https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:49:35 +0000 https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site en https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Header-Desktop Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:11:33 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Header-Desktop A place for the exhange of ideas from Denniston Hill Index ↓ SWERVE<img width="2500" height="1667" width_o="2500" height_o="1667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/239f30043e860dcd899a437d2529b4092f5cf1b7ca70696f201a86304927cd2f/20170722_DennistonHill_WhitneyBrowne-9491.jpg" data-mid="172472446" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/239f30043e860dcd899a437d2529b4092f5cf1b7ca70696f201a86304927cd2f/20170722_DennistonHill_WhitneyBrowne-9491.jpg" /> https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Intro-Welcome-from-the-Editor Tue, 21 Mar 2023 02:40:03 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Intro-Welcome-from-the-Editor <img width="1000" height="750" width_o="1000" height_o="750" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4e14481dbeebae6e15cf674774767a022b06ceadedd4d5c608abe5effe20479f/Chua-author-photo.jpg" data-mid="172470697" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4e14481dbeebae6e15cf674774767a022b06ceadedd4d5c608abe5effe20479f/Chua-author-photo.jpg" />WELCOME&nbsp;︎︎︎ from the Editor Dear You,From all of us at Denniston Hill, hello and welcome. SWERVE began as a conversation on the porch of the farmhouse at Denniston Hill. It was the morning after artist Okwui Okpokwasili and her work/life partner, Peter Born, had showcased an excerpt of Okwui’s “Poor People’s TV Room.” Okwui, artist and Denniston Hill co-founder Paul Pfeiffer, the historian and curator Adrienne Edwards, the poet and photographer Tim Gerken, and myself were finishing breakfast and watching the trees shimmer in the late August air. Somewhere in the house, the artists Julie Mehretu and Jessica Rankin were making breakfast for their children, Cade and Haile.If one looked carefully, the leaves gave the faintest indication of autumn’s approach. It felt as if everything were part of a single great perennial movement.We were musing on professional responsibilities and social obligations and noting the interconnectedness of our own creative and research trajectories. The conversation began idly enough, as a recounting of shared acquaintances and histories, and then moved from the clubby atmosphere of a professional encounter into a broader discussion. José Esteban Muñoz’ name had come up quite a few times over the last few days: a shared link across performance studies, queer futurity, and utopianism. Adrienne had been a student of José’s, and she mentioned a poem that he had insisted she read. &nbsp;Written over 2000 years ago, Lucretius’ Dererum natura or On the nature of things, was a meditation on the ideas of a Greek philosopher, Epicurus, who lived over 200 years before him. &nbsp;The poem describes a world with no limits in either space or time, where the grandest things are made of the smallest, atoms. These tiny particles are the building blocks of all that exists, linking the one and the infinite.[1] While falling through the void, they are sometimes subject to a slight, unpredictable swerve or clinamen that produces unforeseen trajectories.&nbsp;There are strong parallels between Lucretius’ poem and Vedic thinking, and indeed Carvaka; the Vedic philosophy of materialism; is often considered a precursor of Epicureanism.[2] While modern science has made these ideas common place, Lucretius’ poem is still relevant today because of the way it links the experience of reality with the world that our senses mask: the imperceptible particles that move in an infinite void, coming together to form compounds and universes and then falling apart as these universes and the compounds in them dissolve. Lucretius is one in a long line of poets, philosophers, artists, and writers who have demonstrated that the duality of nature and her laws is not irreconcilable, and that our experience of nature can lead us to a deeper understanding of her secrets. SWERVE is intended as a forum for the exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries in order to better understand “the stuff of the universe,” the infinite number of bodies, ideas, and desires moving randomly through space, colliding, cohabiting, forming complex structures only to break apart again, in an endless process of arising and passing away. We chose the name because of its multiple resonances and the idea that a chance encounter, like the ones that happen every moment at Denniston Hill, might produce not only a life-changing event, but the knowledge that the universe itself is made up of these random interactions. At this critical historical juncture, the lessons of Lucretius and the swerve are even more important to grasp. They suggest that beyond a politics based purely on the senses and emotional affect lies a deeper understanding of the universe based on the critical development of our faculties and the swerve.Yours Truly,Lawrence ChuaWriter, Historian, and Co-Founder of Denniston Hill [1] Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), 280. [2] A.K. Sinha, “Traces of Materialism in Early Vedic Thought,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 75:1/4 (1994), 235-241. https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Live-at-Dedalus-Adrienne-E-and-Okwui-O Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:11:33 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Live-at-Dedalus-Adrienne-E-and-Okwui-O LIVE AT DEDALUS FOUNDATION&nbsp;︎︎︎ Adrienne Edwards and Okwui Okpokwasili We honor two brilliant women who inspired the SWERVE platform into being: curator, writer, and historian Adrienne Edwards and artist Okwui Okpokwasili. In fact, it was Edwards who suggested we call this journal “swerve.” (Thank you, Adrienne!) Edwards and Okpokwasili are frequent collaborators, and theirs will likely be a life-long conversation. This particular talk took place at Dedalus Foundation. Edwards deftly used the concept of the “swerve” to orbit through Okpokwasili’s multi-disciplinary performance work, Poor People’s TV Room, which draws on two historic women-led resistance movements that occurred in Nigeria, and which was partly developed at Denniston Hill in collaboration with her partner Peter Born. Edwards asked several questions about “proximity” within the process of art making—meaning proximity to source material and research, and proximity to the people we intentionally put around ourselves. Okpokwasili connected proximity to her relationship with her audiences, asking “how do I make more mirrors for the way you are watching?” She also spoke with deep reverence and love about possible proximities to Blackness itself, stating: To go into the blackness, its material, to disappear in the most profound Blackness. That’s where you become form. That is the beginning and the end.I think about the skin.The fact that Blackness is something that’s not seen, Blackness was not meant to be exposed.Always in opposition to light. The truth is in Blackness maybe. &nbsp;The most optimally liberated space for black and brown bodies to be and move together. Adrienne Edwards was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2016.Okwui Okpokwasili was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2016, and is the inagural recipient of Denniston Hill’s Distinguished Performance Artist Award.&nbsp; @bornokwui Special thanks to Katy Rogers, ProgramsDirector and Director of the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné Project at Dedalus Foundation. https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Melanie-Crean-Shaun-Leonardo Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:34:43 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Melanie-Crean-Shaun-Leonardo DIGITAL PORCH CONVERSATION&nbsp;︎︎︎ Melanie Crean and Shaun Leonardo with Paul Pfeiffer and Amy Sadao ABOUT OUR GUEST: Melanie CreanMelanie Crean is an artist, educator and filmmaker based in NY. In her practice she researches industrial architectures of control that are read onto site and body, and explores how these structures and systems can be challenged and re-patterned. She works with voice in its diverse forms, often through performance, ritual and non-verbal communication as measures of resistance to reclaim contested spaces, whether they be the built environment, one’s own body, or the production of history. She believes in principals of inter-communalism, frequently working collaboratively to reimagine new ways of relating and learning. The aesthetic forms she creates include photography, video, social engagement, immersive media, participatory film, speculative design and open curriculum. Crean is an Associate Professor of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York, teaching courses on emerging media, social engagement and visual culture. Her recent work includes A Blade of Grass fellowship collaborating with young equestrians and law enforcement in Hartford, CT; a FACT commission working with incarcerated veterans in Liverpool UK; and a commission with Artspace New Haven critiquing the nature of justice fifty years after trials of the New Haven 9. Her work has been supported by Art in General, Creative Capital, Franklin Furnace, No Longer Empty and The New Museum. @creanmc ABOUT OUR GUEST: Shaun LeonardoShaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City, recently profiled in the New York Times and CNN. His work has been featured at The Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, New Museum, MASS MoCA, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Studio Museum, and The Bronx Museum, with his first major public art commission now on view at FDR Four Freedoms State Park. Leonardo’s artwork negotiates societal expectations of gender and sex, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and the experience of failure. &nbsp;In his work as an educator, Leonardo promotes the political potential of attention, self-reflection, and discomfort as a means to create awareness, disrupt meaning, and shift perspective. He is currently Manager of School, Youth &amp; Community Programs at the New Museum and has worked as an educator at the Fortune Society, Socrates Sculpture Park, Cooper Union’s Outreach program and The Point (Bronx). &nbsp;He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received awards from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; The New York Studio School; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Art Matters; New York Foundation for the Arts; McColl Center for Visual Art; Franklin Furnace; and The Jerome Foundation. Leonardo’s current collaborative work, Mirror / Echo / Tilt, is funded by Creative Capital. @elcleonardo @recessart https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Baz-Dreisinger Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:34:43 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Baz-Dreisinger DIGITAL PORCH CONVERSATION&nbsp;︎︎︎ Dr. Baz Dreisinger with Lawrence Chua, Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer Denniston Hill is reaching out beyond our campus to know and work with neighboring communities across Sullivan County in upstate New York. As we approach our 20-year anniversary, we want to deepen our connection to this land and the people who live here. We talk a lot about liberatory practices, especially with regards to art making, education and agriculture. We also fully acknowledge that liberation itself has many meanings, depending on who you ask. One important population living in Sullivan County are formerly incarcerated men and women. Woodbourne Prison is 15 minutes from our campus. Our neighbors in the towns of Monticello, Fallsburg and Woodridge include the family members of those currently in prison who want to be close to their loved ones, as well as individuals released from the prison themselves. Dr. Baz Dreisinger is someone who cares deeply about the re-entry process and its lasting, usually traumatic impact, on men and women fighting for their second chances at a full life. She is the Founding Academic Director of John Jay University’s Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which offers college courses and reentry planning to incarcerated men at Otisville Correctional Facility in Orange County, New York. In our conversation, Baz expressed that this work is not prescriptive. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to the issue of mass incarceration in America. Rather, the pipeline is a philosophy: “there is a role for universities to play in prisons and justice systems.” And that partnership can look a lot of different ways.Denniston Hill co-founder, Lawrence Chua, called out one danger in this work, which is masking the inhumanity of prisons with education and agriculture programs. He questioned if the prison itself gained more from such initiatives than the inmates themselves. Baz said yes AND yes. She noted that that “awareness is important,” AND that there are people involved who deserve access to knowledge and opportunities. Baz is a ‘card-carrying’ abolitionist, and asks, ”in the name of abolition, we are not going to provide services to people who need it.” Baz also pointed out that whatever services are provided to people inside of prisons, the need is even greater on the outside. There is trauma and family connections to heal, lives to rebuild. Most importantly, folks need roofs over their heads and they need JOBS. Baz is a dot-connector. Culture…to race…to criminal justice…to capitalism. We talked about the conditions of the unpaid labor force used by prisons and corporations everywhere to continue their own economic policies rooted in capitalism that perpetuate slavery. We looked at alternative workforce models such as cooperatives, which not surprisingly are rare in the United States. Baz shared this list of businesses who support the lives of system impacted people around the world. It even includes a public restaurant located within a jail! Click each name to learn more: Tereza by Humanitas360 (clothing company, Brazil) InGalera, Milan (restaurant, Italy)Cooperativa Esquina Libertad (design, print, and production house, Argentina) Second Chances Farm (agriculture, Delaware) Gorgona by Frescobaldi (wine label, Italy) Our conversation was so rich. Much more in the YouTube link above. We are grateful to all of you who watch -- you are on the porch with us. We hope we’ve dropped a few seeds here that will benefit your own gathering and growing of knowledge. Dr. Baz Dreisinger will be a resident at Denniston Hill in Summer 2024.@bazdreisinger @incarcerationnations https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Mitesh-Dixit-Maxwell-Mutanda Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:34:43 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Mitesh-Dixit-Maxwell-Mutanda DIGITAL PORCH CONVERSATION ︎︎︎ Mitesh Dixit and Maxwell Mutanda with Lawrence Chua, Julie Mehretu, and Paul Pfeiffer The heart of this conversation between Denniston HIll’s co-founders, Lawrence Chua, Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer, and architects Mitish Dixon and Maxwell Matunda, is an inquiry about built environments — defined as human-made structures created with specific intentions like living and working. The focus on built environments speaks to an accountability that people who create these environments might have towards issues of architectural shape, scale, material, and perhaps most importantly, towards the people who inhabit them. &nbsp; This conversation flowed through many kinds of built environments, including the simultaneously ephemeral and very real online space we call social media. Paul began with his interest in architecture as a shared psychic space, and Julie reflected that her study of architecture gave her tools to create structure and scale in her paintings, to understand her paintings as a place to put things such as “space" and “time.” Lawrence offered that architecture is the cohesive study of cosmology, astrology, carpentry, and masonry. Maxwell Matunda reminded us that building shapes, and even door sizes, are all products of extended political policies. Matish Dixon agreed with Maxwell, confirming that “things have bias.” He suggested we might design using terms that offer a relationship, or an action, over a pre-determined thing. For example, instead of a “window,” we might strive for design elements that offer “opacity" or “porosity” to the building. He thought in this way we could “eliminate the experts or the dominant gaze,” and instead consider a more infinite way to understand the things that makeup buildings. &nbsp; The group wondered together: was a decolonized architecture possible? Towards the end of the conversation, Julie warned that we are currently experiencing a “shit storm of bad architecture.” She was speaking about a specific building in New York City (you’ll have to listen in to know which one!), but we might take heed from her observation that this particular storm is the result of historical and economic policies shaping the environments in which we live, work, and create. We might then ask of ourselves: in what ways are we the accountable builders?&nbsp; ABOUT OUR GUEST: Mitesh DixitMitesh Dixit is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, and holds an affiliate position with Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship &amp; Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York. &nbsp;Dixit’s work has focused on the intersection of design with government policy, society, and culture. His research has explored the processes of region- and border-making in the Balkans and along the US-Mexico border, tracing the effects of ideology in the transformations of the built environment.&nbsp; Previously, Mitesh Dixit was on the faculty of TU Delft in the Netherlands as a visiting professor of architecture and urbanism. There, he also served as editor for the Chair of Complex Projects and helped to develop curriculum. Throughout 2016, Dixit lectured internationally, conducted workshops, and seminars on behalf of the US Department of State. After completing undergraduate and graduate work in politics and philosophy, Dixit completed the master of architecture from the Washington University in St. Louis and then began his career at the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Prior to DOMAIN, Dixit worked with Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture as a project leader. While at OMA, Dixit led multiple international projects, such as the MahaNaKhon Tower in Bangkok, Holland Green in London, East Block 30 in Cairo, and the Kuala Lumpur Financial District in Malaysia. @miteshdixit@dad.polito @domain_office @institute_for_architecture_ @material_contours @skopje_project ABOUT OUR GUEST: Maxwell MutandaMaxwell Mutanda is a Lecturer in Environmental and Spatial Equity and Co-Director of Equality, Diversity &amp; Inclusion at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His work investigates the role of globalisation, climate and technology within the built environment.His achievements include the 2018 AFRICA’SOUT! Artist-in-Residence at Denniston Hill, New York; 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam; 2020 Graham Foundation Grant to Individuals; 2020 Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change grant from the Prince Claus Fund; as well as fellowships from The New Museum’s IdeasCity New Orleans; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2020); and DocLab: Liminal Reality, and IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling film festival screenings (2021). Maxwell studied Architecture at the Bartlett, University College London and is the 2020 MSc in Sustainable Urban Development Sheehan Scholar at the University of Oxford.His work has been featured at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Arc en Rêve Centre d'Architecture, Bordeaux; the 2014 and 2016 Venice Architecture Biennales; the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Maxwell has been an editorial contributor for The Architectural Review as well as an advisor for the Prince Claus Fund's Building Beyond Mentorship programme. He is currently a Trustee on the board of Mediale, an international media arts charity and arts festival based in York, and the Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Funded Organisation (NPO) Eclipse Theatre Company, a leading Black-led touring company based in Leeds.Maxwell Mutanda was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2018. @maxwellmutanda @studiodtale @bartlettarchucl @bartlettmahue @clubzero_co https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-kara-lynch Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:34:43 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-kara-lynch DIGITAL PORCH CONVERSATION ︎︎︎ kara lynch with Lawrence Chua, Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer, and Amy Sadao ABOUT OUR GUEST: kara lynchkara lynch is a time-based artist living in the bronx, ny - born in the momentous year of 1968. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, through low-fi, collective practice and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered - Black, queer and feminist. kara completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego and has been a research fellow in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas, Austin and the Academy for Advanced African Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany. She earns a living as an Associate Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College.&nbsp; Major projects include: 'Black Russians' - a feature documentary video, ‘The Outing’ - a video travelogue, ‘Mouhawala Oula’ - a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video, and saxophone, and the current project 'INVISIBLE’, an episodic, speculative, multi-site video/audio installation - excavates the terror and resilient beauty of Black experience.kara lynch is a founding member of Denniston Hill, and currently serves on Denniston Hill’s Advisory Board. https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Prem-Krishnamurthy Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:34:44 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Prem-Krishnamurthy DIGITAL PORCH CONVERSATION ︎︎︎ Prem Krishnamurthy with Lawrence Chua, Julie Mehretu, and Paul Pfeiffer ABOUT OUR GUEST: Prem Krishnamurthy&nbsp;Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) is a designer, author, and educator. He directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design consultancy and organizes Department of Transformation, an emergent, itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. He has directed and curated large-scale exhibitions including Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019.In 2022, Domain published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters. His experimental electronic book, P!DF, is available online.Prem Krishnamurthy was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2010. @prem_krishnamurthy https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Melancholia Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:49:35 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Porch-Conversation-Melancholia DIGITAL PORCH CONVERSATION ︎︎︎ Melancholia with Lawrence Chua, Nana Adusei-Poku, Gregg Bordowitz, and Arnika Fuhrmann This conversation between myself, Nana Adusei-Poku, Gregg Bordowitz, and Arnika Fuhrmann took place on August 28, 2022. Nana, Arnika, and myself were at Denniston Hill and Gregg was in Provincetown. I had thought to bring us into conversation because of the ways the concept of melancholia wove itself throughout our thinking and also because of the ways their work had transformed a historically Eurocentric understanding of the idea in psychoanalysis and art history. Although Freud’s linking of melancholia to the denial of a profound loss is perhaps the predominant understanding of the concept in modernity, the discourse on melancholia can be traced back to antiquity. Nana’s show, “Black Melancholia” at the Hessel Museum of Art/Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College had recently deployed a critical understanding of melancholia to subvert racialized discourses in which longing, despair, sadness, and loss were not only pathologized, but also reserved for white cis (fe-)male subjects. It reframed melancholia as “a form of unfathomably profound collective gloom born of insistent socio-historical violence against Black people in every corner of the world.”[1] <img width="1382" height="1036" width_o="1382" height_o="1036" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/752c1211730d50d8a13328ab8420dd4573595c49dd21228663f962139ea2dab9/Screenshot-2023-09-19-at-2.29.03-PM.png" data-mid="191286983" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/752c1211730d50d8a13328ab8420dd4573595c49dd21228663f962139ea2dab9/Screenshot-2023-09-19-at-2.29.03-PM.png" />Installation image from Black Melancholia, June 25 – October 16, 2022. Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Photo: Olympia Shannon, 2022 Gregg’s media work articulates a reappraisal of the politics of melancholia within the activism of the AIDS crisis. In Fast Trip, Long Drop in particular, Gregg poignantly identifies a new sense of political agency within a longer history of human loss, misery, and mourning.[2] In&nbsp;Ghostly Desires, Arnika Fuhrmann has likewise sketched out a new relationship between trauma and agency from the perspective of Buddhist thought. She uses the term “Buddhist melancholia” to refer to a noneventful conception of trauma (or a kammic conception of trauma). In the films and media she analyzes in this study, the subject isn’t rendered incoherent through trauma but learns to inhabit the traumatic state in ever more canny ways.[3]&nbsp;Agency in this sense is a conglomeration of structural conditions and of individual and collective affect; it’s not just within the domain of the subject. Our conversation has continued since this recording, a testimony to the generosity of spirit as well as the enduring importance of the ideas we discussed. Since the recording was made, Nana joined the Departments of Art and African American Studies at Yale University and Gregg was appointed head of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. --Lawrence Chua, Kyoto, September 2, 2023 [ 1] Nana Adusei-Poku, “Black Melancholia,” exhibition brochure (Annandale-on-Hudson: Hessel Museum of Art and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2022). [2] Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambrdige: MIT Press, 2002), 268-270. [3] Arnika Fuhrmann, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernaculary Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 85. Nana Adusei-Poku was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2019 and 2022. Click here for Nana’s website. Arnika Fuhrmann was a resident at Denniston Hill in 2022.&nbsp; Click here for Arnika’s website. Gregg Bordowitz will be a resident at Denniston Hill...soon!&nbsp; Click here for Gregg’s website. Click here for Lawrence Chua’s website. https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Interview-Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook-and-Paul-Pfeiffer Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:34:44 +0000 Swerve Magazine by Denniston Hill https://swervemagbydennistonhill.cargo.site/Interview-Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook-and-Paul-Pfeiffer <img width="900" height="450" width_o="900" height_o="450" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/728cfcf0432fb6086dec98a7c36922c27853e441be455ff54aca409f7fe2152c/araya-rasdjarmrearnsook-interview-900x450-c.jpg" data-mid="158778380" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/900/i/728cfcf0432fb6086dec98a7c36922c27853e441be455ff54aca409f7fe2152c/araya-rasdjarmrearnsook-interview-900x450-c.jpg" /> IN PRINT CONVERSATION ︎︎︎&nbsp; Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Paul Pfeiffer I first became aware of Araya’s work when I came across a video from her Two Planet series. In the video, a group of Thai farmers sits before a reproduction of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass. The video is set in a bamboo grove in the rural countryside. The farmers are in repose, casually riffing off the painting. The discussion is playful, funny. and speaks to the inventiveness of the farmer’s imaginations. What draws me to Araya’s work is the acuity with which it hones in on the invisible codes and hierarchies shaping everyday reality. Within the mundane details of daily life she finds just the right point on which to pivot, so as to reveal and subvert the underlying power relations. I am inspired by the aesthetic economy with which she uses the video camera to enact such moments of creative subversion. In summer 2016, Araya visited the east coast for a residency at Denniston Hill and to give a lecture at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In between these two points, I traveled with Araya to engage her in a dialogue. - Paul Pfeiffer Paul Pfeiffer: Thank you for making time to talk over lunch. This is bulgur wheat. Are you vegetarian? Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Not really, but when I work with dying animals, it sometimes helps to not eat too much meat. PP: In the beginning of your lecture yesterday, you told this story about the clay vessels in your house. One detail that I found surprising was about spraying them with water every day, which to me implies that this was unfired clay. AR: I was molding it at the same time as I was living with them, so it was unfired, definitely. PP: You didn't show any pictures of them, but just the idea of living with them made me imagine them as like human figures. AR: There’s like a metal exoskeleton on the inside and there are these kind of tiny wood pivots – I don’t know how you’d call them – that connect different parts of the body together. And when these were finished, it was kind of anatomical, right? They had a face, they had fingers, they had complete hands, so it was a body. PP: Amazing. The fact that they're still wet means they're almost living. You have to take care of them every day like a plant or a living being. AR: Yeah. It felt quite haunting because the home I was living in had three bedrooms and it was two stories. Because the space was so big, it felt like there needed to be friends occupying the space with me. PP: One of the things this makes me think about it is a quality that I see in a lot of your work and the word I would use is "uncanny" which in the German would be “unheimlich.” Is there a Thai approximation for the word uncanny? AR: Sometimes uncanny is very loosely used, but I have a sense you're being very specific here. PP: The literal German translation of uncanny is un-homely. AR: Unheimlich? PP: Yes, and the architectural association of unheimlich is in fact a haunted house. AR: (laughs) Really? PP: It’s familiar like home but then somehow not exactly familiar. Within the familiar, there is something strange or foreign. AR: The word “uncanny” was used by a curator in Gwangju for an installation that I showed, “So Many Dead Now.” This is the second time I’ve heard it in relation to my work. PP: I think about it in relation to the clay vessels, because another way that I think about the uncanny is that it is something that is both human and not human. AR: Ah. It could be like the dead dogs between life and death. Kenji (translator): I think in Thai it's being translated as the same word as "strange" or "weird" would be but I don't think... PP: That’s a little bit generic. I think uncanny itself would be connected to, in a way, a historically European or Enlightenment world view. The way that Freud would define it is that the uncanny is some part of life which we don't want to &nbsp;deal with so we put it under the table but then because we put it under the table it comes back… AR: Ah, it's beautiful. PP:…as strange. Or as something alien. Like we don't recognize it because we’ve repressed it. AR: So it means, if you need to hide this part it's not so positive, under the cultural norms or something. PP: Exactly AR: Ah, thank you, because when the curator said it was uncanny I felt sad. PP: I think that's a compliment. And so maybe it's obvious but for me it seems really like an interesting way to think about your relationship — for example with the dogs that you live with — in a way they become like the clay figures in the sense that you treat them almost like they're human, and yet for an average person you can see it's not human, so it's strange. I mean of course in the United States there's a big culture of people having pets but still the idea– I mean usually if you have pets you have one pet, to live with many dogs is quite strange. [laughter]. I mean this in a good way. AR: When I first went to Chiang Mai and was done teaching, I had a lot of time to spare. I was watching a lot of TV and soap operas, but now that there are lots of dogs there's no more time to kill. It feels very full. [laughter] Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Life Needs No Introduction. Excerpt. PP: I know you did a piece where the dogs watched the soap operas with you. AR: So that dog in that piece was very old and she passed away four days before I got back from Germany. I was in Germany preparing for installation and a friend called, saying that this dog was going to the clinic. I was being prepared, but it was still very difficult. So it's the same internal conflict, that you're repressing feelings or emotions of grief while at the same time talking to these four technicians who don't really know what's going on and don't really care and the work still has to go on. Being an artist or living the life of an artist there's always those moments, those kinds of tensions, but this was when it was most palpable. PP: In the different works of yours which I've seen, there's a kind of extraordinary aspect but the scene is very kind of quiet every day life. Even the most, seemingly, lowly aspects of life. There is the sense of caring for the low in your work. AR: Do you think it has to do with exercising a feeling of motherhood that women have? PP: No. In some ways I think of the work as very masculine. AR: Oh! Really? That's very interesting. PP: You mentioned that there are people in Thailand who send you negative emails because they say you're not acting like a woman so that's what I mean. You're doing something that also doesn't follow society's codes.AR: Yeah, very much. PP: And you also compared your life as an artist to your former life when — I remember you said something about how when you were younger you were more, like, a good woman in society. AR: I tried to be. PP: But it didn't work out. AR: Because I am an artist. PP: Yeah. AR: I tried to be. I think I was very quiet and gentle to adults and parents and teachers and friends.PP: One of the most amazing works of yours, to me, is “The Nine-Day Pregnancy” which maybe is the best example of what I’m talking about. On the one hand it has to do with being a mother but at the same time it's not following the codes. It's doing the exact opposite. It's something aggressively against the codes of what is expected of women in society. AR: Because the pregnancy is so short — it’s only nine days I’m performing this — but the effects, how it spread in the art world, seem so disproportionate to that, that it spread like wildfire, and it seems to be an index of the kinds of things that people like to talk about and these personal issues that catch attention. Part of that is because there is this image of me for other people that I’m very independent and do not need a family, and suddenly one day nature takes over and here's the pregnancy. So it seems to be very shocking news. PP: In a way it seems to me that it's a very interesting metaphor for being an artist in the sense that you're involved in creation. There's the way that society tells you to be creative in a very specific way. In the case of women, you can be creative by creating a child or by following the conventions of production in biological terms. In a way, as an artist you're also involved in production and creation but not necessarily in the way that society tells you to. You do it independently and maybe even create new rules for production. AR: You mean art production. PP: I mean art production but also as a metaphor for creative production or life production. AR: Yes. PP: To me this idea is interesting because I have this idea about your relationship and your artwork’s relationship with the social context it lives in. On the one hand it's very carefully tied to it but in another way it's very intentionally breaking with it. The relationship of critics to art is that they should encounter something that they don't have words for yet and that gives them inspiration to create new words. Arnika Fuhrmann to me, does a good job of describing a sense, of situating Araya's work in relation to maybe like a foreigner's perception of Thai culture. Just because there might be a tendency for someone who doesn't know Thai culture so well—including me, I feel like I don't know it so well—to think in a very simple way that somehow Araya's work is an expression of Thai culture. But what Arnika's saying is more complex, like saying that in a way there's a more progressive aspect of Thai culture and a more conservative part, and in a way the work aligns more with the progressive part but it comes into conflict with the more conservative aspects of Thai culture.AR: So what did Arnika say? PP: Specifically she was talking about — uh oh, I hope I'm not getting anybody in trouble. AR: [laughter] It's okay, it's okay <img width="800" height="533" width_o="800" height_o="533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1fd2d293bcc71f9e32727597c052f271abcde2a0da63851095f8225d77ab1ea3/Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook--Groundbreaking-Film-and-Video-Artist-07.jpg" data-mid="158778379" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/1fd2d293bcc71f9e32727597c052f271abcde2a0da63851095f8225d77ab1ea3/Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook--Groundbreaking-Film-and-Video-Artist-07.jpg" /> Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, The Treachery of the Moon, 2012, stills from a color video, 12 minutes, 37 seconds. PP: This is just my interpretation. She was trying to make a connection that has to do with some ideas, maybe western ideas of feminism. So she gave the example that historically, in Thai funeral rites, historically there's been a pretty central place of women in historical funeral rites, women performing in the context of like a funeral. She mentioned, like a performance of dancing during funeral rites. But then she said that today in Thailand that that has been suppressed, that you don't see it so much anymore, that it's primarily men's voices that are heard now in funeral rites. So she's saying that Araya's work in a way is reconnecting with the older role, or a kind of suppressed role of women in funeral rites. AR: In reality, the space of the temple is sustained by women, even though women cannot be ordained as monks per se. In the sense that with every religious ceremony there's always the aspect of preparing flowers, bringing food for worship, cleaning, and those are kind of labor that is seen as taken for granted. So if you're looking at the context of contemporary Thai funerals, the most important role goes to the guests of honor: the important people who come and sit in front. And whether if it's a political or military context, famous funerals, the person sitting in front is often a man. Because a funeral ceremony scene is like a shadow of the real scene of hierarchy &amp; showing off in some way/some aspect. &nbsp;And the chants or prayers that are recited by the monks in the funeral, it really has nothing to do with the death of that person or death, but it's really about teaching Buddhism to the people who are in attendance, the living people. There's really only one talk the Matika that actually has to do with the dead person and that's chanted when the body is transported to the pyre. So if you think about the funeral, it really shouldn't be about all these people in attendance and the ostentation of it all, that it should really be about the people who have suffered loss and the dead person. So if we are going to speak of the female performers who in the past danced in front of the corpse or in Araya's work, reading in front of the corpse, it's actually playing the same structural role as the monk's chanting in front of the corpse. Or you might think of it as similar to the role of the guest of honor who leads the funeral ceremony in the sense that, he’s being the one that guides the ceremony and gives the cue of what people should do and how they should feel. So that's one context. Another context, a professor has told me that the faculty of medicine at Chiang Mai university, feel that I am taking their ownership of bodies away from the discipline of medicine. They had never thought before that bodies are for art. Artists don't have that right to the body and there is a subversion involved in saying that the artist is going to be collaborating with medicine and they can be on an equal level. Some of them had threatened that if I was trying to do this project again they would talk her to court. PP: Wow. So it must be quite threatening, to them. AR: In a second incident when I was doing the work with the mentally ill, it was also artists who were pushing back against her work. This artist who was against me had written a letter to the academic committee that was reviewing her work for tenure and said that she was unethically working with mentally ill people and that she herself isn't in the right state of mind because she had faked that pregnancy. And also the "Two Planets" series got resistance from the academic community because there was this feeling that I was denigrating these old masterpieces they were used to teaching. One of the people who criticized me admitted that it wasn't that the content of my work was aggressive or anything like that, but that they didn't understand what was going on and that was why they were so against it. PP: To me I find those works very moving because they speak to me of a kind of fundamental humanity, maybe in relation to the strangeness of language. Like whoever you are when you see that image, you feel the strangeness and the limits of language to describe adequately what one experiences. AR: One of my friends really praised the farmers, saying that they're excellent for being able to encounter something they don't know of and are very unfamiliar with, but they're very creative and they can keep going with it. PP: It's both the limitations of language and the resilience of the imagination. Something about that scene that I can't quite fully describe is that by showing cultural difference in a particular way, it sort of gives me the feeling of stripping away culture to something very basic. It is really two worlds, and yet the creativity of the villagers shows that despite the two worlds, something kind of fundamental can be transmitted. AR: So perhaps the title of the work, "Two Worlds," is kind of a trick to get you to think there are two poles or binaries when in fact there isn't. PP: I love that description. To go back to the scene of the funeral, right, you're describing several different directions of address. There's the people sitting in the front row, the dignitaries, there's the monk. AR: You have the body, which is there, the audience, and most of the people are sitting in these kind of folding chairs that are being put there, and then there are guests of honor who get to sit in the front row in a very kind of comfortable sofa and everybody knows they're the important people. PP: They're almost like the symbolic audience. AR: In a way, these are the most important people who are going to be listening. And there's a row of monks who when the time comes they chant their prayers and it's usually some form of teaching about some Buddhist precepts. PP: In the chant. AR: In the chant, but it’s unintelligible really because it's not in Thai. It's in Pali. But the content, if you translate it, are teachings that are addressed to the audience about how you should think about impermanence, about loss. <img width="640" height="423" width_o="640" height_o="423" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/60c06ee5ac145be285d7f121bbba2cdc4c394d2d295b3ba104e4d7b71b31d985/Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook--Renoirs-Ball-at-the-Moulin-de-la-Galette.jpg" data-mid="158778376" border="0" data-scale="49" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/60c06ee5ac145be285d7f121bbba2cdc4c394d2d295b3ba104e4d7b71b31d985/Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook--Renoirs-Ball-at-the-Moulin-de-la-Galette.jpg" /><img width="638" height="422" width_o="638" height_o="422" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e3d0d56119f5e81e8424d36ebf325e88c037b6ad312fb3a811ba81422e7ae2c5/Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook--Manets-Luncheon-on-the-Grass-and-the-Thai-Farmers--2008--video.jpg" data-mid="158778375" border="0" data-scale="49" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/638/i/e3d0d56119f5e81e8424d36ebf325e88c037b6ad312fb3a811ba81422e7ae2c5/Araya-Rasdjarmrearnsook--Manets-Luncheon-on-the-Grass-and-the-Thai-Farmers--2008--video.jpg" /> Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets: Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers, 2008, stills from a color video, 16 minutes. PP: I'm thinking also about the arrangement of space in your videos. So there's a reversal. The audience in the video take the place of the dignitaries in a way. AR: The problem for the Thai audience is that I’m usually sitting behind the head of the corpse and that's problematic because the head is supposed to be the holiest part of the body and so there are people who write to her about that because she's sitting... Sometimes I sit at the other end too but it's always when she's sitting at the head that there's a problem. PP: I'm thinking of my position as a viewer. I'm outside of the video but I'm also the audience if this is a funeral. So in the different layers there's also the viewer of the video which you can imaginatively extend out. I remember seeing, “The Class,” one of the pieces with the cadavers where you were talking in front of a blackboard like an instructor. I listened to it for a long time — and there was a moment I noticed which really stuck in my head, and this is just my imprecise memory, but what I remember is that you were addressing the cadavers but at a certain moment the teacher says, “you're not listening” or “pay attention” as though talking to children. Then the teacher says, “anyway, you're not really the one I'm talking to.” And somehow I got it in my head that it was… AR: You. PP: That it was me, the viewer of the video. It was a way of indirectly addressing me through the cadavers, telling me as a viewer, I'm talking to you, I'm not talking to the cadaver. I found this such an interesting moment. AR: Yeah it's happened often that the viewers immediately in some way feel that it's not a conversation between the teacher and the dead but the teacher and the viewers. PP: I'm so interested in this idea because in some ways I see it also in the "Two Worlds" series. Again I'm in the same position. I'm in a row facing, not a cadaver anymore, but different objects. AR: Especially if you are a person in the arts circle and you think you know those relations better than those farmers. I don't know how you feel because you know better than to think that they are in a lower position than you. PP: I know what you're saying but for me it comes from someplace else. For me it's because I also work in video. When I work in video I consider the camera as almost another eye or another character in the scene although this character is invisible. This is why I asked you the question about when you started using video, because to me the power of the video works for me as somebody also using video has to do with a kind of psychological situation that you create which in a way we relate to it like it's real, it's every day, because that's the scene that's being shot — for example, with the nine-day pregnancy. But in fact there's another barrier which is the presence of the camera. In a way we don't think about it but it's also mediating the situation and it, to me, it's similar to that feeling of the teacher addressing the cadavers but I feel that the teacher is actually addressing me. It's a bit unclear but I'm very interested in the psychological nature of the presence of the camera as an invisible like, third eye or third perspective that can produce an uncanny feeling. You're in the scene, they're relating to you in the way that they think that they know you, that it's familiar and they think they know what's happening, but then at a certain point, it becomes uncanny. Suddenly it goes from being familiar to totally unfamiliar and then they become upset. AR: I opened this new division at Chiang Mai University, Intermedia Arts. It’s an multidisciplinary division and it affects everyone who is otherwise working in a single discipline. The scene is especially strange when I teach my graduate seminar and on the first day, we go down and give a bath to the dogs. My other colleagues are like, “What is she teaching? Is this how you teach art nowadays?” PP: I think the reason why I'm attracted to work in video is this. People know new media from movies and television, but to use it as an artist in some ways you can become very close to life, but then there's also an uncanny difference. There’s the potential to show the most alien aspects of life from this other perspective. AR: Wow. Thank you. PP: The other night at the lecture, if I understood correctly, you made a comment about the Dhammakaya sect. Would you mind repeating that? What made you think of that? AR: The Dhammakaya seems to be fixated on self-meditation and it seems to focus too much on the happiness that comes in the moment when you’re in that meditative state. But that happiness isn’t really sustainable. True happiness is actually about understanding that the existence, or nonexistence of things is beautiful. So it seems that Dhammakaya focuses on this question of existence or what exists. That if you give a lot you will go to heaven. They are very good at expanding and creating sub-branches of themselves, whether it’s within Thailand or internationally. It’s tied with tourism, and sometimes tourists, not just Thai but also Chinese and Korean tourists, are led into believing that the more lanterns they buy and release into the air, the more merit they’re making. So, everything goes back to being quantifiable and concrete. In Chiang Mai, they have contact with a certain credit union that offers higher interest rates for saving accounts, so when people deposit money, their interest is transferred to the personal account of the abbot as an investment. Right now the police have already apprehended the manager of the credit union so he’s now in jail. He’s already confessed everything including how this is a money laundering scheme. PP: No, really! Kenji: The temple’s defense is saying that, as monks, if people want to give them money that’s in their right to do so regardless of the source. Of course it’s suspect that there’s this one credit union that keeps giving money every year in such vast sums. So now as you see, the believers are literally, physically protecting the abbot. It seems like this Dhammakaya is another factionalizing event that is dividing people into clear camps, much like the Red Shirts and Yellow Shirts. When the police were trying to apprehend the abbot, he told the police that they couldn’t arrest him right now, but that they could only arrest him when there was democracy in the country. This is the same statement as Thaksin’s political party, which is to say you can’t arrest me because it’s not a democracy right now, it’s unlawful. So this idea that you can reject the constitution or reject the law because the source of the law is the military, therefore it does not have the power to compel. It’s funny how something so religious gets folded back into the political reality. So now you understand a bit of the context. You visited their wat… PP: I didn’t visit to meditate. But I went on a Sunday and you could see the attraction. It’s very soothing, in a way hypnotizing. AR: One of the people closest to the abbots, he’s a doctor also at Thammasat University, said that the abbot is more of an artist than a monk because he’s responsible for the staging of everything, like the aesthetic choices, the lighting, how the ceremonies are run, how it’s being filmed. For instance, when the monks go out on alms rounds in the morning in many cities, the abbot decides that the path that they’re traveling on has to be strewn with rose petals. The Supreme Patriarch, basically the highest-ranking monk in Thai Buddhism, let slip that participating in this event was the first time he could collect alms while walking on rose petals. It was a kind of luxury alms round. PP: Did he mean it as a joke? AR: No. The Dhammakaya temple gives him hundreds of millions of baht in order to maintain and expand his own temple. So it is a very materialist way of dealing with things. So that’s the fate of Thai Buddhism. PP: Well it definitely expresses some tensions in society about the meaning of things. AR: The previous Supreme Patriarch, who has passed away, actually wrote in a letter that the abbot of the Dhammakaya should be defrocked because of all these violations. If you think of this in terms of religious hierarchy, the Supreme Patriarch who is supposed to decide the assignments of various monks and who should be the leader of each monastic community but the Dhammakaya has basically bought out that mechanism and they are no longer answerable to this hierarchy. Sorry, this is a bit long. PP: No, no, it’s very similar to things that you can see happening here in the United States and Europe. In some ways that’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in video. In the wider picture, not just with art, the role of broadcasting and the nature of mass media contributes to the emergence of organizations like this. Video is used to produce a certain kind of consciousness. It makes me think of the people who consider the work that you’re doing unethical. Artwork like yours can deal with the uncanny in a way that reveals the futility of seeking a materialist solution to suffering. I’m not sure if I’m making sense. <img width="1600" height="1200" width_o="1600" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/af243950deda857e0f72cf2adaef5bac5b2377932172aacb1a1a44afca50d968/Village-and-Elsewhere-Artemisia-Gentileschis-Judith-Beheading-Holofernes-Jeff-Koons-Untitled-and-Thai-Villagers.jpeg" data-mid="158778388" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/af243950deda857e0f72cf2adaef5bac5b2377932172aacb1a1a44afca50d968/Village-and-Elsewhere-Artemisia-Gentileschis-Judith-Beheading-Holofernes-Jeff-Koons-Untitled-and-Thai-Villagers.jpeg" /> Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Village and Elsewhere: Jeff Koons’ Untitled, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled, and Thai Villagers, 2011 AR: You need some more hot water? AR: After my MFA I applied to scholarship for a German exchange studies program. I failed the first time and I tried a second time and got in. PP: How long were you in Germany? AR: The first time, two years and ten months; the second time, one year. PP: So you went two different times? AR: Two different times. The first time, I came back and then my father died. He was sick and had cancer. The second time I finished was his funeral. PP: I see. May I ask you what it was like when your father died? AR: How I felt? PP: How was the experience for you? AR: He had lung cancer because he smoked a lot and drank a lot even though he was a doctor. He went to the hospital and underwent surgery and radiation therapy. He stayed in the hospital for one year and never came home. Even though he could not speak from the surgery, he would often communicate to us by writing. I collected his writing. Once he told me, “I dream that I travel.” It was so funny because he could not move his body. He could not even move his head from the surgery but he dreamed that he traveled. PP: Amazing. AR: And in the end it's those four words that I decided to maybe put in my video that I'm working on. A doctor asked him to write to check his consciousness so at that time, the letter he wrote very short words but then he wrote forwards, a lamp, train, leaf, olive tree leaves. I used that to write a short story. I’m still not sure why in his last moments of consciousness these symbols came to him. The train could be trouble and stuff, and lamp could be a sign of, of course light. PP: It's something you see changing, a leaf. AR: It's beautiful. A movement, not lasting. PP: So these were his last words. AR: Yeah, his last word wasn’t in words. It was late afternoon and I put my head on his body under the cover of the blanket. I put my hand in his hand then I did realize that he tried to communicate. He gently squeezed/pressed? my hand. I was so excited because he can't communicate by words but I thought he still had his consciousness and that was maybe two days before he died. PP: When I'm listening to you I'm also thinking about my mother. The same thing happened with her. The last two or three weeks before she died she stopped talking. She was ordinarily very talkative so it was quite strange when she stopped talking. She talked a lot and laughed a lot so it was really quite strange to experience her not talking. Like she would look at me but no words. AR: With open eyes? My father no, he closed his eyes. PP: I mean later on she closed her eyes but even when her eyes were still open she already stopped talking. Very strange. AR: How'd she look? PP: It was hard to describe but it was like she was looking through me. AR: Curious. PP: And then she closed her eyes and maybe the last week, she didn't move. It was like she was asleep. No response. AR: And food? How did you feed her? PP: No food even in the last week. AR: One week? PP: About one week. She stopped eating. AR: My father stopped eating because he got food from a tube. PP: Now in the US you sign something called “Advance Care Directive.” Basically you give your instructions when you're still healthy to tell the doctors to tell your family should you feed me through tubes or not. She didn’t want that. AR: It's in detail? PP: Yes in detail. AR: You have this? PP: Yes. Yes it's very important now. The lawyer explained to us that it's very important that you sign this because when you can no longer speak we will follow your instructions. PP: What did you say was the source of the three words – dream, root, and death? AR: From a female writer who teaches how to write. If you need to write you should come to these three schools before you can write. You have to go deep to your dirty part. You should confront it. PP: To learn how to reveal it. AR: It must have come from a student in the class. When we suppose we are in the school of writing… and in the school of writing we have to reach the meaning of three words: dream, root, and death. Dream is wonderful because we lie down and we see ourselves and we realize that this is us in our dream but we cannot control ourselves in the dream. So we see ourselves everywhere, communicating or doing something, but we can't control it: that is the state of dream. So then root: root means… my lecture was very close to the meaning of root because root means you can reveal something very dirty, very secret. You can accept it and show it. You don't hide. If you succeed, if you make it from the school of roots then you won't hide some parts of yourself and follow social trends or social norms. That’s very important. Then there's the school of death. I ask them to imagine when death comes, what they are going to do. One student said she would stay in her room and she doesn't need to contact anybody and just be by herself. But where I got the idea to commit suicide is what one student said: she need to observe herself, before she dies what will happen? Is it painful? Wounds? Smell really bad? So it’s from her I got the idea it's maybe interesting to confront the last moment. It could be really bad, but you never experience that kind of bad in your life because when you're still alive you take a shower, you dress, you smile… But at the time of dying you can't smile anymore. You can't laugh anymore. You can't even think of things with humor anymore because maybe you feel so bad, so painful or feel nothing. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/60b9ab417079b1d7bdb6ce3584d74df53df593270994f9aca34438a910784180/2015_-Rasdjarmrearnsook_Araya_00002.jpg" data-mid="158778963" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/60b9ab417079b1d7bdb6ce3584d74df53df593270994f9aca34438a910784180/2015_-Rasdjarmrearnsook_Araya_00002.jpg" />Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Pray, bless us with rice and curry our great moon, 2012. Video still. Courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art. PP: I like the idea of writing or speaking as though you’re already dead. If you dead and gone, what would you care to talk about? AR: Explain more. PP: Well, if you're already dead then your time and energy are not consumed by the petty details of daily survival. You’re not focused on self-preservation or self-gratification because you’re not a self. You’re free of the plane of worldly affairs and social status. AR: Actually I am free as an artist. In some way free form cultural condition for a short moment, which could be illusion. PP: I don't think so, but I imagine a lot of people might think so. AR: How free should we be? PP: Well, freedom for me is a complicated term. It’s connected to ideas of individual identity and inter-dependence. The night before your lecture there was a conversation in the same lecture hall about the legacy of slavery, and Sarah said something I think is very important. Freedom isn't about freeing yourself it's about freeing all people. Individual freedom means something very different from freedom for all. AR: How did you come to this point? It’s beautiful, but it’s in some way idealistic and similar to political speech. PP: The conversation started with a young black man in the group asking the question, "what does freedom mean to you?"