Try to cope.

February 07, 2022

Sometimes, all you can do is cope. That's what Alex Headlam has been doing for the past 200 pages of his life. Under the name Aleqth – pronounced “Alex” with a lisp – the Miami-based artist created cope. while he was still in college. The brand is now home to all things that manifest in his mind, from his own clothing line and music to paintings and prints. By sharing his creations online, the 22-year-old quickly made a name for himself in the East Coast’s eccentric art world.

Aleqth’s new book, “cope. VOL. 1,” tells a visual tale of where he has come from and where he’s headed. As a 200 page curation of drawings, prints, and paintings, the chronological stream of consciousness finds beauty in both the imaginary and the mundane. From something as simple as spending the day on the couch with a Nintendo Switch or downing a Redbull, his vibrant visions transform everyday life into a literal work of art. Experience a new perspective with this cognitive collage exploring the unseen surrealism of existing.

Interview by Megan Hein
Photos by Isabella Cash

Along with what now seems like the rest of the world, Aleqth is dipping his toes into the digital art sphere. All pages from “cope. VOL. 1” are available to own as NFT’s. However, if you still prefer the pre-crypto construct that is physical media, copies of the book are also available to purchase on his website.

We sat down with the artist to discuss his book, cyber surrealism, and what cope. really means to him.

You made your own book, which is a huge milestone for someone at 22. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

You know, Megan, I'm gonna be honest – I had no idea how I was gonna make this book happen. I had no clue. I just knew, like, 'I need to make this book. However it happens, I'm gonna see it through.' But I didn't actually start the book until March of last year. I had been taking pre-orders in December – honestly still not knowing what I was doing – but people just believed in me. Like, 'Yeah, you'll figure it out. Here's my money.' The process that I started with was very different than my typical art practice. It involved a lot of printing of images and then reworking. It's a mix between digital and also analog – which was kind of in real life with markers and paint and stuff. I think the most special part about working on it was I was sharing the pages as I was making them on Instagram. It's a big deal for me to even have a hardcover book with 200 pages because I grew up on Dr. Seuss. Every night I wanted to read 'The Cat in the Hat' or 'Green Eggs and Ham.' Those were my two favorites. And then 'The Cat in the Hat' movie dropped in like 2006 and completely changed my world, how I saw everything.

That movie is actually insane, but it's also so artistic and camp. It was underappreciated, I think.

It's so underappreciated! It activated something in me which was, like, a surrealism that was tangible for a child. I wasn't looking at a Salvador Dalí painting, I was watching 'The Cat in the Hat.' Experiencing that world just triggered something within me and I feel like I'm always inspired by that. cope. is very inspired by that world of surreal imagery and energy – a dream-like quality. My friend mentioned that my work kind of seems like digital surrealism, or he calls it 'net surrealism,' which I'm exploring right now because it is very internet influenced.

Definitely. Also with NFTs, I feel like the world of art is changing so much and like there's so much possibility. I don't really understand them, but –

You'll figure it out. I mean, it's so early. It's like trying to explain to somebody what Facebook is in 2006. And it's gonna expand in terms of definition. And of course it's gonna be polarizing, but eventually it'll be a technology that I think revolutionizes how we interact with art and intellectual property. I actually minted all the pages from my book as NFTs.

You did what with the pages?

It's called minting – when you actually put it on an NFT platform and they're available to purchase as NFT’s. So if somebody had the book and wanted the NFT off a page of the book, it could be theirs. It's kind of similar to in Japan – you know Studio Ghibli films? You can get a single frame of that film, and then it’s yours. And when you're watching a movie, you can say, 'I own that frame.'

That’s crazy. I didn't know that about Studio Ghibli.

Yeah. On the cover of the book is my car. You know the story of the car, right?

Yeah. Well, I know you spray-painted it.

Yeah. So, the car's spray painted. I used to get so many questions about it. Like, 'Yo, did your girl do this? What's up with your car? What's going on?' It took a certain courage to keep driving it and live with the decision of doing that. But I look at it as my artwork and I think it made me realize just to trust my own ideas and embrace criticism instead of rejecting or running away from it because it's making people think in a different way.

Is that why you made it the cover?

Yeah, but also there's levels to why it's the cover. I'm trying to sell the car as well as an NFT. So I thought that by making it the cover of my first book, it would drive the value of the car in itself. If it's that much of a bigger deal, then it's no longer just a car – it's a part of my life. It's an artwork. It served as a vessel for my previous life circumstance and where I am or right now, cause I drove that shit all down the East Coast to Florida. There's just this crazy relationship with this car. It's still got the same markings on it from before all this even happened, and that's why I don't want to touch it anymore. I feel like it has a strange spiritual charge, like, 'This is building. Trust the ideas that you have.'

Is there an underlying theme in the book or is it different for every page?

Oh, that's a great question. Actually, that drives it even further because the underlying theme in the book was a conscious stream, chronological but contingent based on the techniques and energies of the pages before. So, if I made one page or try to outdo another page or try to expand on certain ideas – they're not necessarily linked in terms of story, but you can see it moment by moment. It was kind of capturing energies on specific days, and I thought that was an interesting way to tell a story. It's kind of like a period – step back and look at things as like, 'This was a moment,’ as opposed to 'This happened, then this happened, then this happened.' So it's expanding on the ideas that I've discovered through this intuition, and I think that's a key component. The book in itself is just intuitively doing it instead of trying to think too hard. There's a lot of pages that I go back to now and I'm like, 'Ugh, that's in a book.' But that 'ugh' feeling is actually why it should be in the book.

Definitely. The last time we talked, you said your art was kind of angry. Like, there were a lot of teeth present. Have you seen it evolve since then? Is there an evolution throughout the book?

I think the book brought my work to a level that it was no longer just the teeth and stuff. I still have the teeth and eyes, but now I'm realizing that my physical body can actually interact with these ideas and forms that I'm creating. That's something I want to explore even more, hopefully in the form of a show. Like, what if I could just put myself into these worlds? That's an idea I was trying to expand on in the book. What that does is it makes it kind of comedic, like a cartoon, and not just dark. It took me a while to even understand that the art was dark. It was usually from people telling me like, 'Yo, what if you're like possessed or some shit.' But now I realize it's a language that's being built and I'm embracing that, cause I see it's a reflection of some parts of me.

Speaking of shows, didn't you have a gallery a while ago? I saw that the editor of The New York Times bought a piece. What was that all about?

So crazy! In June I went to a group show called 'Nightmare' at The New Image Art gallery in West Hollywood. They wanted these two big paintings that I had done to be in the show. But on the night of the show, I get there and they're like, 'Oh, we couldn't put your paintings up. But we put these drawings up that you made on the flight to LA.' I was furious. I thought, 'I finally get to show these paintings that I made in the midst of COVID.' And they just didn't show them. I went back to the hotel and just kind of cried about it – not really any tears, but like I was like, 'Wow, it's over.' But the morning of, we're walking around LA and the gallery owner calls me. She's like, 'Alex, guess what just happened? The chief editor of the New York Times – Dean Baquet – just bought three of your drawings.' And this is something that rarely happens. He comes in every now and then, and the last time he did was like three years ago for an artist who's really big right now – like crazy big. So I was like, 'Wait, what? The New York Times? What's he doing in LA?' But yeah, that was like the first moment for me where I'm like, 'Yo, I'm at a level now that's pretty dope. I gotta take this shit more serious.' And being able to tell that to my mom and dad, like, 'Yo, I finally did it!'

Has the meaning behind the name cope. changed for you throughout all of this?

I think it has changed. It's expanding in terms of definition – to deal with life in a way that just works for you. We're always posed with challenges and how we can manage to handle these challenges best. I feel like a lot of that has to do with perspective, and that's something that I've been really focused on – a shift in perspective. Maybe not seeing things as negative upfront. Maybe acknowledging that it's not what you expected, but this occurrence opens up the opportunity for another thing to exist. I think that kind of embodies what cope. is, but also trying to spread a message about trusting whatever happens in your life and trying to establish a sense of community – that you're not alone in your creative endeavors and that there's a vision of the future that we can all participate in

Speaking of the future, what's next for you?

As far as projects, I'm trying to tackle more film stuff now. I think I'm ready to write more and direct. I want to take on the role of, like, creative director. Now I'm trying to temper with the constructs of reality and our environment – to capture magical moments and showcase that to people, I think that's what's next. It feels like such a natural progression, but I feel like I'm also such a student. I just want to have a limitless expression going forward. But yeah, more music, but definitely trying to capitalize on being a visual artist in the most immersive way possible.

Any final words?

Thank you Virgil Abloh.

Art

Even Better Than The Real Thing: Poets Respond to the Whitney Biennial

April 24, 2024

The Whitney Biennial returned in March with the 81st edition of the longest running survey of American art, titled Even Better Than The Real Thing. The works in the exhibit explore themes of authenticity, bodily subjectivity and autonomy, material instability, urban architecture, and the history of colonialism, to name a few, and range across mediums and disciplines. Featuring works by 71 artists and collectives including Pippa Garner, Ser Serpas, Mavis Pusey, and Kiyan Williams, the 2024 Whitney Biennial also includes a film program and performance program which will offer screenings and shows through September.

In a reinstallment of our coverage of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, office invited poets Kyle Carrero Lopez and Kay Gabriel to respond to the works in this year’s biennial with ekphrastic poems. Below are their reflections.

Introduction by Samuel Getachew
Poems by Kyle Carrero Lopez and Kay Gabriel
Installation view of Once Again… (Statues Never Die), by Isaac Julien, 2022.
Photograph by Ashley Reese

From left to right: Takako Yamaguchi, "Issue," 2023; Takako Yamaguchi, "Catalyst," 2023; Karyn Olivier, "How Many Ways Can You Disappear," 2021; Takako Yamaguchi, "Proxy," 2022; Takako Yamaguchi, "Clasp," 2022; Takako Yamaguchi, "Formula," 2023. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Takako Yamaguchi, "Issue," 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

Abstraction in Reverse

By Kyle Carrero Lopez

after Takako Yamaguchi

The laptop logo looks like a cartoon apple

and the cartoon apple (in two parts) looks like a sideways

sort of jagged tooth below a pointed oval — its floating stem:

not simply oval but vesica piscis, fish bladder, the shape made

between two intersecting circles, heart of the venn diagram,

the heart itself in the center of one’s chest,

though leaning slightly left—an imperfect center—

the heart itself symbolized by a shape unlike the heart;

the false heart representing true feeling, true love,

its shape, in one telling, pulled from Aristotle’s theory of its shape:

three chambers with a dent in the middle,

and though we now know it’s four, the false heart isn’t so far off,

essence of the true shape there in the abstraction,

the true heart loosely similar,

the true heart on a lab desk pre-transplant

pump pumping the false heart’s trademark red,

blood-soaked comice-pinecone-misc. THING,

vigorous, and thick, and horrifying,

ours

Sharon Hayes, "Ricerche: four," 2024. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Tourmaline, "Pollinator," 2022. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

ektor garcia, "teotihuacan," 2018. © ektor garcia

“He Is Here!”

By Kay Gabriel

See: Sharon Hayes, “Ricerche: four,” 2024; ektor garcia, “teotihuacan,” 2018; Tourmaline, “Pollinator,” 2022.

Sharon Hayes seems patient.

She asks a lot of older people what they think is going on,

If the gains they fought for have endured,

where they feel safe and if they

think the world is better now or worse than when they were young.

These questions can be frustrating. I mean, I get frustrated,

sometimes, asking people if they think it’s a bad world

and why, and what to do.

Hayes’s interviewees agree the world is worse,

even, than the one in which they came of age, though

they don’t agree on why. They feel something disintegrate.

I’m paraphrasing—they didn’t say disintegrate.

A man acknowledges legal rights.

He’s Black, gay, looks to be in his late 70s.

Watching the moral panic grow—

paraphrasing again—

he suggests the win is fragile. Where’s safe?

Home. Where’s home? A retirement

community in Tennessee. We used to be so afraid

of a liberal world, that it would subtract the force

of our critique, like shock absorbers on a car, or a

Katamari ball yes-and-ing its path across a surface

pounded flat. We, I mean, queers whose consciousness was

easy-baked in like 2012. We regarded with

suspicion the capacity of art to—what, exactly?

Challenge? Sure, if you put it

like that. I mean we watched people sharpen

critique while the relatively powerful repeated it, and metrics

like average inequality, average deaths per day

tunneled deeper into nightmare.

I’m trying to explain a feeling—dispiritedness;

the sense that pricking conscience

wouldn’t do much, even in highly trafficked environments.

Were we wrong? Hannah Baer called herself a “skeptic

at church,” about poetry, not art, but it feels similar:

suspicion about the relationship of content to changing

unbearable conditions. And not even poetry per se but poetry

readings, which can, sure, be dreary affairs. There’s your

ex on his phone. There’s a bad feeling. There’s a pile

of interesting people. Or it’s transcendent,

I mean, the words change something—clarify the obscure, offer

strength to the downtrodden, make productively

light of misery. Cecilia did, “sucking

and sucking,” wishing Chiqui would fall

on stage. Pamela Sneed remembered

Assotto Saint defiant at a funeral: “He is here!”

and I wept. It’s like: “Cecilia!” Patrick wept, when Nan Goldin

read Cookie Mueller’s “Last Letter” in the new Walking Through

Clear Water— “I know, I know, I know that somewhere

there is paradise … Courage, bread and roses,”

see, Hannah, I’m crying right now,

so I don’t hold your position.

Peter Weiss in Aesthetics of Resistance has

his antifascist fighters, exiting Spain,

study Guernica in the woods, and Amilcar

Cabral wrote poetry while he fought the Portuguese.

He died before the victory he made possible.

I could go on, even if the “art world”—a euphemism

for the class that holds the keys—shreds its revanchist wave.

I believe that that, too, will pass,

not just like that. I mean I think that people change their ideas about reality

faster than reality can change. I suspect they do it

faster even when together, which is why Hannah’s

right, it’s church. We’re moved to see each other

moved. It’s nice that the Whitney likes trans

women artists so much: Ser, Pippa, Tourmaline.

Tourmaline’s “Pollinator” video is stunning, her orchid

headdress, her Marsha research. So are ektor garcia’s

sculptures. “Teotihuacan,” named after the ancient

Mesoamerican city in the Valley of Mexico, joins mesmerizing

white crochet to a steel frame. I think about the artifacts Diego

Rivera collected there and framed in the vitrines

at Anahuacalli. Then you climb the stairs and see his planned

mural, Stalin and Mao offering peace to the peoples

of the world—Pesadilla de guerra, sueño de paz.

No, really! Stalin holds a dove. A generically ugly Uncle Sam fumes. His eyeline,

Stalin’s, extends across the mural to where Frida Kahlo

engages visitors. Probably you don’t agree. You wouldn’t say that that’s

how it went. Maybe nor would Sharon Hayes, or her crowd

of gentle older queers. Someone should ask them.

a promise undelivered, promise given a new look / by fresh eyes 53 years later

Dejygea

By Kyle Carrero Lopez

after Mavis Pusey

I looked and looked and still know not what it means.

Dejygea – Pangea, caesura, déjà voulez-vous.

Would love to know what Miss Mavis meant with that title,

yet I know that not to know for sure

is itself a gift. Reaction vid or GIF:

Kandi Burress cocks her head and cracks

you just made that up! to Porsha Williams.

And did!

Oil on canvas. There’s black and white,

and reds, greens, blues: the three primary colors in physics

(sorry to yellow)

and here we see physics sing out, the oil scene

informed by architecture informed always by physics,

structure and scaffolds and quake safety, heat and energy, and and and and!

It’s Miss Mavis’s take on the Lárge Apple’s

constant construction, constant noise,

the way its buildings shoot up and plunge down.

It’s Miss Mavis back at the Biennial after the ‘71 Biennial on Black artists

with no Black curators,

a promise undelivered, promise given a new look

by fresh eyes 53 years later:

Blackstraction redeemed!

Sitting in the crowd of a Black poet’s reading,

Hanif Abdurraqib overhears a white woman ask her neighbor

how can Black people write about flowers

at a time like this?

If I’m Black and I make a thing up and it fails to convey

the right Black thing to the right donor’s taste, did the tree make a sound?

Friends from college may remember a time, a period really,

when I fell afflicted, obsessed with saying Lazy Susan, laissez-faire.

It came forth like revelation and I couldn’t stop speaking it aloud,

or sending texts with cryptic lineation:

lazy susan

laissez-faire

Deep within my jokey, specific, idiosyncratic dome

I looked and looked and still know not what it means.

Art

Paul Hameline and Paige Silveria’s ‘Preservation’ Asks Us to Dream

April 24, 2024

Paul Hameline and Paige Silveria's Preservation, a collective exhibition on view at CØR Studio in the heart of Paris earlier this month, reckoned with the loss of childhood wonder, aging, innocence, and society's inane obsession with knowledge under the guise of progress. A series of photographs, sculptures, and installations by artists such as Gaetano Pesce, Alyssa Kazew, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Cecile Di Giovanni, Gaspar Willmann, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallages, Ladji Diaby, Ron Baker, Simon Dupety, and Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Preservation was ultimately a reminder that when we grow up, we can forget ourselves. For Hameline and Silveria, the exhibition acted as "a safe haven... A dystopia slowly leading back into utopia," celebrating feeling over rationalization, invoking curiosity and a renewed openness to the unknown. Read our conversation with the two on their attempt to call people back to their imaginations below.

Interview by Sahir Ahmed
Images courtesy of Paige Silveria

Can you talk a bit about your selection process, especially when co-curating an exhibition with another person?

Paul Hameline — It involved several coffees, a bunch of beers, nighttime, daytime. Several back and forth, it was all quite similar to a tennis match really. I would send Paige one image, she’d reply to me with another one. Same with texts, Paige would send me a text excerpt and I’d reply by sending her another one. Eventually things started taking shape in an organic way, and we would simply orient the narrative in a direction rather than another.

I’m sure you were uber excited about all of the artists included, but was there one in particular you were looking forward to presenting to this local audience (maybe new to them)?

Paige Silveria — That’s obviously really hard to answer. Though I want to say that I found Gogo Graham’s self portraits really special. I met her years ago when I interviewed her about her fashion show in New York. As a trans Latinx fashion designer and artist, her runways were these incredible, conceptual presentations. You really felt like you were immersed in an art performance. Recently, I saw that she’s been taking a bit of a step away from fashion and focusing on her art, especially paintings. So I reached out to see if she might want to show one with us in Paris. I love these two portraits she allowed us to include so much. One is her when she was this adorable little kid with big ears and the second is later, as this like glamorous icon.

Gogo Graham

And this wasn’t your first show in the space, right Paige? How would you compare the two?

PS — The first thing I did was a curatorial collaboration with Arcane Press magazine for the release of their first issue. The aesthetic was a bit darker and moodier and really focused on the artists included. This show with Paul was a bit more personal and organic. We spent months chatting between the US and Europe and with coffee on walks when I’d finally returned to Paris. We would send artists and work we loved and discuss the complexities of why they made sense for this little world we were creating. Then trying to articulate what the world was turning into with literature … It was a really special and fun project to do between friends. And we really took our time.

I loved coming by the night before the opening when unfinished and seeing it the next day, how late did you stay?

PH — Not so late after you left, must have been 10-10:30. Once we were done, we went for beers, some cigs and giggles. How was the match?

[I went to FSG vs Barcelona, it was good, Barcelona won.]

PS — I love the install. It’s so exciting to see everything together finally after staring at images on your computer or phone for months. Things are tangible and you can start to really craft the physical world that previously was only in our heads.

Sculpture by Cécile di Giovanni, Prints by Alyssa Kazew, Chair by Simon Dupety

What was your favorite part of curating together?

PH — The thought process, the research, the exchanges etc. Paige showed me artists and authors I didn’t know, I’d reciprocate by making her discover some she wasn’t familiar with. Sharing is caring. We obviously are two different people with our own ways of seeing and experiencing, so merging the two in order to give birth to that show was a great experience.

PS — It’s been a while since I was able to put a show together with someone from the inception. I really loved to be inspired by his way of thinking and being introduced to new communities of artists. It was also pretty exciting when we realized that our separate ideas were super similar and the vision was happening in tandem. Things worked so smoothly; we somehow emerged with the same aesthetic in mind.

What led you to the title ‘Preservation’? What are you preserving?

PS — The title was pulled from the excerpt (in the press release for the show) from Robert Pirsig’s book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. With the title, we’re analyzing civilization, societal structure, moral grounding — preservation of what exactly? Of whom? At what cost? And why? It’s less of a statement, or a desire to preserve anything, and more of an inquiry to begin the conversation.

In an interview I read recently, Hans Ulrich Obrist said that “good curation is working with someone who can do something you can't.” He also called curation a kind of junction-making, creating these avenues where people and ideas meet and interact. Do you agree?

PH — That goes without saying. The basis of any relationship is to give and take. You have something to offer, and the person sitting in front of you has something to give you. We grow through our relationships and encounters, from a lover to a stranger asking you for a lighter.

PS — My favorite take away from Marx was when he said that human relationships are the point of our existence. I think that’s any conversation and exchange, even reading the book of someone who’s past … With these shows it can be so exciting bringing people together. A while back I did a Good Taste show in LA and was showing work by two really iconic artists, Erik Foss and Erik Brunetti. Although they’d been aware of each other for over a decade, they only finally met when we began installing this show. It was really cool to listen to them discuss things from over the years that one another had done that’d made an impression on them. Even just small connections like this are a part of why I love to curate — not just about making sales!

Bill Taylor

What conversations are you hoping to nudge into existence with this show and those to come?

PH — The way I perceived it, it’s about how civilization reached a point of no turning back, it’s about creating some kind of world within oneself, against the turmoil present in today’s world. We tried to create a safe haven, some kind of fort. A dystopia slowly leading back into utopia. A bit like Peter Pan and his Neverland. A feeling of compassion, of affection, of love followed. Memories of childhood, the importance to dream and to use one's imagination, allowing us to become our own architects of wonders. Let yourself dream. Shake up the ‘younger you’ hidden in your own eyes and past. The one the world tells you to silence and forget too often. Do not let that little guy disappear from your life. It's about having fun, smiling, playing. Keep that spark burning like an eternal fire.

PS — Yes, I love that.

Shelf by Wolfgang Laubersheimer, Bear by Anthony Fornasari

Art

For Eimear Walshe, There are no 'Goodies or Baddies'

April 23, 2024

Eimear Walshe and I sit on the ground by the water at the Arsenale in Venice, just 100 yards from their widely successful exhibition ROMANTIC IRELAND for the Irish Pavilion at this year's Biennale. ROMANTIC IRELAND is a multilayered piece that utilizes contemporary storytelling to address the bargains we make through the traditional Irish practice of earth-building. Their work centers on Ireland's late 19th-century land contestation and its relation to private property, sexual conservatism, and the built environment. The piece consists of three primary storytelling elements — the earth-built sculpture of the physical exhibition space, the five-voice operatic soundtrack written by Walshe describing an eviction, and the video consisting of seven dancers, including Walshe, dressed as 19th-century to 21st-century Irish archetypes, sporting green, wide-eyed latex fetish masks.

The layering of symbols and the use of atypical languages, specifically a physical and movement-based language, create a multilayered and complex piece that deals with the dualities of living in modern society and reckoning with the past where, as Walshe says, there are no 'goodies or baddies.'

By Isabella Fox Arias
Images by Eimear Walshe

Isabella Fox Arias — How does language play into your work? Despite using a visual medium, language is still omnipresent throughout.

Eimear Walshe — The process of making ROMANTIC IRELAND started with writing, and I am very word-oriented, even as a visual artist. Writing comes up high in my communication fluency areas, so my challenge for this pavilion is thinking about the three different things produced.

The first part is the libretto in terms of its development, and that's obviously a writing process. But the challenge with the other aspects, like the video and the sculpture, was to think through, you know, the performers don't speak; they communicate just through gestures.

That was a challenge because I want to get more fluent with working just through gestures. What better way to do that than through dancers with their own vocabulary? I was really lucky to get to work with the dancers, performers, actors, and musicians who convey without words. Then, through the building, it was like thinking about retelling a part of history just through the material itself.

I'd love to hear more about constructing the story of the building.

The libretto text was the starting point and, I suppose, is also like the temporal anchor point in the sequence where the video was set. It's the biography of a building — the building site is the before, the eviction is the destruction of the life of the building, and then the ruin is the afterlife. The libretto about an eviction became the fulcrum of the narrative arc of the pavilion. It's central and primary, but I think it's also something that I try to challenge myself with. That's why it's so special to get to work with other people: you find out their languages, their fluencies, and their modes of conveyance.

Have you worked with dancers before, or is this your first time working so heavily with just a movement-based language?

Yeah, this is my first time. I got Mufutau Yusuf on board at the very start. I did that because, in his work, he has the ability to communicate incredibly large volumes and intensity through very minimalistic gestures. Some of his works involve really explosive, hugely energetic movement, but then others involve microscopic movement, like having individualized control of a whole sort of fan of muscles on your body. That extends into the kind of narrative that he is able to make through those really microscopic movements. I remember seeing one of his performances that involved moving a bicycle a tiny bit backward and forward. It's just incredibly beautiful. That ubiquitous movement captured and repeated was really of interest to me in terms of the earth building. The brief or the remit for the movement and why I was so comfortable working with Mufutau as a choreographer was I don't really want there to be dancing. I wanted to be built around the types of movements required for this kind of labor and building practice.

Working with Mufutau, Rima Baransi, and Gallia Conroy, who were the crew members with strong backgrounds in dance, was really inspiring. They just have a different way of creating. I was able to write the scripts really differently than I usually would; I'm usually a little bit over-contrived. People who are improvisational dancers are going to challenge that. For some parts of the script, I just bought laminated photographs of pieces of furniture.

What kind of furniture did you bring?

One of the really important ones was a phone stand, which is a funny mid to late-20th-century piece of furniture that you'd have in your hallway. There's a little door, you put your phone book in a little press, the phone is up high, and there's a little place to sit. That appears in some of the photo documentation of the work. Erin plays the harp, so she needed a harp stool; my businessman needed a big mahogany desk, so we made that out of our bodies, and the landlord wanted to shit on everyone, so we made them a toilet. That was incredible because it was not an area of aptitude for me. It was really special getting to work with people who were not even exclusively in that field but who have such strength in that area.

That's wonderful! I was also interested in your choice of using masks for your dancers. I found it powerful that the identity was erased from the dancers, and instead, they became almost monster-like.

Yeah, I mean, those masks have really different associations for different people. People asked me the least about the sort of monster alien end of the spectrum, and I'm excited to talk about that, actually.

Really? It was my first thought watching the piece.

Yeah, I guess there is a spectrum of associations with those masks. Their primary use is their fetish objects, and they're from a latex company that produces custom whatever you want sort of latex pieces in any color. They're in olive green, so they also have an association with Ireland, the military, and the colors that were worn by volunteers in our revolutionary history. Also, any kind of face covering is often associated with clandestine activities. There's some kind of line between deviance and criminality when you have to cover your face because of what you're doing. Thinking about the different types of external forces that create the necessity for that but also thinking about, especially the fact that they all wear it even though they're all from different historical and class positions, this kind of universal marker.

The monster bit is really relevant because I'm thinking about the way that colonized people, whenever they resist in any way, shape, or form, including peacefully, are constructed as terrorists. That's definitely something that's at play with this. These constructions of forced clandestinisation, deviancy, and the relationship between armed resistance and liberty. All this is painted on them, and then they act out a soap opera. I suppose what I'm asking of the viewer is, can you when you see them go through all these daily activities, can you identify with them anyway, even though they've been othered by this costuming?

You mentioned otherness, which I felt while watching your work. You piece made me think about otherness and its relation to being a queer artist. You are non-binary and your work deals a lot with transient middle space that exists between two extremes. I’m thinking about how your work deals with coming from a land that was both the colonizer and the colonized. There's not really a question there.

But you're onto something aren't you? You certainly are.

Yeah, this is what your work has been making me think about.

I think there are two things with that: the interest in forced clan destination probably does come from thinking about the kind of bargains that you cut, and there are the invitations to self-betrayal, which includes betrayal of your history, betrayal of your ancestral struggle, and betrayal of your peers. That's certainly something that I'm thinking about with this. What you were saying in terms of Ireland as a colonized, a settler colony, but also the agent of, certainly in a really extensive way, religious imperialism. We tend to be a bit less keen to discuss.

Then secondly, the assistance to the extension of, and the aiding of, for example, US imperialism. We are a colonized nation that aids in the colonization of others and has learned nothing. In terms of what that has to do with being non-binary, maybe there's something very kind of simple in terms of creating a narrative film where there are no goodies or baddies. Why is Ireland so keen to discuss its victimhood in relation to colonization and so shy of or even in denial of how it perpetuated it? Part of it is because narrative framing doesn't allow you the complexity to have both, and that's also the case in lots of other kinds of categories.

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