All Water Has a Perfect Memory
Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
August 26 - August 28, 2022
What does the color blue mean to you?
It’s been a running joke between me and my sister, actually, since I was really young. Blue had just sort of found its way into my life. I would just collect things; my bike was blue. My luggage was blue. I always bought blue T-shirts, I had a habit of having blue around me. I started reading a book by Rebecca Solnit, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost.” A lot of it is about the color blue and its relationship to longing. It's always in the water and at the deepest depths or on the furthest horizons. That book really shaped a lot of my feelings about things I wasn't able to verbalize. Solnit was able to verbalize for me in that text and in that writing. It really inspired me to go down this like a rabbit hole of blue, blue things.
It's a very calming color to me; it provides me with a lot of solace. I think that's why I surround myself with it. It's a way that color can animate my life- it's a way that it almost ventures into a spiritual place, like an abyss. That's something that other artists who have gone into this realm of looking at a specific color, specifically blue, always end up going into that place. There's Yves Klein, who is all about the abyss, all about that place of unknowing. I find it very interesting that like something as simple as a color can open up so many disparate modes of feeling or disparate modes of thought: different ways of embodying it.
What about red or yellow?
They just don't do it for me the same way. It's funny because I'm looking at a painting on my wall right now that is all red. I have a lot of pink in my other work too. Red is certainly something I play with. They all have different ways of activating a person. I think that color to me is definitely charged with energy.
There’s a way that certain things can resonate with someone, for me, it's attached to an instinctive mode to like go towards what energetically feels right. Blue, for whatever reason, holds that space. I go to it to feel a sense of calm, meditation, or healing. I can be somewhat metaphysical with it. Whereas maybe red activates me in a way that is more like less calming, or more aggravated.
How does color serve as an agent to bind the thoughts, memories, and materials?
Because color is such an abstract concept, I was able to just pick up a lot of loose threads, put them all in one space, and let them have a conversation with one another. There is such a broad net. I was looking at blueprints, cyanotypes, a series of authors, writers, and artists who used blue as something they were grappling with. All staged around like longing or desire – again like the abyss.
The physical body of the work, which was drawings or the ephemera that I collected, was where I placed these things together so they could have like a really quiet conversation with one another. Simply placing things in context with one another was an invitation for people to make those links or associations.
The performance side of it was a bit more narrative; there was like an actual arc of storytelling that then was about someone going into that abyss and what happens on the other side. This idea of returning to childhood, ending up in the same place. Blue is such a broad field that I felt like I could really explore all of those different interests. There's a visual connectivity because it's all bound together with this color; theoretically, it's all held together by the color.
How did you approach narrative in the performance?
I started approaching narrative by thinking in terms of traditional performance. I was interested in a theatrical structure where there's a beginning, middle, and end. I let that narrative piece build itself out from a series of tasks or gestures that I had in mind. I had different vignettes, scenes in my mind as a vision for the work. Then I began building out, how do I get from one piece to the other? A narrative just emerged.
I built out the structure a bit differently. Someone once said to me, we were talking about this piece, that things just come to shore sometimes. The water pulls things out of its depths, then you collect it, and you see what it has regurgitated. Putting things in context with one another, narrative just naturally forms. As people, we are really interested in the formation of narratives; we like to hold onto meaning.
How does structure inform the performance?
I think that because there were there was a lot of different elements in the performance. One of the things that didn't happen in the presentational performance was in this broader performance, I would go to the beach right near Loyola campus, and I would collect water from the lake. I put the water in the space in little cups.
This auxiliary performance is outside of the performance. The work that I was performing with my collaborators and the pieces that were in Roman Susan proper were really like an offering, not for the public, but were actually for the lake.
It was sort of ritualistic in that sense of thinking about ritual and how you can offer it back to nature. This ceremony of sorts would be an offering back to something larger. At the end of the performance, and once I took everything down, I would return all those drops of water back to the lake as a practice of return again.
What textual references did you make in the performance?
There were quite a few. In the audio, the sound score helped keep everything on beat or on track, there was a particular audio clip that was from “Blue” by Derek Jarman. I was ripping the audio from parts of that. There was one piece at the very beginning that was an audio clip directly from it. There was a recurring bell sound that was also from “Blue” by Derek Jarman.
There was text, a script from Toni Morrison's novel, “Tar Baby”, which was about a star exploding. I was also making digital renditions of songs from Joni Mitchell's “Blue.” I was making these on my synth recorder. I was making remixes of it. Toni Morrison's work, “The Site of Memory,” is where I got the title. She writes, “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it came from.”
How does this performance connect to your practice at large?
It was an important piece for me because I was just out of graduate school. I graduated during COVID. It was hard to be a performer like in physical space. I was able to kind of take the time before that to really collect a lot of information. I put it together in ways that were more abstract for me. I was able to leave a lot of loose ends, which is something that I take with me.
Giving people just enough information to be able to interpret the work is strategy that I still take with me. Giving the audience one coherent meaning, letting them take whatever they want from the work, was one of my goals. I was really trying to incorporate all of my different practices, costume design, costume construction, drawing, and research. All of this can live in one space; I just have to have the space to create it and let it kind of come out of itself.
A lot of that work was instinct, then editing. I think I'm really good at those two things. Collecting, collecting, collecting, and then knowing what has to go and what gets to stay.
Why was Roman Susan the venue for All Water Has Perfect Memory?
I worked with them earlier during COVID. They were lending the space to artists just to have a week or two of space to experiment and try new things. There was a relationship between the work and that space. I had really spent time there understanding and processing these feelings.
It’s proximity to the lake is really important because I was able to do this gesture- every day before I would go to the space, I would go to the lake and collect water. Every day, a back-and-forth motion of moving from the lake to the space. I found that that was like actually a really important part of the work. Movement to and fro. Geographically speaking, that was really important.
My work is really abstract, and sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. Nathan and Kristin were really happy to let me use their space to do what I needed to do in the work. I could flesh things out in the process. They were really good with me in terms of supporting and giving that work a home.
What was it like being a performance artist in Chicago in 2022, right after the pandemic?
Things were just starting up again. I was excited by the prospect of being with people again. Performance needs an audience, not always, but sometimes. Bringing people together to witness art in this particular way was exciting. I can only say that it was really challenging just before that.
I can only speak for myself, but it felt exciting to be back with people in that way. Being able to make work in that way again. When I was working, doing stuff digitally and online, you were missing the feeling that people were witnessing something. When I was performing, the witnessing of the work felt real. It felt really good to be experiencing again.
What about today?
I still go to performances, and it feels a little bit closer to what we knew, but I think that the times are so hard right now. Spaces are going away. That's really challenging. As a performer, so much of it is about a space that lets you perform as opposed to creating two-dimensional work. There is a space issue, that's just my two cents. High Concept Labs is now going away. Defibrillator has been gone for a while.
How would you describe the artist community in Chicago?
It's a big community, but it's also really small; you end up realizing that through one person, you end up knowing so many people. I recently made a connection with a friend out and about, they're like a in the scene, too. We followed each other on Instagram and it's like, oh, how do you know all of these mutual people?
It's also growing every day, coming out of SAIC, one of the only institutions that has a performance practice focus. People who come out of that program stay; you see their work, you see new people coming, you see new people going. That's what embeds me in the community that I know, but I also recognize that, like it grows every year, every month.
Other artist histories: hiba ali // Tallulah Cartalucca // Julietta Cheung // Kandis Friesen // Steven Husby // Juan Molina Hernández // Ruby Que // Olive Stefanski // Chiffon Thomas // Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson