Don’t tell anytone about the cult ! – An interview with Lisa Harris & Alisha Wormsley
We met Lisa Harris and Alisha Wormsley at Studio XX on a cold and windy day and asked them to talk about their creative process as individuals and as a team, but also about their past and current work. Here’s what they told us:
On their creative paths …
Lisa: I started singing in the opera when I was 8. It changed my life immediately. I had no attachment or goal, love or lust for the arts. But when I started doing it, I realized that I really liked it. There were a lot of adults around, with more oversight of “she should do this”, kind of carving a path for me. When it came time for me to revolt, I wanted to take this voice that until this point I was strategically taught to esteem more than any other part of myself and use it to esteem something different.
Alisha: I was always really good at arts and always creative. My mom is like a black Martha Stewart! We were always crafting things around the house. I studied cultural anthropology and I thought I was going to make documentaries, so I went to Cuba where I was supposed to document a conference. We went to this artist community an hour away from Santiago and I ended up staying there for 6 months! Cuba was my art school, as officially I didn’t go to an art school.
I definitely have more freedom. My training is not nearly the same as Lisa’s but I was definitely trained to think about things in a certain way, to create concepts in a certain way.
I make films like I make collages. I’m a collage artist, so I make films in layers.
On what science-fiction allows…
Alisha: A lot of my work is about the 4th dimension and time – so, everything that happened in the past, will happen in the future and is happening in the present. When people tell stories, they mesh memories up together. Science-fiction is very appealing to me because I have so much freedom to mesh every memory. Science-fiction has always been able to dwell into the actual issues of things, it’s almost like cover.
Children of NAN is about black women and white men being at war. There’s definitely some social, racial, gender issues in there. I always think that black women and white men are the beginning and the end of everything. Lisa says they’re like the 0 and 1 in computer language. They’re symbols.
On the institution of opera…
Lisa: In the 50s, is was very fashionable for every opera house to have a singer of color. They were like trophies. It was almost like we pressurised this organic material through this machine and then we have one thing left. All my life I had a feeling of pride for black people. Coming from a classic classist kind of identity comparison, we’ve done everything!
On working together…
Alisha: We get the reaches that we both want to. I’ve always collaborated but I’ve never really valued collaboration until I collaborated with Liz because we’ve been collaborating for such a long time. It’s easier.
We have to say less. It’s awesome.
Lisa: We deal a lot with universal themes. We can creatively, through our different and shared background, explore those universal themes. The huge part is how we are both here and in the same time and space. That actually makes all of us now the same. Things that we get to work with in installation and performances together. I think a lot about the differences between this idea of one and this idea of two. And how big a difference that is and what is in that space.
Alisha: We’re always kind of in the same place. It’s very easy for me to be visual with her. Most of our projects overlap in so many ways. We are women. We’re black women. We’re strong and creative. A lot of our ideas evolve around that.
** Alisha and Lisa will be giving a workshop at Studio XX tonight at 7. Everyone’s invited and it’s free (!). Check out the details here.
See more of their creative work and views in their exhibition PROOF and the roundtable conversation Afro to the Future!
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Interview by Amanda Clément & Tara Ogaick