Lagos! I love this place, it feels
like home, like I am of it, in it. It is smokey and full—from when
I step off the plane I can smell salt fish, palm oil and fires. And
incessant horn honking accompanies all public movements. The
crossing of streets is not to be taken for granted. As I left the
Centre for Contemporary Art today, I stepped across the briefly empty
street only to hear a shriek (mine?!) as the passenger on a
motorcycle gently shoved my elbow away. (Please don't tell my
Auntie.) It is amazing to see young school children navigate these
roads. Lagos is a dance intensive of the highest order. And so it begins...
Yesterday we made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Bahia. Time travel slowly. View from the catacombs, which is also the education room(!). Used to be a slave port. And a sugar mill. Didn't feel ghosts strangely enough. The museum is majestic, several galleries, wide open spaces.
Blue and white tile work covers the walls leading to the main gallery. Where is the place of history and remembrance in all of this? I thought of the artist Adriana Varejão whose work brilliantly displays the history of colonization within the beauty of the ceramic work. Her work should live here.
by Adriana Varejão
There is also a restaurant below. Caipirinhas on the patio? The irony does not escape me.
The tracks from the ingenio (sugar mill) below my feet.
First Encounter: Sixteen years ago in West Oakland On the set of Drylongso. Subsequent Viewing Pattern: I am compelled to screen an Ogunji videoevery seven months or so.
With My Father and I Dance In Outer Space, Wura-Natasha Ogunji has deepened and refined her endurance performance videos by stripping away everything that we don’t need, and providing us with everything we do need to feel unstable, uncertain, enthralled, and undone. The spirit dancer presents herself, and then proceeds to make a barren landscape with her footprints, moisten it with her sweat and breath. Based on my experience with the Malibu State Park Rangers, the intensity of the Ogunji Spirit’s sustained levitations will certainly aerate that yellow soil. If we return to this site in one month’s time, the Ogunji Figure may not be there, but I am certain, that scented chaparral shrubs, and desert cacti will. Rather than frame and validate the video’s signifiers enjoying direct linkage to Yoruban ritual and Ogunji’s heritage, the artist opens the video to grander possibilities and indeed extends her speculations beyond terrestrial identity into the speculative realm of the cosmological. The discomfort we feel as we sympathetically ache with the strain of Ogunji’s gorgeously choreographed performance is diminished by her application of distance and time. The figure’s placement in the landscape tells us one ting about this gesture while the sky above her tells us another all together. Long Memory. Clouds sweep over Ogunji faster than we can comprehend just as my Malibu clouds confounded my aperture many times over the course of an afternoon of building an inverted maypole and tearing it apart. The Ogunji Spirit is a regenerative force that finally stops because the work is done, not because its powers are exhausted. Just as I was happy to have Wura on my set building the delicate readymades that grace the finale of Drylongso, I am happy to have her videos with me now: Ogunji’s work never fails celebrate and test the confounding tension between the quotidian and the magical.
my first animation inspired by a day at the market, being an outsider and insider, a stranger and family, being an artist. title after the play of the same name by Ngugi wa Thiong'o & Ngugi wa Mirii
Finally language comes....rough inspiration from Kimberli Gant's review in Art Lies of my recent exhibition at WATW. She writes, "Though Ogunji’s interweaving of ancestry and spiritualism is understated and effective, her art-historical appropriation could use some strengthening." True dat. This helped answer a question, or look at a question I've been asking myself since landing here in Abuja. Thinking about the Atlantic's place in my cosmology. Wondering how my metaphors will change, what shifts will happen in my imagination, in the world of my creativity.
What drew me to the Ife heads has something and nothing to do with art history. The power of artifacts, objects, (even people!) encased in museums has always been palpable and it is so ironic that we must come to know ourselves through artifacts. Can we? What draws me to the Ife heads is the sense of individuality in the people, not how these heads are evidence of a great civilization. That question doesn't interest me--if we are or are not, were or weren't great (that was never our question). I am interested in how these faces are portraits of individuals who navigated the world with all the vulnerabilities that I have, with all that makes us human. What is it that I want to know or need to know? That they loved as I do and had doubts and touched the earth and felt the sun against faces and couldn't get enough of the smell of rain against the dusty red roads.
The smallest gestures are so important, that is what I have been looking for, not the epic but the quiet, unseen, embodied. I realized there was nothing massive in what I longed for. A smell. Or sound.
The airport is a subtle combination of palm oil and dried fish I think. It smells like the African stores in the U.S. Familiar and specific. And emerging from the airport reminded me so much of the Dominican Republic, that sweet and smokey smell of burning trash but unending because of the Harmattan. I walked so certainly out of the baggage claim to find my cousin and waiting for her I felt so comfortable after having navigated the Santo Domingo airport so many times.
Though landing here felt strangely common, as if it had happened so many times before. It moved me, but in a slow way. My cousins love me as if they have always known me. Though people in the street call me oyinbo (white person in Yoruba; oyibo in Igbo) wherever I go, I don't feel like an outsider to this place, or even a stranger.
My cousin tells me on a daily basis how much I look like my father. And all my relatives have gaps in their teeth (i used to have one too).
I am enjoying a lovely moment of quiet as I write this, a moment without the sound of generators.
I think about something Stephen Hawking said when asked to name his hero. He said Galileo because he taught us the power of observation. It is a beautiful gift to always be able to observe, to compose with our eyes, to observe our own gestures and responses, to be present to our mistakes and awkwardness as well as voice, difference, commonalities. I love that all this is new and familiar.
Incidents at the 22 Hotel takes a post-apocalyptic landscape and imagines what it is to be part of that future. The main character, called ‘Unexplained Presence’ struggles to imagine her own existence. During the performance, she lives two lives, one as an African artifact, full of ancient power, yet motionless. In the other, she must choose to be human and imagine herself into the future. The Porter, a trickster-like character, wears a fantastical mask which also doubles as the hotel itself and accompanies Unexplained Presence on her journey. The Runners keep track of time as they literally run for as long as this futuristic world exists.
Soundings is born from my deep amazement at how we walk in this world.Maferefún Ana-Maurine Lara, Samiya Bashir, Leigh Gaymon-Jones, Kiyana Horton, Amanda Johnston and Senalka McDonald for the beautiful beginnings.
In a few weeks I travel to Miami to do the third performance of Soundings.It’s a public visual performance installation that speaks about memory, history and power as located in the black female body.I have visioned the piece to happen in multiple locations: Brazil, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, the United States and on a ship crossing the Atlantic (yes, breathe.....).I am forever in search of the threads, connections and in creating physical evidence of our existence, our power, the movements of our bodies in the world, the mark, the vévé.The performances are all videotaped—the camera is another witness.Eventually the geographies will meet as multi-channel videos that reveal the complete visual sonics: fathoms, seams, syncopation (mother of dissonance?).
I began this project almost two years ago and thought it might quietly disappear as I have felt unsure about the language I am looking for—how do we access collective deep knowledge and then make that physical?I return to the performers to understand the piece.Sometimes we need other people to remember for us.Carole tells me that the work is about connecting that space of erasure between Africa and the Americas.She says, “I’m the summation of what came before me so that I can be here today.”And how to visualize that summation?
What does it look like when you know ‘You are’?
Another performer reminds me that the seams are important.
How to include these?
Performers are asked to 'describe the color of your deepest power'. I create 'fathoms' of these colors.
It has been a day of starts and stops.And so I am looking for the connections, the lines and the drawings these lines might possibly become.Yoruba creation myths talk about how we choose our journeys in life, all important events like our own births and deaths, and parents and other major markers and then we must touch the tree of forgetfulness just before we are born.We walk this journey to prove that we have chosen a good path in life.Elegua indeed.There must be a drawing in here somewhere.
I made a new performance video ‘Ife Head Lands’ and burned two copies of the dvd.Two.Today I realize that there may only be two copies in existence forever as I seem to have lost the files into the netherworld of my computer.Is it possible to reconstruct the film in exactly the same way again?It will be an almost-identical twin the second time around.Or maybe not a twin at all.These themes in the work take on a life of their own.A face painted to look like an Ife Head is a way to understand the artifact and the person that came before.And then I suppose the artifact has something to say.I found and it found me.This dance choreographs itself into my body and onto the landscape of paper that surrounds me.Sometimes I want to give away all these creations so that I can start fresh, clean, clear.
But it’s impossible.They always find you. I prayed at the ocean in Miami this spring, thinking I am not ready for all these stories that wake me at 5, 4, 3am.The message was something I should have known already, ‘be thankful for the stories that come to you.’This breath is a responsibility, this body.The air can pull you to your knees, make you change directions open doors close doors open doors.
Astrologer Anne Ortelee says we are in a time of double negatives.So the unexpected two doors closing is actually an opening.But breathe first. And we are supposed to be writing down our dreams for insight.Last night I remember dreaming about an email that said: Following you here has been becoming.Is it a clue?Or not not a clue?From the same friend who told me ‘I love being around black people’ one evening in Jamaica.I hear that in my core, knowing I have felt that before on the island of Santo Domingo, that specific sensation of my own weight in the world, past and future.It is something that the land absorbs, that is etched so that our very existence resounds, booms. And the sound is deep house.I have never had that, heard that here in the same all-encompassing way. It is deep knowledge.
Like Tisa Bryant’s Autodidact: “Self-knowledge is a disavowal of contested spaces, elbowing a way in.Back door!Disremembering, unremembering as a reasonable response to trauma: either I don’t remember feeling anything about not seeing myself in every book I opened, or I just realize I wasn’t (supposed to be) there.But we look at each other, and know, you and we, are here, and here, and here.”
Following you here has been becoming.As in the drawing has been happening for a long time now? As in when you find it, it will have been waiting for you? They found you here? They did not not find you here. Yes, we looked at each other.
You, me, twin dvds, Ife Heads, what I found when they found me. The body is the axis, mine, yours, not not ours, the weight of it, the drawing of it, the becoming and the sound of doors open doors close doors open.
Jump at 3am
Jump (detail)
Annelize Machado and Surabhi Kukke as Ife Heads in the workshop performance of Incidents at the Two Two Hotel at Co-Lab, Austin, TX. 2009
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(MattRichardson) 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.
