Incidents at the Two Two Hotel

The Ife Heads (Surabhi Kukke and Annelize Machado)

Incidents at the Two Two Hotel: a science fiction experience, a future world where inhabitants live in a hotel called the Two Two that consists of two sky-high towers built on an artificial, floating island made up of the plastic detritus of centuries. Movement in this landless future is most strongly determined by language proficiency. Inhabitants may access as many floors of the hotel as the languages they speak. There is also shadowlandic, a phonic and hybrid language spoken by the hotel porters. This is a post-post-apocalyptic world: land masses have gone under, there is no firm ground, no dirt or sand to speak of—except in the outlier colonies where piracy is rampant (there is a profitable trade in sand).

The audience is seated on the island.

Movement happens on the island and in the sea around them.

At Co-Lab space in Austin, performers worked with a ten-minute excerpt of the script which tells the story of The Porter whose Brother is traveling to meet him from the outlier colonies. The Brother imagines a new and glamorous life at the Two Two, while The Porter longs for the sand his brother will carry with him. Ife Heads who are at once marketwomen and statues know the future and the past and serve as witnesses to this journey. They also sound the death cry when the Brother’s body washes up at the hotel lobby/beach. The Tourist, who speaks poor French, catches the first glimpse of the body.

(THE BROTHER has been slowly circling the island, he becomes entangled in the sand bags. A dance of the floating IFE HEADS and THE BROTHER as he meets his death at sea.)

THE TOURIST

(through the lens of her camera)

Faites vous le voyez?

THE PORTER

To see. Not what it used to be.

THE TOURIST

Un cadavre. Cette horrible!

THE PORTER

(looking through the lens)

Cette une tragedie.

THE TOURIST

I feel horrible.

THE PORTER

Mais porquoi? This is not your tragedie.

CHARACTERS

IFE HEADS (Surabhi Kukke and Annelize Machado) are a combination of marketwomen and statues. They wear bathing suits under long flowing dresses that carry the striations of the IFE HEADS. Their faces are painted with these striations as well, in neon pink and gold. They speak in high, long tones.

THE PORTER (Azure D. Osborne-Lee) works in the lobby of the Two Two Hotel, comes from a family of porters, speaks shadowlandic. Is trickster, Elegua, crazy, sane, manic. Charming. A hustler. His speech is disjunctive and shadowy; he speaks in rhymes and broken sentences.

THE BROTHER (Matt Richardson) is THE PORTER’s brother. He is journeying to join him from the outlier islands via boat. He is queer and fabulous and in search of his own freedom which he believes he will find at the Two Two Hotel. He leaves his mother to join his brother. He journeys with bags of sand, as sand doesn’t exist on the island of the Two Two Hotel. He dies during the play which is indicated by a change in speech—he begins to speak as if he is bobbing in the sea, between breaths. He also comes back to life.

Visual notes: THE BROTHER carries/drags spray-painted gold bags of sand (with striations).

THE TOURIST (Gwendolyn Ferreti) is from what once was Africa. She claims to be from Dakar. She has managed to slip into the French-speaking floor of the hotel, though her French is poor. She is concerned with living a glamorous life. She photographs, films her experiences in the lobby to have proof, evidence. She has sex with THE PORTER, she thinks she loves him.

Surabhi Kukke, Annelize Machado, Gwendolyn Ferreti, Azure D. Osborne-Lee, Matt Richardson, Wura-Natasha Ogunji

Many Thanks to Sean Gaulager at Co-Lab, Ana-Maurine Lara (Dramaturg) and Nicole Vlado.

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Jump

studio view

Him and Me (2009)

Ife Head (2009)

Jump (2009)

Jump (detail)

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Paradise

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Edna Manley's Sculpture, UTECH, Jamaica

Maya Deren's 'A Study in Choreography for Camera' with Talley Beatty

Pas de Deux by Maya Deren

Can you know a place by drawing it?

There are shoes between us

I recently started a series entitled ‘drawing the return’ through which I am exploring the question: “Can you know a place by drawing it?” I am specifically looking at my relationship to Nigeria. The series begins with the piece ‘There are shoes between us.’ The drawing is based on a pair of shoes I made for one of my first performance pieces over 10 years ago. They are leather, covered in white clay, modeled after a pair of Hausa shoes.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the ‘when’ of memory. About timing and recurrence. And that necessary moment of recollection. In 1998 I created this performance piece in which I wrapped myself in a raised structure of branches. I wore a mask with long flowing threads during the 2 days of the performance. When I was outside of the structure I wore hand-dyed blue clothing created specifically for the piece. And the Hausa shoes, which perhaps had been hand-made in a very similar manner hundreds of years ago by my own ancestors.

And so the return…

Lagos Island, Nigeria



There's a city between us



Try these



There are birds between us



How deep did you say this is?



How deep did you say this is? (detail)


We hid our birds

making fathoms

Sight is a feeling

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shelter, ancestors, transportation (2008)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 3:02

These video stills are from a series of performance works that I began creating in September, 2007, while at the Can Serrat Artist’s Residency in Spain. When I arrived, stories of global immigrations were very much on my mind. These changing cultural maps led me to consider the individual as the new nation. And all that that might imply about our connections to the history of a place and the land itself. I created belongings, marks, and earth puts on a mask during this time away. Upon my arrival back in Austin, I performed the return and shelter, ancestors, transportation. infinite return (bird on the sun) combines the landscapes of Catalunya and Texas; my body serves as the bridge between.

belongings (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 3:15

I begin with what we carry.

I am crawling along the foothills, making my way across almond fields, belly to ground. The land will not register my passing. The earth here is solid, compacted. I can walk in boots and leave no trace. I wrap stones around my feet so the mountain will remember: that I prayed and breathed it in and asked and listened and broke open and imagined. And what I saw. The people once fled into this same landscape of serrated mountains, running to and from, escaping. It is in the dust, as are all crossings: Gibraltar, the Canaries, the Atlantic. Our what ifs are immense. Our bodies makeshift rafts on open seas, and ladders pushing walls.

marks (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 1:15

earth puts on a mask (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, silent, 2:21

Is this the universal? Actions and shared actions? What one body invokes in another?

These performances are drawings, like Haitian Vodoun vévé—lines of cornmeal that mark the floor of ceremony. Vévé are how spirits enter the space; they are journey, possibility. What exactly is possible when body is our everything? How do we move through the world? What does our power look like?

the return (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, :50

infinite return (bird on the sun) (2007)
single-channel digital video
color, sound, 7:03

You see these drawings. Sight is a feeling. Infiniphonic. Sonic and forever. And within that a drawing. And within that. And what if within that.

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I lingered at the crossroads

I lingered at the crossroads (2008)

What if we do not feel brave? (2008)

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Is there rope or net or direction for falling?

It is lace it is landscape it is the undulations of our bodies. I am continuously moved by the ability of artists to invoke the body so viscerally without actually picturing it. I recently read a conversation with artists Ernesto Neto and Fernanda Gomes in BOMB magazine (winter 2008). Neto says: “Maybe that’s why people dance, as a way to be outside themselves; maybe not to be is more comfortable than to be—.” I am thinking dance is the place where we are completely embodied, so much so that we are able to be in irresistible connection with the spiritual, the sound, the lights, the sweat, the ether, where our bodies are synced with the communal body, so much so that it indeed feels like a leaving of self, a letting go of the individual. Is this what he means by not?

But now, of the being. I am looking at this work-in-progress from artist Lisa C. Soto’s Rodinia series. Rodinia, from the Russian родина for motherland, a supercontinent hovering on the surface of our spherish world, but before, in the beginning as we know it geologically, rodinia, rodinia, it lingers in the mouth like being in love, a supercontinent indeed, this graphite on mylar. Lace, necklace, the forest. Stones in a river. And so many islands. Or an almost dress, this new pangaea. Her fingers must be stained black from the making, from the stitching of country to country. And so many. There are 192 or 193 or 195 depending on how you count and who counts. And measures. Soto includes territories as well and perhaps other land masses unclaimed. (Are there?) Her project feels unending…that the line of her work may extend into outerspace one day…taking map-like notes on the ever-colonized stratosphere and beyond. The tracing on mylar and the cutting will likely be a forever part of her artistic process.

I love the blackening of materials. The rubbing of graphite into plastic. To proclaim territories and understandings and non-nation nations Palestines Kosovos Puerto Ricos the Lakota Sioux. Though rooted in land, Soto’s Rodinia describes a landlessness as well, where these shadow nations are primary, where darkness is everything, the blackening divine.

There is a whole set of questions I want to ask the artist, a whole set of imaginations that I want to have embodied and explained. Can she tell me how this flesh and bones will look when rome falls, when the disintegration of borders takes hold, when the sea no longer eats us? Is there a motherland even after the first? And will we be whole when we see her? Are we shapeshifted enough? Or not? Is there rope or net or direction for falling? Should we slow and linger? Or disco nap? But I already have…

And is this what we do to remember? That Pluto is not a planet? Pluto, that smallest and coldest and once-farthest from the sun...now you feel? Hear the shadow? This looking is dancing, you know.

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And then there is into

I visited Annette Lawrence’s studio to view her recent installation entitled Free Paper. The artist saved her junk mail for 13 months from November 2005 through November 2006. She tore the stacks of paper into two-inch wide strips which she then stacked on top of each other. Each month of free paper stands on a small table-high shelf. Lawrence speaks of the 11 years it took her to feel comfortable with the horizontal orientation of work, having moved from New York to Texas where, as everyone knows, the sky is bigger. These works spread out along their shelves like faded horizon lines stacked upon each other. Simultaneously, they stand high like architectural models, quiet skyscrapers pushing up against the white sky of the studio walls.

Evidence of marks and their maker. The strips of newspapers, glossy inserts and hard coupons speak of the internal as well—into earth and body. There is up down, the four directions, inside outside. And there is into. This invocation of the geological suggests a contemporary sedimentation: greys, reds, so many reds, an orange edge, but not quite. Strata of capitalism. Made beautiful. The weight of the thin strips of paper makes the stack curve fall at the edges, as the horizon line always bends in our peripheral vision. We should always remember the curvature of the earth.

These were once trees, this free paper. Lawrence has created rings of age, movement and breath. I can imagine the artist’s hands holding the metal straight-edge against small stacks of paper, then ripping, the sound hypnotic. I am looking at evidence of 13 months in a small room—November through November, an almost-lunar counting system. The overlap of months makes me think of a spiral. And infinity. Though they measure a specific beginning and end, there is really none to speak of. Though unintended, there is a lovely reference to the Jamaican saying “free-paper burn”. When free paper (a slave’s pass or documents of freedom) burn, our vacation is over, we must return to work. But here I imagine free paper could again become earth, trees, ash, air, breath.

I walk closer to these forms, remains and want to breathe them in, smell them, want them to smell like wet earth and clay, something alive. They are curiously absent of scent. I peer around the edges and am reminded of what exactly this is, this free paper: a Target logo, the blonde hair of a department store model, a coupon for 10% off. Must sacred always require the profane? And the liminal the ordinary?

I am in love with these bodies these forms and their spines—the squarish spaces that run through the middle of the stacks, devoid of color, that place in the fold of the newspaper the ink cannot touch. They are crooked vertebrae. Her body, my body, the neighbor, the mail carrier, whose free papers, whose bodies. They are all of us and absolutely gorgeous. I am again convinced that we live in a time of artists. Who else can transform junk into such beauty and reverence. I am reminded of Paul Chan’s My birds... trash... the future, a two channel digital projection that occupies two sides of a flat screen, all futures are possible.


2004. Two channel digital projection installation, front view. 17 minutes.


And they can indeed emerge un-apocalyptically.

It is humbling to stand before a work that makes me want to move slower, to savor and embrace my own actions, the rise and fall of my own breathing and voice. I am so moved by the what remains. It is photographic. Pre-photographic. Ancient as fossils. Rectangles of colored light that reflect up against the wall, a field of red or purple or blue. A kind of camera obscura, as if the light will remember the piece after the paper’s disintegration. (I think of Rothko here. Is it possible that works of art speak to each other regardless of our presence before them? Is the sound between works something we cannot hear? Does it surface as light? Is it the space before—in front of—the painting?)

I have been thinking about what constitutes an aesthetics of bravery. Is it the into? The vulnerability of the dirty, the truest truth of junk, trash, books, bibles, ships at sea, returning and returned, free paper burning. Not because of endings and apocalypse. Perhaps bravery is a future, a red light on a wall that is only sometimes there. A spiral. A chapel...I haven’t even spoken of the boxes that Lawrence builds for mailing these works, perfectly fitted for each month’s variations, rarely to be used, but waiting. More layers in the strata, crossroads become mathematical, between boxes and stacks, between shore and ocean, free and burn, between quick and linger there is into.

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