 Hello everyone, my name is Andreas Hakem, I'm the Director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program here at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and we're incredibly honored to be welcoming Joan Jonas to this auditorium here today. Surprisingly Joan is not aware of the huge influence that her work has in architecture and I would say in culture at large at this point and not only culture as she's been connecting different disciplines, science, art, politics through her entire career and and this is for us a very very unique moment. This is something that Chelsea Chen has been organizing and making possible together with the with Joan Jonas team that has been also incredibly generous. Joan Jonas is going to be introduced today by Samuel Steward Hallevi who's here that will also be moderating the Q&A after Joan's presentation and he will be, some will be joined by David Moon in responding to Joan Jonas and moderating the debate with the entire auditorium and Jordan Carver and Asfrab Abdallah will be supporting Sam, Joan and David in the Q&A. Before we start I would like to acknowledge that today we gather in Lenape Hawking, Lenape land, the unseeded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations, not only as a history but something that remains and a number of realities that keep being suffered in violence and acknowledging that as a school, Columbia like New York and the United States as a nation has founded upon the exclusions and erasers of indigenous peoples. G-SAP and the AD program are committed to addressing the deep history of eraser of indigenous knowledge in architecture and in the Western tradition of architectural education specifically. With this G-SAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring indigenous knowledge in its curricula, something that of course is directly related to what we do and also the what we need to undo. With this I would like to pass it to Sam. Thank you Andres. I'm very happy to welcome Joan Jonas to Columbia today or I should say actually back to Columbia where you were once a graduate student like so many of us in this room. Today Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work crosses a wide variety of media including video, sound, text and sculpture all of which are connected through her singular practice of drawing. Her early performances and installations have been crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres and practices today and also I think seem uncannily prescient. We need only to recall the past two years of trying to negotiate telepresence in the time of the pandemic to think back to a Joan's early closed circuit experiments and televisual feedback from the late 1960s and early 70s. And while Joan is often celebrated as a pioneer of these forms her work is also intensely collaborative. It is often produced with fellow artists, dancers, composers, children and since 2014 marine biologists, sedimentologists, cephalopods and sea squirts. As her exhibitions and performances have increasingly taken up themes of environmental degradation, extinction and interspecies communication. So I'm not going to try to represent the many attempts that have been made to find a kind of single line through this heterogeneous and complex body of work which she time and again revises and repurposes towards new ends because we're about to hear from Joan herself about the narrative of her artistic practice. But I would like to recount a few of her many accomplishments and sites in which her work has been recognized and exhibited since the late 1960s. These include her frequent participation in documenta in castle where she's been a part of six editions of the exhibition between 1972 and 2012. Her work was also the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London in 2018. And she has presented numerous exhibitions including at the Malmo Kunsthaal in Malmo, Sweden, the Pirelli in 2015, the Pirelli Hangar Bikoca in Milan in 2014, the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 2003, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 2000, the Stadelik Museum Amsterdam in 1994 and the University Art Museum Berkeley in 1980. In addition to documenta she has been a frequent participant in biennials including the Taipei Biennial in 2014, the Venice Biennale in 2009, the Biennale of Sydney in 2008, the Yokohama Trianale 2008 and the São Paulo Biennial in 2008. In 2015 Joan represented the United States at the 56 Venice Biennale. Her many solo shows include the NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016, the DHC Art Foundation for Contemporary Art Montreal in 2016, the CCA Waddes Institute San Francisco in 2014 and Le Plateau and Jou de Pomme Paris in 2005. In 2018 she was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize presented to those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of humankind. She has just completed a performance at the Park Avenue Armory in April and is presently preparing for future exhibitions at Munich's Haus der Kunst and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2026. She's also currently professor emerita at MIT's program in Art, Culture and Technology and is the author of reference texts on the performance arts. She has lived and worked in Soho in New York since 1968 and we're so happy that she came uptown today to be with us so please welcome me and join me in welcoming Joan Jonas to Columbia GSAP and the arguments lecture series. Thank you I'm so honored to be here and to return to Columbia after how many years like 65 how many years is that? But I'll just tell you that the art school was in the rotunda of the library when I went when I came here so bear with me while I read my lecture. I'm gonna make it a little bigger. So growing up I spent summers in New Hampshire with friends. With friends I would put on amateur theater performances and I spent a lot of time in the woods and the fields that surround the house. I had a dog named Cindy. I've had dogs all my life and they've become a part of my work. Winters we lived in New York City and as a child I went to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. I attended five different schools before college. This continuous displacement led to the forming of an outsider's life view. My memory is that okay this is a new place I have to adjust each time. Each project is a new experience. In graduate school at Columbia I studied early 20th century poetry which greatly affected the way I think about the structure of a work. The form of the haiku was very important to the images poets who were a major influence on me. Metaphor is an aspect of my visual language. How does one tell a story with sound and image in time? What is the function of an image? Inspiring modernist poetry the structure of the haiku can combine two images to make a third or like Ezra Pounds in the station of a metro from 1913. The apparition of these faces in a crowd pedals on a wet black bow. When I began to work in time-based media I had to invent ways of structuring sequences of images so I worked for the language of montage in composing my work. My earliest influences were magic shows in addition to the circus and Broadway musicals and of course television and movies as well as an indirect exposure to the art world. Through family I became aware of the contemporary art circles of New York. In university at Mount Holyoke College my studies were in art history literature and sculpture. I then went to art school in Boston and continued with sculpture while concentrating on drawing. Drawing being a basic element of my work. When I switched from sculpture to performance in the mid 60s I had to think about this new form and consider how to work with it in order to develop a language of my own. I made this statement at the time. I didn't see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing. Draw, erase, draw, erase, memory erased. While I was studying art history I looked carefully at the space of paintings, films and sculpture. How illusions are created within a frame space and how to deal with the real physical space with depth and distance. When planning or developing a performance I just went to a space and looked at it. I would imagine how it would look to an audience, what they would be looking at and how they would perceive choreographed movement of figures in the ambiguities and illusions of the space. An idea of a piece would come just from looking until my vision blurred. I would also begin with a prop such as a mirror, a cone, a TV or a narrative, a story. Sassetta and Pierre Adela Francesca are two renaissance paintings, renaissance painters that I really loved. I was interested in the geometric forms and how the space of architecture was depicted in the space of the city. In Sassetta I was drawn to the form, the delicate colors, the magic. In the magic in Piero it was the placement of figures in the space of architecture. How they stood and seemed to float just off the ground while beginning to gesture. A direct influence was Alberto Giacometti. His figures, sometimes tiny, sometimes enormous, occupied and commanded a focused space. The figures are in bronze. The idea of alchemy in the transformation of material is essential. From the very beginning nature has been a context for my work. Since childhood I have loved the outdoors, playing in the woods in New Hampshire, putting on plays with my friends in various wild gardens and watching thunderstorms move across the valleys. These were high points. The first time I really understood why people made up stories about gods was when I went to the southwest of the U.S. and saw the landscape there. It was so overwhelming in an unexplainable way that I understood why it had to be explained by myths and stories. When I made Wind in 1968, it was filmed outdoors on the coldest day of the years, though it was based on an indoor piece. The wind became a character and a force. The wind turned what could have been familiar everyday movements into a comedy of chaos. Forces of nature and the landscape continue to be a major presence. I studied the structure of film, modernist poetry and literature while figuring out how to tell a condensed and fragmented story. I learned so much from looking at the early films of Bertov, Eisenstein, Podovkin, Ozu and others. I was drawn to the effect of one image next to another and in a related way to the use of a series of close-ups to build a narrative. I was affected by the use of landscape and the contrasting close-ups of animals, flowers, children and people. The Russians, like other early filmmakers, were attracted to the activities of everyday movement. After seeing silent films, one was more aware of how sound could be used in a particular way. When I was in high school during the 50s in North Port Long Island, I saw my first Japanese film. It was called Ugetsu by Kenji Mizoguchi and it intrigued and startled me at the same time. I was taken aback by the style of acting and its imagery. I had never seen anything like it. Later, after formal studies, I continued my study of film by attending film screenings in New York at many places, but concentrated viewings at the anthology of film archives, which was established by Jonas Mikas. When I began to work in time-based media, I had to invent ways of structuring sequences of images, so I worked with a language of montage in composing performance, film and video works. Film techniques included the cut, the edit, the fade, the double exposure, the manipulation of light and dark and so on. When working with video, I thought, what is peculiar to video and how do film and video overlap as technologies? In the 1960s, when I knew I wanted to make performance-based work, I attended dance workshops, performances and happenings by visual artists and dancers in New York, such as Klaus Oldenburg, Yvonne Rayner, Simone Forte, Deborah Hay, Robert Waschenberg and Trisha Brown and others. I was often so looking at how art is a dialogue with the past and with the future. I am a collector, constantly looking for both familiar and strange objects in flea markets, at home and away, that might become props in my work. I often do not know exactly how I might use something until standing with it in the space of performance. The objects I use are not literal adaptations of the elements in the story or concept, but are symbolic or archetypal. For example, a prop that I've continuously constructed out of paper or tin, the actuality of the form, the cone, was an instrument to channel sound to the audience. I could whisper in their ears, look through it, listen to it, yell through it, sing, always directing sound to a place. Funnel, a piece I did in 1974, was based on the form of a cone. I made many paper cones of different sizes and proportions. I started working with nine-foot tin cones in 76 and continue to be inspired by this shape. My inspiration also includes travel, collecting objects and the study and research into practices of other cultures and their rituals. Ritual is part of my language, my own ritual. While inspired by others, I do not copy them. In some cases I've borrowed, but very little. In studying art history, every painting has a story and many practices began in ritual. The Noh Theater began as ritual. I have always been interested in the early periods of art as the Minoan and the Mycenaean period. I spent a year in Greece in the 60s, including several months in Crete, because I was drawn to the Minoan myths of women diving into the sea with dolphins. In the 1960s when I was doing research and getting prepared to go into performance, I saw the Hopi snake dance in the southwest. It was amazing, outdoors, and beautiful. All of these ideas have continued through the years and have been applied in different ways to later work, not the Hopi snake dance, I have to say. They have to do with my way of performing, my way of disguising myself and working in relation to the camera, how to alter the image through the various media, and then, after recording, alter later through editing, using layering devices and reflection to alter how the audience perceives what they see. A method of layering becomes a basic way of building and conceiving. Simultaneously, I have continuously stepped from the making of a performance to making autonomous films and video works, and back to installation, and then back to the other forms while moving images and ideas from each to the other. The first prop that I used was the mirror. And as you saw on wind, we had costumes with mirrors pasted onto them. I was inspired by the short stories of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. I was very intrigued by how he wrote about mirrors and space, and the infinite multiplication of architectural elements to form a library. The endless library that went on and on. So I made several performances with mirrors in the late 1960s. These pieces continued, consisted of a group of about 17 people walking very slowly while very carefully moving in choreographed movements in the space. The mirrors face the audience. In turn, the audience saw the reflected fractured space, the other performers, and themselves. So what you're seeing now is a recent reconstruction from notes and photographs of Mirror Piece 1 and 2, which was originally performed in the late 60s and early 70s. The mirror was a metaphor for me, a device to alter the image and to include the audience as reflection, making them uneasy as they view themselves in public. The fragility of the mirrors and glass that could actually break and also cause discomfort. Inclusion of such abstract content pervades my work with or without the logic of the story. Beauty with an offsetting edge. Other outdoor pieces also involved a viewpoint of the audience. Following the mirror works, my early work developed in a particular concept and place. In the 1960s, some parts of New York looked like ruins. Parts of the lower west side, for example, and the docks nearby along the Hudson River. These were places to explore. Is there sound with the video? And is it showing now? Okay, sorry. The first outdoor piece, Joan's Beach piece in 1970, was about perception in the distance. How sound is delayed by distance. When sees the action and splits seconds later, one hears the sound. Space is flattened by the distance. Certainly one can relate to it, relate it to the history of painting and representation of flatness and the idea of trying to create the illusion of depth through perspective or color and form and placement of figures, buildings and so on. I went to Japan in 1970 and saw the Noh Theater. It had a significant influence on me and my work. It was then that I started experimenting with masks and used them in the outdoor works. Masks hid my face from the audience and gave me another persona. They inspire me to move in a different way, behave in a different way, and they mask my personality, which I like. The sound of wood hitting wood in the Noh inspired me to work with wood blocks, clapping the sound delay in my outdoor performances. Noh Theater also inspired me in the development of my own visual language. The percussive musical accompaniment with players sitting on the stage to one side, the use of props made of simple materials like paper and wood. The Kabuki Theater was also of interest in which illusions were made, for instance, of the sea with paper and other special effects, which were done using natural materials. Speaking of using what is at hand, what you're seeing now is a piece called Nova Scotia Beach Dance. Although the piece was happening on the beach itself, it was seen from overhead by a group standing on the cliff above. I wanted this viewpoint, and in this case the concept was of a bricolor. Everything I used was found on the beach, so for using materials at hand. I wanted this viewpoint. I've spent every summer since 1970 in Cape Breton, Canada, and every summer I record the landscape and perform for the video camera. When I moved to Soho in 1968, it was relatively empty and artists were able to move into old, recently abandoned factory lofts that had the beauty of another time. It wasn't expensive to find a place to perform or exhibit one's work. You could work on the streets, lots, and docks without getting permission from the city. My performance in Biddy reflected that setting. It was an atmosphere grainy and rough. This performance is Delay-Delay from 1972 with a group of people who as usual were friends and artists. For instance, Gordon Matta-Clark is in this piece. I would work on location, in this case the empty lots, of Lower West Side of New York for a few months with ideas developed previously at Jones Beach in Nova Scotia and then rehearsed with a group before performing in public. For Delay-Delay, the audience sat on a roof of a loft building on Chamber Street overlooking these empty lots where old factory buildings had recently been torn down. This work dealt with the perception of both distance and the overhead view. The film's song delay was based on Delay-Delay and shot in this location in order to recreate the illusion of the space. In other words, the distance and the activity over a wide viewpoint. I worked with filmmaker Robert Fiori and we used two lenses, the telephoto lens, since you wouldn't be able to see the sound delay in the distance through a normal lens and a wide angle lens to record the area of the empty lots. It was pure accidents that boats went up and down the Hudson River in the background as we recorded. We were very lucky. Every time we started to record the wood clapping sound delay, the boats went by. That was real fun. Here we see an image of organic on his visual telepathy. Can you turn the sound up a little bit? No, don't do it. Don't. Anyway, the music is a reggae music that I adore. I hear it in the background. The first video performance that I ever did. I bought a video camera up for this. Here we see an image of organic on his visual telepathy. The first video performance that I ever did. I bought a video camera in Japan in 1970 and started working with closed circuit video systems, which was quite a revolutionary video system at that time. Artists seeing themselves live performing and recording at the same time. I don't think you can imagine what it was like. This was unlike recording in film where you can't see the results of recording until later. It was really a radical moment. This device altered my way of performing. I began to perform for the camera. I didn't want to be recognized as myself, so I wore masks. I dressed up. I played with disguise. I developed imaginary characters or states of mind, alter egos in a way. I found myself in the mirror walk works and through video transformations. Organic on his visual telepathy evolved as I found myself continuously investigating my own image in the monitor of my video machine. I then bought a mask of a doll's face which transformed me, formed me into an erotic seductress. I named this TV persona Organic Honey. I began increasingly obsessed with following the process of my own theatricality as my images fluctuated between the narcissistic and a more abstract representation. The risk was to become too submerged in solipsistic gestures. In exploring the possibilities of female imagery, thinking always of magic show, I attempted to fashion a dialogue between my different disguises and the fantasies they suggested. This was in part inspired by the feminist movement of the time. I was exploring the idea of what is the female, what is the male in imagery, because at that time people were saying, oh a stick is male and the sun is, you know, the moon is female, the sun is male, and I wanted to really get away from that dichotomy. There was a small monitor in the space of the performance connected to the camera so that I, the performer, could frame and watch my actions. At first I operated the camera, but later I had a camera person as performer. All movements and shots were set up beforehand and rehearsed. I always kept my eye on the small monitor in the performance space in order to control the image. The audience saw this live performance simultaneously with the image transmitted from the camera to the projection or the monitor. This was a detail of the live action, so the experience was of a double narrative linked. In subsequent video performances I continued to explore this space of perception. I am interested in drawing during performance. A drawing in a performance is different than drawing alone in my studio where there are no witnesses. The performance affects the drawing. As organic hunting I drew for the monitor while looking at the monitor and not at the drawing. I found different ways to include drawing as a live activity for the audience. I think continuously of how to work with screens, the design of the screen, and how to work with projection on the screen. I'm interested in creating my own special effects using my own technological trickery. I do work with a peculiar and specific technology of video, but at the same time I include something I call the handmade aspect. Almost always revealing to the audience how the images are made. The audience is watching a process. Mirage from 1976 was designed particularly for the anthology film archives. It was the last of a series of video performances working with early black and white technology and was structured in relation to the projection screen of the cinematic. Because one could change the size and shape of the screen, various movements were performed in relation to these shapes. A large monitor turned on its side played pre-recorded videos such as May Windows and Good Night, Good Morning. These works were recorded by a camera turned on its side to fit the vertical format. In this piece I included two 16 millimeter films, a drawing film and a film of volcanic eruptions both projected. However, the screens were mostly blank serving as backdrops for my movements on a small black wooden table or stage. Sometimes this if the screen was backlit one could see through it and we performed behind the screen working with the transparency. I did not include the live camera and the closed circuit in this piece. In Mirage, props include a group of nine foot tin cones, a small hoop and a Central American wooden mask of a man. For the 30 minute film my act of drawing was recorded by a filmmaker. I made a series of drawings on a blackboard. Drawing and erasing in this case images or symbols were part of my vocab that were part of my vocabulary. This is a weather symbol and a heart I draw over and over a basic iconic image. I was inspired by films of Maya Darin the American filmmaker who spent time in Haiti filming the voodoo rituals. Practitioners were making drawings over and over again on the dark ground with lines of white powder. I have referred to Mirage more than once and I've used this drawing film in other works or as part of the installation version of Mirage. Mirage is a piece I go back to in order to develop certain aspects of it in new work. It interests me to go back to an early work, take part of it and work with it in relation to other material. I'm interested in how the content is altered by juxtaposition or by being in a different context but Mirage lends itself to an ongoing to ongoing abstract considerations. For instance I've used a footage shot in Wall Street at night repeatedly in different ways but most work at some point is considered finished. Once we went, I think I'm not sure if I mentioned this mentioning Wall Street, I went down there with Pat Steer. Do I mention that David in the lecture? No, so anyway an artist, Pat Steer painter, we went down one night with a video artist with a camera and we brought my tin cones and we performed in the streets of Wall Street at night. We only attracted one man who took a liken to Pat and was chasing her all over. We were both wearing white dresses and it was, that's what you could do then, you can't do that now I don't think. Well here I am sitting on top of a television set which was turned on its side in a vertical position and making a series of gestures. The image of the cone inspired me to include volcano footage. The whole piece involved the idea of opposites. It was an abstract piece dealing with light and dark. These are images of a piece called stage sets. I thought of the constructed situations for all my performances as stage sets but this particular arrangement is autonomous and not made for a particular performance. It is presently on exhibit at Dear Beacon along with the shape that sent and the field things. So you could go up to Dear Beacon please do if you want to see some work, some installations. This is the Juniper Tree. Are we there yet? Yeah. The first version for children. In 1976 I started working with a narrative or storytelling inspired by prose fiction. As with the mirror, the video, the outdoor work narrative I would say was another altering medium in which the image relates to a story and is affected by the story. This is the first version of the Juniper Tree based on a fairy tale by the Grim Brothers. It was made for children which interests me to have children react and respond to the work. It was the favorite story of one of my closest friends, Susan House's son, Mark. It was his favorite story. I just say that because of the very Grim story. When I showed it, the mothers came up to me before the performance and I said, oh my God, are you showing this story to children? I had to say that I just read Brunel Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment in which he explains how fairy tales help children to understand danger and so on and to get through difficult situations. In this case the tree is a ladder, an iconic way of representing a tree. The wooden rope structure was the house. When I began working with the story, I analyze it, take it apart, and I note the colors, in this case red and white, red as blood and white as snow, traditional fairy tale colors. On the red cloth I drew an anatomical heart turned into a face representing the boy. On the white cloth for the girl I drew a Valentine heart which also became a face, each step at different moments in the performance and then hung the drawings on the wall. They became part of the set. Installations are adjusted for various situations. In 1994 when I had a show at the Stadelik Museum in Amsterdam it was the first time that I had a major show of installations that were translations of performances. This is the installation of Organic Honey. I wanted the audience to experience the work in a different way. I take all the elements, the video, the sound, the structures, the screens, the props, and I rearrange them. In other words I take the performance apart so it's not based on linear time but exists in a different experience of time. The audience chooses what to look at and when. As they walk through the space the sounds of the different videos play together. What interests me now is the form of the installation. This way of exhibiting a work in a space that I construct. This is the installation version of Mirage as I mentioned earlier. The two films side by side, the drawing film and the film I made to go with it. The second film consisted of footage shot in the early 70s and includes footage shot off the TV at the time because I wanted to bring everyday current events into the work and juxtapose what I was doing in the privacy of my studio with what was going on in the world around me. I'm very aware of what's going on in the world. The juniper tree relates to the idea of the female for instance and in this case with Mirage the Vietnam War, Nixon and so forth are referred to. This is the performance version of Volcano Saga a piece based on an Icelandic saga Lux de la Saga. I began to work with projections in color as backdrops reflecting the narrative and placed in relation to the space of the performance. The video is edited to form a parallel narrative to the live action in and around it. In this case it's on three different screens. The third screen is behind a piece of glass that I stand behind at time and use as a sounding board knocking on it or painting on it. I visited Iceland to work with performers and to record the landscape and to also learn more about the sagas. I continue to explore ways of telling a story. I do not illustrate the story I represent it. The projection and the live performance form parallel narratives. I perform in the image and decide it always in relation to it. In each of my work I've made my own soundtracks or worked with a composer. For Volcano Saga I worked with a composer Alvin Luciaire. Tilda Swinton played the main part. The characters in an Icelandic saga are more three-dimensional as they are based mostly on real historical figures. In Iceland when you mention certain figures they say oh yeah he lived over there or he lived in that town so they really are based on their own history. Fairy tales were two-dimensional. Cardboard cut-ups either good or evil. I wanted to have an experienced performer in this case Tilda to play the part of Gudrun the main character or woman who was married four times. She has a series of four dreams that foretold her future. Ron Vodder an actor from the Worcester group played Vassir who interpreted these dreams. After several large-scale epic works I started to think in miniature. I began to make a series of sculptural objects long wooden boxes echoing the shape of a cone but squared. Inside the larger end is a stage with a video backdrop. The viewer stands and looks into the box. This piece was the first one I did it was called tap dancing. It's a poetic documentary about a form of dance they do in Canada and it's about a particular folk dancer. The movement is called step dancing. Children use learn these dances. I've made six of these with different subjects and shapes. This is my new theater three. You can also see my new theater another my new theater behind this. This is another example of drawing in relation to my body. I put a wet sheet over me and I drew its outlines on the sheet in charcoal. It looks like my skeleton on the outside of my body. After this I began to do these drawings and performance by tracing over a large piece of Japanese paper held against my body. In 1968 when I began to perform publicly I had the desire to develop my own language as I've mentioned. I feel the following works my most recent are coming together of all these ideas of the early works. I have developed them into longer and more complicated narratives. I think you're looking at waltz right now I can hear the music. Lines in the sand was based on a long poem called Helen in Egypt written by HD or Hilda Doolittle. HD was an American writer living in the early part of the 20th century who was analyzed by Sigmund Freud in the 30s. I include quotes from her memoir tribute to Freud. It was written right before the Second World War. I grew up in the Second World War. War is a background condition. There's a section from HD's book about her analysis with Freud that begins that refers to this time before World War II in a certain way and I'm just one line begins there was something beating in my brain. Helen of Troy was blamed for the Trojan War. Of course a woman had to be blamed. HD's account is based on a classical reference that stated that Helen never went to Troy but went to Egypt. The Helen that was in Troy was a phantom a copy and that it was actually a trade war. I was thinking of the fact that we are still at war and that the true reasons are never made explicit. I am interested in these historic mythic female female figures and the echoing theme of the double. For part of my research I visited Las Vegas where we recorded scenes in a casino called Luxor. The fake Luxor was juxtaposed against the real Egypt represented in the work by photographs that my grandmother took when she visited Egypt at the end of the 19th century. This was an echoing of the theme of the double. I do not play Helen. There are two of us performing echoing the real and the fake. In this case I'm making a large drawing of a step pyramid suitable to the scale of the performance space or stage. I often become obsessed with one form. In this case the pyramid and the sphinx drawing the image over and over again on a blackboard while being recorded. This is one of my several drawing videos. Are you going to play the next video? Is it on? This is the shape doesn't feel anything. Okay. Around 2003 I started to develop the shape, the scent, the feel of things which is at Dia Beacon also. The video version of it. The title of the piece is quoted from HD's writing but the piece was based on a book by Abby Warburg a German art historian whose methods interested me of looking at the history of culture parallel cultures comparing images from different cultures and so on. The piece was based on a book by Abby Warburg images from the region of the Pueblo Indians in North America. In the early part of the 20th century Warburg a German art historian visited the southwest and saw that certain ceremonies of an indigenous people's the Hopi. Through his writing I returned to my own memory of seeing the snake dance of the Hopi in Arizona without in any way representing these images. I had avoided referring to these dances because we do not have the right to in any way represent them but it could not help but it was an amazing experience that stayed with me all my life. I designed the work for the very large basement state base of Dia Beacon. In 2005 I began to work with Jason Moran the jazz composer who composed music and played live in the piece. This has been a long-lasting and important collaboration. We continue to work together for reading Dante, reading animation and they come to us without a word. We still perform together we perform we just performed reanimation in Japan right before the pandemic. I spent two years working on a script and recording video in many locations. My research took me to the desert landscape of the southwest of America and southern California and woods and beaches of Canada. The haunting images from the Salton Sea I don't know how many of you know what that is it's a place in the southern part of California and it's a falling apart ex-resort by a famous architect I can't remember his name right now I'm sure we should look it up and you probably know who it is in the Salton Sea the architect who built a resort and we it's part of the background of this piece which you I don't think you're seeing. The haunting images of the Salton Sea for me represented the decay of certain American culture and became a backdrop for the song Pastures of Plenty by Woody Guthrie. It's an ironic juxtaposition says something about America. Layers of actions occur in relation to the space and the projection. At the end of the work the character Warburg walks down the length of the enormous warehouse space in Dear Beacon the metal doors roll open letting in a flood of light as he walks outdoors. We worked for six weeks Jason and I developing the soundtrack for this piece. Reanimation the next piece was based on the Icelandic writer Haldor Laxness Under the Glacier. It's a novel a work of fiction written in 1968. I shot it partly in Norway and partly in my loft in New York. While in Norway I met a Sami singer named Ande Sambi. We recorded his animal songs which were part of the soundtrack. Jason Moran composed and played the music again. Reanimation was my first piece in which I wanted to include questions about the problems in the environment in my work. Of course I'd always been thinking about these things. I was struck by Laxness writing and its focuses on the poetic presence of glaciers nature and its creatures. I use crystals in the piece because glaciers are made of ice crystals. Because my work is always set in the present I had to take into consideration when creating the piece that glaciers are melting. I used footage from a 1973 video called Disturmences which was located in and by a swimming pool with shots of women swimming underwater. This referring to a future world underwater. From my time in Kitakyushu, Japan, with a center for contemporary art Kitakyushu, I had worked with soji screens. So I reconfigured the piece and had these paper screens made for the video projections for reanimation. It really alters a perception of the image because seen from one side it divides the image into a grid pattern. Images are back projected so visible from both sides of the screen. The audience can walk into the architectural space and be surrounded by the projected images. Also part of the piece but outside of the room like space are two large minor theaters playing other fragments of the abstract narrative. In the performance of reanimation I made a drawing with ink and ice. This is an image of the drawing projected through the crystals and metal structure. I thought of the black ink on the white snow as a kind of polluting element. Just another example of how I work with drawing. Here I draw on the snow in Norway with paint. This is an example of how Jason Moran and I work. Can you turn it up? This is one of my favorite pieces that Jason's composed for my work and when he plays it I always have to get up and dance if I can. When I come to his concerts he often plays it. It's deeply emotional but I love it. It's one of my favorite pieces of Jason's in relation to my music. Jason plays at the Village Vanguard during the Thanksgiving holidays. I love going there to hear his music. Anyway this is an example of how Jason and I work together. I'm making drawings of birds as fast as I can and sliding paper away one after another inspired by the music. I was particularly inspired by one of Haldor Laxness descriptions of a bird standing erect against strong winds of a storm. They come to us without a word. I was invited to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Again this is an example of one work sighing into another. I quoted Laxness, a beautiful quote about the miraculous action of bees and what they do and how they function. I wanted to make a piece about animals and include children as performers. For me this represented the fact of our fragile environment that children will inherit. In each room there are two projections. One concerned the main subject of the room, the bees, the fish, the wind, and the homeroom for the children. The other projection concerned ghost stories from the oral tradition of Cape Breton, Canada. I thought of the ghosts of creatures that are disappearing. Oh now there's a video and then you know the other one with the fan. I'll let them play a little bit. The one with the fan, the video that was in the wind room. The same music. It's the same music. But this was made for the Venice Pavilion in one, it was in one of the rooms. And the children, well when I show you the latest work I've been doing, the same children, I invite them year after year if they can come to be in my work because they started out quite young, like how many years ago, seven years ago. And the two female characters are now young women and there's still a little girl, she's 13 now, and is my neighbor. So I like very much working with people I know. No? Yeah. In this piece, stream or river, flight or pattern. Birds are a major presence in the work. Also continuing to work with children. While I was traveling I recorded video in Vietnam, Spain, Singapore, and Italy. I didn't have a plan, I just took my camera with me and recorded what interested me. Particularly the bird zoos in the far east are very special, beautiful, they're actually beautiful zoos. And I never thought I would go back to zoos but one has to, to see creatures. I projected the videos on a wall in my loft and then performed in front of them and recorded it, as I've done so often throughout the years. The thread of my work from the very beginning has always been my role as a performer. I step into a piece and move, guided by the music, the text, the props, and both inspired and working in the space with other performers. Bird on branch, shot, stuffed, brown, buried. Perched owl on green base, wood is split, heart shaped face. Gray oversized elephant, painted wood, exaggerated trunk. Behind white wooden carved rabbit, gentle. That was actually sung by, I'm sorry I can't remember her name, it's terrible I should have thought of this, but Allison, she was a student here at Columbia. I met her when one of my visits to the art department of the graduate school and for this situation she came, she came to, to Santander in Spain and took a workshop with me. Now she's become really well known and I will send her name to, to you so that we don't forget I'm very bad with names but anyway the way we did this song was I gave her fragments from Japanese plays that I put together and I asked her to make a song and she, that's what she did, she took a song, it's a folk song, American folk song and she sang it with the words, it's amazing I think anyway. I'm sure you think so too. I continue to explore these ideas in my recent piece about the ocean. Now I'm going into another way of talking to you but I'll read a little bit and then I'm going to show you a number of videos that are from my most recent piece concerning the ocean and the environment. Moving off the land. So what is the video? All right well we'll wait until we, okay. The situation facing the planet is dire and I am profoundly saddened by this crisis. However I am grateful through my work to have gained a deeper understanding for creatures both in the ocean and on the land. I believe if we understand the importance of these miraculous creatures we can better understand ourselves and live in harmony. I think before we show, I think I will show you this series and I'll talk, I'll add lib as they're playing but I won't say before. I was invited by Utometa Bauer to make a piece about the ocean and to work with an organization TBA 21 which its main function is to support work about the ocean and to preserve the ocean. It's idealistic but it's the way one starts. I just read last night in the New Yorker there's a piece about a marine biologist Sylvia Earl who is older than I am. I won't tell you how old I am but she's older than I am and she's still diving and she develops one of the things she does has developed deep sea containers and she goes to the bottom of the sea. She spent how long there did you remember? Like weeks under the ocean and she's still diving it's amazing. I'm afraid to dive so when I started working on this piece I collected the way I worked on it was to visit aquariums whenever I could and record the animals and to I read books The Soul of the Octopus is a book about the octopus. It's very touching and beautiful and tells you you'll never want to eat an octopus again. I mean actually when people see my work they often say I'm never going to eat an octopus again and Sylvia Earl doesn't eat any fish. She doesn't think we should. So through a newspaper on the internet and another book and then books by Rachel Carson. I don't know how many of you know who she was. She was a woman who wrote in the 60s beginning in the 50s and 60s about the environment. Her first book that was a bombshell was called The Silent Spring and as long ago as that they knew what was happening to the planet. People knew and still did little to halt that progress of destruction and Rachel Carson I think is also a poet. I dedicated this piece to her. Her writing is beautiful about all aspects of the ocean. So I'm going to play you a series of videos from this piece and I'll say a little bit about each one but very little and you can ask questions about it later. I'll just move so I can see it. So this is okay the first few are the performance. So the performance and the installation are separate entities but related and interchangeable because I use images in one and the other. However you'll see the performance has different images and I must also say that normally did I work with these writers but I worked I met through TBA 21. That's why I met Andrash which thank goodness. I also met a marine biologist named David Gruber who I decided I wanted to work with him because TBA doesn't really tell you what to do but they organize convenings they call them and they put people together and so you meet people in the field and you can decide yourself who you might want to work with. So David Gruber interested me and we're still working together because he has he's a marine biologist he's a diver and he also has developed cameras and lenses that can record underneath the water the luminescence of sea creatures which you cannot see with your naked eye. So that's one thing he's doing he's now doing a huge research project on the sperm whale. So David you can play I'll just talk while this is going on. So this is an image from the performance where I'm making drawings of fish that I when I was in Kitakyushu in Japan my first endeavor drawing fish was to make a hundred drawings of fish. I found a Japanese book on fish in the area of Japan and they're one of these it's a beautiful science kind of scientific book with beautiful colored drawings which inspired me to make these drawings of fish in red paint as you can see. And in the background when I went to Norway I went to an aquarium in Norway on the Lofoten islands which are amazing. They're islands that are mountains really and they they ride they're sort of like this they rise from the sea and I spent a friend of mine had a house there it's above the Arctic Circle and I spent about a month there one winter with her driving me around photographing the landscape which was in reanimation which I used in reanimation. So this is another clip from the performance. Can you put the sound up? I'll just tell you I had two bells and so I played the bells. I play little instruments like that and Jason and I do a duet actually in which I play my instruments which consist of bells and toys and things I bang together and he he well of course it's up to him to fit into that but it's one of my most pleasurable experiences in performing so in this case the other performer is telling me I can't see anything I'm blindfolded he's telling me to move from left to right in front of the these images of starfish. So one thing with the children I thought of children you know to to show them how beautiful these sea creatures are because most of us don't really see them or the next day. So we'll just keep this for a minute. This is a still of the piece as it was transformed into a large installation shown in Venice I don't know how a few years ago and I built these big boxes that are giant minute theaters that I mentioned before architectural elements or sculptural elements in the space and each of these boxes because there was a lot of light and I had to control the light with the projections and so I made these boxes so that the light and also I liked the idea that the audience could go into the box and sit and really concentrate on the video and all and the children you'll see later are going to play some and then we decorate the drawings are from the performances and so on we decorated the space it's a beautiful church that TBA 21 has leased for how many years 20 years or something what yeah and it was a fantastic place to to to work in as you can see I love working in these big spaces architectural spaces and yeah they inspire me what can I say all right next day that's Lila whose dad is here where is he okay the mind evolved in the sea water made it possible all early stages took place in water the origin of life the birth of animals the evolution of nervous systems the appearances of complex bodies that made brains worth having zora costa bear that's that is and this don't play wait for a minute um this is you'll see first we call this mermaid because when I started working on this piece I thought well how can I approach such a vast subject as the oceans and as usual I approach it through myth because that's the thread that runs throughout my work I was just thinking in relation to your introduction Matisse said that he always when he's thinking about his work or get stuck he looks for a thread running through the work I always remember that and so so one of my this is one of my threads what was I saying sorry um what oh myth yeah so one of my threads is myth so I thought of the myth of the mermaid which is all over the globe and every culture that lives by the ocean has at one point had the myth of creatures living in the ocean and it were it's I think we have a memory in our DNA because you know whales once came on to the dry land and then went back into the ocean and there's so there's a real connection with these creatures and who knows how long and what happened but so for me the mermaid was a theme in this piece and you'll see these are the children again performing we shoot this in my loft but I record the the footage in other places and the way I worked with David Gruber was uh to he would show me he's he doesn't he says he's not an artist but his his uh his his his recordings are really beautiful that he shoots underwater and I have to say that I wish that I could have gone underwater but I just don't have the courage to put it you know put something on my back and dive but I think that it's very important like people like Sylvie Earl and and and David they have to you know they're people and also people who are at home doing that um so in this case you'll see David Gruber's footage you'll see this magical green uh material with yellow lights that's his footage so I he would bring his his work to my studio and I would look at it and then choose what I really thought was beautiful he was very generous in that way and that's how I work with him now now we're working on another slightly different type of project go on so David and the sound is um Ikue Mori began to work with the composer Ikue Mori for this ocean piece what's the next one so this is the I think this is the last one right there is all right well let's just play this two marine biologists published a study of giant manta rays responding to their reflection in a large mirror installed in their aquarium in the Bahamas the two captive rays circled in front of the mirror blue bubbles and performed unusual body movements as if checking their reflection they made no obvious attempt to interact socially with their reflection suggesting that they did not mistake what they saw as other rays okay the what's the next one yeah let's just play this the seahorse is completely encased in an armor composed of interlocking bony plates these take the place of ordinary scales and seem to be a sort of evolutionary harking back to the time when fish depended on heavy armor to protect them from their enemies so that's a quote from Rachel Carson and it's the red um seahorses or david's shots of the seahorse and so that's the end of my lecture oh there's oh sorry there's one more yeah um tba 21 the woman who runs at francesca she said well why don't you can't you do a piece for the other room too so uh i made a big drawing of a whale that we suspended and then play it loud this is David Gruber's um sound recording of sperm whales and what he's doing now he's working with how to interpret these sounds if it's possible which is quite a quite an endeavor but i think many scientists are working to understand the language of animals i think that's something that's going on right now but in this case the sperm whale and the sperm whale as you know is an amazing creature all right well that is the end of my lecture thank you i just i want to thank david thank you david and i want to thank andresh and also he invited me to be in singapore and i did a piece about the oceans there thank you and thank you all for coming but i guess now we're going to have another stage of this situation right yeah a question and answer so please ask questions if you have questions but i'm not sure um i was just saying that um i'm sure that there are many questions from the audience also because so many so many of the uh concerns that you raised especially at the end about the fragility um of the environment in this moment are very much on our minds as well in this course and as architects so i you i have another question which is about drawing and i wrote this out because you circulated your talk beforehand so i hope it's not too kind of overcooked but i think drawing might be another kind of common denominator between your work and and the practice of architecture so as i was watching your performance and moving off the land um i was thinking about a passage in the very first treatise of architecture by betrubius uh day architectura uh in which he he describes the discovery of the architectural plan or what he describes as iconography or footprint writing as a kind of shipwreck story so he says that um in book six he writes that the greek philosopher eras dipis washes up on the beach at roads uh and there in the sand he sees human footprints which take different geometric forms and then rather than being scared that you know there are these footprints on the beach uh he says to his fellow castaways take heart for here are the vestiges of man and then they go into roads and they go to the gymnasium and they start to to discuss philosophy so i was thinking that in moving off the land you you kind of reverse the direction of this architectural myth i mean you're asking us to go from the beach back into the water but drawing remains the kind of vehicle for that translation so instead of revealing the vestiges of man your drawings trace or sometimes uh even chase or try to catch up with many other forms of life it often seems to me that your drawings have like no time to spare they have the sort of urgency to them so i was wondering since betrubius's story uh has for so long served as a point of origin for a humanistic practice of architectural drawing and plan making uh if you could teach architects how to draw where would you start and what would we have to forget if we tried to draw uh at the speed of a fish well i'll just say when i went to art school my teacher herald toavish i was i had to learn how to draw you know it's it's a it's something a practice some people are naturals and other people have to learn anyway i was learning and so the first thing he said to me was just draw the outline you just concentrate on the outline of something and i would say you could do the same thing with buildings or with anything so i wasn't drawing buildings at the time i was just drawing the outline what was your question i was i was trying to make it i guess a distinction between this is this is something that i was discussing also with my students before your lecture about some of the differences between the ways that architects use drawing to usually to anticipate some something in the future versus in your performances your drawings seem to be catching up or or sort of chasing natural phenomena that are kind of outpacing your own well i draw i mean what i the way i approach drawing is and i think architecture students could do it in a very different way but i approach drawing is every time i do a new piece i think of how can i include drawing in relation to the technology and to the subject and how can the drawing function in that way i don't just i mean i often also make drawings in my studio of creatures like you know fish and i became particularly fascinated with the colors and so on structures of fish but so each time you know to think of a new way to actually physically make the drawing so for instance i make the drawings like i look at the monitor and i don't look at the page or i make a drawing while walking around in relation to movement and i think particularly for architects for me i mean i also i'm not i didn't study architecture but i have thought maybe i could have been an architect i don't know you know not really but but i was always interested in walking into when i was like looking at art history walking into a church walking into a cathedral for instance Gothic cathedral or Romanesque cathedral so or you know going to Greece and seeing the architecture of Greece and so on and and also in Crete for instance i mean not in Crete in the Greek islands the incredible continuous architecture of the islands that there's everything is joined together i'm just speaking it's very hard to answer your question but i'm just saying that in each case you could go and like in the architecture in the Greek islands i never thought of this before or will never do it but you could go and sit in one place and draw what is all around you you know instead of drawing something like this you could physically just you know approach it in a very different way and and make a different kind of drawing in that way or you can draw on the sand or in the dirt does that answer your question i don't know it's a difficult question complicated yeah maybe something we'll continue to discuss and i know that david uh is also someone who practices as well so yeah no i i think uh well i guess you can hear me um i think we're i mean first of all thank you so much for this wonderful talk i mean i think it's an honor to have you here and also um me personally um you know having research in ocean environments um and a project with small islands but also research in new york in this really important period in the 60s 70s where a generation of artists and uh institutions were born out of this kind of fertile ground of experimentation um and also like this interesting unconventional uses of spaces like you know 112 green street and the kitchen um but also really important issues um just ongoing in terms of like marginalization um and of course yours you know have a completely different uh story or perspective um but i think you know just to continue this conversation of like the commonalities and interests um i'm really intrigued by your research work and um you mentioned in uh hanyakans book in the shadow of shadow i think is um maybe architects we also delve into some kind of exploration at the beginning um and you know if nothing else is so that we know something about what we're starting to to delve into or talk about um so um i think this process is really for architects very complex and varied right and how you begin this project and and how to start thinking about things um in your work um you always delve into some kind of deep understanding whether it's the poetry of hilda du little or writings of or hey louise borges and i was wondering um how you begin that process or how you navigate that process and perhaps um you know sometimes it's more faithful or serendipity or sometimes you know very kind of deliberate and choreographed in a way but i was wondering if you could talk about that research aspect of your work and i think you know something like a lot of us are are dealing with also i okay i'm just going to say something related not related probably but i'll just talk about the way i looked at renaissance paintings were my one of my inspirations for looking at a frame space and how the painter dealt with the shapes and forms and i mentioned sassetta i don't you know his paintings they're very beautiful it's the architecture i love the way architecture was depicted in those paintings and it was often pastel colors and you know and also odd odd shapes but in the painting and then pierre de la francesca became more classical so i was very always interested in how the renaissance painters depicted architectural space as an important container um how i begin i could begin like that i could begin i could go home and say okay sassetta and but i begin sometimes by getting a lot of books and spreading that on a table and looking at them and taking things from each book and putting them it's a kind of collage technique a way of beginning um i also have to begin uh like i said with the form the cone that's another way to begin to begin with a shape and to make everything like the cone i made i made um you saw shapes of performance spaces with the form of the cone thinking of the form of cone and like it's a basic shape i like the cone better than the cube for me it's more eccentric and not so boring after the cube can get boring right yeah but um and so i also like i was thinking how to relaxness i began with one of his quotes about bees and then so then i did research on bees like for that piece his quote about the bee is so beautiful and so we found a beekeeper in long island i mean in brooklyn and we went and visited him and i filmed the bees and then put the children in the in the honeycombs and uh and that's the way i begin with uh with something small and then expand it and also uh with rachel karsten like the uh the the seahorses the idea that they have armor anyway that's okay um not i think that's incredibly helpful um and and you know really fascinating to understand your process so going from like the beginning of the process to maybe like not the end but like later in the stages um i think you know hans albert's orrick in a conversation you mentioned uh this kind of revisiting of the theme or a kind of continuity between projects or even within itself which is very very fascinating this kind of transformation transformation for example lines in the sand was first shown as a video performance in 2002 and then moving to um you know the kitchen in 2004 and then the the musea dart contemporary to barcelona in 2007 and who knows maybe in moama in in a couple years um so i was just wondering um maybe how you think of um this process in towards the end of your project where um in some ways the audience has a greater role in interpretation but at the same time your own perception of how these projects are changing over time and you know as the world changes or in some ways the world stays the same um you know how much of the work is autonomous and how much of it is a kind of reflection both literally and figuratively um that's you know changing over time so i think the work changes interestingly from site to site but in a kind of time-based manner uh you know if you look at a project that is maybe like you know from a decade ago versus now um do you have kind of personal um kind of retrospective thoughts about what they mean i mean it's very complicated and if i tried to um first of all i do not know really how the audience reacts to my work i do not know what your thoughts are or what your associations are unless i speak to you or i what i do is i i make my work i try to communicate my ideas as clearly as possible and also i'm interested in image making so i try to make it something that will draw the audience in but i'm not sure you know and when i redo it i'm sure that pieces i did in like the organic honey i think i'm going to show it in moma the audience will see it in a different way from the way the audience saw it when i first showed it and i don't know maybe i'll find out because i'll have reactions i hope but um so i don't have any i don't try to control that that's not something and i don't i try to make the work uh like for instance the things you lines in the sand i will show it at moma exactly in the same way that i showed it recently wherever it was last in in the tape you know because it worked there i did it you know you can't change it all the time you'd go crazy and um and also it wouldn't be appropriate i'm not interested in doing that either i'm interested in doing new work whenever i do a big show i try to make a new piece because in other words to be drawn into the past into your work is a kind it could be a deadening experience you have to continuously keep making new work in order to keep your mind fresh and to keep your idea like i'm going to work again with david gruber on something but it won't be a major piece because he's very busy but for instance i'm going back into that um territory of the fish with him again but in a very different way um it was very hard for me to let go of the fish piece because and i probably am going back to it because it's a fascinating subject and and so heartbreaking and important and i think it's very important um to address these issues now um so i think after this i will think about your question and your question and i'll be upset i'll think how could i have answered that differently i mean and what more can i say about it you know i think those are fantastic i think those are fantastic answers well thank you yeah we also have an opportunity now to for you to know um you know how how that reacted and to kind of continue a discussion that we've been having in our our section so i wanted to open it up to the audience and especially the students and and this time we wanted to try something a little different so everyone who has a question just raise your hand at once um and then jordan and ashra that means you have to choose hi i really love your presentation and i find really interesting like on your last works like moving off the land how you like transform the spaces to create like immersive experiences so that people can engage more with these kind of topics so i'm thinking about like all the things that you said about space and architecture and i just want to know like what is your perception of the architects role like right now he's asking what is your he said i'm sorry i'm just asking because i can't understand you so he's telling me it's like a foreign language i'm sorry but you know the microphone and my hearing so what is it the final question was what is your perception of the architects role today um yeah with the transformation of spaces and making like the people engage with these social issues like you know with your projects like moving off the land what about moving off the land i think he's asking how can architects give people a sense of the transformation of space in the way that you do in moving off the land oh i don't know how to answer that exactly but i will say um i live in new york i've grew up in new york um the architects should fight for their position in in architecture because frankly um new york is being ruined by developers and um so maybe architects have to be more fantastical you know think of fantasy a little bit more and i mean if you look around new york you see buildings that were built by architects and then you see buildings that were built by developers who knew nothing they know nothing about architecture and this was once a great city it is still a great city but i think that um i know that there is a feeling among some like there's no more an architect critic at the new york times there used to be an architecture critic no more why i don't know the answer to that question but um i think you have to maybe you have to be you know think in practicality not practicality but in fantasy and um maybe you have to make some look at the old those old um depictions of round buildings or or anything that happened in the past that is shown to you as a fantastic piece of architecture we have to go back to that you know in a way i don't know how but i i don't know if that answers your question but sorry um first i i'm so glad you talk about developers because i totally agree with you they are just totally destroying new york but um on another topic i i'm very interested by this kind of common thread that you have uh with the myth because it just it leaves both on the on the fantasy and and the truth and i think what you just speak right of what architects maybe need to move to it's more of this kind of myth reality right that that it can leave beyond kind of the fiction and kind of what what's happening in the real work so i'm guess i'm just curious of how and why that trade just kind of continues throughout your work and and how it has affected um every kind of piece that you maybe not every piece but you know your work in general and and second how does that play along with with time right because i think that's a very particular thing that meets have it is just time and kind of how they play along with the audience hopefully that's clear maybe not too big of a question i think it's a microphone you know people just spoke loudly i could probably understand them microphones are making it weird anyway going what was the question he's asking you how you make use of myth in your work as a way to traverse time well i mean i began to work a long a long time ago when i first began um because i was interested in mythology mythology is main underpinning of my work in the earlier video works where there's no language or words it's all based on on myth but it's not visible it's what i was looking at and how i thought of as an underlying structure and um in the history of art uh myth is an underlying uh theme that runs through like every painting i mean i'm talking about western art and eastern art has a story or a myth and um that's not true in modernist uh painting and sculpture and uh uh but it was true and it's what i related to as i said i was interested in how how do things begin you know how does art begin and how so when i started making art i looked into the beginnings of things and that's what inspired me like the no theater for instance began as a ritual and in turn into a theater um a theatrical form and i also strongly um uh felt that there has to be a continuity in one's work and they're you know from the beginning to end so sometimes i often go back for instance i've done a lot of reading about the no theater and so for instance for the piece called they come to us without a word and that song that i explained um i i there's books by uh actually west fennelosa and ezra pound about the no theater i go back to that time again so i often go back and look at my early work or no not at the work but i look at some of the texts that i was inspired by and have forgotten and and how do i bring it into the present and it re re uh it re inspires me um i don't know if i answered your question yes and also from other cultures so from the very beginning uh i wanted to it's probably a psychological thing of wanting not to be in home at home wanting to go to other countries and not wanting to be you know where i come from and so um i was always interested in other cultures which is another subject yeah maybe if i just could sneak in a quick question related to that um because you mentioned in your talk that um you that the hopey snake dance was the one ritual form which did not which you did not use uh later on like it was no i didn't use the ritual forms i didn't but i i thought of my own work as a ritual in my community in soho you know my audience and they were kind of rituals that i was performing so how do you begin to make a performance i don't know um the only direct borrowings i've made of other cultures is uh from the malookian book of the dead a new guinea tribe and they had this tradition where they made these beautiful um geometric looping drawings everybody had to know it in order when they die you have to know the drawing because when you meet the they call the devouring which at the line between life and death the witch begins the drawing and you have to finish it in order to pass over so that's the myth i never use that myth but i use the drawings in my performances i copied them and i learned how to do them they're beautiful and continuous line in a grid like that so it's a beautiful performative action can be um i really avoided copying other people's rituals especially i hope indigenous americans i never used any american myths indigenous american myths in my work i did work with japanese myths it has to do with um the idea of what is a dominant culture and um and what is it appropriate to refer to i feel it's okay for me to be inspired by the no theater although i never copied it but i was inspired by it i mean this is a complicated subject and um yeah so the i never had the right and i still don't to copy anything from the hopey culture it's a beautiful culture i did feel it was all right for me to remind people you know to look at it but you know when i saw the snake dance it was an amazing experience but i could never ever bring it directly into my work so when i read abby werber who did not hesitate to bring it into his work in a way um i could i could quote him without referring visually in any way to the hopey or referring to the actual snake dance never in that piece i made a drawing of a snake but it wasn't a snake dance so when i work with something like that like the coyote or the snake i try to work with something that's indigenous to many cultures and not just one culture i mean in that case like an animal like a snake or a coyote the coyote is very important figure as you know for many indigenous cultures and certainly in america and other places i don't know if that answers your question but for the hopey no never but just mentioning it i didn't even mention the word hopey in my performance you know hi um so thank you for your hi over here um thank you for your presentation i thought there was really thoughtful um and a certain aspect i really like was the way that you use mirrors uh to sort of reflect um upon the idea that perhaps human activities of some way disrupted the ocean's beauty but i was wondering how in considering the objective of fostering a more environment uh centric thinking uh do you think designers should take a more confrontative stance to express a sense of urgency or should it be presented in a more comprehensive way so to allow the audience sort of freedom to interpret the information that you have presented enabled the audience what audience to interpret the information that you presented so i mean the audience can interpret it anytime and in any way they want i have no control over that and i don't um i think that um as an artist you can't get too involved in that because then it would be an endless it would be an endless uh a thing that would distract a little bit of course you have dialogues with other i don't know if i'm answering your question but of course you have dialogues with other artists and and the audience and you bring the audience in but i don't do um audience participation you know i don't have pieces in which the audience um and i'm not i never actually liked the idea of um of the audience finishing that was a prevalent thing that happened for a while is that the audience could step into a piece and finish it however they wanted to i can't it's not interesting to me is that um is that why the interaction that you have with the artwork only pertains to you and the artwork but never with the audience interaction with the artwork only pertains to you and never with the audience well i hope it's a little bit of a misinterpretation of what i say it doesn't only pertain to me but i'm an individual and i look at it and i see it you know i see it the way i can see it and i say that because i know that this person sitting next to me will have different thoughts and of course i'm interested in that i'm interested in i mean i love talking to people about it it's i have to say as you get older you talk less and less when you're young and you're all in school you exchange ideas and talk a lot about each other's work as you get older people like me don't have time you know to sit around and talk about each other's work it's a luxury in a way i mean that's i'm just saying that's one point of view maybe people wouldn't agree with me i mean i talk to my fellow artists i go to see their work um we we support each other in that way and we exchange ideas still of course we also exchange ideas without talking to each other visually and orally but um yeah i think so and i also you we are also running out of time fortunately but i was wondering maybe we could do a few questions at once would that be Nuriya has one over there hello thank you very much for your talk um i found fascinating the continuous experimentation throughout your work and a very simple question how do you keep up experimenting without just repeating because it's inevitable so i'm fascinated by how you keep going experimenting i just do no um it's a constant challenge i have to say and um each time i begin a piece i think oh my god you know really really i mean i can often like i segue from one piece to another i begin with a certain thing from the last piece and continue but it's always incredibly difficult because um you know you're always thinking oh my god is this going to be any good i don't know and also on the other hand um one of the thing that has become um one of my driving forces is the research you know being inspired by by reading a book or you know i go to a museum and i look at things and i get inspired when i'm working on a piece like in mirage when i was working on mirage i would walk down the street i saw the hopscotch by children you know children you i put it in the piece you know that's just part of our culture and so and it became part of the piece so i think of my brain is like a computer and we all have i mean we all have a brain as a computer and um what i do is i put things into the computer and then i let it run around and interact you know your brain just does it for you it's the way you put things into the computer and then you move them around and um so there's a natural process in a way uh but and so you lay awake at night and you like some problems you can't solve and you lay awake all night and you solve the problem at night you know there are problems that you set up for yourself and so that sort of explains it a little bit i don't know does that help so you just have to go for it hi hi yo thank you for your presentation and thank you for your sharing about your artwork and your life and uh my question is how is performing on a screen different from performing in front of the screen and i mean uh in most of your performance we can see both of them at the same time and so what's your intention and what are you thinking when you're performing in front of a screen all right so i'll just begin by saying that um i cannot sit outside and see my performances but when i'm working on a performance i step in and out of the performance space continuously looking at what i'm doing recording what i'm doing looking at it and um and in that way i can see what's happening i don't just throw it together you know i don't just improvise in front of the screen without knowing what i'm doing i constantly um take a distance and look at it and um yeah is that answering the question does that answer your question or was there more sorry but you know all my work my performances are very choreographed so although i do um move a little more freely than some say actors and a play move um i'm always moving depending on the situation in the same way that i did in that section the last time i did it like with jason when we work together so he's a jazz pianist and what he does in my in relation to my work which i've observed that's why i talk about it is he knows it sort of by heart and he has little notations but he knows it and so each time i've noticed over the years when we've done a performance again and again each time he does it he adds a little dynamism to it you know it becomes the same piece but you know a little different and i can only say it like that i can't put it in words so i respond to that but not radically changing the tasks that i've set up i might move from one place to another in a different way and then i look at the performance and i judge myself you know i can look at something and think oh my god what's terrible you know and then i go back and try something else or i ask friends to come i also ask my friends to come and see my rehearsals because sometimes it helps for people to um yeah to give you a little tip like i have one friend sakina gabin who lives in the she's the mother of the little girl she's a great critic and so i also use my friends as critics not use them but ask them to be my critics yeah thank you it looks like there's one last question oh okay uh so in your performance moving off the land you use a lot of like experience sound and acoustics so i was wondering um so using sound as acoustics and in just a position with visuals of different sea creatures um so also in the clip that you showed um where you were like running bells behind like in front of a screen um so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about like the notion of interspeciality and space making using sound and acoustics as tools to address the issue of climate crisis wondering if you could address the issue of the the way in which you think about uh interspecial interspeciality or communication between species as a way of addressing the climate crisis in your work yeah well i only think of it is um something when i began working on moving off the land um like i would do a performance and no one knew in the audience very few people would know that we actually came from the sea we're made of the same material as the sea there are many elements our elements of our body is the same as the seas so people i didn't know that until i started doing this research and a lot of people in the audience didn't know that um they're just learning about interspecies communication and so since i began that piece i noticed that more and more people are exploring it and writing about it probably have been doing so for a long time but when they first recorded the sound of the whales those heartbreaking songs that were recorded in the i guess the 70s or the 60s i don't know do you know those sounds of the whale crying or singing in a way um you know we'd never heard that before and now like david gruber is exploring the sperm whale sounds and it's a clicking sound that the sperm whale makes through his head so they're just learning these things are just being um learned and experiment this very it's very difficult like i have a dog i know my dog talks to me and i'm sure many of you have animals that talk to and it's something that you develop uh and interspecies communication i wish that i i don't know how to if that's your question but um of course it influenced it interests me but what was it about sound you were asking about the use of bells in the performance yeah so like you were using bells and then like different pitches of sound with the visuals of the sea creatures and i was wondering if there is something like uh significant about that what's the question did the i guess did the bells give you a kind of way of communicating with these other forms of black no um i've used sound from the very beginning and i use instruments and i never thought of it as communicating i can they communicate to other you know of course you as humans i mean dogs communicate with sound and you can you know communicate with your dog with your voice but i don't pretend to know very much or experience very much about that but um i've been using sounds like the bells forever and from the very beginning and i work with composers for instance the way i work i'll just say i don't know how to answer your question but the way i work with jason the way we developed the sound was to work um to be inspired so i would do a movement or i would have a text and he would play a tune or something and then i'd say yes i like it or i don't like it and then i would be inspired to move in a different a certain way by his music and he would be inspired by what i was doing so in that way there's an exchange between the composer and the performer or the artist the same way with eco a mori you know i show her the material and with her it's less of a process in that way because i just let her play i mean i don't let her play but she plays in the context of the piece and bells are just one of my instruments always and i never thought of them communicate maybe the animals wouldn't like that sound you know they have sensitive ears and so i think the sound there's a lot of research going on now about sound in the oceans that are bad for the whales bad for the fish bad for everything they're destroying them you know the sound that machines make there's a lot of bad sounds out there that are one of the problems so i'm not sure how to you know there's certainly no interspecies communication going on there and in order to do that you have to have a very silent situation in order to hear the sounds in the ocean you have to have silence you can't hear them unless you can't even as a diver go down with a bubbling thing on your back and here you know you have to do free diving so i'm just talking about the ocean it's very dangerous and and also only a few people can do that and a few courageous people anyway i don't know how i just wanted to thank you for sharing your good sounds with us today and also for trying to communicate no i'm sorry that i can't understand almost anything that you're saying in the microphone with your masks on so that's why i had to keep asking so maybe i could have answered a little bit better if i'd be able to understand it's a great exercise and listening to so thank you so much and thank you also thank you thank you