Lucien Smith Serves The People for Adidas

June 11, 2021

In an effort to benefit his nonprofit, “Serving the People”, artist and filmmaker, Lucien Smith, has partnered up with Adidas to release 200 Adidas Originals Forum sneakers. Supporters can purchase these Adidas sneakers for $250 a pair, where proceeds will go to the mentorship of young artists to aid them in navigating the gallery system and commercial market. Along with the release of these sneakers, Smith has also partnered with director, Rick Rocha, and Sneeze LLC, to create a short film entitled, “Fire Finder.”

In his film, Smith portrays a firefighter who works his way through fine art, acting, music, and skateboarding. Other stars in the film include actors such as Julia Fox, Anthony Hayden Guest, Arsun Sorrenti, and many others. The 7-minute short film went live on June 3, while the sneakers will be released on June 10. Smith customized these sneakers at Spring Studios, where he will feature his unique “rain painting” technique.

Text By Cassandra Jekanoski
Interview by Tiana Randall
Photos by David “Shadi” Perez

What was the point in your life where you realized that 'Serving The People' was necessary?

I guess I was just going through my own hardships with understanding and for me, I went to art school unaware of the art market. And I guess outside of school, I kind of had an accelerated career where I sort of had to learn all these lessons, and sort of seeing behind the curtain of something I didn't really know existed. And at a certain point, it kind of took all the fun out of it for me. I started to look for something that I could use my skillset with that maybe had more resonance, more responsibility to society, and to the people in my life. And, you know, my community, and that's slowly formed in STP. It was definitely not something that happened overnight. It's definitely been a process and STP is still sort of developing and figuring out at its core what the future is. But at the very minimum — the base foundation of the mission is to really create a healthier creative world and to sort of allowing more accessibility for artists, especially the young and emerging.

And what does a healthy and creative art world look like to you?

I think one where we all have equal footing in. And that artists are at first and foremost, the ones that are being respected and being cherished, and not the galleries or the collectors. But, you know, the creators. And I think at this point now, you know, the important "artists" in the world are the ones that have the highest selling prices or show at the best galleries. And I don't think that's necessarily a world that I wanted to go into. And I don't think that's a world that a lot of artists that I share community with enjoy either.

Nice. so 'Serving The People' is about eliminating the barrier within the art world?

I think it's reinventing what we think the art world is. You know, I think that the art world, as it is today is not one that I want to adopt, right. Or not one that anyone that I know wants to adopt. And so we want to create a new art world and replace the old one. So it's definitely not an alternative. Our plan is to create a better one.
Can you give concrete examples about how you're breaking down these barriers, and what impact has it had within the art community?
Right now, our focus has been just purely on the community and linking those communities internationally, and throughout the United States. And DFA shows was one of the ways that that sort of came together and really started to build that core of a thousand artists and more. They sort of gave us the platform — more now artists are approaching us and wanting to be involved. And so, now that we have sort of linked that community together, we are building a platform for that to exist for those artists to really be able to not just for us to handpick the artists that we work with, but for them to be able to feel free, to create their own programming, publish their own artworks. And a lot of the software, a lot of the functionality of that comes from the recent developments with the sort of blockchain technology.

And so STP, I hope is just one of the many new marketplaces and that, that, that spawn from this revolution, um, that all linked together on this same software that makes it possible for artists to enjoy, you know, some of the benefits of what the blockchain has shown us with digital art, as far as smart contracts and artists ownership, and really like inventing a new way for collectors to not necessarily manipulate the market and still enjoy a lot of the benefits of collecting young art. But at the same time, the first and foremost is protecting young artists and giving them a place where they feel that their work is being healthily shown and shared, and for them to have a community and not have this sort of like a competitive speculative market that runs that sort of operation.

What do you think of NFTs and the market of NFTs, and getting young artists into that?

I think NFTs have really exposed to me, what's more important than an NFT is the blockchain. The security and the democratization, and the transparency that something like that can provide. I think NFT with the first example, I do think NFTs are a really good way of artists being able to share their vision and introduce their imagination and build careers from that. Because a lot of artists can't afford studio spaces and can't afford artist supplies. And NFT is like a really easy way for them to sort of put that vision into that. So it's a consider NFT as a new media, you know, and I see the next generation of artists — instead of struggling to try to find a studio space or, making ends meet with trying to get oil paint and things like that, putting a lot of their vision in the NFTs and sort of building a following and an audience. And then, entering into the studio practice.

It's visibility, right. There's so many platforms now where you don't have to live in New York city to necessarily gain notoriety, as an artist. That's something that I think spawns from the very early days of even computing the idea that one could work from home and run a business, not from a major city, but from somewhere more rural. And I think that's starting to happen. I think blockchain is finally allowing us to be able to use the internet in a much healthier way than it was that it has been. You know, imagine if the rolling stones had YouTube, and didn't have to sign to a label and how amazing it would be for them to rapport and to share their music instantaneously.

So how has the impact of 'Serving the people' had on you, emotionally and internally as well?

It's gratifying, you know, I think that I often, when speaking to people at STP we've been thinking about how we had an online marketplace for art when people laughed at us and said "art will never sell online."And now you see galleries starting to switch to creating platforms and through the pandemic, they have sort of have expedited that online viewing room. And so I think we've always been ahead of the curve. And so we're not so in a rush to necessarily evolve our current existing platform, but more, 20-10 years ahead of the game with trying to really build something that can link all of those platforms together.
Can you tell us about the specific initiative you're working with this time around for Adidas?
I've always thought of STP as a way to sort of use a lot of the commercial strategies, like, you know, the marketing strategies to sort of push our mission across. Adidas was very supportive in the idea that if I was going to do a sneaker, which was very commercial, I'd allow my community to participate in it. So from hiring, from finding Rick Rochet, and having Rick being able to sort of bring together his community as the star of the operation, that was really like a really good example of how STP works. We want to work with brands, you know because obviously, they want relatability, and they want to be able to evolve and tap into these sort of micro pop-cultural communities. And STP is that, you know, it's not an agency, but we have access to so many artists that do certainly a great thing. Or if we can sort of funnel them into these creative projects that we're working on and using these brands as like a platform with a high audience to sort of highlight them — that's like mission accomplished there for us.

Why this specific silhouette? And why make a shoe over anything else, like a t-shirt?

I think that was more on their end, that was more something that they wanted and they wanted to move a certain model. So I'm fine with having to work within sort of these sort of regimens. When you give someone free creative control, it's almost scarier because it's like 'Oh God, I got to like really think about this.' But when they're saying like Oh, you wanted a sneaker, that limits the amount of thinking I have to do— which made my job a little bit easier. Then obviously, you know, just doing a sneaker wasn't enough for me. I really wanted to do a film and I wanted to not take myself too seriously, you know? And that's why the film has this sort of slapstick self-deprecating vibe to it because I think artist takes themselves way too seriously. And I wanted to do a fun project and like help an organization, but also like art is supposed to be fun. It's not supposed to be so rigid and it's not supposed to be such a transactional process. So the film really helped to show you know, that we're here to have fun and, connect, and enjoy ourselves.

It seemed really funny and just like definitely a different side of you — you seem very serious.

I take what I do seriously, but what I do isn't serious. You know, it's art, it's creative, it's fun. And like that's a lot of what STP has brought back to me. It's that sort of like inspiration and sort of that mentality of 'I want to be enjoying what I'm doing first and foremost, but I'm going to spend my life doing it.'
Can you tell us about the film? You have people like Julia Fox and a great cast in it. How did you come together to make that?
Well, yeah, STP actually is hosting. We hosted one, but it's sort of gone on hiatus for a second as it's summertime, but we're hosting a podcast series of Julia. So she's entered into our community. And she really expressed— she came to us and really expressed interest in being involved. And we love that. So just naturally, you know, it came to fruition that she would star in this film with us.

Right. What is next for STP?

We are building a new marketplace that runs on a software that I think is really gonna help connect a lot of these digital marketplaces that are separated right now. We are also starting to really branch out and start to create a network of contributors, photo, and photojournalists, writers on our sub stack platform and allow for people to freely upload content. Whether it's photo galleries, or articles, or essays. So you'll see a contributor call-out, um, going live soon. And that's really exciting to me because I feel like we spent a lot of time building the platform, but not a lot of time really allowing for other types of artists, not just painters and sculptors to have a place where they can share their content.

Art

Even Better Than The Real Thing: Poets Respond to the Whitney Biennial

April 24, 2024

The Whitney Biennial returned in March with the 81st edition of the longest running survey of American art, titled Even Better Than The Real Thing. The works in the exhibit explore themes of authenticity, bodily subjectivity and autonomy, material instability, urban architecture, and the history of colonialism, to name a few, and range across mediums and disciplines. Featuring works by 71 artists and collectives including Pippa Garner, Ser Serpas, Mavis Pusey, and Kiyan Williams, the 2024 Whitney Biennial also includes a film program and performance program which will offer screenings and shows through September.

In a reinstallment of our coverage of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, office invited poets Kyle Carrero Lopez and Kay Gabriel to respond to the works in this year’s biennial with ekphrastic poems. Below are their reflections.

Introduction by Samuel Getachew
Poems by Kyle Carrero Lopez and Kay Gabriel
Installation view of Once Again… (Statues Never Die), by Isaac Julien, 2022.
Photograph by Ashley Reese

From left to right: Takako Yamaguchi, "Issue," 2023; Takako Yamaguchi, "Catalyst," 2023; Karyn Olivier, "How Many Ways Can You Disappear," 2021; Takako Yamaguchi, "Proxy," 2022; Takako Yamaguchi, "Clasp," 2022; Takako Yamaguchi, "Formula," 2023. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Takako Yamaguchi, "Issue," 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

Abstraction in Reverse

By Kyle Carrero Lopez

after Takako Yamaguchi

The laptop logo looks like a cartoon apple

and the cartoon apple (in two parts) looks like a sideways

sort of jagged tooth below a pointed oval — its floating stem:

not simply oval but vesica piscis, fish bladder, the shape made

between two intersecting circles, heart of the venn diagram,

the heart itself in the center of one’s chest,

though leaning slightly left—an imperfect center—

the heart itself symbolized by a shape unlike the heart;

the false heart representing true feeling, true love,

its shape, in one telling, pulled from Aristotle’s theory of its shape:

three chambers with a dent in the middle,

and though we now know it’s four, the false heart isn’t so far off,

essence of the true shape there in the abstraction,

the true heart loosely similar,

the true heart on a lab desk pre-transplant

pump pumping the false heart’s trademark red,

blood-soaked comice-pinecone-misc. THING,

vigorous, and thick, and horrifying,

ours

Sharon Hayes, "Ricerche: four," 2024. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Tourmaline, "Pollinator," 2022. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

ektor garcia, "teotihuacan," 2018. © ektor garcia

“He Is Here!”

By Kay Gabriel

See: Sharon Hayes, “Ricerche: four,” 2024; ektor garcia, “teotihuacan,” 2018; Tourmaline, “Pollinator,” 2022.

Sharon Hayes seems patient.

She asks a lot of older people what they think is going on,

If the gains they fought for have endured,

where they feel safe and if they

think the world is better now or worse than when they were young.

These questions can be frustrating. I mean, I get frustrated,

sometimes, asking people if they think it’s a bad world

and why, and what to do.

Hayes’s interviewees agree the world is worse,

even, than the one in which they came of age, though

they don’t agree on why. They feel something disintegrate.

I’m paraphrasing—they didn’t say disintegrate.

A man acknowledges legal rights.

He’s Black, gay, looks to be in his late 70s.

Watching the moral panic grow—

paraphrasing again—

he suggests the win is fragile. Where’s safe?

Home. Where’s home? A retirement

community in Tennessee. We used to be so afraid

of a liberal world, that it would subtract the force

of our critique, like shock absorbers on a car, or a

Katamari ball yes-and-ing its path across a surface

pounded flat. We, I mean, queers whose consciousness was

easy-baked in like 2012. We regarded with

suspicion the capacity of art to—what, exactly?

Challenge? Sure, if you put it

like that. I mean we watched people sharpen

critique while the relatively powerful repeated it, and metrics

like average inequality, average deaths per day

tunneled deeper into nightmare.

I’m trying to explain a feeling—dispiritedness;

the sense that pricking conscience

wouldn’t do much, even in highly trafficked environments.

Were we wrong? Hannah Baer called herself a “skeptic

at church,” about poetry, not art, but it feels similar:

suspicion about the relationship of content to changing

unbearable conditions. And not even poetry per se but poetry

readings, which can, sure, be dreary affairs. There’s your

ex on his phone. There’s a bad feeling. There’s a pile

of interesting people. Or it’s transcendent,

I mean, the words change something—clarify the obscure, offer

strength to the downtrodden, make productively

light of misery. Cecilia did, “sucking

and sucking,” wishing Chiqui would fall

on stage. Pamela Sneed remembered

Assotto Saint defiant at a funeral: “He is here!”

and I wept. It’s like: “Cecilia!” Patrick wept, when Nan Goldin

read Cookie Mueller’s “Last Letter” in the new Walking Through

Clear Water— “I know, I know, I know that somewhere

there is paradise … Courage, bread and roses,”

see, Hannah, I’m crying right now,

so I don’t hold your position.

Peter Weiss in Aesthetics of Resistance has

his antifascist fighters, exiting Spain,

study Guernica in the woods, and Amilcar

Cabral wrote poetry while he fought the Portuguese.

He died before the victory he made possible.

I could go on, even if the “art world”—a euphemism

for the class that holds the keys—shreds its revanchist wave.

I believe that that, too, will pass,

not just like that. I mean I think that people change their ideas about reality

faster than reality can change. I suspect they do it

faster even when together, which is why Hannah’s

right, it’s church. We’re moved to see each other

moved. It’s nice that the Whitney likes trans

women artists so much: Ser, Pippa, Tourmaline.

Tourmaline’s “Pollinator” video is stunning, her orchid

headdress, her Marsha research. So are ektor garcia’s

sculptures. “Teotihuacan,” named after the ancient

Mesoamerican city in the Valley of Mexico, joins mesmerizing

white crochet to a steel frame. I think about the artifacts Diego

Rivera collected there and framed in the vitrines

at Anahuacalli. Then you climb the stairs and see his planned

mural, Stalin and Mao offering peace to the peoples

of the world—Pesadilla de guerra, sueño de paz.

No, really! Stalin holds a dove. A generically ugly Uncle Sam fumes. His eyeline,

Stalin’s, extends across the mural to where Frida Kahlo

engages visitors. Probably you don’t agree. You wouldn’t say that that’s

how it went. Maybe nor would Sharon Hayes, or her crowd

of gentle older queers. Someone should ask them.

a promise undelivered, promise given a new look / by fresh eyes 53 years later

Dejygea

By Kyle Carrero Lopez

after Mavis Pusey

I looked and looked and still know not what it means.

Dejygea – Pangea, caesura, déjà voulez-vous.

Would love to know what Miss Mavis meant with that title,

yet I know that not to know for sure

is itself a gift. Reaction vid or GIF:

Kandi Burress cocks her head and cracks

you just made that up! to Porsha Williams.

And did!

Oil on canvas. There’s black and white,

and reds, greens, blues: the three primary colors in physics

(sorry to yellow)

and here we see physics sing out, the oil scene

informed by architecture informed always by physics,

structure and scaffolds and quake safety, heat and energy, and and and and!

It’s Miss Mavis’s take on the Lárge Apple’s

constant construction, constant noise,

the way its buildings shoot up and plunge down.

It’s Miss Mavis back at the Biennial after the ‘71 Biennial on Black artists

with no Black curators,

a promise undelivered, promise given a new look

by fresh eyes 53 years later:

Blackstraction redeemed!

Sitting in the crowd of a Black poet’s reading,

Hanif Abdurraqib overhears a white woman ask her neighbor

how can Black people write about flowers

at a time like this?

If I’m Black and I make a thing up and it fails to convey

the right Black thing to the right donor’s taste, did the tree make a sound?

Friends from college may remember a time, a period really,

when I fell afflicted, obsessed with saying Lazy Susan, laissez-faire.

It came forth like revelation and I couldn’t stop speaking it aloud,

or sending texts with cryptic lineation:

lazy susan

laissez-faire

Deep within my jokey, specific, idiosyncratic dome

I looked and looked and still know not what it means.

Art

Paul Hameline and Paige Silveria’s ‘Preservation’ Asks Us to Dream

April 24, 2024

Paul Hameline and Paige Silveria's Preservation, a collective exhibition on view at CØR Studio in the heart of Paris earlier this month, reckoned with the loss of childhood wonder, aging, innocence, and society's inane obsession with knowledge under the guise of progress. A series of photographs, sculptures, and installations by artists such as Gaetano Pesce, Alyssa Kazew, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Cecile Di Giovanni, Gaspar Willmann, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallages, Ladji Diaby, Ron Baker, Simon Dupety, and Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Preservation was ultimately a reminder that when we grow up, we can forget ourselves. For Hameline and Silveria, the exhibition acted as "a safe haven... A dystopia slowly leading back into utopia," celebrating feeling over rationalization, invoking curiosity and a renewed openness to the unknown. Read our conversation with the two on their attempt to call people back to their imaginations below.

Interview by Sahir Ahmed
Images courtesy of Paige Silveria

Can you talk a bit about your selection process, especially when co-curating an exhibition with another person?

Paul Hameline — It involved several coffees, a bunch of beers, nighttime, daytime. Several back and forth, it was all quite similar to a tennis match really. I would send Paige one image, she’d reply to me with another one. Same with texts, Paige would send me a text excerpt and I’d reply by sending her another one. Eventually things started taking shape in an organic way, and we would simply orient the narrative in a direction rather than another.

I’m sure you were uber excited about all of the artists included, but was there one in particular you were looking forward to presenting to this local audience (maybe new to them)?

Paige Silveria — That’s obviously really hard to answer. Though I want to say that I found Gogo Graham’s self portraits really special. I met her years ago when I interviewed her about her fashion show in New York. As a trans Latinx fashion designer and artist, her runways were these incredible, conceptual presentations. You really felt like you were immersed in an art performance. Recently, I saw that she’s been taking a bit of a step away from fashion and focusing on her art, especially paintings. So I reached out to see if she might want to show one with us in Paris. I love these two portraits she allowed us to include so much. One is her when she was this adorable little kid with big ears and the second is later, as this like glamorous icon.

Gogo Graham

And this wasn’t your first show in the space, right Paige? How would you compare the two?

PS — The first thing I did was a curatorial collaboration with Arcane Press magazine for the release of their first issue. The aesthetic was a bit darker and moodier and really focused on the artists included. This show with Paul was a bit more personal and organic. We spent months chatting between the US and Europe and with coffee on walks when I’d finally returned to Paris. We would send artists and work we loved and discuss the complexities of why they made sense for this little world we were creating. Then trying to articulate what the world was turning into with literature … It was a really special and fun project to do between friends. And we really took our time.

I loved coming by the night before the opening when unfinished and seeing it the next day, how late did you stay?

PH — Not so late after you left, must have been 10-10:30. Once we were done, we went for beers, some cigs and giggles. How was the match?

[I went to FSG vs Barcelona, it was good, Barcelona won.]

PS — I love the install. It’s so exciting to see everything together finally after staring at images on your computer or phone for months. Things are tangible and you can start to really craft the physical world that previously was only in our heads.

Sculpture by Cécile di Giovanni, Prints by Alyssa Kazew, Chair by Simon Dupety

What was your favorite part of curating together?

PH — The thought process, the research, the exchanges etc. Paige showed me artists and authors I didn’t know, I’d reciprocate by making her discover some she wasn’t familiar with. Sharing is caring. We obviously are two different people with our own ways of seeing and experiencing, so merging the two in order to give birth to that show was a great experience.

PS — It’s been a while since I was able to put a show together with someone from the inception. I really loved to be inspired by his way of thinking and being introduced to new communities of artists. It was also pretty exciting when we realized that our separate ideas were super similar and the vision was happening in tandem. Things worked so smoothly; we somehow emerged with the same aesthetic in mind.

What led you to the title ‘Preservation’? What are you preserving?

PS — The title was pulled from the excerpt (in the press release for the show) from Robert Pirsig’s book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. With the title, we’re analyzing civilization, societal structure, moral grounding — preservation of what exactly? Of whom? At what cost? And why? It’s less of a statement, or a desire to preserve anything, and more of an inquiry to begin the conversation.

In an interview I read recently, Hans Ulrich Obrist said that “good curation is working with someone who can do something you can't.” He also called curation a kind of junction-making, creating these avenues where people and ideas meet and interact. Do you agree?

PH — That goes without saying. The basis of any relationship is to give and take. You have something to offer, and the person sitting in front of you has something to give you. We grow through our relationships and encounters, from a lover to a stranger asking you for a lighter.

PS — My favorite take away from Marx was when he said that human relationships are the point of our existence. I think that’s any conversation and exchange, even reading the book of someone who’s past … With these shows it can be so exciting bringing people together. A while back I did a Good Taste show in LA and was showing work by two really iconic artists, Erik Foss and Erik Brunetti. Although they’d been aware of each other for over a decade, they only finally met when we began installing this show. It was really cool to listen to them discuss things from over the years that one another had done that’d made an impression on them. Even just small connections like this are a part of why I love to curate — not just about making sales!

Bill Taylor

What conversations are you hoping to nudge into existence with this show and those to come?

PH — The way I perceived it, it’s about how civilization reached a point of no turning back, it’s about creating some kind of world within oneself, against the turmoil present in today’s world. We tried to create a safe haven, some kind of fort. A dystopia slowly leading back into utopia. A bit like Peter Pan and his Neverland. A feeling of compassion, of affection, of love followed. Memories of childhood, the importance to dream and to use one's imagination, allowing us to become our own architects of wonders. Let yourself dream. Shake up the ‘younger you’ hidden in your own eyes and past. The one the world tells you to silence and forget too often. Do not let that little guy disappear from your life. It's about having fun, smiling, playing. Keep that spark burning like an eternal fire.

PS — Yes, I love that.

Shelf by Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Bear by Anthony Fornasari

Art

For Eimear Walshe, There are no 'Goodies or Baddies'

April 23, 2024

Eimear Walshe and I sit on the ground by the water at the Arsenale in Venice, just 100 yards from their widely successful exhibition ROMANTIC IRELAND for the Irish Pavilion at this year's Biennale. ROMANTIC IRELAND is a multilayered piece that utilizes contemporary storytelling to address the bargains we make through the traditional Irish practice of earth-building. Their work centers on Ireland's late 19th-century land contestation and its relation to private property, sexual conservatism, and the built environment. The piece consists of three primary storytelling elements — the earth-built sculpture of the physical exhibition space, the five-voice operatic soundtrack written by Walshe describing an eviction, and the video consisting of seven dancers, including Walshe, dressed as 19th-century to 21st-century Irish archetypes, sporting green, wide-eyed latex fetish masks.

The layering of symbols and the use of atypical languages, specifically a physical and movement-based language, create a multilayered and complex piece that deals with the dualities of living in modern society and reckoning with the past where, as Walshe says, there are no 'goodies or baddies.'

By Isabella Fox Arias
Images by Eimear Walshe

Isabella Fox Arias — How does language play into your work? Despite using a visual medium, language is still omnipresent throughout.

Eimear Walshe — The process of making ROMANTIC IRELAND started with writing, and I am very word-oriented, even as a visual artist. Writing comes up high in my communication fluency areas, so my challenge for this pavilion is thinking about the three different things produced.

The first part is the libretto in terms of its development, and that's obviously a writing process. But the challenge with the other aspects, like the video and the sculpture, was to think through, you know, the performers don't speak; they communicate just through gestures.

That was a challenge because I want to get more fluent with working just through gestures. What better way to do that than through dancers with their own vocabulary? I was really lucky to get to work with the dancers, performers, actors, and musicians who convey without words. Then, through the building, it was like thinking about retelling a part of history just through the material itself.

I'd love to hear more about constructing the story of the building.

The libretto text was the starting point and, I suppose, is also like the temporal anchor point in the sequence where the video was set. It's the biography of a building — the building site is the before, the eviction is the destruction of the life of the building, and then the ruin is the afterlife. The libretto about an eviction became the fulcrum of the narrative arc of the pavilion. It's central and primary, but I think it's also something that I try to challenge myself with. That's why it's so special to get to work with other people: you find out their languages, their fluencies, and their modes of conveyance.

Have you worked with dancers before, or is this your first time working so heavily with just a movement-based language?

Yeah, this is my first time. I got Mufutau Yusuf on board at the very start. I did that because, in his work, he has the ability to communicate incredibly large volumes and intensity through very minimalistic gestures. Some of his works involve really explosive, hugely energetic movement, but then others involve microscopic movement, like having individualized control of a whole sort of fan of muscles on your body. That extends into the kind of narrative that he is able to make through those really microscopic movements. I remember seeing one of his performances that involved moving a bicycle a tiny bit backward and forward. It's just incredibly beautiful. That ubiquitous movement captured and repeated was really of interest to me in terms of the earth building. The brief or the remit for the movement and why I was so comfortable working with Mufutau as a choreographer was I don't really want there to be dancing. I wanted to be built around the types of movements required for this kind of labor and building practice.

Working with Mufutau, Rima Baransi, and Gallia Conroy, who were the crew members with strong backgrounds in dance, was really inspiring. They just have a different way of creating. I was able to write the scripts really differently than I usually would; I'm usually a little bit over-contrived. People who are improvisational dancers are going to challenge that. For some parts of the script, I just bought laminated photographs of pieces of furniture.

What kind of furniture did you bring?

One of the really important ones was a phone stand, which is a funny mid to late-20th-century piece of furniture that you'd have in your hallway. There's a little door, you put your phone book in a little press, the phone is up high, and there's a little place to sit. That appears in some of the photo documentation of the work. Erin plays the harp, so she needed a harp stool; my businessman needed a big mahogany desk, so we made that out of our bodies, and the landlord wanted to shit on everyone, so we made them a toilet. That was incredible because it was not an area of aptitude for me. It was really special getting to work with people who were not even exclusively in that field but who have such strength in that area.

That's wonderful! I was also interested in your choice of using masks for your dancers. I found it powerful that the identity was erased from the dancers, and instead, they became almost monster-like.

Yeah, I mean, those masks have really different associations for different people. People asked me the least about the sort of monster alien end of the spectrum, and I'm excited to talk about that, actually.

Really? It was my first thought watching the piece.

Yeah, I guess there is a spectrum of associations with those masks. Their primary use is their fetish objects, and they're from a latex company that produces custom whatever you want sort of latex pieces in any color. They're in olive green, so they also have an association with Ireland, the military, and the colors that were worn by volunteers in our revolutionary history. Also, any kind of face covering is often associated with clandestine activities. There's some kind of line between deviance and criminality when you have to cover your face because of what you're doing. Thinking about the different types of external forces that create the necessity for that but also thinking about, especially the fact that they all wear it even though they're all from different historical and class positions, this kind of universal marker.

The monster bit is really relevant because I'm thinking about the way that colonized people, whenever they resist in any way, shape, or form, including peacefully, are constructed as terrorists. That's definitely something that's at play with this. These constructions of forced clandestinisation, deviancy, and the relationship between armed resistance and liberty. All this is painted on them, and then they act out a soap opera. I suppose what I'm asking of the viewer is, can you when you see them go through all these daily activities, can you identify with them anyway, even though they've been othered by this costuming?

You mentioned otherness, which I felt while watching your work. You piece made me think about otherness and its relation to being a queer artist. You are non-binary and your work deals a lot with transient middle space that exists between two extremes. I’m thinking about how your work deals with coming from a land that was both the colonizer and the colonized. There's not really a question there.

But you're onto something aren't you? You certainly are.

Yeah, this is what your work has been making me think about.

I think there are two things with that: the interest in forced clan destination probably does come from thinking about the kind of bargains that you cut, and there are the invitations to self-betrayal, which includes betrayal of your history, betrayal of your ancestral struggle, and betrayal of your peers. That's certainly something that I'm thinking about with this. What you were saying in terms of Ireland as a colonized, a settler colony, but also the agent of, certainly in a really extensive way, religious imperialism. We tend to be a bit less keen to discuss.

Then secondly, the assistance to the extension of, and the aiding of, for example, US imperialism. We are a colonized nation that aids in the colonization of others and has learned nothing. In terms of what that has to do with being non-binary, maybe there's something very kind of simple in terms of creating a narrative film where there are no goodies or baddies. Why is Ireland so keen to discuss its victimhood in relation to colonization and so shy of or even in denial of how it perpetuated it? Part of it is because narrative framing doesn't allow you the complexity to have both, and that's also the case in lots of other kinds of categories.

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