A Spatial Inquiry
How does a body move through space? How do spaces become embodied? How can emotion be embodied within physical objects? How does the position of a body in space generate emotion? How does the position of a body in relationship to urban infrastructure generate meaning and emotion. How does this meaning and emotion shift or change as a body contacts the dock, the boat, the shipping container, the bridge, the water, the lighthouse, the control tower or the crow’s nest?
FM: My regular physical presence on the wall is political. Through making temporary interventions and short performances on the wall I draw attention to the physical scale of this piece of infrastructure and the commercial ambition of those responsible for its inception in the 18th work I used the scale of my body as a means to measure the extent of what was originally the longest sea wall in the world. Other interventions draw public attention to the parts of the wall that are no longer publicly accessible– areas that have been acquired by semistate interests and in turn leased out to private shipping companies. Regular walks on the wall have resulted in the compilation of an extensive slide diary of the wall as ’place’ – sea traffic, recreational activities, wildlife, changing tides, rising sea levels, dilapidated infrastructure and re-appropriation of industrial landscape. I’m using this site as a means to create works that prompt the public to recognize the consequences of extensive global shipping trade, to question our need to be consumers and to rethink our role as users and potential custodians of public space.
SF: Fiona McDonald, Let’s begin with you. Your practice has been engaged with making new work on the Great South Wall at the entrance to Dublin port for the last two years. Your engagement with this site involves regular walking and documentation of this sea wall structure. Can you talk about your body’s physical and emotional engagement with this particular site? Why is this important to your work?
RF: Most of my work over the past year has been located within Toronto, a city that is in the middle of the largest condo boom in North America. I try to directly engage in the bureaucracy and institutions of power, submitting irrational development proposals to the government, while imposing signage, time zones, and infrastructure in urban spaces to isolate them from the rationalization and speculation of the market. There is an element of satire within this, stemming from a real anxiety about the implications of losing any alternative to the narrative of development in the city. By seeking temporary moments and spaces, I attempt to break this narrative, while opening opportunities to explore alternative approaches to how urban space is practiced. Increasingly, structures and methods of performance offer an important role in [my] work, due to their inherent ability to emphasize and isolate time within a space, temporarily establishing autonomous, dialogic, and acoustic “glitches� within the rigidity of the rapidly developing city. Reenacting and performing the first phone conversation by screaming across a five kilometer water channel, back towards the city, and absolutely failing to have anyone hear that, exposed a physical vulnerability and isolation on a site that until that point, I had only isolated conceptually. Space can be deconstructed conceptually, but this deconstruction does not fully occur until bodies interact with those concepts.
SF: Ryan Ferko, your practice also involves walking and interventions, imagining temporary autonomous zones, or finding glitches in the matrix to carve out physical areas of freedom. Talk about how performative acts or physical structures can disrupt or expand relationships to urban spaces and redevelopment in Toronto. How do you see the emotional body relating to these newly formed spaces, or helping to create them?
SF: Nadine Attewell, You’re interested in how intimate relationships and embodied identities are regulated, segregated and determined visa vis state control, urban infrastructure or unwritten social norms. Can you give a few examples of the very physical and potentially metaphorical role that certain port infrastructures might have in this regulated and segregation of bodies, specifically in your case mixed race people of Chinese descent during the early 1900’s.
NA: Colonial port cities are compartmentalized worlds, organized according to regulative regimes that distribute power, space, and belonging in racially differentiated (and differentiating) ways; but they are also contact zones in which, to quote Mary Louise Pratt, “subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures” come together, often in unsettlingly intimate ways. Between 1904 and 1930, for example, Chinese people were legally prohibited from owning property in the more desirable Hong Kong neighbourhoods, and yet many European expatriates also supported Chinese mistresses during and sometimes even after their stay in Hong Kong, leaving wills that enabled some of these women to become property-owners in their own right. Later, during the Second World War, white Britons who had refused the order to evacuate Hong Kong and Singapore in advance of the Japanese invasion were shocked to find themselves
interned with British subjects of mixed Asian descent, who had not been permitted to evacuate to Australia because of the latter’s whites-only immigration policy. Photographs of the British dockside neighbourhoods where, in the first half of the twentieth century, most non-white migrants to Britain made their home make plain the multiracial and cosmopolitan character of the communities that took root there. But although white women who married men of colour found some measure of acceptance from their working-class peers, such unions aroused panic in the nation at large. In 1925, the British government passed a Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order that empowered the authorities to deport “coloured” seamen who could not prove their right to live in Britain, splitting up multiracial families in Liverpool, Cardiff, and other port cities throughout Britain.
SF: Y-Dang Troeung, I’m interested in your work with Cambodian deportees and how you might see the relationship between this forced migration and infrastructure? In your collaboration with Phnom Phen based group Studio Revolt, have you noticed any pattern emerging between the artists’ physical bodies and the spaces that they portray, work with or relate to in their artistic practice?
YT: The relationship between forced migration and infrastructure in the memory of the Cambodian diaspora is one of genocide and state violence. When Pol Pot’s regime took over the country in 1975, Cambodians were forcibly displaced to the countryside to work in labour camps. All forms of modern infrastructure and civilization were to be destroyed with the goal of taking the nation back to “Year Zero.” Over 30 years later, Cambodian American refugees are facing a crisis of forced deportation once again, but this time it is at the hands of the US deportation regime. The work of Studio Revolt, a Phnom Penh-based artist collective, reveals the continuity of this history by exploring questions of bodies, space, and the lived experience of deportation, how it is both suffered and surmounted. In Studio Revolt’s spoken word video, “Why I Write,” the body of the spoken word artist and deportee Kosal Khiev reflects the history of his multiple dislocations and re-rootings. From his tattoos to the red target on his chest, Khiev’s body bears the scars of state profiling, incarceration, and deportation, while the rhythmic, fluid movements of his performance insist on his refusal to be contained: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YstoXrrz1Gs
SF: Matilda Aslizadeh, Y-Dang spoke of the historical violence of deportation and dislocation via port cities. Like Y-Dang and Nadine, you also talk about an interest in the fragility of humans in relationship to landscapes and infrastructure. Can you talk more specifically about what that violence feels or looks like, what sorts of environments particularly strike you as having this capacity or quality? What is the relationship between the man-made environment and the sublimity of the natural landscape. What about places that intersect both like a reclaimed sea area, or a coal mine?
MA: Human beings are always caught in environments with limitations: in material and social landscapes that impose certain constraints (or violence) on both subjectivity and the body. These constraints can be very physical as those encountered in in situations of active repression, material scarcity and armed conflict, but they can also be psychological and ideological, banal and part of the everyday existence of material privilege. In my work, landscape acts both as a metaphoric externalization of this relationship of constraint and as a reference to real landscapes and the social hierarchies they reveal. In a sense, all landscapes are ÂŤmanmadeÂť because to imagine them through human subjectivity is to humanize them: this makes me dream about the (im)possibility of representing landscape post-humanly.Â
SF: Michael Truscello, you too are thinking structural violence in relationship to infrastructure, while exploring the concept of elevation. Can you talk a little bit about the biopolitical implications of elevation in relationship to infrastructure?
MT: While there are a host of physiological effects associated with dwelling at high elevations--the depletion of oxygen in the body, for example--and while it is a fact that human bodies function best at sea level, the relationship between elevation and the body should not be reduced to these effects. A host of cultural factors affect the disciplining of bodies as well. Consider, for example, the port cities that facilitated the slave trade. The mobility of ships, forms of racism, and imperialist flows of goods and people were made possible in part by ports built at sea level (obviously). Could the same circulation of enslaved bodies have happened high above sea level? To some extent, yes; of course, there were slave trades over land. However, the approximately twelve million bodies imprisoned and traded in the Transatlantic Slave Trade had a specific relationship with the circulatory apparatus of maritime mobility. On the flip side of this example, it is also true that radical political movements, such as anarcho-syndicalism, circulated the globe in part because of maritime mobility at the turn of the 20th century.
SF: Kate Hoffman, you’ve made work directly relationship to your body and your body in relationship to a city but also to scale, to time, to systems. How have you been thinking about the body or bodies in relationship to your current project: Liquid Gold-Black Gold, the Golden Age of Whaling?
KH: At the crux of the artwork I made dealing directly with the body is an interest in the moments of exchange. A moment of impact between two bodies can be on one level innocuous to both parties and on another it is a physical acknowledgment of both bodies existing in the same space and at the same time. The work I am doing with «Liquid Gold-Black Gold, the Golden Age of Whaling» looks at the larger systems of movements; whale migration, the whalers pursuit of them as a fuel commodity and the twist of these movements that are tied up with the system of escape from slavery sometimes referred to as the “Saltwater Underground.» As I did with previous body work, I am looking at bodies in space. The body of the whale that became a source of wealth and commodity, the mobility and displacement of the bodies of people pursuing these creatures around the globe, and the industry of whaling; where the bodies of the slaves could find a means of escape among these other bodily movements and systems.
SF: Jim Skuldt, your migration on the high seas via shipping container may have other conceptual aims but if you can reflect for a moment about what it means to contain your physical body within this 8’ x 8’ x20’ space over a period of time while moving through different spaces. How do you perceive your body in relationship to this transport structure and what is your current/imagined future physical and emotional relationship to this object?
JS: In comparison to trailers I›ve lived in recently, a 8 x 20 foot space will be quite spacious; in each of these instances, my head has grazed the top of the trailer, whereas the container leaves a little extra for hats and jumping. As in those cases, the body is encapsulated, but you must really consider this within its [shifting] surroundings as an overall environment. This an interesting context from which to observe these arrays of contained physical bodies as an element of a network within numerous networks. The synergies/ relationships to these (and other) bodies in motion will be noted and is yet to be determined...
SF: Emilie St. Hilaire, let’s examine together the smallest and most vital of movements, the breath. In our discussions you’ve mentioned the importance of the breath in your practice. Talk more about the role breath plays in your art and where that physical process meets a physical landscape? Does the breath somehow intersect or intervene in your relationship to physical space? Or conversely does infrastructure intervene or shift the relationship with your breath?
ES: I began to consider the breath with my art practice when I felt the creative potential inherent in meditation. Physical practice and habit can shape the infrastructure of the body. I›m amazed at how easy it is to forget about breathing entirely. It›s something when it isn’t nothing.
SF: Ada Jaarsma, your research on Kierkegaard has been moving towards exploring ideas of embodied time, of us in relationship to time and made from time. Can we throw space into the picture? How then does a person embodying time, relate to a particular space. Since our cities are constantly changing, being re-built, destroyed, sold, or changed how does a body relate to a particular physical space, at a particular time when that space itself may be an embodiment of a memory, or an event, or a use?
AJ: I think it’s so true that, as you put it, space itself embodies the past. Memories and events prolong into the present through our movements, stretching and extending our bodies in relation to environments, preparing conditions for new events. I wonder how even our attempts to conjure up timelines (positioning our bodies in the present by specifying “past” and “future”) also implicate space: what spaces become monuments or ruins? What spaces mark the promise of new events in the future?
This publication results from conversations with colleagues from the Banff Centre’s BRIC Dock(ing) New Economies of Exchange Workshop. The concept and photographs were created by Sarah Farahat, an Egyptian American interdisciplinary artist living in Portland, Oregon. She is currently in the process of creating a working spacial relationship with the Broadway Bridge in Portland, Oregon through an ongoing physical and dialogic creative practice at its ape in order to better understand or excavate a possible physical subjective relationship to a port infrastructure. Her work addresses issues of socio-political engagement, assimilation, communication and loneliness. Her work has been experienced in public spaces including Chiapas, Dakar, Beirut, Lebanon, Milan, Torino, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon as well as via the internet at sarahfarahat.weebly.com.