, you know, the greenery up. I'm like, how the fuck can we do, how do I do that? That's what I want to do. They're like, what do you want to do here? I'm like, that's what I want to do there. I have to pull this grass up. Like, what the fuck is here? Like, I, it's not reworking. It's kind of past reworking. It's rewiring the brain. And like, then hoping that other people will keep doing the work so that we can rewire our brains because if we keep going the same way and we keep preserving, we're just going to keep preserving that same model. Yeah, I think this is part of the sort of identity crisis of preservation right now that the word itself is not helping the discipline because we immediately associate it with established elitist narratives. But I think the work that we're all trying to do is to say that history can be extremely powerful in appreciating a much more complex and diverse society. And, you know, history is something that you can continuously return to and have find these other alternative lines through, you know, that this is part of writing alternative histories. And I think it's important not just to write, you know, I mean, I think for a couple of decades I've understood it's important to write the history of, say, women in architecture or women in decoration and for even figures, but I think it's just as important to rethink the methodology that if we have a different process that's not about these sort of monumental highlights but it's looking at the kind of material bodily interactions between people and places that it can actually open up a different understanding of history. And so the female isn't as limited, you know, in our conception historically because I think that's not a really helping issue. And like maintenance is one of these things that, again, like maintenance, craft, color, and text that have been sort of associated with female producers and I hesitate to reinforce that but I also love all of those things. So I think it's not even just about, you know, making those, identifying those with female but just broadening what techniques we use when we're engaging either the history or the present that they can accommodate these marauderly experiences. So what would be another word for preservation? Well, we've been working on this for a while. We've been working. We're making health. What are we making health? I mean, now it's experimental preservation. Experimental preservation. That's hard. That's hard. That's hard. Final question? Yeah. Hi, thanks for having me today so far. I'm in the visual arts and mythic program right now so we're having a lot of the same conversations especially about, you know, this little moment that we're at the moment now and what do we do as artists and I always kind of push back a little bit because, you know, I'm from South, all my family's from rural, backwoods, places and stuff and so within the last 28 days I haven't really seen anything on a day basis that's different now. You know, like everything is pretty much the same. So I'm wondering how do you think of, you know, your practice and like a transforming practice or a practice that's responding to where we are especially as we're dealing with the body, gesture and space. But then how do you couple that with the fact that for so many people things are not a new enemy? You know? Yeah. And I'm just taking a lot of that body and space. I don't really know very much about architecture but it's really interesting to kind of learn a few new things but especially in terms of the way that the actual body or the actual person experiences that space and the way that the body functions in the artwork of that space. Like Kate, I was thinking about I don't remember the title of the work but the pink and the women run the pink in different slots. Like I'm seeing the piece and then I'm also thinking well on a regular museum day as a guest or as a viewer they would experience that space differently based on their body. So it's like how do you interpret the experience of the person and also the experience of the body that's in the artwork? Also thinking about the youth in Chicago and their bodies in that space and what do those buildings represent in the relationship to their space? So I'm just thinking about I know that's not really a multi-part question but yeah, I mean how do you think about where practice is going and the way that you're addressing bodies in space and is this weird kind of positionality where, okay, we're already so we're going to do something new and I don't think he's destroying these systems, I think he's just keeping the systems he's preserving the systems. Is he that person? Yeah. We can't even show the name. We should not say my five role is like stop. Don't. That's better. That's better. Maybe it's just a brainstorm that I'm leading up there. What's your name? I'm Allison. I mean that's really a good question. I just want to say any artist who is not influenced by this work by what's happening right now I just don't get it. I just don't get it. I'm sorry. I come from a whole different thing maybe but you know what it's your job to go into this people's studio and be like, what the fuck do you see what's happening because I mean this is the time to be in art like this is the time where I don't want to be one of these people like art really matters in but maybe you know. It's art is science right? It's like trying to find, I don't know if it's not solutions but trying to find pathways in you know so here we are I will say though just I do believe in pause I think we're at day 20 what, 8, 9? What day are we? None of you know we don't know. Which one? We're at day 28 right? But besides the other riffraff that happened before all of that. Time is we live in this fast paced world of course we have to respond but at the same time there's also like we have to take care of ourselves our mental sanity we have to employ self-care there's no way around it otherwise you will go into mental like see I don't have that skill that's a good skill for me that's part of my work regardless of before this happened when I was making my work I always would try to put a pause especially in performance based works because I think it's part performative I can really just go there and then everyone I can feel it you guys feel it in the room we have to we have to let language fall out sometimes and there's no words for some things we keep trying to grasp the words that they just don't exist because we never saw it before we have to accept that we never saw it before like this because we weren't alive the other times we were alive now and this is the time for any move I think that might be a great place to end no but that pausing thing it's a skill you walk for months for two years there's nothing in me to walk for months for two years that is a skill she just controlled you that was amazing did you feel the whole vibe of the that is a true performance artist the energy can be so high like her slowing down and saying like five words it just completely changed the entire vibe of this talk that is an amazing skill I mean maybe control control and preservation