sensingbelonging

[sensingbelonging]

earlier this week i wished that i didn't put the performance desk outside. my Unexpected Arrivals project begins in the Great Hall tomorrow and the floor reminds me of the Katzman Gallery where I performed Ground/line (2017). I thought of replicating the covering of the floor with paper as a kind of layering the processes, recalling that scale of drawing that felt so wild. And then bringing other objects from other times in, such as the desk as a sculptural body. I went through thinking up how I might rebuild the desk I gave away and how I wanted to make furniture as a performance because it seems to connect the performative gesture with utility... i'm generally thinking toward utility and simultaneously working away from utility.

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I decided to include this fork that I never use because the tines are unusefully tight. I don't know where this belonging came from. The pattern is reminiscent of my grandmother's set but I feel this object surfaced only recently, as if my Sunday guest who is not coming back, brought it and forgot it? I don't know but I take the risk to include it in the dispersion.

[sensingbelonging]

Thin textile animation. Fast and rough. I take liberty to not linger over the fact that I don't know how to render this texture. I begin with a blind contour then look at shapes and get them wrong. I do not erase the mistakes, there seems like an energy of the form that wore this in the messiness and lack of clarity. Lines going nowhere reflecting the broken friendship.

[sensingbelonging]

Sweater left by a friend. Mailing to Switzerland.

[sensingbelonging]

Reluctant return of the studio lights and camera to the Animation Dept. Tim led me into the room full of returns of similar stands and lights. I didn't see any other cameras. He wasn't marking anything down, he wouldn't know if I didn't return the camera but I pulled out the bag. He told me to put the camera there, just on the edge of the base of an unused photo enlarger. So I did.

I still felt a pull toward the object. I decided I would not take it back when he turned away, but it was a conscious NO in my mind. I continued to sense this connection to the belonging in the increasing proximity. Hyper awareness of the austerity of these rooms with locked doors, sensation of the door on my arm as it closed behind us, the opening and closing of the office door, that clicked to lock as the wood slipped off my fingers, my walk to the elevator, my remembering I had forgotten to document the new landing site so I took a photo of the office door that requires a pass card.

Such a bizarrely epic connection-! Why why why. Perhaps a memory of taking something from a store as a child. The "I'm just borrowing it" justification. The "No one will love it like I have loved it" intensity. Why would I leave it behind? Sense of abandonment felt through the belonging. As I write this I feel sadness in my sinuses. I'm glad to come back to my senses.

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Book return after... 2 years?! I had to buy my own copy in order to return the borrowed one.

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LIGHT LINES

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tracing and rubbing/frottage

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Her hands are bigger than here face in the photograph. I see this. Letting things be unfinished. Stopping midway because it is time to redirect my attention to other deadlines. Letting strands of the process be out of proportion and out of order. Multiple layers of attention to and reflection on going on around me at various stages, different sensations and temporalities perceptible in the framing of "inspiration" to go back into a drawing or "impulse" to do this instead of that and actuality of "when can I get to the library to return the books?"

Here a drawing of the cover of Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject, University of Minnesota: 1998. Borrowed from York University Library in 2019, pre-COVID. This copy of the book features in my video in progress ecc split screen trial that undertakes the split mind of reading, as a series of lines of flight a.k.a. distractions.

[sensingbelonging]

It has been a good time, buddy. We made the Avalanche together!

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Lights from TA work during the pandemic. Going back Thursday.

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unexpected arrivals

To always know belongings are relational and that relationality is a portal into feeling and discerning awareness of my ethical place in the world.

I am greatly inspired by Tuck and Yang's article "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor." They identify: "Settler fantasies of adoption [into Indigeneity] alleviate the anxiety of settler un-belonging... In this move to innocence, settlers... mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradications of Indigenous peoples."

(Quotes from "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor," by Eve Tuck and K. Wang Yang, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-­‐40, p.15)

I cite this to acknowledge the danger of perpetuating a feeling of non-belonging.

Knowing that I know nothing about my Indigenous ancestors because my parents and grandparents, in their effort to survive in a new country, felt it necessary to leave history behind them. They preferred to invest in the unspoken trauma that involves cutting ties to the birth country.

I acknowledge I had my own Indigenous ancestors, lost in historical erasure. I don't need the fantasy of adoption to feel I belong somewhere else. I agree wholeheartedly that the injustices of colonization involve a continuous task in the work of healing.

It doesn't matter if I belong, it's how I relate to those who do. In the historical sense this un-belonging is a fact, my ancestors lived away. In the lived sense, I have a belonging here to my birth place, that is also a fact.

What in these material belongings can deliver a message from the past? An infinity of relations. Listen to the objects to realize my relationship to them. Each belonging brings to heart another part of myself.  

An enumeration? A symbology for spontaneous remixing, to order into utterance? Can I hear a song that my ancestors played through these subtle vibrations..? By honouring the difference in every single object as felt through breathing body. To wake up the sensing body because to not feel is the living trauma.

Maybe I'm taking this all too far. Feel free to point out the questionable scholarship. Am I making stories to justify art for art's sake, or to diminish the overriding sense of committing to a meaningless task?

I realised today that all the belongings I'm drawing, are things that I give less importance to, things I'm overly ready to get rid of. Things that I don't care enough about anymore, that I have already said goodbye to to some degree. But now I feel that that is not a problem.

It's about practicing sensing. I have an endless stream of material here.

[sensingbelonging]

Presence through kinds of attention to the body's relationship with objects in time and space, is everything. Power in nuances of the undercurrent, what is barely visible.

What in my life… has led to this sense of a meaningless body?

How to reframe this body as a vehicle for noticing all the things that are actually going on and to actually build capacity to hold awareness - rather than practicing limiting the inputs through decision-making.

[sensingbelonging]

I'm coming back so much to the question of what has this object ritual of release got to do with performance? This desire for a deeper inter-relationship to objects?

Presence through kinds of attention to the body's relationship with objects in time and space, is everything.

Power in nuances of the undercurrent, what is barely visible, is what I have gleaned from dancers. And what we are all doing all the time. We know and we forget. We bypass. We see another way, a trained out of my-human-as-animal knowledge way.

The why in lifting my arm. The heaviness/lightness of existence in time with eyes on self moving. Movements are full of meaning.

How could I have "forgotten" this basic human understanding? What in my life, in the erasure of generational history has led to this sense of a meaningless body?

How to reframe this body as a vehicle for noticing all the things that are actually going on and to actually build capacity to hold awareness - rather than practicing limiting the inputs.

[sensingbelonging]

Anne Imhof makes me feel organized in my thoughts. This is a still from Anne Imhof's studio within a video interview from Art Basel.

Still from SEX, 2019, within a video interview with Anne Imhof at Artforum.

[sensingbelonging]

Taryn Simon on "Black Square," https://youtu.be/fOGXeSmPYtI

echoing things i have been invested in.

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Eliza Douglas, collaborator with Imhof. Image from her instagram echoes a drawing I made below. To display the folds. The imploded version of the graphical language.