This week, IMAGINAL DISCO is pleased to present the second special LIVE recording from the “From Survival to Sanctuary | Speculative Solidarities in Conversation" series now underway! This episode, “ARCHIVE + ACCESS / MOVING and BEING MOVED : DOCUMENTATION as RADICAL PRAXIS,” is presented unedited and uncut, and the full transcript is available above alongside a video of the session! For this session, I (your host, Elæ Moss) am joined by Luciana Achugar, Chloë Bass, and Arien Wilkerson.
This session brings together interdisciplinary creative practitioners working in performance and media production for a conversation on documentation, publication, pedagogy, and the archive as modalities of liberatory politics.
As a jumping off point, we dive into the evolving role of print, digital, and oral media-making, archiving, and storytelling as human technologies — considering the capacity of creative expression as a tool of systemic transformation, and how the control of the means of its production, documentation, and dissemination continue to impact that collective work. I believe it was Chloë who posed it this way: “how might we represent ourselves to the futures we might imagine?”
Some of the questions we’re asking in this roundtable are:
What happens when we consider the production and maintenance of a living archive—and access to this documentation—as essential tools of human meaning-making? Who gets to tell the story? And who hears it?
How is an artist-led practice of collective documentation and archiving a radical politics? What do artists gain through developing this praxis and supporting the archiving and dissemination of their and others’ work?
Why is this particularly critical for movement artists, social practitioners, and time-based creators, given the ephemeral nature of performance?
As you’ll hear, in this conversation we consider ways in which we’ve observed and experienced the power of artist-led documentation within and beyond the arts — and push back against the ways in which institutions both control and co-opt narratives, even those established counter to the canonical ones they influence so greatly. As creative practitioners all engaged in teaching — especially in the context of the current student uprisings — we found ourselves considering the manifold ways that the questions of DIY and collective resource making, public documentation and witness are playing out in and around (and despite) the institutions so many are speaking out against. And then, of course, it simply flowed to too many rich places to list. You’ll just have to tune in!
Everyone in this lively dialogue — and many of our guests — were peppering the very active live chat with resources and links throughout, giving examples of ways we’ve worked across various mediums, folded these questions into our teaching, or been inspired by the work of others. Below you’ll find some of the projects and media mentioned, as well as some highlights from each of our practices!
The video here, from Chloë’s Wayfinding project, takes us into a realm we barely scratched the surface of — how in her practice there’s extensive exploration of the ways public forms of document, signage, text, and image can function as a site of intimate relational and personal inquiry. How does this modality sit within our larger question of the act of archiving and documentation, whether in text or print or other forms? There’s a whole other episode there for sure.
Some of the links and references shared include:
The Operating System Open Access Library - and the direct link to Chloë’s monograph, The Book of Everyday Instruction [library developed / designed by Elæ with Doug Luman, the largest ongoing ARCHIVE + ACCESS project]
ARCHIVE + ACCESS / Publication as Public Action: at Autonomous Mechanics, as part of Speculative Solidarities at Bennington, and related course description.
Free the Orphans - a rescue mission project for works caught in copyright limbo
Socially Engaged Archives: In Theory, In Practice - curriculum from a co-taught class from Chloë and Alex Juhasz
Thoughts on Selling Dance and the work of Tino Sehgal
Yvonne Shortt’s work on scarcity and value in art making and buying
On Value by Ralph Lemon (book, Triple Canopy)
Chloë’s Writing for MFA Visual Arts / Social Practice curriculum
Open Resource Library from the OS / Elæ
Arien’s ongoing and upcoming projects, VAULT and A.R.E.N.A.
Luciana’s Pleasure Practice and Utopian Practices
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s Archival Gestures through The Kitchen L.A.B.
Find more about my incredible interdisciplinary guests this week — and more about this series, and what’s coming next, below. You have one more chance in May to join us live for the first mini season, we’d love to have you! You’ll find registration links here as well. Stay tuned for announcements about future events and partners!
About the Series:
From Survival to Sanctuary is running simultaneously as a mini-season of podcasts (find episode one, “The Get Along Gang,” here) as well as a public roundtable series offering Speculative Solidarities in Conversation.
The discussion series invites the public to join in collectively imagining the path that might allow humans to take this journey (from a state of survival to that of lasting sanctuary), alongside a stellar roster of visionary, change-making guests across fields and disciplines. Together, we consider what shifts we might implement to move us away from our conditioned distrust, the invented illusion of scarcity, and competitive drive towards embodying liberatory care. We hope you will join us — whether via the archive or live at a future event (more info / register here) to dig into these questions – and ask your own – as we explore the ways radical humans across practices and disciplines are modeling transformative Speculative Solidarities.
Our three initial live events, hosted by Elæ Moss and co-produced by Autonomous Mechanics Studio and the Center for the the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington College, are:
April 9, 2024: YEAR ONE: Meaning-Making for the Commons - with Marcelo López Dinardi and Clarinda Mac Low [now archived on Substack, with audio, video, and extended content]
April 30, 2024: ARCHIVE + ACCESS / MOVING and BEING MOVED: Documentation as Radical Praxis - with Luciana Achugar, Chloë Bass, and Arien Wilkerson [original event listing here]
May 14, 2024: QUEERING THIRD SPACES: Blueprinting Futures of Care - with Micah Bucey, Dina Janis, and Ira Rain [info and registration]
More about this week’s collaborators:
LUCIANA ACHUGAR (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, and one time nominee, a Guggenheim Fellow, Herb Alpert Award recipient, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades; most recently she received a 2022 USA Doris Duke Fellowship. She is currently an MFA Dance teaching fellow at Bennington College; continuing her research on the "Pleasure Practice" and "A Spell for Utopia"; which premiered in its first iteration in November 2021 at The Chocolate Factory Theater as a co-presentation with NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. In her work Theater is a space for Utopia; Utopia is a practice; practice is ritual; ritual is devotion and Dance is a devotional practice of being in pleasure.
CHLOË BASS (b. 1984, New York, NY, she/her) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011 – 2013), followed by a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015 – 2017), and recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family (Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018 - 2024). She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Since feeling is first (2023 – ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law.
Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: most recently, the 2022 - 2024 Kupferberg Arts Incubator residency, a 2022 - 2023 Silver Art Project residency, the 2022 Future Imagination Fund Fellowship at NYU Tisch College of the Arts, a 2020 – 2022 Faculty Fellowship for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), and a 2020 – 2022 Lucas Art Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center. Previous honors include a grant from Art Matters, a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at the Skirball Cultural Center, California African-American Museum / Art + Practice, Henry Art Gallery, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Reviews, mentions of, and interviews about her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Temporary Art Review, and Artnews among others. Her monograph was published by The Operating System in December 2018; her chapbook, #sky #nofilter, was published in November 2020 by DoubleCross Press. Her short-form writing has been published in Paletten, Hyperallergic, Arts.Black, and the Walker Reader. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice CUNY with Gregory Sholette, with whom she published the book Art and Social Action in 2018.
ARIEN WILKERSON (they/them, she/her) is a choreographer, dancer, video maker, director, producer, and installation artist. Born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Arien is Founder and Artistic Director of, TNMOT AZTRO, a collaborative multidisciplinary company working at the bridge of dance, performance art, installation, sculpture, and sound design for engagements in museums, galleries and site-specific locations. Under the alias Tnmot Aztro considers that the complexities within art derive from the alienation of objects, identities, the body, sounds, and humans and is rooted in repurposing and redefining meanings of "fine art" and its attachment to colonialism, white supremacy, and institutionalized racism. What is queer black "fine art"? Who has access to it? How does art become fine? Where is the "margin" marginalized, displaced, disproportioned? And what systems were put in place to keep black and brown queer folk out. Arien Wilkerson/Tnmot Aztro, sold out performances, online lectures and events have taken place at spaces such as The University of Pennsylvania, Yale School of Art, University of Connecticut, Judson Memorial Church, LGBT Center NYC, Rhode Island School of Design, Austin Arts Center at Trinity College, Real Art Ways, Wadsworth Atheneum, Vox Populi Gallery, Icebox Project Space, AS22O, SPACE Gallery, Wesleyan University, The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, Slought Foundation, the Martin E. Segal Theater, CUNY. Wilkerson is a 2023-2024 iLab Artist in residence at University of the Arts and is fiscally sponsored by Headlong Dance Theater.
LIVE! || ARCHIVE + ACCESS | MOVING + BEING MOVED | Documentation as Radical Praxis