building a home.

It seems that the current discussions over immigration within the US tend to focus on maintaining and sustaining a “true America”, one that is firmly planted in its rights and traditions that were constructed after the systematic genocide of Native Americans and the lands they occupied. In establishing and developing that constructed identity, it seemed that these migrants to the current US nation-state left their respective countries in an attempt to settle into a new land, to leave their respective countries to find a better life for them and their families. They sought, as history tells it, a land of freedom and free expression – a place they could call home.

Historically, as it has been argued, people migrate to find a better place to live, one that allows them a better home, a better job, a nice place to raise the family. For those of us educated in the American public school system, we can all recall this discussion of home-making in our limited overview of the founding of the nation. The discussion of family and the home, then, becomes a metaphor for the public and how we can then live as a society. Locked within the confines of the walls, with windows that peer out onto neighborhood streets and doors protected by lock and key, the home and family becomes a pivotal point in our discussions on the movement of people across borders and nation-states. We must protect our borders as we do our homes, they say. And so must we protect our traditions.

But behind the push-pull politics of many discussions surrounding human movement is the assumption that cultures are fixed in time and (geographical) space. As Paul Gilroy discusses, we seem to forget that civilizations are not “closed or finished cultures that need to be preserved,” a position that “increasingly conforms to the dictates of the West’s reborn imperial power.” To be a member of a given community assumes that they are privy to a whole set of cultural traditions, be it language, food, dress, musical tastes and affinities or even ways of speaking.

Growing up in the city, there were certain things that were characteristic to Chicagoans, and to claim it as an identifier gave us special privilege over everyone else, especially suburbanites. To us, we wanted to claim what was rightfully ours. The city limits were (in our imaginations) hard, clear-cut lines, and being able to call ourselves natives was always a point of pride. As Chicagoans, we distinguish the “true Chicagoan” based on their accents or how they speak. No one outside of the city knows what the hell a cash station is, nor would they ever call it that. Only us native Chicagoans go to Chris’ to play pool or went to Lincoln Square Lanes before the neighborhood became a haven for the post-graduate and educated middle class.

But in this “post-racial” Obama-nation that we live in, multiculturalism is all the rage. A self identified Black President, and the child of a white Kansas mother and black Kenyan father, Obama is the perfect model of a “true American” that epitomizes a truly multicultural America where all immigrants are created equal. But this narrow conception of a “multicultural society” – a view that conflates all cultures as being equal and is part of the problematic narrative of the “melting pot” – falls short from the actual experience of how culture gets transmitted in the US today, and for Obama and other mixed folks how race becomes impacted in our performance of culture. What tends to be forgotten about many migrants to the US is that they’d rather be “home.” While many are excited to “live the American Dream,” others wish they could afford to be back in their native lands. For many migrants, moving to another country is not a choice that they make easily, but merely a tactic for survival. Political refugees seeking asylum typically don’t have much say in the matter if they want to survive.

It seems that the general discussions of immigration and its reform within the US surround the assumption that we have a fixed identity as an “American people” and that we need to uphold the integrity of it by policing our borders. But as with many im/migrants, it is more important to be transnational than to fix oneself to one nation-state. While many prefer to claim one place as home, the transnational subject can flow through cultures almost seamlessly, as if to render any border useless. It is these elusive transnationals and mixed folks that seem to trouble our fixed conceptions of an American identity. Several years ago, in 2007, the city of Chicago underwent a ward redistricting that had vast political implications. As the Chicago Reporter wrote in August of that year, “Reapportionment of election districts is required by federal law every 10 years if a census reveals significant changes in population. A new city council map, … must equalize the population in each ward by creating units that are compact and contiguous.” Dictated by the census, and also taking into account the number of registered adult voters, strong ward associations and even the number of immigrants ineligible to vote became a part of the political future of a neighborhood. Even within our own town, borders were policed and fought for as a way to build political power and protect the homes and properties of its constituents. For the redistricting process, race and immigrant population demographics were used strategically to systematically alter communities, some with devastating results that forced displacement and encouraged gentrification (as opposed to real community development).

Similarly, in my experience as a person of mixed identities, I was expected to uphold certain parts of myself as mutually exclusive identities. To many, I could only be one “race,” and I often felt pressured to perform my Latino-ness or my Asian-ness. Extending from W.E.B. DuBois’ “two-ness”, my “three-ness” (Mexican Filipino American) posed a psychological threat to the rigid confines of racial ideology. Growing up, it quickly became very confusing to my classmates at LaSalle in the mid 90′s that there could be the possibility that I was a person of mixed race. I mean, Mexican and Filipino? That’s interesting…How did that happen? The inevitable discussion after an exchange of names with someone typically went like this:
Person: So what are you?
Me: What do you mean?
Person: I mean, like, what are you? Where do you come from? What nationality are you?
Me: I’m from Chicago, which I guess means I’m an American.
Person: No, I mean where are you really from?

Inevitably, this discussion would result in me either providing them with my life story or trying to understand why they kept asking me stupid questions. Even more confusing was that my parents were not immigrants, but true, 100% native Chicagoans. It was almost a circus act.
Later in life, these questions would also be followed with, “So do you speak Spanish or Tagalog?” to which my answer would be, “I can speak a half-assed version of Castellano.” While often just an innocent question, I couldn’t help but wonder if in their minds, this was connected to the idea that language equals culture. That to fully identify oneself as a “true Mexican”, one had to speak Spanish. The demands and expectations of what it meant to be both Mexican and Filipino while also keeping tabs of what it meant to be a “typical American boy” became an increasingly difficult task – especially when there was no cultural necessity for either language to be used in the house. But the same could be applied to any other aspect of culture as a symbol for identifying oneself as being a member of an ethnic group, such as food, clothing, or style.

It seems that there is a lot of anxiety in a change of traditions for fear that (American) culture will be lost. Many cities, including our own, have translated government documents and post signs in different languages to accommodate the ever-increasing population of non-English speakers – which has subsequently driven the fierce battle to implement an English-only nation-state. The struggle for gay marriage and queer rights is dangerous to the hetero-normative family. As threats to these constructed traditions, the mythology of The American Identity must not be altered.

Moving into their own place together and ultimately buying a house to raise their kids was a an opportunity for my parents to start over. Unlike their parents, they would not subject their children to Catholic school or church. They would do many things that typical American kids would do, such as take an art class, play soccer, learn the piano, take swimming lessons. And while there were still some similar traditions that were carried down into the new house, my parents were confronted with many decisions about how to raise their mixed kids. Fortunately for my sister and I, our parents raised and supported us in a way that allowed us to move freely between our identities. This fluidity gave us confidence among others to assert our mixed-ness, even if we didn’t know that what we were doing was political.

With such an opportunity, one important question for the mixed family becomes, how do we construct a new home and how does that affect our national mentality? In this nation where more and more people are beginning to identify as mixed race, and with more im/migrants being transnational (either physically or virtually), what makes sense in our contemporary timespace to re-imagine and invent as new tradition? What traditions do (or should) we keep if our fixed notion of home and culture has been irrevocably altered? And how do we maintain integrity as a nation?

While I can’t conclusively answer any of these questions, I did want to make the point that racially mixed Americans as well as im/migrants and their transnational brethren who get tangled into the fabric of American society offer the opportunity for, and even demand, a new paradigm for constructing an American “home”. With shifting identities partially tangled in webs of transnational economies and globalization, fixed notions of the nation-state become increasingly difficult to manage and contain, particularly along racial lines, but also along rules of citizenship. With multiple people containing dual-citizenship, some even with triple-citizenship, it calls to question one’s identity if we are to follow the logic of the nation-state dictating how one must identify.

For all intents and purposes, I am currently living geographically between two cities, and sometimes between countries. Though I never really intended for this to happen, many often ask where I actually live. My first answer is to say, “Well, all my shit is in New York, if that helps define anything,” but as I travel between cities for work, I also feel challenged in claiming a city for my own. Despite having grown up in Chicago for 23 years, I find it hard to claim that I’m a Chicagoan. Yes, I grew up t/here. But if I follow the advice of any of the ethnic studies writers, home is where I choose to make it. No longer am I tied to specific geographies or places in defining home. For me, home is now a psychological state of comfort: a place where I feel the warmth of friendship and family, of good food and drink, and music.

these stairs are getting out of hand (some clarifications)

As a way to prepare for a new work for thingNY’s In House project (where mobile sound installation meets house concert), I embarked on a period of intense research and exploration to help me solidify what it was that I was going to do for the project. Sometime in late summer / early fall 2010, fellow thingNY collaborator Paul Pinto asked if I was interested in writing a piece for In House, of which I enthusiastically agreed to do. Fascinated with liminal and in-between spaces with ambiguous delineations of physical space, I was initially drawn to the hallway. But to merge and focus my creative attention, I looked back at my fascination with Sou Fujimoto’s work that re-envisioned the “function” of stairs. Whether Fujimoto’s House H intended to challenge the notion of “functional” architecture is not necessarily the point, but rather to me, the gesture served as a point of departure in re-envisioning other possibilities that a set of stairs could offer. As I further read into that aspect of his work (at least in this particular piece), I began to wonder about all the physical space in a room that is unused, space that is either inaccessible due to the physical architecture of the room or because we are simply too short. What does the upper corner of the room actually sound like? What of the air ducts and the ceiling? These spaces that inevitably become characteristic of the spaces we occupy are spaces that we either are unaware of or don’t have access to. So as a simple solution, a gesture even, stairs become a convenient architectural solution to shift our aural attention elsewhere. And though my initial thoughts on stairs were utilitarian in nature, they have since evolved to be the point of fascination, rather than the tool that moves bodies to other locations.

Similar to hallways, stairs “function” (more symbolically, though sometimes theoretically and physically) as spaces of transition and liminality. Typically preceded by a hallway or passage, staircases, and stairs in general, further spatial ambiguity onto a separate plane. With constructed floors consisting of fixed locations, one always has to indicate that they are on the stairs between floors.  Further thinking about why I became fascinated with stairs aside from a re-envisioned technology for aural possibility, it became painfully clear that this architectural form has become a metaphor for my lived experience. And part of that influence may have also come up as a way to engage in a further dialogue with my father, a trained and practicing architect.

But I think more at the forefront was the desire to find a form that not only carried symbolic and historic weight, but that also had political potential. On a basic level, engaging in a set of stairs (or really, using them to go up or down) requires participation. Often times when we engage with a work of art, we are faced with its product, the final stage that projects a small sliver of the artist’s work. We are further confronted with the hierarchical (binary) positionality of the viewer, a position that closes conversations that allow for new modes of self-awareness. If we consider works of art as a means of communication, and particularly as having political potential, then this type of work allows the viewers to detach themselves from the work they are viewing. But if the viewers become participants in the work, they are then afforded a different position to engage with the work and their own lives. Because of my investment in making political work that engages as many people as possible, and because it works on so many levels (as a site for political possibility, as a metaphor for a liminal identity, as an aesthetic form, among other things), the staircase has become convenient visual vocabulary to draw from for my current work.

In a process that further extended my fascination with stairs, I embarked on a series of innocent studies that would help me develop a sound piece for the InHouse project. Going into the project without any expectations, the studies themselves became pieces of their own, pushing my work to into a whole new realm of possibility.  What started as variations on a theme have now tied back around to an earlier theme from in my obsessive noodling drawings from 5th and 6th grade as well as actual compositions in recent years: the maze.  And while these current drawings are still just conceptual points of departure (read: creative distractions), they have proven to be quite useful in encouraging my brain to further develop other work related to stairs (or sometimes not).

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In a dizzying process of conceptual integration, I attempted to merge several themes of my own thinking into one piece that initially started as three distinct studies for three separate works into one larger piece. After some conceptual juggling and hair pulling (though Hair Piece had not yet started), I came up with toward, in 72 parts. While I’ll spare you the details of the piece, the piece essentially became a piece about process itself, as these three separate works were processes of other works in progress. Though I’m still not entirely finished with the piece (you’ll just have to wait and see), the idea and construction of it have been set. Synthesizing drawings, maps, recordings of a performance, and the ideas taken from gift economies, the piece will take its final shape as a postcard that will be sent to all the people I worked with or who I met at the Banff Centre this past December. And because my over ambitious self has thought up of other projects related to stairs, I have also embarked on book of mazes (to be self published soon) that take on a more playful tone than toward does.

These two projects (aka creative distractions) were ultimately meant as playful explorations though now it seems that they’ve taken on  whole new life. During my residency at the Banff Centre, I was able to involve myself in a more technical approach to stairs via set design and architectural manuals, not to mention other theoretical and historical overviews of stairs. After that process of intense research (and also looking at the relationship between sound and architecture) and obsessive drawing and thinking about stairs, I have only now been able to concretely describe how I came about this form and how these fascinations work together, theoretically and aesthetically. It is my hope that this writing helps to clarify (mostly for myself) my process, and particularly how the banality of structures we take for granted have political potential as sites for further discussion and theorization.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be starting to construct Memorial for ___, the piece for the InHouse collaboration with thingNY that initially started this whole discussion. A clear departure from the drawings/creative distractions, the piece will contain between 2-4 (though maybe more) kinetic sculptures constructed of an audio tape player, cassette tape, some wooden dowels, metal, and tape on a set of stairs. While I won’t delve into the details for this project, I will mention that the piece synthesizes my ideas of historical memory, subversive sound making, and participatory engagement. In a review of all my past work, this seems to be my first significant attempt at making a body of work that I feel is truly political (and which might possibly explain my current fixation). Though I also believe the portrait series as political in its assertion of individual agency and reflection as a text for transformation, this new body of work seems to fully engage the audiences in a way that allows them to be reflective of their own experience (in a very blatantly Freirian way). Thinking back to a lesson that I had with a former composition teacher of mine, he pointed out that no single piece of art has created such political unrest as to change the trajectory of its society’s operations and dismantle the oppressive structures that they may have. Point taken, but what he did not seem to recognize was that my work was not an attempt to be that or presume that art could change the world. My critique of that view is that I am merely contributing to the collection of events, happenings, conditions, and coincidences that enable a change to occur. While I feel like the transformations that are happening in our world today are not up to speed for my tastes, I can still recognize my work as contributing to the work for social justice.

on memory, remembering, and time (an older writing)

Tonight, as I continued the large scale drawing project for toward, in 72 parts, I was thinking of how the maze structure of the piece might be related to memory and how we remember things. It seemed to me that the task of “solving” this maze would require the participant an immense amount of memory skills, if not patience. Maybe this thought was triggered by a TIME rehearsal that happened earlier tonight, or maybe I’m trying to tie in older work with what I’m doing now. Either way, making the connection is always gratifying and now I’m excited to see how this piece can develop as part of the larger process. The text below is from a writing that I did on two pieces from my Portrait Series (2009-2010), a project where I allowed myself to compose/construct pieces that took themes from reflections of each month and made some sort of piece from them. An exercise in venturing into other mediums, this project, I can confidently say, is what has launched my work into an interdisciplinary nature, one that I refer to (in this writing) as an “ambiguous aesthetic.” In any case, I find that this writing and these pieces comes well in my continued thinking of TIME, memory, forgetting, and historical narrative, in addition to my continued thinking of art as a transformative process towards a socially just world.

“Some time around the end of May, early June of 2009 I started to become frustrated at the fact that I wasn’t composing as much as I felt I should be. While my life as a performer was becoming increasingly optimistic and exciting, I was quickly feeling that I was missing the creative outlet of composing that had for years helped me to synthesize my own personal ideas and thoughts into the medium of sound. As a way to deal with the reality of my limited time to compose larger pieces, I devised a strategy to continue to work compositionally that allowed myself to trace my thoughts over a long period of time. After about a month of trying to figure out what would work, I ultimately decided that I would write a short piece every month. These pieces would be constructed as a series of self-portraits that would be low stress, no pressure works that could be open to any sort of medium, whether it be music, performance art, video, sound installation, or really any sort of creative work. I wanted to allow myself to open up to other types of media and art but only as it suited the way I was portraying myself for the month. Essentially, I would draw the theme, either at the end of the month or the beginning of the next month, that recurred, lingered or became prominent and used that as a starting point for composition. As the series progressed, I began to realize that much of the work that I have been doing with respect to the portrait series has become ambiguous work, meaning that they don’t necessarily fit nicely within the confines of a specific medium. While I owe a lot to my training in composition and performance in the traditional sense, I feel that this type of work, wherever it leads, will be something that I’ll be creating for a while.

To that end, Five minutes to remember (September) and stolen synthesis no. 5 are both pieces that I feel accurately embrace the idea of an ambiguous aesthetic. Though both pieces are conceived of as musical compositions, they may also be read (no pun intended) through various other lenses of visual art, installation, and performance. I find the space that best articulates my experience as a person with intersecting identities is the slippage between delineations of music and performance or installation. While both pieces evolved from the series of self-portraits (September and December, respectively), they also lend themselves nicely to the broad themes of process and process as art. And though both are different in aesthetic (in a sense) and come from different points of departure, they share themes of memory, recognition, and change.

My prolonged obsession with memory and remembering is twofold. On the one hand, remembering (or forgetting, rather) is something that comes hard for my family, particularly my late grandparents and more recently, my father and myself to a certain extent. All of us are great at remembering certain specific details about specific moments, or small details, but we typically forget such basic things such as whether or not we’ve asked a certain question already, or more notoriously, where we left our keys, literally two minutes ago. On the other hand, remembering is a much broader theme that hints at a larger political project that aims to challenge and reshape histories that have historically been oppressive, silencing or marginalizing. The act of (re)telling a community’s story that has been historically marginalized or silenced, is a form of remembering. The view that any history (or her-story) is complete shows a lack of acknowledgement to those stories that have yet to be heard or revisited. While these pieces were heavily conceived of within this political frame, they remain open to other views and perspectives that the audience/performers may bring to the work. At the least, I hope that this work invites discussion and exchange about the definitions of music, performance, visual art, and media.

In Five minutes… I was thinking a lot about to the notion of subtle, but continual change over long periods of time and how life in New York prevents me from recognizing that change. Because I am always moving or always thinking about another project, rarely do I have the time to stop and recognize how I’ve developed or how I’ve gotten to a certain point. This portrait is based around my realization of how much I’d grown even from the couple weeks prior. In a parallel conception, but one that is as integral to the piece, is the idea of “fabricating a moment”, or through some means of re-presentation, I will re-produce the moment of subtle change over a short period of time. The use of technology in the creation and conception of the work thus begs the question of our use of technology to access what it is and how it is that we remember. In that “remembering”, what is it that becomes most memorable and what does it mean to remember? Can we remember that which resists remembering and how do we privilege what it is that gets remembered?

The piece is constructed of two parts. The first part displays a series of photographs extracted from a five minute video with each frame representing one second of recorded video. The second part is an unedited audio recording of the five minutes represented in real time from the location of the video. Both were recorded at the same time in the same location.

stills from five minutes to remember (September)

Similarly, though not initially related, the piece stolen synthesis no. 5 plays with the notion of memory and remembering while also hinting at ideas of learning, translation and sound. Like all of the pieces in this series, the idea of the “imagined sound” and its relationship to “actual sound” becomes a central theme that places the perceiver/performers in the position of engaging in a process to negotiate between two “sound worlds”. While mainly conceived as indeterminate compositions (the ways people sound out letters in their heads varies from person to person), this work in particular focuses on the idea of memory and comprehension while also targeting the surrounding environment, thus allowing it to become an installation piece in addition to a composition. As the title literally suggests, this work is heavily based (or is continuation of) the work of painter and visual artist Brett Baker, writer and activist Theresa Hak Cha, and videographer/new media artist Kerry Tribe.”

the process begins

photo by Mireya Acierto / mireyacierto.com

As part of a collaboration with composer-performer collective thingNY and performance co-operative Panoply Performance Laboratory called TIME: a complete explanation in three parts, I have started preparations on a new performance-that-will-become-a-video work that is still untitled. While I’m tempted to call it by what it is, or simply “Hair Piece”, I can’t help but think of what that in itself seems to imply. But title and meta-conceptions aside, the base performance / action / instruction that carries the work is a simple gesture of documenting my hair grow over time. Starting 3 January, 2011, I will take a minute long video portrait of myself over a span of 90 days. Once all of the video footage has been taken, I will then compile the minute long video-portraits into a 90 minute video reel that will be “performed” (or just played back) during the performance of TIME.

While this piece is a clear departure from any of my other sound-based work, whether it be compositions or improvisations, I still find it to be related, if even only tangentially. This piece, while not completely fleshed out, and still very much in the state of a work in progress, it is significant in that it marks a shift in my approach to creative work and “composition”. Within the context of my current fascination and other works with stairs, this TIME piece (or Hair Piece, for now) seems to run parallel in a way that has only become increasingly more apparent. Though the rest of the work has to be sorted out and thought through a little more (so as not to be a shortened version of a Tehching Hsie’s One Year Performance 1980-1981), the gesture of using my own body as a way to document the passage of time relates well to my current thinking of stairs as another way to regulate time and distance. Also at the forefront of this discussion is the association of “the staircase” as a “liminal space” and the idea of liminality as it pertains to time, its passage, and the body – or in my thinking, memory.

In another piece that I’m currently developing for In House (a thingNY collaborative piece performed in the (dis)comfort of someone’s home), the stairs themselves become a physical site for liminality – one that also recontextualizes the idea of memory as a liminal space of the brain, an in-between slippage of time between the event itself and the present . And though I don’t want to dwell on this work in particular (don’t worry, I’ve got a blog post about it soon), I do want to point out that working on this piece in particular (as a sound installation) has offered new directions and possibilities for an expansion of my work. And while I may not ultimately end up pursuing a career in performance (although the possibility is always there), it does allow me to rethink my approach to my works with sound and how I as a performer-composer relate to people / audiences and spaces.

But this discussion of liminality as being a major influence on my current creative work is all just a distraction to what is actually happening to my creative work. This past November and December while I was in residence at the Banff Centre, I started to actively engage with my fascination of stairs and all of its theoretical, practical, and poetic implications and realities. As I was developing ideas for In House as well as for the two pieces in TIME (as well as my further explorations of stairs as a physical and visual element), I embarked on a series of studies that I would continue to develop into what would become this series of works about or pertaining to, stairs. But in that development, I accidentally discovered that I had actually been dealing with a shift in my approach to process itself, not necessarily the content or its result (thought the content itself marks a shift from other, more overtly politically charged pieces). So while I was there, I constructed (or composed, if you will), a largely conceptual work based around the idea of process and then how it relates to myself and my own creative work. It was, to my surprise, a refreshing work that helped to solidify the connections between visual art, sound art, performance, and gifting. It was truly an ambiguous work: one that was constructed of various mediums that fails if one were to isolate any of the single mediums.

But I’m totally getting carried away from the actual story itself, which is is the story of Hair Piece as part of a larger project in thinking about process.

Several years ago, I decided to create political work that was not too overt, yet suggestive enough to still have some impact. For a long time, I explored other people’s work that dealt with politics and art, and the intersections of the two. During that time, I began to seriously question how art itself can empower others and challenge assumptions without alienating the audiences that I was addressing. I wanted so badly for art itself, not the (con)textual or presentation of it, but purely the aesthetics of the piece to be responsible for social influences. Though I appreciated and loved it for its efforts, I couldn’t help but be critical of (political art) work that heavily relied on text or on how the work would be read within the context of its visual/aural vocabulary. After some time, I began moving into the idea of process as a point of departure for effective, sustainable change and empowerment. In moving towards the idea of process, I was isolating an idea from the larger desired project (a friend of mine recently termed my work “subversive”, but I like to think of it as posing questions with sociopolitical implications).

In my earlier pieces, I explored the idea of process through negotiations, whether that manifested itself into the performer negotiating decisions about the form of the piece (I recalled this idea from you, Mr. DuBois), or the audience completing the performance of the work (stolen synthesis series). Though based in the act of negotiations, the central impetus for these pieces was for someone, either audience or performer or both, to be engaged in some sort of process that would cause them to reflect upon their past experience and current positionality. And while last year’s projects were less interested in forcing some sort of overt (or even overtly subtle) political message as the earlier work was, it was still invested in, even if only partially, in the idea of process and engaging the audience in a way that makes them as much the subjects of the work as they are observers. So it makes sense that Hair Piece is only yet another point on the continuum that explores process while still containing a yet to be determined political subtext (there’s something there, I just need to dig a little deeper).

It seems that Hair Piece, in my early conceptions of the piece (meaning now), is a piece about transitions and process itself (with the idea of TIME held hostage). Going back to my fascination with stairs, it’s becoming clear that this piece is (I’m sorry) a step in my exploration of creating a work about process and creating works that subject both audience and performers to reflect upon their own experiences for the better. Though I can’t offer any gems of wisdom or knowledge with this piece, nor are there any profound statements that I’m necessarily making to others, I am glad that I’ve cleared some things up for myself in my thinking about it. That being said, while process itself is an amazing thing, naming it can be equally as powerful. I’ll try to keep a list as I continue to think through the piece.

reperforming Hsieh

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/1year/performancevideo.php

fun and stairs.

Jantar Mantar (astronomical stone observatory)

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stair study part one.

This officially starts my series of studies, documents, research and anecdotes for my staircase project, essentially after Sou Fujimoto. Though the stair trope, if you will, has has been influential, it didn’t become a basis of creative study until I committed to writing for thingNY‘s In House project, which will take place late spring/early summer 2011.

Above is the base shape/idea that has turned into a slew of other creative ideas leading into a multimedia multi-part gifting project (towards, in 72 parts, with a link up soon),  an installation, and field recordings of various walks and travels. Consider this the theme, if you will, with more (variations/diversions) to come!

on sou fujimoto

”I propose a primordial place to live before a notional ‘house’ became a ‘house;’ when it was uncongealed to be all at once a house, a city, a garden, a forest, a prairie, the natural and the artificial. It is analogous to the ruins of ancient cities, to the natural landscapes, to the network of neural activities in a stimulated mind, and to the structure of the Universe.” – Sou Fujimoto

For the past several months, I’ve continually returned to the ideas and architecture of Sou Fujimoto. There’s something about his work that I can’t quite place or define, yet the spaces and buildings he creates are quite striking. He seems to create situations that reveal space in ways that are totally original and yet, somewhat impractical. And though these impractical propositions are seemingly useless, they have opened my mind in ways to reconsider space, place, context, and function.

I was first attracted to his work upon seeing pictures (via the intewebs) of his House H. The multi-storied structure opens itself up to the outside world by way of its massive windows, challenging the relationships we keep between public and private. Its almost as if those outside are as much inside the house as those who are inside the house are outside. This tangled relationship is not only revealed though the house’s relationship to its block or neighborhood, but also in the ways that each “room” or “floor” relates to each other.

What really struck me about this work is his use of stairs that seemingly go nowhere. Or that they seem to not have any other function but to inhabit and visit a certain physical space without going to any discrete location, like a bedroom or a kitchen.

Final Wooden House

And while the Fujimoto’s work, or at least the small amounts that I’ve seen, seem to challenge our conventional relationships to space, I can’t help but think of how this living experience might impact those who inhabit the space. In a way, the people who asked moved there (if in fact someone does live there), would seem to be people who have considered this relationship. But even then, the relationship that they keep between each other, the space, their environment and their community are opened up to allow them to (re)connect with the environment in which they inhabit.

And while I recognize that most people don’t have access to this type of work, or these structures, I wonder what would happen if we all reconsidered our relationships to our environments, to our communities, and to the people – both close to us and the ones we choose to estrange – in the way that theses structures seem to propose.