here are the mornings after. speed has collapsed and anxiety chuckles with retrospect. Saturday’s 8p evening of works tumble into one another — a whirlwind encircling the exterior of the thing at hand…
“Thoughts scribbled in the margins, notes passed on the sly, the indominant culture hidden just below the surface structure. This festival will hold space for names, loss, mystery and darkness, reverence and interaction healing and self-care, attending to layers of history and what comes before as the groundwork for lasting action.”
this night approaching history/memory/periphery contextualized a vastness encompassed in the exterior. each work confounded with testimony offering individuated actions as entry to the other worlds with utility as salvation and abandon. i offer much gratitude for being invited into those spaces from each artists.
with curiosity and suspicion, i posed questions of the curatorial statement which wonderfully provoked generation with a cautionary wide-casting net. i proposed my queries with those fellow artists sharing the evening before attempting this writing / which has culminated between modes of inquiry, ramble, and review…
are you activating this prompt within your process and culminating work? If at all, how?
as i shift focus away from trying to be readable/purchaseable (because it’ll continue without me) and towards the conditioning effect/affect of attempting over time, of what it has been to live this way, where in my life this condition has most profoundly functioned, and where (actually) it doesn’t […] i’m proposing structures and experiences to disorient and reveal. i’m inquiring into the conditions of visibility and representation, the labor and intoxication of those conditions. – Lily Bo
By being bold in action. Depth that sits and is meant for viewer reflection. We have carved out our space and the body and actions reflect that. – IV Castellanos
Performance Art in general is still very much a part of the indominant culture, even though as a practitioner I consider it a medium “of the people”. Often times I feel as though I am very much passing notes into the ether for whomever is there to pick them up on the other side. Getting to collaborate with people who’s work I admire and creating a unspoken yet shared language with them via action is to me the crux of this performance. – Geraldo Mercado
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history/memory/periphery – history/memory/periphery – the container comes to mind — what a stimulating and slippery conception coalesces from these three words // the notion of alien derivatives reified through the gaze of performance and an institutions’ homogeneity. as I watched the works and watched the works be watched I wondered how necessary an evaluation of the inside is / it’s allegiances and political bearings / it’s comprehensive and those socio-constructed identity markers, as it attempts to inquire about the outside… a space far from localized with violence continually ensuing as one’s place/past as present silences another’s, stands on the shoulders of another’s, remains in the architecture of that formidable center we’ve become fugitive to.
how does the expiring moment of offering a glimpse, a performance, contain the combustible material of memory? how do you triangulate the periphery? the recapturing from self to self’s past, these personalized artifacts already initiate the distance — the gray — that mysticism that can offer potential to make from, reimagine form, look back at communication…
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Performance is an expression that breaks barriers between people. It often ignores hierarchies and speaks to emotion and experience. If this is your language you can investigate histories, question society, and embrace – cross-culturally. I think that is important.. – Ayana Evans
The space of performance is so vast and generous, that it allows everyone the potential to define a singular mode of research, while creating a dialogue with other artists. That space provides an exciting platform for generating conversation and building culture. – Zachary Fabri
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the works seemed to catapult onto the static spaceship of JACK’s interior, one following the other with pronounced tension as they arrived with stakes, an interiority from each artists that animated the desire to offer//their vulnerability//disavowing a universal logic. meeting the buffer of audience members. this distance between the two parties articulating the gray with audible reactions, silence, transfixed gaze… collision after collision; how generous on all sides. Even more, the periphery became the center wooden floor, the transitions of blue backlight, the absent voices in the post show one on one feedback, the bodies of color – bodies underground – – the bodies reimagined that will continue to generate magnetism of + for the periphery but surprisingly materialize in minor.
you were not there but I looked for you.
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i heard those absent voices in the mantra’s harked through the work,
can you see me? (Michael Mahalchick)
where are we going? what will we do when we get there? (Social Health Performance Club)
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ringing a profound kind / a magic of not naming and not arriving. there is still much to share and transgress as we attempt to move past our valences to imagine, and in that way, testify for the groundworkings/ers.
to repurpose lily bo’s words, that Saturday night, the presence of bodies, and the facilitation by MR was deeply human… organized into something, striving to be something as it coheres, coagulates, collects itself to be while not able to be everything at the same time. speculation is necessary, if not only to provoke a mode of production and gatekeeping that is consistently evaluative, but also to instigate a need to roam wildly outside of the conceived bounds, traversing over and around the singular and commoditized thing of the outside. i am left with a thrust and hunger
