thirstDays No. 12 Ooooszchhhhhht t shuffle klopp shshhhchglugluglushh
It started with a single drum beat. The resonance of deer hide pulled taut around the circle, stretched across time so that each vibration opened another throat of the chorus.
What is spoken, sung or sounded here? How do these tones communicate? How do we perceive them?
I had arrived at VIVO early per the instructions of the organizers in order to spend some time with Alize Zorlutuna’s installation, a touchable distance (2017). The stone meditation space encompassed the entirety of the room, with bean bag chairs, blankets, benches, and configurations of rocks—lines, circles, the shape of an eye—spread about the space. I followed the instructions projected on one wall to carefully approach the stones, noticing them before selecting one to interact with. I returned to a bean bag with the rock I selected: smoothed by the water, round and off-white with dark grey specks. As directed, I placed the rock on parts of my body: my stomach, my clavicle, before opting to hold its cool weight in my hand. I tried closing my eyes and breathing but the awareness of other folks in the space brought me too close to distraction. I instead spent time gazing at Zorlutuna’s video work projected on a horizontal banner hung low in the space. Four scenes of horizons—two water and two land—were activated, one by one, by the artist’s finger tracing the horizon line. I felt the weight of the rock in my hand. I later learned that the videos were taken in British Columbia and in Turkey.
This work became a spatial and visual container for the remaining contributions of Ooooszchhhhhht t shuffle klopp shshhhchglugluglushh, curated by Elisa Ferrari and Stacey Ho. The second work, which I referred to at the outset of this text, became a sonic container, if only temporarily. Lindsay Dobbin’s Drum Voices (2015) literally surrounded the room in sound, bringing me into my body in a way unlike the rock I kept with me for the work’s duration. Whereas the rock’s weight in my palm made me aware of its presence as distinct from myself, the vibrations of sound washed across me, raising the hair on my neck as if someone was whispering in my ear. I think I was supposed to notice this. Zorlutuna and Dobbin’s works seamlessly meshed with one another as different registers of the same temporal experience.
“Sound may be invisible to the eye but because of air it is entirely present to place.” This is something written by Postcommodity and read by cheyanne turions during the Wood Land School symposium at Or Gallery in 2016. Zorlutuna and Dobbin’s works, acting in chorus, presenced places both near and far, ancient and future, making them tangible in sight, touch and sound.
Later in the evening, Zorlutuna took a pair of scissors and cut along the horizon line of each scene so that the projected images of land and water were thrown onto the wall behind the screen, leaving the sky and fragments of the horizon behind. She took the sheared fabric and cut it into strips before beginning to move about the room, selecting rocks and wrapping them in the cloth strips. She then tied these rock bundles to members of the audience in an act that physically collapsed distance between these bodies and conceptually collapsed the distance between the sites previously projected onto the screen with the space at VIVO. Later in the evening I saw some of these stones scattered on the floor throughout the venue.
During this time, and even before, something else was happening. A woman pulled a long white sheet of paper tightly over her face, folding it around the back of her head. Bending her knees, she began to encase herself in it until she was fully contained in this shell. A beat, and then she rose, turned off the camera and motioned for those gathered around to follow her into the washroom. Six or seven of us squished into the space. She set up the shot, camera pointed at the mirror, and then wrote the following on a small whiteboard:
‘Leticia Parente
Preparação I, 1975’1
She held that sign up to the camera for a long moment before proceeding. She placed masking tape over her lips and then drew on a new set of lips in red pencil. Then she taped over her eyes, one at a time, and drew a new eye. One eye was drawn better than the other because the second eye was drawn blind.
Guadalupe Martinez, the performer of Triangulation of Desire / Return to the Pleasurable (A032, A061, A097) (2017), moved between these actions and VIVO’s archive for the duration of the event. The performances re-enacted works by a group of intergenerational South American women artists—the first reenactment mentioned was by Carla Chaim, Volumes (2014) along with subsequent reenactments of performances by Ana Mendieta (1972), María Teresa Hincapié (1991), Lygia Clark (1973), Yanni and Nan (1983), Marie Orensanz (1978), and Regina José Galindo (2003).
Martinez staged the performances as closely as possible to the original for the camera, and for the archive. A live streamed video showed the view down one aisle of the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, installed on a screen outside of the centre’s offices. The audience could variously watch the screen or look through the archive’s windows to see Martinez preparing bright red folders with letter stickers, which she then inserted into the archive. At one point she held a folder up to the camera that bore the words ‘WHERE IS ANA MENDIETA / DÓNDE ESTÁ ANA MENDIETA’. This folder was inserted into the archive according to the year of the artist’s death. The folders, containing information about the artists as well as the video documentation will remain in the archive. The work performed another act of mapping both connection and distance: of influence, absence, affect, and the affinities between the performances themselves.
Another act of insertion in performance was enacted by Lee Ann Brown and Sonnet L’Abbé’s : SONS : SONNET : SONG : SONIC, described by the artists as a “colonization of text” — an erasure through crowding so that
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold2
Tradition has it sonnets’ aims are to glorify love, and lovers. Then how must my forays into these lines make us beholden? When I originally conceptualized this colonization, Will’s leavings were just source, just canon fodder for my fearlessness. My war-like, dominant hankering set upon those poems’ boughs a weight, inch by inch, to reshape and fork their meaning for my gain.3
In song accompanied by guitar or recitation, Brown and L’Abbé explore and expand the sonnet form, responding to Shakespeare's depiction of flowery love or, as in the above example, using the sonnet to reflect upon the process and implications of “colonizing” text. The presentation took up the sonnet as a sonic experience that acts differently upon us that reading text.
Margrethe Pettersen’s sound work, Living Land—Below as Above (2015), more directly inhabited the sonic as a multivalent site of possibility. The work was originally presented as a sound walk on a frozen lake in Northern Norway, commissioned by Arctic Encounters & Dark Ecology, produced and curated by Hilde Methi & Sonic Acts. Stories of snow in both English and Sami—a language that has hundreds of words for this thing, this concept, this being—spoke to a broad realm of existence beyond the human. Spirits that regulate the relation between humans and the local environment. A water plant that conserves energy on cold days by sinking to the lake bottom. Instances of slippery transition between worlds that materialize value and time differently than that experienced in the ubiquity of individualist capitalism. “...flesh becomes action, not because it is material but because it must do so for ears to remain open and low to the ground. Only if the land decides to stop speaking to us will be enter the world of dislocation.”4 I thought of the single drum beat at the outset of the program, and remembered walking on the land in the winter in the prairies, snow crunching under foot. How do these tones communicate? How do we perceive them?
Katherine Kline’s live sound performance similarly foregrounded perception through sound in the use of field recordings of sessions with psychic mediums. Loud and often grating, looping electronic static was perforated with a woman’s voice speaking in soothing, sometimes monotone, tones. Mostly inaudible, the voice offered tantalizing if ephemeral suggestions of communication with a world beyond. The performance’s title, Alpha Particles (2017), refers to the process of radioactive decay when an atom releases a particle (the alpha particle) whose charge and mass attract them to interacting with matter, though they cannot penetrate the body or travel more than a few centimetres in the air. This seems an apt parallel for communicating with non-physical energies through seances and mediums. In fact, radiation detectors as well as sound recorders are often used when “hunting” ghosts.
Kristin Tårnes’ short video, (over)tro (2016), focused on The Eastern Sami Museum in Neiden in the North of Norway. Built in 2009, the museum has not yet opened due to ongoing problems with the building, which have been attributed by some to a trespass of the spirits under the soil by not asking permission to build there. This trespass, this haunting, are debated and in some ways dependent on the perception of the person speaking—I am recalling of a recent conversation I had with Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson, who reminded me that perception is not simply a matter of choice. It is dependent on where we are born, the context in which we come into selfhood. We also all exist within a settler colonial perception, at least in the context of North America though undoubtedly this is experienced in similar ways by Indigenous peoples globally. The ongoing problems with the building, the mundane horror of a potentially unsafe or unstable site, similarly reminded me of Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s writing on haunting as “the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.”5 Tårnes’ work speaks to these incompatibilities and to the potential agency located in haunting.
The final two works of the final thirstDays program took a decisive turn away from possible hauntings, highlighting the acoustic environment as a site of connection and creativity. The short and sweet work by Tuy’t’tanat Cease Wyss with daughter Senaqwila Wyss and granddaughter Kamaya Anne Cecilia Leo built upon a collaboration between the elder Wyss and Ursula Johnson for the #callresponse project, which I co-organized at grunt gallery in 2016. The initial song was created by by drawing a line on a topographical map from the customary land territory of the local Indigenous peoples—in this case, of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations—to the site of the performance in the urban centre, from which a score is developed. Wyss, Johnson and their collaborator Cassandra Smith performed the song over two hours in a small park behind the gallery, singing back to the land that engendered the work.
For the presentation at VIVO, Wyss and her daughter re-recorded the song together, which names three pollinators: the hummingbird, butterfly and bee. Added to the composition was the ultrasound recording of baby Kamaya’s heartbeat in utero (the first drum beat), her laughter and vocables, as well as sounds from nature: bird song, wind, water. The multiple generations of this family, giving and caring for life, parallel the pollinators’ propagation of life. The work honours this.
Another intergenerational collaboration, Hildegard Westerkamp’s Once Upon a Time (2012) included the voices of her daughter—recorded when she was a young girl—alongside her two grandsons—recorded many years later. This layered fairytale or bed time story told of a girl who loved to sing, her voice pure and true and sweet. A sorcerer, envious of her voice, placed a curse upon the girl so that when she came of age, her voice was lost. The sorcerer returned, disguised, with the gift of a music machine that made the girl forget her sadness at the loss of her voice. So powerful was the machine that its music slowly transformed the entire village, causing people to consume more than they needed, and to work when they were dead tired. They forgot that they could make their own music and that every place has its own sound. They became real zombies. With smiles painted on their faces they observed the world through dead eyes.
One day, a big bird landed on the lake near the village and began to sing a strangely beautiful song. Slowly, the cry and laughter of the loon began to pierce through the music. The villagers fell into a restful sleep and when they awoke, they spoke to one another of their dreams and lives, and listened intently. A woman awoke and remembered that she could sing. The spell was broken. As intent listeners in VIVO, we were lulled by the song of the loon that comprised an extended conclusion of the work. We were wrapped in sound that is often lost in our urban environment.
What stirs within us when the loon cries or when we hear the laughter of a child? What are we awakened to when the snow crunches under foot or when the mallet strikes hide? The final thirstDays attuned us to these sounds as a way to reach beyond ourselves, to transgress our permeable boundaries, to leak into another space. Insertions into archives and histories give presence where there is absence, and map new terrains of connective tissue. Sound vibrations carry story and communicate that which is beyond words, a shared experience of the greater world around us and within us.
Notes
1. The original performance for video by Parente can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/119148500.
2. William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII
3. Sonnet L’Abbé, “Colonized Sonnets”
4. Margrethe Pettersen, Living Land—Below as Above (2015)
5. Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, Eds. Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639–658 (Left Coast Press: 2013).
Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Dutch, French and Métis ancestry originally from the Prairies. She is Curator with grunt gallery since 2014 and was the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. She is currently working on #callresponse with Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard along with invited artists Christi Belcourt, Ursula Johnson, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory. She recently curated Unsettled Sites, a group exhibition with Marian Penner Bancroft, Wanda Nanibush and Tania Willard at SFU Gallery. In 2009 she co-founded the Gam Gallery. She has written texts for Canadian Art, Decoy Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine, and others.
