Kevin Andrew Heslop: How to balance being a human being and being a human being in the city. I don’t know if you have any ideas of what to talk about—apart from the new work.
Guta Galli: I’m open to anything.
Okay.
Not necessarily the new work but possible as well.
Okay, okay.
I mean, since we already talked quite a bit, and I like the way you conduct things, I’m not worried about anything.
Great. Thank you. I feel actually emotional and moved because of how deeply I admire your work. And it’s really, truly an honour to talk with you. And I’m grateful that you trust me in dialogue. It actually means a lot to me.
Thanks for saying that.
It’s really true. I’ve met a lot of artists and I don’t think there’s anything like an objective evaluation of quality, but for a variety of reasons your work speaks deeply to me and I’m grateful for it and for being able to talk with you about it, so I’ll just say that.
And I’m very grateful to hear that. I’m flattered. Not to mention that I don’t talk a lot about my work as much as I would like. It doesn’t go out, so much. So, for me, it’s an opportunity—especially with someone who knows how to conduct an interview with depth and with sensitive thoughts and connection, true connection. It’s rare. You know who is the entity that I talk more about my work? Artificial intelligence.
Ah.
Because I’m an overthinker, so this work that I said—the new work—I’ve been thinking about it for more than a year. And I don’t talk about it with people. But I feel the need to be able to sleep to have actual dialogues, you know? Rather than have just internal monologues.
Why?
Because sometimes I want critique. I want critique. I want to see how the images I’m creating, how they impact or not people. So far I’ve been doing this more than anything with AI than with people. But I strongly prefer people, even though I think AI’s fascinating.
Why?
Because, for example, I try to put myself in the mindset of artists I admire. For example, let’s say Adrian Piper. I love her work. I try to imagine how she would react to the things I’m creating, and then I ask AI: I want you to use the mindset of this artist to reflect on the work I’m creating. So let’s think about it, you know? And then I get to do that with many artists that I don’t have the privilege to talk either because they’re dead or I can’t access them, simply. So I get to do that a lot with AI. And it’s obviously not the same as it would be, but it has a collection there of information that can be very efficiently translated into an imaginary dialogue that is compelling. So, sometimes I’m in the middle of the night and I think, Okay, so I want to do this for this performance. I want to wear that. And then I will—I don’t know if this is compelling. What would this artist think? 2AM. That’s what I’m doing, sometimes. And if I have work that is keeping me awake, I think it has the chances of being something that will be worth making.
So what does she think of the new work—Adrian?
I actually didn’t ask specifically her yet, it just came to my mind right now. But it came as a good idea that I should. But I did ask about the work—not the one I told you, but there’s also new work I will perform in San Francisco in April. And I asked about what would be the intake that Janine Antony, and also William Pope. I’m a fan of both these artists, their performance. One is alive. She’s alive and he died last year. And I got the inspiration from him for the work that I crawled as a bride. You know that work?
Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Yep.
I used the reference. It’s an homage, also, to him, because he did a lot of crawling in his work. But of course I regurgitated that work with my own experience. So I’ve been having an imaginary dialogue with a dead artist, you know?
I mean, I think a lot about dialogue because I’m fortunate to take part in it and often record those dialogues and publish them and see what responses are like and thinking about how valuable dialogue can be because it allows for the introduction of new ideas that you wouldn’t have encountered if you were in a monologue, or if you were engaging with an algorithm. Which is I think in some ways, at least in the context of how you were describing your engagement with AI, the opposite of AI, because it just shows you more of what you think you already want, rather than a kind of directed search that can show you something new. And I think about this country—and it’s ridiculous even for me to invoke the entire country of Brazil because I’ve seen like less than one one millionth of it, and that less than one one millionth I have scarcely understood, but nevertheless it does seem to me to have a kind of receptivity to difference and a heterogeneity which I haven’t encountered in other countries in the world to the extent I’ve encountered it in Brazil. And I guess I just wonder about that idea of encountering difference and how valuable it can be in the process of generating the work, even if only through dialogue with dead or otherwise distant AI-generated personae derived from the work of artists you admire. How is it that you invite people into that dialogue? Sometimes when I’m in that process I worry that I’ll be over-influenced by someone else’s prejudices or biases or identity-fixation or ego, you know?
Yeah. It’s possible. It depends on who you talk to. So, I think I try a lot to be very selective, in terms of who I talk to, especially when it comes to new work because it’s a moment of vulnerability. There’s that moment where you can have some insights that make you feel powerful and to the point of having this dangerous narcissism. But you are also—you can be very insecure and have this freezing insecurity and that’s when it’s dangerous to talk with people whose mindset can influence you in a way that may not be productive for the work. So, I think I select a lot and I think I try not to … I also am always questioning when you got fixated by some sort of identity, I see this as very problematic. And that feeds to what you said about Brazil also because it’s quite surprising to hear that because there’s this myth—Well, not surprising, because it’s you—but it’s unusual to hear that because there’s this myth of the Brazilian identity and what is that, you know? And about the work, I think it’s the same thing. It’s dangerous to get fixated into anything except fluidity. You need that fluidity to keep moving and keep growing and to be free from your ego as well, from your narcissism or your insecurity. I don’t know if I’m really answering the question.
You absolutely are.
Yeah—
—Yeah. Although as I was approaching my time in Florianopolis, I was studying Paolo Freire.
Wonderful.
And thinking about dialogue in the context of Freirian understanding of pedagogy as opposed to the banking model of education, in which I, as the know-nothing interviewer, ask you questions, and then you have all of the answers, and you relay the answers. And I feel like that partakes of the banking model of education that he was acting to rectify; and so we have here then instead a dialogue between two subjectivities. And so you’re not burdened with providing answers, but so too am I not to be burdened, necessarily, by providing the questions, although I can’t help but indulge my curiosity. So I’ll continue to ask questions in that context. You don’t need to have the answers but I think your work has lots of answers. At least I’ve found lots of answers there.
You do?
Yeah.
I’m very curious about that. I would love to know more. Because I—and I’ll give you first time to answer that—but in my work, the way I see it, and it of course is not necessarily the way other people, but in the way I project my intentions, I try to not align with any particular answer, but to make the gaps deeper, you know? The questions wider and deeper. That’s the difference, I think, between art and activism, you know? I think my work is very political, and of course I have my own experience—my own way of understanding politics, the sides who I align with—yet I don’t feel that my work is here to give answers. It’s to provoke, it’s to make people uncomfortable, but in the way of rephrasing the questions, making the gaps bigger, you know?
So, these are the answers that your work provides to me: how does an artist respond to now?
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. And so in that sense, it’s reflective; it’s distillatory and reflective and provocative, as you say, and asks questions. Is this the world we’re content with?
Ah.
There’s an unflinching—it’s a too often used word—but—
Unflinching.
Unflinching.
I don’t know that word.
Levelled gaze.
Okay.
Deep eye contact. No swerving. No anxious gestures—
—No trembling. Focussed—
—Very direct. Focussed. Um … Metaphorically dense. Reflection of atrocious, complex, systemic injustices.
Mhm.
And who’s responsible to carry those injustices?
Mhm. Mhm.
…
That makes sense to me. That does make sense to me.
And so not so much answers but, as I say, answering the question of, What is the artist to say?
In that sense, yeah. I get it. Totally.
It’s interesting, though, this sort of dichotomy, as you phrase it, the difference between art and activism, in that art maybe asks questions and activism provides answers.
Provides answers and sides. I think that the world of activism is very binary in the sense of: this is the oppressor; this is the wrong side; and either you are not with this side. So it’s just black and white. Oppressor and enemy.
Which doesn’t reflect the complicated world that we live in.
It doesn’t. I think it doesn’t allow doubts and it doesn’t allow contradiction. I think the world is so much more complicated.
There’s an anecdote that I’d like to relate here from a buddhist teacher at a place called The Buddhist Society of Western Australia. And in front of an audience he lifts up a glass of water and he says, What is this? Someone says, It’s a glass of water. He says, okay, tell me more. Okay, it’s about two-thirds full. Or maybe three fifths full. There are sort of looping circles through the glass. I don’;t know if they’re in the interior or inside the glass itself. Okay, tell me more. Okay. There’s a 72 on the bottom of the glass. An “A”. A sort of logo. Tell me more. There’s also an “N” but it’s not quite an “N”. Okay, I guess that’s maybe where it’s from? Well, now I can see because of the heat from my hand, that steam has accumulated in the shape of my fingers of the glass. Tell me more. You can go on and on and on and on, endlessly, yeah? And I feel like it’s a valuable anecdote in our times because only by looking at something quickly and then allowing yourself to come to a determination and an understanding of what it is can you binarize it and say, It is this or it is that. This is what Brazilian identity is. I’ve done that. I’ve checked that box and now I can go do the other thing I want to do. As opposed to sustaining a gaze. And so this is one of the reasons that I really value dialogue with artists, because there are some industries, or some activities, which benefit from moving as quickly as possible. And there’s incentive to move as quickly as possible. But I don’t know that artists are incentivized by that sense of pace. Maybe some artists are in some—maybe fashion photography, for instance, where they’re on a very short timeline and they’ve got photos to produce and maybe if it’s connected with journalism then there’s this is sense—But you said that you’ve been thinking about this new work for a year, you know?
Yeah. More maybe: one year and a half.
And of course that’s a year and a half which is after all of the experiences that you’ve had, and so in a way, your whole life has been in preparation for that work, yeah?
Yeah.
I wonder, in that context, what it is that you’re thinking about it and how that thinking is bringing to fruition the new work.
What I’m thinking about in terms of this piece? The space that you need to keep up with? Or … What I’m thinking about in relation to this preparation. Or both.
All of it. All of it: you’ve been looking at a glass of water for a year and a half. What do you see now?
I see. Okay. Yeah, the thing is I think I—you’ve probably noticed that my work is very fed, as you said, by my own life experience. And I think it was the last time we talked—or the first—that we made that joke about menopause. You said it before I said, right? I was telling you how much I was fed up with the idea of being stuck in identity politics and gender politics and I had that feeling before I was pregnant, you know? But then I told you that being pregnant and then creating a human and feeding the human was like, OH MY GOD. I was talking about feminism before and now I’m feeling—carrying in my body—so much to talk about in relation to systemic oppression. And in this body that I was carrying, my own, and carrying the other body of the baby that I just couldn’t be quiet and not make lots of work about it. And as life continued, and I am no longer carrying that body of the new mother. And I have decided to just be one and done, you know? I realize, and I feel a lot, what it means in terms of how society deals with that; and I’ve been paying a lot of attention to my friends that are a bit in other stages of it, of their biological clocks, and how culture understands it. And as usual, I’m feeling—I have very uncomfortable feelings, and these uncomfortable feelings are those that make me make work. And I was thinking about that: what would I be in I weren’t an artist? Probably a psychopath or a criminal of some sort because I feel so much anger about certain things, about the injustices. And part of it is very linked to the experience of being a woman, and the biological constraints and the implications and the readings and so on. So I’m obsessing, as usual, with these themes. And I’m not there in menopause, but I’m that transition moment where you did your job already, you fulfilled your mission, and you have to find more meanings. And you have to make yourself useful, in a way. You are not full of collagen anymore. You’re not with a baby inside, which is like the peak of the goddess. And that’s it. You’re in your forties. You need to find a way to make yourself important, you know? And worthy. And beautiful—beautiful I mean in a wide sense, in a broad sense. So I’m experiencing all that and I, at the same time, I’m observing my own changes in my career also and I’m taking a lot of time to feel and observe and think and then observe again and talk and create a way to express this, the uncomfortable feelings. And I’m fighting with this urge to be hyper productive and hyper fast. I’m fighting—I’ve been fighting—Actually I’ve been fighting against it since I lived in the US. Because you were asking if artists are stimulated in that manner to be super fast in their production. I feel it’s super—Because everyone is. The hyper-productivity mindset, this sickness of non-stop, yes-you-can, you can do it and, you know, all this—don’t give up. Keep going. Keep going. You get anywhere. And go fast. Go fast. Because if you don’t, someone else will. The recipe for burnout, this exhausted society, I think it’s a virus. It’s a virus. And so everyone is affected by that. And when I was in the states, chasing the extraordinary ability visas to be able to keep making my work there and living there, I was as fast as ever. Making lots of work and having many jobs. At the same time, teaching and taking the most shittiest photography jobs you can think of. So, fast, fast, fast. I would never rest. It was just one thing after the other. After crawling for two hours, that super dense, physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, the next day I was working in two, three jobs instead of recovering my super hurt body, you know? And I had a burnout, at some point. I got super deeply depressed and I made work about it as well. And it changed me. And since then—and, of course, with the experience of motherhood and the need to take care of another being, I had to slow down. And I had to learn something from the depression, right? I had to. So I kind of made peace with no putting out work in the same pace as I used to. And I’m trying very hard to not feel less because I’m doing that. And I think, since I work with my body, I need a lot of time to feel. And if you are in that non-stop rhythm, you just—It becomes a form of anaesthesia, you know? You stop feeling. And then how can I make work? How can I make work that is also about my body. I mean, it’s the axis of my work—always. What’s the impact of these systematic oppressions in a female body—and now of a female body in the forties? So maybe it will take five years—I don’t know—or more. And that’s okay. Does that make sense?
It does. I guess I think of artists as potentially being immune, as a class of people—it’s already dangerous to be putting anybody in classes, of course—but those who are inclined towards the arts, I feel aren’t incentivized by the things that most people allow themselves to be incentivized by. Like material and financial comfort. And that inherent in a kind of artistic disposition is an awareness of the profound brevity that we inhabit as human beings and how, in the context of that brevity, and the heightened sensitivity that accompanies that awareness, that there is room to do great violence and great injustice to the beauty that could be, you know?
Mhm.
And maybe a pursuit of beauty, or a pursuit of truth, or of honesty, or of justice being motivating factors more than a kind of dissociated succumbing to the virus that you described. And yet I needn’t sort of fetishize any one group of human beings as if they were the philosophers who were going to save humanity or something like that because that’s foolish—
—But it’s tempting.
*chuckles* Yeah. Maybe it’s that those who are inclined towards the arts have made a greater peace with their own mortality than many people do.
I think so.
Maybe.
I have that impression. And I also think—especially those working with cameras. I think there’s nothing more morbid than a photographic camera, right?
Tell me more.
You’re working with ghosts all the time—each moment, each fleeting moment, you know? It’s like, Okay, I need this—I need now—this image, this person, this moment. And then it fleets. And you have there and then you collect. And you end up with, you know, a full range of dead people, dead moments.
Phew.
And in a way it’s a way to reconciliate with it, you know?
To collect brevities.
To collect brevities. To collect the ephemeral. If it’s nostalgic, it’s morbid.
Which could then maybe we contrasted with performance because, if it’s embodied in a temporary experience, you have to be letting go at the same time as you’re creating.
Yeah.
You can’t collect it. It’s like theatre.
Yeah. It’s similar to theatre in the way that it’s embodied. But there’s this big difference, I think, in terms of when you’re making theatre, you repeat.
Mm.
You rehearse and you repeat the same piece over and over. Of course it’s never exactly the same because it’s embodied and we are changing each second. We are two different people: tomorrow you’re a different Kevin. And in performance there is always that range of the unknown, that flexibility that tends to make it specific to a certain moment. And I think that’s precisely why I don’t like to repeat performances. I’ve done it before a couple of times but I don’t like because it also loses that vulnerability, you know? Of, Okay, I don’t know how to do it. And I’m going to do it. And I’m going to figure something out. And something out of the blue might come out that then becomes something completely different than what was imagined.
Mm.
And that’s where you’re vulnerable. I like that.
…
…
I’m thinking of the—I won’t say intrusion, but—the unexpected appearance of a collaborator in your performance, I think your first performance, of Cup of Tea, which is to say someone who was responsible for ensuring the cleanliness of the gallery.
Yeah.
Who then kind of accosts you. Who’s going to clean this up!? And how, in a way, that engagement made the performance perfect, if I can put it like that.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. And also, when I did the crawling, all the people, how they reacted in threatening ways or supportive ways; and of course I had no idea how to crawl. And needles here and there. There’s all this unexpected elements that will influence. It’s not a controlled environment like a theatre. And of course there are ways and ways of making theatre today. But I think performance expands in this unknown. It’s like a black whole of unknowns.
It’s like improvised theatre, in a way.
Yeah.
No script.
You have a character?
You have a structure. You have a guiding idea. But there’s a lot of things that you can’t control and you don’t want to control and they become actors as well, in the piece.
I think it’s one of the things that good theatre can do is to reveal that everyone had been playing a role as they took their seats.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that everyone will have the opportunity to resume the role they were playing before they took their seats after they leave them.
Yeah, yeah. Very true.
I mean, I think, and I’ve come to the term virus myself a number of times thinking about—of course it’s not just capitalism, but it’s all of it. And the infected are not responsible for the virus.
Mhm.
The virus isn’t really responsible for the virus, you know?
Who is responsible then?
Right. Well, everyone, I guess—everyone who’s infected. The stakes are nothing less than the continuation of sentient life on the planet—or at least the kind of sentient life that inhabits the planet now, that is the planet, that is part of the planet.
Yeah, I feel we are all responsible. I mean, we are aware of that virus. We can’t eliminate the virus. But being aware makes us—And it depends how we relate to that awareness, of course: if you just keep feeding, even being aware, feeding the wheels in the same way without class consciousness, privilege consciousness and all that, then you’re guilty, right?
Yeah.
Do you struggle with guilt, if I may ask a question?
Do I?
Yeah.
Um.
In wide senses. In political, broad ways.
Generally, now, in my life, not.
Uh-huh.
What I struggle with, when I woke up this morning was, am I going to get up and go to jiu-jitsu.
I see.
And there’s a moment where—class starts at seven o’clock. I set an alarm for quarter after six. I’m awake. My mind is clear. My room is air-conditioned, speaking of privilege. And I’m in the bed. And it’s warm. And I could pretend to go back to sleep. I’m not going to go back to sleep. I could pretend to go back to sleep. My arm hurts anyway and I have to listen to my body and not—This is my third or fourth day in a row doing jiu-jitsu and I have—What am I doing to my—That’s not very kind, you know? And then go through these rationalizations. And then at a certain point I get up. And I have to sit to meditate. And if I don’t sit to meditate, then I can feel guilty for having forsaken that sense of obligation which allows for the day’s foundation, and a kind of clarity.
Yeah.
And an aligning of priorities. And then I proceed to jiu-jitsu. And I’m able to interact in my deep humility, grateful for the people there who are willing to teach me a little bit at a time, and to proceed through those interactions with humanity and, I hope, grace, and often humour, often self-effacing humour. And then there’s the next moment after that, and the expectations as to whether or not one rises to one’s responsibility in the moment or not. And I think that the majority of those moments, as to whether or not I’m to proceed through what I believe to be something like my destiny, if I can be so grand, I am choosing to proceed towards my destiny. But there are many days when I choose not to, many moments when I feel inadequate to that. And one of the metaphors that’s been on my mind lately is the myth of Sisyphus on a daily basis pushing a boulder.
I’m obsessed with that. Obsessed. And the new work has a lot to do with that.
Well, if I may be so bold, my variation on the myth is that as you push the boulder, you get stronger, but so too does the boulder grow larger in proportion to your increasing strength.
Yeah.
And so it’s always the same boulder. Even if you’re growing stronger. And I feel myself growing stronger.
It’s always the same proportion.
It’s always the same proportion. And the mountain grows too, yeah? And if you don’t push the boulder, the boulder doesn’t increase in size; the mountain doesn’t increase in size; but you also forsake your own growth. And so I wouldn’t say I struggle with guilt, but most mornings I struggle with whether or not I’m going to sit to meditate as opposed to lying in bed.
Discipline. A struggle with discipline.
It isn’t so ingrained in me that it is easier to succumb to discipline than it is to succumb to the lethargy that would allow me to forsake it.
Interesting.
As I was sitting to meditate I was recalling a dialogue that I’d heard with Salman Rushie, the novelist, and he said he gets up out of bed, sits and writes what he knows will be the beginning of his day’s work. It kind of sets his course for he day; and then he can go have a shower and change and have breakfast and then he goes back and sits down and proceeds through his day’s work. And he says, By this point—and by this time perhaps he had been writing novels daily for some fifty years or so—it’s easier for me to do that than not to do that. It’s so ingrained a habit. I’m not yet there. It’s effortful for me to get to sit down to write the beginning of the day’s work before I have breakfast. So that’s the extent to which I’d say I struggle with guilt. I think that the work that I’m doing, when I’m sort of following my destiny—and I just experienced a moment of deja vu, that I tend to interpret as a good sign, that I might be in the midst of that destiny—requires of me a responsibility proportional to my privilege, which, in this world, is not insignificant. And you?
Thank you so much for answering that. I dared to ask a question to the person interviewing me but I was really curious. No, I—Thank you. I do. I do struggle with guilt. And I think that’s one of the uncomfortable feelings that motivate me to make work, you know? With guilt, with anger. Not in my—I think the anger itself doesn’t mix a lot—I mean, I don’t express a lot of anger in my personal relations, but I have to express it in my work somehow. And I think the guilt that I feel in relation to the privileges that I have—and I think I often feel that there’s so much pain, you know? Everywhere. So much injustice. And I think that my role—you were talking about responsibility in relation to your privilege—I think my role in relation to this pain that is everywhere, it’s so tiny. It’s so, so tiny. But I also feel that’s my only power, the only power that I have, and that is possible also because of my privileges is to express these feelings in an articulated manner that can maybe, but just maybe, affect people in their feelings and thoughts. And that can be a micro-change. I think I believe in micro-politics, as well, you know? You have something to say that will put—even if it’s just minimal—some extra clarity on the [unintelligible] of this systemic oppression. And I believe that in doing so, some people might feel seen, or might feel some of the feelings of that I have. That I’m uncomfortable. And I can see that maybe, potentially, it is a good thing—because these feelings, either they kill you or they provoke action. And these actions potentially can change some things even if it’s still in the range of micro-politics. So I do feel a lot of guilt and the way to overcome it is making work. Because it’s not comfortable to feel that. And yeah, so I see it as a responsible thing to do, to channel this into work. But sometimes, especially I felt this a lot this past year, with the escalation of wars, the level of cruelty that is widespread in the media. I mean, it’s no news: the world has been cruel for—I mean, it’s not a novelty. But seeing it so much every day and to the extent that it got this past year, especially with kids, women, and pregnant women, for months I felt, My god. What I do has no importance at all, you know? It makes … The only important thing now is to grab these urgencies by the horns and eliminate them. But I also felt absolutely powerless in relation to that. So it doesn’t—I can’t align my power that I feel in terms of expressing, creating art, and saving anyone.
You can’t, consciously, but people can give you the platform. People can give you the microphone. People can entrust you with that responsibility. And that takes time.
Takes time.
And it’s in process.
Yeah, yeah. True. I hope.
Because those escalations of war and even the purveyance of images of violence in the media are evidence of those who didn’t rise, perhaps, to the responsibility of their privilege.
Mhm. Yeah, certainly. I think there’s a lot of numbness in regards to that, to the pain itself and in relation to responsibility. Numbness, alienation.
Pain is interesting, in the context of numbness, because I think of how profoundly powerful are those pharmaceuticals companies which would provide us with the chemicals allowing us to avoid the feeling of pain. And speaking of the United States, what are called deaths of despair among people who are medicating themselves against themselves against that pain and numbing themselves to that pain because it’s become unbearable, because they choose to, because they can’t help but choose to, whatever their reasons and motivations. I’ve certainly had experiences where I was wanting to numbing myself to experience because it was too painful.
Me too.
And yet you’re choosing continually to drag yourself through the street in a gown through needles and learning to crawl as you crawl before the next day, taking your two or three jobs in order to live.
My mind is blowing with many thoughts at the same time but I don’t want to interrupt your line of—
—It’s impossible to interrupt a dialogue between one entity speaking with itself. Please carry on. Go wherever your mind went.
No, I was just—Well, it went to a few different places but one place was you were talking about the US with this epidemic numbness, this pharmaceutical choice to not feel. And at the same time, in Gaza there are no anaesthetics to amputate legs and knees and people who are fully burnt and need surgery. It’s insane. Right? And the other thing you said about when I chose to crawl between needles and learn how to crawl on the concrete, it is true that the pain that I felt from repeatedly hitting my hips and my elbows on the concrete for hours, it was enlivening.
Mm.
And it was glorious. It was wonderful. It put me in a state of euphoria for many days; but this euphoria wasn’t compatible with the day-to-day routine of the jobs and the crushing *chuckles* reality of not being able to keep feeling, having to use numbness to keep going. And that’s where the dangerous zone is. I think pain itself is not problematic.
Yeah.
You know? The numbness is a problem. Pain is not the same as suffering, right? Pain, pleasure—both blessings.
How do you distinguish pain from suffering?
I feel that there’s this—in suffering—there’s this prolonged … it’s almost as if it carries self-pity. Pain can be—Pain is telling you something in the present, and you have the option to deal with it in a way that you learn about something that is important, something that is happening, you know? And if you manage to not associate it with something negative, but something like a sort of wisdom, I think you can move it and negotiate with it. Of course there are limits to that. There are limits. But when you asked that question, I cannot not think of when I gave birth without any medical intervention, without anaesthesia, in my home. There was a lot of pain, but there was no suffering.
Mm.
You know? There was no suffering. There was no fear. When there is suffering, there is self-pity; there is fear; there’s a projection to the future or what will happen. And pain, it might be very intense, but what makes it unbearable, I think, it’s typically how your mind frames it. And if you feel fear when you’re giving birth, the pain will be much stronger, much harder to cope. And then there are thoughts, Oh, I’m going to die. I’m going to break myself. I’m going to be shattered. Or, I can’t do it. I can’t take it. But if you frame it and you use pleasure, for example, and also you use your full body, too—okay, there’s pain that area, but there’s relaxation in that area—then you can manage it. And I think it’s not different when outside of this context of giving birth. Sometimes your life is fucked in a certain way but if you are still able to feel your whole body, if you don’t freeze with fear, for example, and you can not only learn from the pain but you can feel other sensations, like pleasure, like the joy of just existing. And, again, there are limits to what I’m saying. I’m not talking about someone in the death—I mean, maybe. I would have to live more of my own death to know. But I think that has been my experience. And for performance, when it comes to pain you feel while you’re performing, I think it’s—I don’t see—Because people ask, Oh, you like to suffer, right? Because there are some performances that are pretty masochistic in terms of pushing the limits. I said, Well, I like to feel. I like to feel—a lot. Which is not the same as you like to suffer.
Mm.
There’s a big difference. I don’t like to not feel anything. That’s when I know I’m dead, you know? And I’ve been depressed before for two times. I had one big episode of depression and the recurrent feeling was that I wasn’t feeling anything. I was witnessing the same beauty as ever—of existence, the same power—but I was like an empty shell. I said, I see the beauty. I know it’s here. But I can’t feel anything. Because I’m not here. I’m dead. While being alive. It’s just haunting. It’s …
In a way there’s a spiritual quality to pain, perhaps, as you’ve described it in the sense that, as you’d mentioned it can be a teacher in the present, that there’s a necessary now-ness to it.
Yeah. Exactly. That’s precisely the point.
And so it is a piece with performance because performance art that does not exist in the present is not that. It’s something else, maybe.
Yeah. That’s how I feel about performance. That’s pretty much it.
How else do you feel about it, about performance? Because it’s not just existing in the present. That can be done sitting in meditation silently or with your legs crossed, eyes open, whatever, in front of an audience. But you’re also consciously engaging with symbology.
In performance.
Yeah.
Yeah. You are consciously engaging with—You are trying to grasp meaning using your presence. And using and creating symbols and images through a certain action for your presence. And in my understanding, a big part of performance is that vulnerability, again. I see it as a very deep vulnerability of being in a fleeting moment with that huge black hole of the unknown. And trying to widen the gap of the questions. And with that ferocity of whatever can happen in terms of the environment you are, the audience you have, regardless of the audience, knowing it’s an audience or not. Sometimes I feel that vulnerability itself is a medium, you know? I don’t know if that makes sense but I have that strong feeling.
It makes sense because vulnerability isn’t an abstraction but an embodied state of being. And if it’s embodied, then it’s inherently a medium.
Yeah. I’ve had that intuition, I think, when starting to perform. Because I used to do mostly photography before—until I did my first performance and a second and so on until today. But I felt that in the act of carrying the camera and choosing the frame and putting a subject in front of you, there is a certain authority there. Control. And the first time I let that sleep, and I used just my body and the audience, with or without a camera, especially when it’s just your body, and a certain audience, conscious or not conscious, watching you, judging you.
Because I’ve had the privilege of talking with you about your youth, I think about how the foundation, in some ways, was set for your capacity to exist in maybe pursuit of whatever it is we’re in pursuit of when we’re in performance—if there is a pursuit, I’m not sure—but to inhabit that medium of vulnerability in the context of your having foregone a predestination that had been arranged for you to be a diplomat, I think it was, right?
Yeah.
And how inherent in that becoming you learned how to choose how to go in spite of judgement; and it was a necessary foundation, maybe, to have been built in order for you to be in front of an audience immune to judgement—maybe aware of it, maybe you can read it—
During the piece, you mean?
Yeah.
No.
Not reading it.
No, no. Not only I don’t read, but I feel zero affected by the judgement while the piece is going on.
Okay.
It’s just … the feeling is that … when I talked to Jessica, my friend, a performer, we—I think we both describe it in a similar way, as if there’s a little key that you turn in your brain and you go into this spiritual portal where you go into that zone and you are immune to the judgement, you know? Completely immune. It feels like a parallel *chuckles* existence. You are in this hyper-focused mode of performance. And it really doesn’t matter if it’s one person, no people, or—I don’t know—200 people. And they may judge, not judge. You might be naked doing something completely bizarre. And we have the consciousness that people judge. But there is no … I’ve never felt affected by that. I mean, there’s a lot of adrenaline right before starting. And part of the adrenal is the fear of judgement. That extreme vulnerability of being exposed. But when you turn the little key in your brain and you go into that zone, there’s nothing that matters. It’s as if nothing else existed. And it’s a wonderful feeling, you know? I think it’s a connection with the work, somehow—a deep connection. It’s not so different than being in a super meditative state as well. And I’m sure you’re familiar with that since you’re a meditator.
Well, I think we are verbs until we die, and then we become nouns—if we’re lucky.
If we’re lucky.
And so, while I’m practicing meditation, I’m an imperfect meditator at this moment. There’s a meditative element maybe to my presence but I think I know what you mean. My point of reference isn’t necessarily meditation but rather acting on stage; and I think that there’s an important difference between performance art and acting in the sense that you’ve got a script as you’re acting and you can, as you say, replicate it; and so it’s a different but similar medium—and I was thinking about a moment in which, when I was playing the role of Creon in Sophocles’ play Antigone—
Wow. You played that? That’s amazing.
And I revealed to Antigone over the course of my attempting to persuade her to permit the burial of her brother and to renounce her having—or rather permit the unburial of her brother and permit the renouncing of her having buried him—and Creon reveals, I don’t actually care one way or another. You know? It doesn’t actually matter to me. These are the rules and I need you to follow the rules, essentially. And the play in Jean Annoulih’s translation has a succession of monologues between Antigone and Creon for about twenty minutes; and this was about fifteen or sixteen minutes into this exchange of monologues; and then I’d revealed, I actually don’t give a shit. I don’t fucking care.
Yeah.
Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care. And somebody in the audience audibly gasped. And I remember feeling pulled out of the moment as a result of my response to their response.
yeah, yeah, yeah.
The judgement, and their belief that what wasn’t happening was happening. And in retrospect it seems to me to have been an imperfect state of mind as an actor, because to be tugged out of the consciousness of the moment by thinking anything apart from being in the moment is like a concession away from that state of egoless presence. I mean, I wonder if you’ve ever selective conjured that state of presence in other contexts in your life apart from performance art. Do you ever find yourself lured by the temptation towards the kind of egoless awareness, if I can put it like that, in line at the supermarket or something like this?
*chuckles*
Or is it just impossible, as you’d said earlier, to be in the world in that state of ecstasy as you’d described it in the context of the bride performance?
Well, I feel that I’ve been in these states in other situations as well. And they always involve the body, somehow. Giving birth, definitely. That’s 100% that. Meditating, obviously. Doing—Having some psychedelics. I would say … I did ketamine as a treatment last year in October. And I did it for chronic pain. I was having a lot of back pain for a long time. And then my therapist, a psychiatrist, he recommended I use it. And it was such an artistic experience of such power and deep presence and deep ecstasy for existence, for colours, for shapes, for textures, and felt similar in that regard, that kind of ecstasy. So I think physicality and also how you frame this physicality in the sense of, for example, the ecstatic experience with The Bride, I think it was a combination of the repetitive struggle, physical struggle, and how my body reacted to the repetitive pain in order to overcome it, and how I was understanding what was happening in the sense of performance for me is always a social lab. So I put myself in that situation in a certain point and time in San Francisco and I was already like, Oh my god. This person said that I am—He started shouting to me that that image was the death of traditions, a trash-bride on the floor with needles. He says, This is why the US is in this fucked state! People like you! And I was like, Wow. What does it tell about these times? And then all these people just feeling like zombies? And some people being curious and supportive and no, let’s go! Or some women, Oh, I feel you, honey! I feel you, honey! It hurts, doesn’t it? So, all that, for my mind, it was very stimulating. And I had this stimulation and I had the body, trying to overcome pain. I think that combination makes for a euphoric moment. And you can have that for other situations. Birth was one of them because of the way I perceive birth as this wonderful moment and privilege of this divine experience that I got to experience. Did I answer?
*laughing, clapping* So great. So great. Ah, that’s funny. It’s like playing a triad on a piano in the presence of John Coltrane and then Coltrane plays in three different time signatures and—Okay, okay, no more ego. That was fantastic. It was great. You answered it.
And witnessing art as well, for sure. Do you know the dancer, Barishnikov, the Russian? I think one of the first art pieces that put me in a state like that was watching him in São Paulo dancing for his own heartbeat, you know? We could all hear him, his heartbeat, and he was dancing to it. And for me that was, OH MY GOD! This is brilliant and it’s so profound and it has so much meaning and I was with my jaw like crying and it’s just witnessing something. But feeling so much, you know? Feeling so much that puts you again in a physical and mental and spiritual state that is extraordinary. And it’s rare—especially when you’re in the hustle hyper-culture.
I don’t have enough fluency in mathematics to appreciate the elegance of a theorem like E=MC2, but I feel like there’s something similar going on with a dancer microphoning their heartbeat before an audience and with such elegant simplicity—
Exactly. It’s simplicity. And I think it’s so hard to reach that with art, to have something that is as deep as simple.
Right.
It’s so hard. It’s the goal. It’s the gold, as well—better the gold than the goal, because the goal is too … sporty.
I think I have sometimes an experience not dissimilar from that which you experienced while watching that dancer with the amplified heartbeat in conversation where, it seems to me, we’ve arrived at a kind of astronautic place and it’s kind of impossible in that state to formulate a question. I could revert to something banal like, How is art inherently political? but I could never say something like that because it would be too atrociously reductive a question; and it would invite a kind of pat answer, in a way, and so let me see if I can’t, in the spirit of performance art, move towards the unknown abyss.
…
…
…
I think that identity is a subject because we had talked about and joked about how you’d inevitably make work about menopause and how in some ways this would be an intolerable concession to, Of course, women’s artists have to do the women’s art thing. And it’s almost conducive to the tendency in our culture or cultures to put people in particular spaces and we have the 7% funding designated for the women-artists.
Yeah. It is. Yeah.
And yet, it’s the aperture that’s available to you as an artist. And I remember having read the work of a poet Billy-Ray Belcourt whose context was specific and I thought to myself, Oh, this is what a genius born in this circumstance looks like. That’s how genius responds there. And I don’t take any stock in that idea of genius as a fixed noun or something like this—and historically I don’t think that’s how genius has been thought of or experienced—but I think, in an era in which, preoccupation with a kind of fixity of identity which seems to better represent of oppression, maybe—
Mhm.
—Rather than something more essential, and which, maybe, credits six stars in a night sky’s constellation, in terms of the number of points that make us up as individuals, I think about the work that you are in process with, and come to making art without awareness of my identity in a sense in the same way that I might be like, This black-white binary is obviously fictional bullshit. And it’s like, Okay, maybe it is for you because you can walk across the street and walk into the pharmacy and nobody’s going to check your backpack when you go through the—You know? So you don’t actually have to experience the consequences of that fiction.
Yeah.
So it is actually not a fiction, asshole. It’s very real.
It’s not a fiction. Yeah, it’s real and it’s real every second.
Right. So I guess, from my experience as not maybe existing in a body which, after a certain point, the culture that we inhabit for millennia sees as a kind of disposable commodity: you’ve done your responsibility to give birth to a man’s child and what now?
What now?
What now?
What use, right?
Right.
No longer in the reproductive age. No longer in your prime, because there’s the sexual objectification that plays a role as well, right? Yeah, that’s the big question. What now?
Well, in a way, I feel like there might be a purity of experience available because it won’t be laden with expectations and societal pressures. If you’re disposed of, in some cultural way, then you’re free to—
—Be yourself—
—Be yourself.
To be your own self. If you no longer need to fulfill expectations, you can finally just be. I think that’s the richness of it. If you can free yourself from all the bitterness that comes with it of not fitting anymore. I think that I would say that that would be the aging with grace part. And you can really—and obviously I’m not talking about the cosmetic part of aging—but the social expectation. I think that is the big question that I am studying. I think these categories, these boxes, they serve this purpose of organizing a certain chaos, of this impossibility of exactly putting in boxes the experience of being human in all its vastness, all the differences. And I feel that, exactly to try to deal with the fear of this impossibility, the result is to trap everyone into these roles. And as you said, when you no longer fit these roles, as we said, we can finally be—and that is, as I said, it can be very rich but absolutely scary, because you have to reinvent yourself from scratch, basically.
Is it a reinvention or is a revelation?
I think it’s better put as a revelation.
Taking things off.
Yes, taking the masks off, the masks that are glued. You have to actually grab with a certain violence the masks that were forced into you—and then find yourself behind. And I think it takes courage, a lot of courage, because that necessarily entails disappointing people, because even if you don’t have these roles anymore, this no-role is a role, in the sense that being invisible, being useless, plays a part in the grand scheme of things.
Mm. Mm.
And if you rebel from it, if you question it, you are in a way shaking the structure. And I think that’s what we have to do. That’s what we should do with that awareness. That’s how I feel.
Mm.
But I do question, very often, if I’m really doing it, if I really … if I’m doing enough to really unglue these masks, you know? Because I probably would need several lives to see myself through. And I am my body. And the materiality of my body, it’s … I can’t be beyond it, really. As you said, it’s not fiction. You know what I mean?
Mhm.
Am I going too far?
No, no.
You’re still here.
Yes.
In the sense of the comprehensible.
Yeah.
And I think this new work—You brought the myth of sisyphus. It’s the core of the work, this myth. Because that’s the big question, as I said: what now? What do I do with my existential libido? My creativity? And why? And for whom? I don’t have it all figured out. I won’t have. But I think that that’s the area I’m scratching. I think I’m trying to bring—I don’t know if it will be possible, but—I think I will bring something in this new work from Cup of Tea, the materials. Blood. And the minimalist aesthetic. But I’ll also have something from Leite de Pedra. I don’t remember how I translated to English, but you know.
Eu prefiro o português.
Eu prefiro o português. The title is so much better in Portuguese. I think it’s Stone Milk or something but I prefer Leite de Pedra as well. I think I’ll bring something from these two, for me, very important works in my career, the first and the last one that I did that I considered that had that simplicity that I seek, the depth and the simplicity. So I’ll probably bring some of the structures of Leite de Pedra, the machinery, and then my body will negotiate with that, with my own material.
Your own medium.
My own medium, yeah. And let’s see what happens. And I certainly will need an audience that will interfere with this negotiation. But there’s a lot to figure out still. But it will definitely bring elements from both these pieces that had milk and blood.
Milk, blood, and machine.
Yeah.
And unknowing performance artists contributing to the work by presuming to interfere in it.
Yeah. For sure. But I know I’ll have many sleepless nights, too.
2AM AI dialogues.
Yeah, dialogues saying, Hey, Chat GPT. Tell me what Anna Mendieta would *chuckles* how would she react to this? And how about Adrian Piper? And Aconte. Big time Aconte. I always want go inside his mind. I’m going to say something very silly, but: the actual mediums, the people that—If they really could talk to the dead people, if I could I would choose some artists. They probably wouldn’t be interested in talking about my work, but in my fantasy that’s allowed, right?
I mean, in the invitation of other voices or perspectives or consciousnesses, there is an appropriate deviation from the convention of the author-idea.
Yep.
Can I invite you to say a few words about what authorship means to you?
Mhm. Yeah, I love that topic. I think about that a lot. I think I am part of this generation of artists, post-modern artists that do not believe in authorship. I don’t feel—I do not believe in this idea of the pure creation. I think what we artists do is we are fed by all the artists we seek and we get touched by and recreate, regurgitate, all the inputs. I feel that my own experience in this planet, in this body, is unique, yes, so that doesn’t mean I don’t have my individual creation. But it’s not pure and it has never been. It’s massively influenced, consciously and not consciously, by my elective affections.
Elective affections is great.
Elective affections that crossed paths with me.
Mm.
And I feel that it’s as if there are thoughts and images everywhere, fields … I wouldn’t say energy because it’s such a silly word, it’s so overused—but there is this … floating ideas and images and artists with unbearable questions that need to come out. And we grasp one image here that maybe you created and I grab it and I eat it and I vomit. And when I vomit, there’s a lot of my own experience, my own luggage, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. But I don’t believe I am creating anything alone. I don’t. I steal from artists. I do my best in terms of stealing with respect. Like when I saw—and that’s what I mean with stealing: it’s not that I will copy someone; but I will—okay—I see this image, I see this structure of thought, and this is very powerful. I’ll use it and I’ll honour it and I’ll bring my own input of my own experience in my body, my gender, and my individuality. And I think if people steal from me, I’ll be flattered. And I had this experience: I think I had just finished my MFA and I got invited to this performance. Jessica was in it. And it was an interesting performance. I liked it a lot. But it had many elements that were very strong. It was a group of people: it was Jessica and another girl and two guys. And when I left the performance and people said, Oh, you should ask for the credits, you know? They were working with yarn; they were crawling. And this and that. And I said, Yeah, no. I saw there’s many elements in common with my recent work and even Jessica was a bit, Oh, I should have told you before and I swear these things were already going on for a long time before we met your work; and I said, Jessica, it’s fine. It’s totally fine. I believe you, first of all, that these things—maybe no one saw my work—and even if they had, I would be flattered because it’s still great work that is still—There’s new input. I think it’s infuriating when you see someone stealing in a poor way. You have to steal with elegance and adding new stuff for it; adding your own input, not a discreet stealing with, Oh, I’m going to do this. That’s being sneaky. So I don’t believe in authorship and the artist with purity. I think that’s so naïve.
In the same way that the body can’t exist without every breath that it’s drawn, and every bite of food or swallow of liquid that it has consumed.
Yeah, and it’s also: when I think of the artists I admire, even the dead ones, there is a sense of community, that I want to belong to a certain vocabulary and a certain mindset, certain political statements, and part of this belonging means grabbing references, inspirations, stealing parts of it, but in a good way. And if there are other artists that also feel inspired to do that using my work, amazing. If they are elegant, of course.