ARTIST STATEMENT
To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge?
-- Anna Tsing, "The mushroom at the End of the World."
And I swear you could taste the chicken and tomatoes
And the noodles and the marrowbone
But it really was nothing but some water and potatoes
And the wonderful, wonderful soup stone
-- Dr Hook, "The Wonderful Soup Stone"
My method can best be compared to the folk tale "Soup on a Stone." You ride into the village with all your great ideas and see who will join you in a performance, a musical, a choral, a symposium, a runway show, an exhibition, a metamorphosis. A micro-socialism where you give what you can and get what you need. Dancers, singers, academics, composers, curators, writers, high school students, mothers, my mother, my sister and my daughter, have contributed to my work in ways I can best describe as "body-mind bending."
There are ways to move through life, other than your own. A parallel timeline, for example:
A photo-shoot collaboration with my daughter, modeling re-fashioned and splendid polyester gowns in a desolate covid-bubble, metamorphosed into a postapocalyptic pastoral, inhabited by chrysalises, cocoons and butterflies: WIP[Fotzepolitic]
An immersive installation became a a book, became a nomadic "mothership" hosting interdisciplinary symposia about mothering and art making, intergenerational eco-feminism, and the politics and poetics of care work: mothernism
A femifuturist costume drama, led, via workshops with members of the SoEx Youth Advisory Board about imagined futures in the Bay Area Anno 2069, to a musical extravaganza, executed as a silent disco performance roving through public parks in San Francisco and Chicago Hatorade Retrograde
An interspecies wearable, designed as a portable TAZ (temporary autonomous zone) becomes an MCA performance and a living architecture dedicated to Chicago immigration stories: refuseniks
An anecdote from my mother, who worked as an occupational therapist in psychiatric care throughout my childhood -- about a woman who heard voices and built a house for them so she could hear herself think -- led to research into two women's fates at the Skt Hans Hospital (the largest psychiatric hospital in Denmark) turned into a total installation, into a heartfelt choreography, into a choral work performed by a 40 member strong choir, inspired by self-taught artist Karoline Ebbesen's surviving notes and naive cosmology:
A Space Where Your Voices Can Live
These are a few examples of how a collaborative process rendered a different, and richer, outcome than I had initially imagined when approaching partners and institutions for projects, and how projects might evolve over time.
Mother is a noun and a verb; I regard my practice as a sourdough, a gestation of material, out of which individual works, texts, and shows are wrought, while the mother remains, active.