Sofa Issues
On Family, Feedback Machines, and the Anxiety of the Image
Sarah Blesener in conversation with Leigh Ledare
“The presence of the camera is really important. It plays all these different roles, right? It’s a stage, it’s a mirror, it’s a mother, it’s also a judge. It’s a panopticon. It’s a drug – it’s also a tool that’s used to castrate. It’s also something like a priest that allows a confession.” – Leigh Ledare
Last year, I came across a flyer for a workshop at Leigh Ledare’s studio in the Bronx. The first line read, “The process of making what we might call ‘invested’ work cannot take place in a vacuum.”
At the time, all I knew of Leigh sounded like rumor: that he’d once maybe skateboarded professionally, that he might have lived with Larry Clark, that he may or may not be close to Nan Goldin, and that there existed lots of unsettling images of his mother. All lore to the side: I remember meeting Leigh, sharing with him my woes, and a mess of images and notes. He didn’t flinch. Over the next year, a small group of us gathered monthly at his studio to show unfinished work.
Leigh often spoke about how, in families, authorship is collective – that each member contributes, consciously or not, to a shared mythology that keeps evolving. He encouraged us to look at the ways agency shifts within that system, to see how every gesture or refusal reshapes the narrative over time. Meeting Leigh helped me recognize how those narratives, and the roles we inhabit within them, might be holding us in place, and how shifting our relationship to them could open up whole new ways of seeing.
Leigh’s film The Task is less a film about a group than an experiment in what happens when the act of watching becomes the very thing under study. Over three days in Chicago, twenty-eight strangers, ten psychoanalysts, and a team of camera operators gathered to enact a Tavistock-style Group Relations Conference: a temporary institution designed to study itself. In this setup, the usual distance between observer and participant collapses: the analysts observe, the cameras observe, and everyone is forced to contend with their own role in the system. What unfolds is not therapy, exactly, but a collective inquiry into perception, power, and complicity. As the group turns its attention to its own dynamics, and to the cameras that encircle them, the film becomes an evolving system studying itself, a portrait of consciousness under observation.
In this conversation, we spoke about The Task, the ethics of implication, the trapdoor of visibility, the grave as a conceptual art piece with a gift tag, and all the unspoken hauntings we drag with us. Before signing off, Leigh added, “let’s keep talking about how to not get pinned down—how to move laterally out of expectations.”
Sarah Blesener: Leigh. Can we discuss what the hell happened in The Task?
Leigh Ledare: It’s important to parse the method because it is a sort of intervention into Tavistock group relations, a movement that began in the 1940s in the UK. What this group developed into was a sort of systems-based group psychoanalysis with three to five day immersive conferences: the goal of it was to enact a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself, a kind of feedback machine that brings to the fore neurosis within the group.
What I ended up doing for The Task was making an intervention into that method. I hired a group of 6 camera operators and 10 analysts trained in the method, and they led 28 participants, across-section of people from Chicago, through a series of small and large groups over the course of three immersive days – the task being to examine one’s own behavior in the here and now.
The typical doctor/patient relationship is recast here to be something along the lines of worker and management, so there’s an inherent kind of balance of authority the work is organized around. And this is a reflection on the institution. It brings up these questions of haves and have-nots, grievances, and authority (who’s authorized to speak to what and who isn’t?) play out along both identity and power lines.
One of the things that happened in the film was that there were two institutions placed in conflict with each other. There was the institution of their therapy method and the model of a feedback machine around institutional life. And then there was also the institution of aesthetics – the idea of the film.
Of course, it raised questions and anxieties around privacy. What happens in the here and now, and what gets to stay in the here and now? In other words, what does it mean to actually create a representation of all of this? And there’s an issue that was raised in the middle of this – what does one actually consent to when it’s unknown what will unfold? What can one consent to?
I don’t simply want to document a conference. What I want to do instead is to create a conference with cameras, where the cameras and the camera operators and myself, as the director of this film, are actually part of the conference. It was a way of incorporating the issue of the mediated nature of subjectivity and the question of control in our society, and raising the question of how we’re always being watched and the voyeurism that culture contains today.
“How do you construct a space where things can be spoken about that you know are present but might not be able to see directly? How do we work with the tension of the prohibition of what can be spoken about or not? And this is where it gets interesting – art being this permission, giving a structure to reflect on things that might make us uneasy, but which, if we don’t attend to, if we don’t perform a proper burial, so to say, we drag them forward throughout our life.”
Sarah Blesener: I mean, I was even surprised with some of the topics that people brought up. It was…deeply uncomfortable as a viewer. I’m wondering if you could talk about how you use abjection, and what that lens opens up for you in spaces like these.
Leigh Ledare: Well, it’s not transgression for transgression’s sake, even though it does poke at things that aren’t being addressed or looked at. But it’s more so to create space so that the permission to think about them can come forward. That’s what a lot of art has done. And I think it’s important to say… counter to a moral impulse to keep one’s hands clean and pretend that we don’t participate in this, or to act as if we don’t have unconscious baggage or unconscious hostility that we bring into situations – this work has tried to really acknowledge where we’re implicated, you know?
Sarah Blesener: Yeah. Can you say more about this idea of implication? What draws you to that in your work?
Leigh Ledare: I think it is a way to get into the depths of certain things. If you don’t implicate yourself, you’re pretending that you’re sort of staying clean from it all. It’s a distancing, right? It’s a way of repressing your own involvement. If you can’t address it, if you can’t metabolize it in some way, you can’t understand how you might be further enacting something that trickles through the system. So there’s something about an ethics here – a switch from a morality to a kind of ethics in which you don’t, from the outside, say “this is good or this is bad.” Rather, “this is the reality of the situation and the complexity of the situation, and this is how I position myself inside of it.”
I guess the culture I grew up on, and the sort of artists that I’ve loved, have also approached it a little differently. They haven’t made art that has to be a kind of telegraphing of their alignment with a certain thing – like, “we’re on this side, we’re not on this side. We fit the morality of this structure and not this structure.” My interests have been more Paul McCarthy, Philip Guston, or filmmakers like Kiarostami. Guston is not aligned with the scenes that he’s painting. In a way, what he’s saying is somehow, I’m implicated in this, and I’m uncomfortable being implicated in this, and at the same time, this stuff is being rammed down my throat, and I’m going to kind of regurgitate it as a way of commenting on the reality of that situation. If he doesn’t implicate himself, he can’t get access to the levels of what’s at play.
Sarah Blesener: Even watching it [the Task], it was really uncomfortable – I had to pause it many times. Did this work complicate your ideas around everything we’re talking about with anxieties and biases, and group dynamics?
Leigh Ledare: Well, you’re constructing a kind of field. As a participant, it’s one thing, but as a viewer, you’re also having to locate yourself somewhere. You know, by virtue of identification or identity or sympathies, however you want to play it – there’s really no safe place to stand. So, in a way, it was a portrait of the paranoia of society.
The group in the film forms a kind of collective ego in some way. It’s kind of like the group as a whole is a representative of a social psyche, and all the different parts of that psyche, all the different polls – the sadistic and masochistic polls, the erotic and death drive, all of these are present in their destructivity, the linking and unlinking and binding and unbinding. All of those impulses are present in there just as they’re present in the mind internally, but also in relationship to the subject and the other.
Sarah Blesener: You know I come from a documentary background where there’s this huge push towards authenticity. And one time you described that impulse as maybe a reaction to a fear of voyeurism. I’ve since felt really challenged in my own “willingness to go there” – and we don’t have to get fully into the project about your mom, but in regards to collaborating with her and thinking about subjectivity and implication, can you maybe speak a bit about where this work comes in?
Leigh Ledare: In terms of the work with my mother, I started making those pictures when I was 20 years old. There was a need to sort out what was happening in the family. Previously, my mother had danced for the New York City Ballet, and then now she was dancing as the erotic dancer at the Deja Vu, which was a nightclub directly next door to the apartment building where my grandparents lived. At first, it was kind of a way of distancing myself, but then it turned into a way of questioning what was happening inside the situation.
I don’t see the project simply as being a work about me and my mother or about my desire towards her – that’s secondary. There are other, more complex issues at play – how she’s wielding her sexuality towards different ends – in a way to shield herself from her aging to find a benefactor and a man who might take care of her at a moment when she was being faced with my grandmother’s decline. But also she was refuting my grandfather in a very, very loaded way for how he expected her to behave as a daughter and as a mother and as a woman her age.
And somehow I was introducing the camera into this, but the camera was kind of imbricated into a structure that already existed, like the veins on a leaf or something. This was a way of sounding it out. It was a way of materializing something that otherwise would remain immaterial and wouldn’t get processed.
Sarah Blesener: Were there moments of crisis for you throughout this?
Leigh Ledare: Yeah, I mean, certainly. In the most serious way, the question of whether to publish it as a book and to make it public. I guess it comes back to that question of dirty laundry or something, right? Do you even allow yourself the permission? I mean there’s reality and the things that are depicted that you can capture on a camera. And then there’s other issues of psychic reality that I think the work was trying to get at, like what is it to make that work relative to the symbolic markers that are present? Meaning the mother, the archetype of the mother, or the archetype of the parent. And what is it as a viewer to look at that work? Does it make you actually open up a space to reflect on your own relationships to people whom you have both affection and also love and hate towards? You know, because these relationships are so complicated, the needs are so heavy, and the disappointments are so brutal.
Also, the book is slipcased in a photograph that my grandfather sent each member of our family – the same day he presented us all with grave plots for Christmas.
Sarah Blesener: ….
Leigh Ledare: Well, and the fucked up thing was it was kind of like him acknowledging the impossible fragmentation in the family, but also inside of his impending decline and mortality, and basically saying “Before I die myself, this is the opportunity. I’d love to see you all together in life, rather than in death.”
And then I took that grave plot and attempted to give it as a gift to MOMA.
Sarah Blesener: How did that go?
Leigh Ledare: Well, it’s interesting. It’s still a conversation. The idea for it would be that when transferring the property to MOMA, they would own it so that nobody else could be buried there. So, the gift would actually be the grave plot, and it would actually be a gap between the other plots, which would speak to the lack that precipitated the gift in the first place. It’s a crazy one, but there is this piece about the ambivalence of the family, and also mapping that over the idea of the ambivalence around inclusion in the art world and in the “collection.”
Sarah Blesener: Leigh. That’s wild.
Leigh Ledare: The question with all of that stuff comes back to – how do you, how do you sublimate something? How do you take something that’s unfortunate and use it in a way that you can start to ask real questions with it?
And I would say one other thing about The Task, which is that the presence of the camera is really important. It plays all these different roles, right? It’s a stage, it’s a mirror, it’s a mother, it’s also a judge. It’s a panopticon. It’s a drug – it’s also a tool that’s used to castrate. It’s also something like a priest that allows a confession.
So you know, a lot of the work was dealing with these blind spots – these absolute resistances to being able to metabolize what was.
Sarah Blesener: What you mentioned before – the ability to look at ourselves and start from this place of private memory and reckoning with our own roles – do you have any advice for those of us who are afraid of being read symptomatically in our work?
Leigh Ledare: You know, I’m working as an analyst. Now, one thing that you realize is there’s no one out there who doesn’t have some sort of fraught relationship to things, if it hasn’t gone examined. So the question becomes, where can you find the places where you speak from and with the most truthfulness about your situation, in a way that can’t be dismissed? Because so much of the fear of the symptomatic reading is the fear of dismissal. And yet collectively, we have so much to share. None of us is without the drives and the pull between the productive and destructive urge, right?
There’s a great value in understanding how all of those parts fit together to drive something. Circling back to The Task, that film is basically lifting the hood of the car to see how the pieces underneath the hood fit together in a way to drive society, right? There’s a similar thing in one’s own work, that is, understanding that we’re a kind of accumulation of experiences, events, and positions. We take up strategies, even unconsciously, to cope with or to defend ourselves against something. The idea becomes, how is it that we can own it? How is it we can be responsible? How is it that we can act from an ethical position, which means to take responsibility for what it is that we do?
I think your question goes back to this issue of how quickly it is that people flatten the complexity of experience to simply fit into their kind of cookie cutter conception of where they put things.
The book [with my mother] that I would have made today is very different from the book I made then. But no less, its significance isn’t dampened by the fact that it’s not exactly what I would have made now. It’s in conversation with who I am now. And that’s this thing about doing this kind of work, this sort of afterwardsness of it. A memory of an event will shift based on how we need to remember it at a given point in time. These things become symbolic. They become templates for how we read ourselves. Another way to put that is if you made a work that simply ossified who you were, and that was the beginning and end of the story, and it wasn’t continued to be elaborated on or worked on or reframed or placed in a different, broader context, or in the context of time passing… then that might be problematic.
Everything demands a constant elaboration, a constant destabilizing of its meaning, and a constant kind of understanding of it from different angles. And, I have to say – the mistake is valuable. I think we’re too afraid of making mistakes.
Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them. Ledare’s projects have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Ledare’s work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. In 2017, Ledare was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Sarah Blesener is an educator, artist, and visual researcher interested in the complexity of human relationships and their visual representation. Their approach uses guided participatory expression, pedagogy, and collaborative methodologies. Alongside photographs, Sarah uses archival imagery, mixed media, poetry, and painting. They are currently an MFA student at PSU studying Art and Social Practice.
We’re Just People Being People With People:
The Potential of Peer Support As A Practice In Mutuality
Interview with “H” of Project Belong
“What we really try to promote is the idea that we all belong in society, that individuals who are marginalized as a result of their experiences in life can, through spaces like Project Belong and Social Club, maybe regain some sense of reintegration with a broader community… [peer support] is in some ways potentially revolutionary.” – ‘H’
‘H’ and I first met several years ago when I began working as a Peer Support Specialist on Project Respond’s mobile crisis intervention team. Project Respond is a team of licensed mental health counselors and peers who offer support to a person or family who is experiencing a mental health crisis. The team provides in-the-moment support, assessment, safety planning, and connection to additional community resources at a person’s home or out in the community.
Since 2015, ‘H’ and his collaborator, Sharon Eastman, have been running “Project Belong” as part of the Project Respond crisis response program. Project Belong is space for community members who interact with the crisis team and need additional stabilization support after a mental health crisis. Sharon and ‘H’ meet with participants on an individual basis and in a social support network called ‘Social Club,’ which is offered to individuals seeking community connection.
‘H’ has been working as a certified peer support specialist for over a decade. Prior to working in peer support, he studied physics and worked in the aerospace and semiconductor industry.
Deets: When people who aren’t in the mental health field ask me what peer support is, I have a hard time doing the elevator pitch thing. So I wanted to ask you how you talk about it, in your own words?
H: I basically just say we share and leverage our experiences and see if it’s beneficial to the individuals that we’re speaking to, and it doesn’t even have to be. It’s just sharing life experiences. If there’s commonality, which in peer support is also called mutuality, then we can start a conversation.
Oftentimes it’s a conversation that establishes a relationship, but it’s the relationship which I think people find to be the most helpful.
Most of the people we meet really want to talk and to be heard. When you first meet, it’s usually resource-related because those are the tangible needs on a person’s mind. And also, you don’t have to expose any vulnerabilities. But then people start to open up and say, “well, I never told anybody, but when this happened, etc, etc.”
Once we say, “Oh, hey, that’s similar to my experience,” then you establish mutuality. The other thing is, I think a lot of peers are very good at listening and not invalidating. That’s the whole thing. Just listen, don’t invalidate.
We accept people however they are and we recognize our own value as well as the value of others. And it’s not about us establishing what it is that needs to happen in our relationship, it’s about working together to establish what the relationship is.
We get to set up the rules together.
Deets: Yes!
That makes me think about an aspect of peer support that’s hard for me to explain. You know, because our work is person-centered and is very case by case it can be sort of subversive. To me, peer support is a radical movement, because it’s flexible and it’s outside of a medical model of mental health. I think there’s a liberatory aspect to it too. It’s not all about outcomes; there’s what we’re doing in the moment, but if you step back, and take in all the unseen, gradual things that happen really slowly and happen maybe even after we met with the person, it becomes a ripple effect. We rarely get to see the more lasting impacts of our time together.
H: Definitely. And you can’t predict what those impacts will be.
Project Belong had a participant that we met with for, I think, seven or eight years. We tried to disengage from that individual a few years back, and we got an email from our supervisor that said, “the client says you guys are the only ones that he ever talks to in a week, so can you please keep meeting with him?”
Deets: Wow.
H: Another thing is, oftentimes, participants are invalidated by mental health providers so you hear responses like, ‘you probably don’t believe what I’m saying.’
And this is especially true if someone has been told that their experience is a delusion.
So I say, ‘well no, that’s not it.
I believe exactly what you’re saying.
I accept your reality, so please accept mine.
My reality is I’m not experiencing what you are experiencing. I’m not saying that you’re wrong or making it up, your opinion and your experience matters, it’s just different from mine.”
Deets: Exactly. I don’t want to dismiss the reality of what someone is seeing that I can’t see, but I also refuse to lie and say I can see it.
H: I mean, what even is a delusion?
I think the people who use the word ‘delusion’ are delusional because they’re suggesting that they can read somebody else’s mind! It’s just that the way that some people interpret the world is different. And in so-called behavioral health, this is often
equated with ‘noncompliance.’ They tried to say this about people like Galileo. People who had these really wild ideas were just ‘delusional’. Well, no, they just had insight that no one else had.
Deets: You’ve been a facilitator of the program “Project Belong” for some time now, can you explain how it got started and share a little about its evolution?
H: Sharon is the visionary behind a lot of the peer support happenings with Project Belong.
When we started out, we would get referrals from the Project Respond crisis response team just like we do now, and from there we’d go and meet people out in the community. For many years she and I would meet with individuals mostly together. But then somehow, you know, we just got too popular.
Deets: [Laughs]
And then there’s “Social Club” which is the group-based aspect of Project Belong. Can you explain a little bit about what Social Club is?
H: Basically, we just think of it as a social club. It’s not a support group or about mental health, but it’s completely about mental health.
[laughs]
We tell the individuals who are referred to Project Belong and who seem like they may benefit from a regularly occurring social space, “look, this is not like a group at the clinic. This is just like if you had a group of friends that hang out regularly.” It doesn’t mean you can’t talk about things that you’re struggling with, but yeah, that’s the framework.
Often Project Belong invites the social club out to a cafe, and we pay the tab for everybody. Sharon has told me that some people really were touched by the idea that anybody would be willing to spend a couple of bucks to buy them a cup of coffee and spend time with them. And that’s really the point. What we really try to promote is the idea that we all belong in society, that individuals who are marginalized as a result of their experiences in life can, through spaces like Project Belong and Social Club, maybe regain some sense of reintegration with a broader community. It’s in some ways potentially revolutionary.
Deets: Oh, definitely. There are so few options for a lot of people to be welcomed into a social group without many formalities other than being respectful of the collective needs of that community.
H: Yes, and that’s one thing to mention, it is open to everybody, and we do treat everybody the same, but the expectations for everybody are also the same. Sometimes there will be someone that can’t participate in a way that feels safe for everyone. So, it’s open to everybody that’s willing to participate as a group.
We don’t ever suggest what’s appropriate or inappropriate behavior, but we do have to say there are some things you just can’t do at Social Club. I think that’s a really important boundary for any social club to maintain. You have to think about how to create a space that more people can feel more comfortable, more often.
Deets: I’m wondering if there is anything you would really like the general public to know about peer support work?
H: Many of us, I think, are socialized to, well, because you have this deficiency or this condition or this limitation, you shouldn’t trust yourself; You should trust others who know better.
But the reality is they don’t live here. [points to chest]
I live here, right?
So learning to trust ourselves, and support each other in doing so is a big part of peer support. Honestly, it’s really just about humans supporting humans, and that can go either way. How do you do that? You share experiences.
And then what happens? You established a relationship.
And from there, you decide (hopefully without a lot of interference), what’s really important? What do you want to do next?
When it works well, that’s what we’re doing. So, to be honest, everybody can do this. We’re just people being people with people.
Deets: [Laughs] That’s your new commercial.
H: I just made that up.
“H” prefers to not over emphasize himself in the work he does as a Peer Wellness Specialist and asked that instead of using his name, I refer to him as “H.”
Peer Support Specialist: (noun) A person trained in effective strategies for sharing their own lived experiences with mental health or substance use recovery in ways that foster hope and resiliency to an individual beginning a healing process. Peers share resources, provide advocacy, and assist in building skills for self-empowerment.
*If you or someone you know is in crisis:
• 988: National Crisis Hotline
• 503-988-4888: Multnomah Co. Crisis Line
(For Project Respond, call this number)
• 877-565-8860: Trans Lifeline
• 877-968-8491: Youth Warmline
• 1-800-698-2392: Peer Support Warmline
I’m Very Angry, I’m Extremely Angry About it.
Haruka Ostley in conversation with Tonye Stuurman
“Not a lot of women have the privilege, or can express or can’t speak out about it. So I think…That was my thing… I need to get this out there.” – Tonye Stuurman
I met Tonye in Shanghai while I was an artist-in-residence at the Yew Chung Education Foundation. Her husband worked at the school, and one day she stopped by my studio and asked if I could help create a community artwork for a grief memorial—an event meant to bring people together who hadn’t been able to mourn their loved ones during COVID, especially expats far from home. From that first conversation, I was moved by Tonye’s warmth, passion, and the decades she has devoted to supporting survivors of gender-based violence and young adults facing mental health challenges. Since then, I’ve been grateful for the chance to collaborate with her on several meaningful projects, including our recent Kintsugi workshop for the 16 Days of Activism, a continuation of our shared commitment to supporting women in need.
H: Can you tell me a bit about your background, what drew you to journalism, and how your experiences eventually led you to move to Shanghai?”
T: I’m from Cape Town, South Africa—born and raised there. I did all my schooling and went to university in Cape Town, where I studied journalism. After working for several years in journalism and communication, I decided to do a postgraduate degree in Women and Gender Studies. That decision came from a personal experience—I was raped back in 1995. It’s something that’s stayed with me, and it really shaped the way I see the world. As a journalist, I was already reporting on issues like violence against women and children—unfortunately, it’s a huge problem in South Africa—but going through it myself made me realize I wanted to dig deeper and do something about it.
I do think there’s a huge connection to our apartheid history. You know, in a country that went through apartheid, most of the victims or survivors tend to be Black people. There are so many connections—poverty, unemployment, patriarchy—it’s a whole system, and it’s deeply tied to our very messed-up history. Having spent time interviewing children and women who had gone through these experiences, and then experiencing it myself, I realized that I was somewhat privileged compared to many others—I had a platform and a voice I could use. That led me to start a volunteer group in my community, which we called a support group. Through this group, we began training ourselves and inviting organizations to come in and teach us. In the 1990s in South Africa, there were many organizations working on violence against women. Unlike today, we had to actively reach out and build relationships. We also worked closely with our local police station and set up a weekly roster on weekends to provide support and outreach in the community. Our support group would be on call– if the police got a case, they would call us, we would go down to the police station, and we would sit with that person throughout the interviewing process. We would also go with that person to the hospital for the examination, and just be with that person, support them, and all of this was voluntary. Apart from those support services we provided, we also worked on public awareness and education. We went to schools, we went to churches, and we regularly had. these meetings with the police to sort of train them on how to approach victims and how to speak to them. I had a horrible experience with the police and I had a horrible experience with a doctor that examined me. You can then understand why people don’t want to take these cases further–If you are treated like that by the system, why would you want to take a case further?
H: Can you share how your personal experiences shaped the way you approach supporting victims and survivors?
T: I think it’s about making that person feel that they are being seen and heard. I think that they are not being treated as if they are an inconvenience, or they do not matter or they are just another number. I remember how I felt when the detective took me to this dark area alone with him in the car. He said I needed to pick up the rape kit from another building and wasn’t at the police station. I was alone with him in his car, and I didn’t know him. The kinds of things the doctors said to me, “Oh, why didn’t you take a bath?” or “Why are you letting me come out in the middle of the night?”For them, it was an inconvenience. So the way you treat victims or survivors is so important because we already have this stigma around violence, rape, and abuse. “She was asking for it,” or “she deserves that”, or “It’s her fault,” or “Why was she there at that time? Why didn’t she do this?” and “Why, Why, Why?” As a support person, it’s important for you to show that person, hey, “I don’t care about anything else. I am here for you.” So I think that was important. We had an amazing group of volunteers. and I’m talking from working women to housewives, to students, to high school students, to even young men. We all came together to listen, learn, and support those who needed it.
T: This work stuck with me as a true community effort. It was about people coming together.
H: That’s so wonderful. You reminded us how vital it is to treat survivors with genuine care and dignity — being seen, heard, and believed can make all the difference. It also shows the power of community when people come together to listen and support with compassion. So that the person doesn’t have to feel alone.
H: Having lived in both South Africa and China, how have these different cultural contexts shaped your approach to healing and supporting others? I’m sure it’s a very different experience.
T: It’s relative! We’ve been in Shanghai for 13 years now. When we left South Africa, it was… 2005. We went to the Middle East for 4 years. And then we came back to Africa, and we were in this little landlocked country.
During those years-the 4 in the Middle East and the year in Lesotho – I didn’t have the opportunities to really follow what I really wanted to do. In the Middle East, things are hidden and it was difficult to fully follow my passions.
It was such a different culture, so if you didn’t personally know someone, there weren’t really any organizations or resources to go to. You could try to help when you heard about somebody in need—but those opportunities were very few and far between. When we came to China in 2013, I only got connected to this work again because my daughter was struggling with anxiety. I was looking for a counselor for her and found this organization. At that time, our medical insurance didn’t cover mental health, so I had to find someone affordable, because it’s really expensive. I found the Community Center in Shanghai and connected with a counselor named Katie, who was amazing. She said, “Oh, this is what you’ve been doing—you should get back into it.” And that’s how I started volunteering again. It’s a very different environment here. We’re connected in different ways—not as much face-to-face, but more over social media.
H: Social media?
T: Yes, there isn’t that one-on-one connection here. Everything is done over social media—people reach out, ask for help, you refer them, and that’s where it ends. You usually don’t see or hear from them again.
H: That’s interesting. I imagine the stigma around gender-based violence is strong in the culture. People may be afraid to be seen or to connect with others in public spaces to talk about it. It might feel easier for them not to meet someone in person, to stay anonymous instead. The longer the relationship with a counselor, the more serious it becomes — so I assume they prefer not to form deeper or long-term relationships.
T: I had to adapt the way that I think because I am more…
H: Person-to-person, right?
T: Exactly.
T: But this is our situation, and so we need to deal with it and make the best of what we can. It’s also very hidden here– People take a while before they ask for help, and they don’t speak very easily. I’m speaking here specifically about the expat community. You have to constantly consider who this person is and where they come from. That respect for diversity is really, really important.
H: Do you think the community has changed or evolved at all over your 30 years as an advocate, or do you feel it’s still moving very slowly? Is it still somewhat taboo to talk about these issues, or have you noticed any shifts?
T: Do you want the truth?
H: Yes, I want your honest opinion.
T: I’m very angry, I’m extremely angry about it. It pisses me off when people say, “Yes, but we’ve come so far.” And I’m like… really? Have we really come that far? If I look at what we did more than 20 years ago in South Africa, and then compare it to other countries I’ve lived in, I see how far behind they are in dealing with gender-based violence. Yes, South Africa has the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world and the highest rates of HIV,but we are also a country where people come together. If we’re not happy with something, we make our voices heard. If we want to take action, we do it.
H: That sounds like a supportive community..
T: Exactly. It happens, and I think also in South Africa, there is shame around it, and there’s still the stigma- but it is not like nobody talks about it. It’s not hidden.
T: Especially when a child is being hurt, the community steps in. In South Africa, we have this belief: “My child is your child.” We grow up in communities where the auntie next door—even if she’s not related to you—can check on you as a parent because she has the right to do that. We still hold onto that idea, where accountability isn’t just within the family but extends throughout the community.
H: That’s wonderful! In Japanese culture, especially today, people tend to avoid getting involved when there’s trouble. So even when someone is clearly in need, others often stay away. Sadly, many cases of gender-based violence or child abuse are discovered too late, even when victims had been asking for help or showing some signs. I truly admire open and warm-hearted communities like that.
H: Will you also tell me more about your Writing Wounds into Healing workshop, which uses storytelling as a form of recovery? How do you see writing helping survivors reclaim their voice?
T: You know, I think storytelling can be a form of recovery—it helps people process their pain. For me, with my background in journalism, I’ve always been drawn to writing. A few years ago, I became really serious about wanting to write a book—specifically about the experiences of young Black South African women in China, because it’s such a significant topic. I found this amazing publisher in South Africa who offers an eight-week online course on writing. As a journalist, you think you’re a writer, but there’s a big difference between journalistic writing and other forms of writing. I was so inspired by her. When I was in South Africa on holiday, I attended a full-day workshop with her. She’s incredible—she publishes most of the top South African books and is really passionate about people sharing their stories. When I came back to China after the workshop, she mentioned the eight-week online course, and I thought, “Ooh, I’m in!” And she would guide you through the whole process. These exercises were really interesting. She would have us do meditation exercises. She would send recordings, and once you finished a meditation, she’d say, “Now get up and write.” She had exercises that would bring out so many things in writing that you’d never even considered before. It was very personal, very biographical—it was all about yourself, your life, and how you tell your story.
Anyway, a few years ago, I was asked to be part of a hospital group. They wanted to start sexual trauma support groups. So I was very privileged to be asked to be part of that group of facilitators. We were trained by an amazing organization in the US called Hope Recovery. They trained us to be online facilitators for sexual trauma support groups. During COVID, a lot of people were online all the time, so we had a huge response to these people joining support groups. From that experience, I thought it would be helpful to create something for people to write, because for some people, it’s easier to write than to speak about their experiences
I sat for a while, and I put together this 8-week online program called Writing Wounds into Healing. This was specifically aimed at survivors of sexual trauma. Each session focused on different aspects of participants’ experiences: how sexual trauma has affected their lives, how they feel now, and so on. The sessions would start with free writing to clear the mind, followed by exercises with two or three prompts. So people would free-write to clear their minds, and then, we would go into prompted exercises, and we would have 10 to 15 minutes writing. It was amazing to see how powerful the process was for people—just giving themselves the space to reflect, process, and express through writing.
H: That’s a fantastic process. I also used drawing as part of my own personal healing journey, so I can totally relate. It’s wonderful to have the camaraderie of others supporting you through it. Sometimes people don’t know where to begin, so having those prompts must have been really encouraging.
T: And, yeah, writing isn’t for everyone but for those who do it, it can be really powerful. Some people prefer meditation, or yoga, everyone’s got their own thing. I ran that eight-week program a few years ago, and you won’t believe it, a month ago, someone messaged me saying, “I haven’t forgotten those eight weeks. If you do it again, please let me know.” That really made me realize how impactful certain things can be for people. We also did work during the 16 Days campaign, using some of their writings in a Kintsugi workshop. For me, the most important part isn’t just talking about statistics—it’s about hearing people’s voices. Whether it’s through a Kintsugi workshop, art, writing… whichever way someone is comfortable expressing themselves, it matters. Voices need to be heard, whether it’s mental health, gender-based violence, or anything else. I can stay and talk about my own experiences when needed, but recently I told someone, “I want to start writing again, but I don’t want to write about my trauma anymore. I’m done with that.” People have asked me over the last couple of years if I want to share, and I’ve said no—it’s time for someone else’s voice to be heard.
I don’t have a problem sharing when it’s necessary, but I truly feel it’s more important that people’s voices are heard. That’s where connection comes in—because when you hear someone’s story, you can connect to something in their experience.
H: Yeah… and I just think it’s amazing how open and vulnerable you’ve been—how you let yourself be seen in that way, and how that, in turn, makes others feel safe to open up too. I’m curious—what gave you the courage?
T: I don’t know. I think it started with anger. I think that’s been a twist.
H: Oh, that’s really honest — your motivation came from a true, genuine impulse, not from pretending to help others for the sake of appearance. It’s inspiring how you were able to turn that anger into energy that encouraged others to rise up while also offering them big support.
T: I was very angry. I don’t think I went through the whole cycle of… I don’t know, but it was definitely anger. Every time I thought about it, I was angry—angry because I experienced something that so many women go through. And for me, that was… but those women don’t… like I mentioned to you at the beginning…Not a lot of women have the privilege to express themselves. Or, for many reasons, they can’t speak about it. So I think that was my thing– I needed to get this out there.
H: So in a way, you felt a sense of responsibility because of your privileged life. But I’m sure it wasn’t easy to speak up because it meant telling your parents and letting everyone know what happened to you.
T:I think my parents struggled a lot, because I was so public. I would do TV interviews, and I would do newspaper interviews, and my poor parents just had to deal with whatever because I needed to get my story out there so people could hear, so that women could understand that we need to deal with this issue.
H: You mentioned that your mother once told you your experience happened because you weren’t going to church. Reactions like that from others must have made it even harder to share your story.
T: That’s right. I feel I was just angry, and that is where it started off. It’s been almost 30 years and I still have to tell this story? That’s my question. When I was going through those years of doing workshops, and we were doing marches, and we were speaking in public,–In my mind, I thought, the next generation is going to have it better, because we are doing so much work. And now… I have a daughter. And I worry, constantly, is she going to be okay?
H: I can only imagine. I feel it’s harder to detect now since most gender-based violence happens within a single household. Even people who need mental support often connect privately online, so community networks aren’t very visible. I don’t even know my neighbors, which makes it harder to find support from others.
T: And so, in my mind, I’m back in that angry phase again. I really thought it was going to be better for her. I thought the work we had done meant we’d never have to go back there—that women wouldn’t be treated like this anymore. And now I think, what has really changed? I still have to check if her tracker is on her room key, and I even bought her a little alarm when she went to university. I’m like, “Please, the alarm must be on you!” Why?
H: Right.
T: You know what I’m saying? And I’m sorry if people think that I’m pessimistic, but I just cannot help it. I just cannot help it, because I know there are these amazing organizations and amazing women across the world who are putting in their everything in doing this work every day in their communities, and it gets to a point where you think, what’s the use? Nothing is changing, nothing is changing. So, after 30 years, I’m angry again.
H: Maybe having anger is motivating, because you speak up, and so openly, and doing that gives power to people around you.
T: I think that’s why, three years ago, I started the 16 Days project in Shanghai. I was like, “Hey, have you heard of 16 Days?” In South Africa, we’ve been doing 16 Days for years, and people here were like, “What is that?” In a way, I feel like this little girl from Africa can come to Shanghai and teach them a thing or two. You know what I mean? I really love that. I think, “You don’t know about these things?” So, 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence is huge for me. In South Africa it’s an international campaign. Starting it off in Shanghai… I don’t care if only 10 people hear about it, or 20—I have to do it every year.
H: That seems like a difficult thing to do, and you’re doing it amazingly, because your environment does not allow for you to have these kinds of campaigns, and there’s a lot of restrictions.
T: Right. There’s not been a year that we haven’t had issues. But for me, it’s important. You need to surround yourself with a network of people that are genuine and that understand and have good intentions. You are just one person in this whole scheme of things.
H: Right.
T: It’s not like I saved somebody’s life or anything… It takes belief, you know what I’m saying? It really takes a village to make change.
Beautiful Misunderstandings
Peery Sloan in conversation with Shimabuku
“I never read guidebooks. I don’t want stereotypes. I’m not afraid of misunderstanding. Sometimes, a beautiful misunderstanding is better than a good understanding.” – Shimabuku
I met Shimabuku at an artist residency after what sounded like a small odyssey from Japan. Polite, tired, and direct, he asked if he needed a key. He didn’t—and in that moment, it felt like we both recognized one another as bearers of a certain, peculiar logic. A few days later, at his talk, he showed a video of himself dressed as Santa Claus in spring—standing by the sea as trains passed, a fleeting red figure glimpsed and gone. His work—disarming, funny, and quietly tender—doesn’t announce itself; it lingers, aiming, as he says, to “make the heart flutter.” I wanted to know what that means to him, and how he thinks about where art, play, and daily life meet.
Peery: When I first saw your work this summer, I was struck by how playful it was—and how much joy there was in it. Sometimes it even felt a little absurd, but in a way that made the world feel lighter. Can you talk about the role of play and humor in your work?
Shimabuku: My opinion is that art should be something for a bigger sense of peace. It has to make people happy. So first, I try to make myself happy. If I’m happy, maybe I can make others happy too. That’s my theory.
It’s like music—pop or rock music, or a love song. It might start as love for one person, but it becomes something everyone can share. Like Layla by Eric Clapton—it’s not only for him and one person, but for everyone.
P: So you start with something personal, and then it opens up.
S: Yes. I think that’s what art should do.
P: You’ve often worked with animals—like the octopus you took on a journey. What drew you to that piece?
S: Octopus is a kind of local colleague for me. I grew up in Kobe, and we have a lot of octopus there. When I was a child, I used to see them walking on the ground, which was normal. Later I realized most people didn’t know that, so I wanted to share it.
When I began to study octopus more, I found out so much more. It became fun to learn about something from home. Maybe that’s why I wanted to bring it with me—to learn more and to feel closer to the place I’m from.
P: Did it make you feel more connected to Kobe?
S: Yes, a little. My parents weren’t from Kobe, and my Okinawan name sounded strange there. People always ask, “Where are you from?” I think learning about octopus made me feel more local.
P: That makes sense. Do you see the octopus as a collaborator?
S: Well, I don’t say collaborator, but I feel like it was a friend in a sense. You know? I released it back to the sea, I couldn’t eat it. I imagined it telling the others underwater about its strange experience with a human—like someone telling a story about being captured by aliens.
P: That’s great. In a lot of your works, humans, animals, and objects seem to exist on the same level, as if they share equal importance.
S: The biggest boundary is between myself and everything else. Everything beyond me—humans, animals, objects—is kind of equal. I don’t feel the hierarchy that people usually make. I just try to be kind to all of them.
P: There are a lot of Indigenous worldviews that align with what you’re saying—that humans are no greater than any other species, that everybody is equal.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah! It started to change. I think Western people have started to change, especially in Europe, you know, they started to think differently from before. So even when you ask such a question, maybe you start to think about it. Right? Sure. So that’s very good. I like it.
P: Much of your work happens outside, in public or in nature. What draws you to working in those kinds of spaces?
S: A studio costs money! (laughs) When I started, I didn’t have one, so I worked outside. But also, I grew up between the mountains and the sea, so being outdoors feels normal to me.
Wherever I live—Kobe, Okinawa, even Berlin—I always look for a mountain and a sea. Those two things are important.
P: You’ve moved many times and travel for projects. How do you approach new places when you arrive? How do you think about the people that live in those locations?
S: Usually, a museum or curator invites me, and we walk around together. I ask many questions—especially about food. Food reflects culture and history, so it’s a good way to know a place.
I never read guidebooks. I don’t want stereotypes. I’m not afraid of misunderstanding. Sometimes, a beautiful misunderstanding is better than a good understanding.
P: That’s a lovely idea—“beautiful misunderstanding.”
S: So I think artwork is like a beautiful misunderstanding or it could be said, my personal understanding. So I just try to see, try to understand by myself.
When you come from outside, you can see things in another way. That’s the good thing about being a stranger. I think that’s why I’m invited to different places—to find things local people don’t notice in the same way.
P: Your Fish and Chips project in London comes to mind. You filmed a fish following a potato in the ocean. I wonder how many Brits have considered a potato and fish in the sea together. Chippies are so common in London, it’s a very ordinary dish.
S: It’s too, too normal for them. So, you know, they never thought, “that’s a strange mix”, you know?
P: How do you know when something becomes art? Does it matter to call it art?
S: Well, that was fun. If it’s fun, I think it’s artwork, right? Yeah. If it is boring, I mean, there are many artworks that are boring. I love art and always want to make great art. But many things that look like art are not really art. The world is full of things that pretend to be art—paint on a canvas, for example.
For me, art is something that makes the heart dance. If it makes my heart move fast, that’s art. If it’s boring, maybe it only looks like art. So I follow what makes me excited. Sometimes, the works I’m unsure about—the ones where I think, “Will this even be a piece?”—end up being the best ones.
So for me, any form, any things, even dog swimming competitions, you know, if it makes you happy or it’s behaving like that— maybe that’s it.
P: So your definition is if it makes you happy?
S: Yeah, or it makes my heart dance fast.
P: So are you looking for an emotional response?
S: Mm-hmm. I often say art is not things to understand only. Many people in contemporary art today think that things are made to understand. Right? But sometimes you don’t have to understand. You just feel it or you just laugh about it.
P: Yes, I hear that too—it’s common for people to not “understand” art. It becomes a barrier to experience it. Especially in the West, in America, we get so cerebral and assume that we have to figure it out. Do you find that to be true in other places you’ve lived?
S: Well, of course. I mean, when I was in Berlin, I had a hard time because they didn’t like what I was doing so much. So I didn’t have many chances to show my work there, but it was a good place to live. You know, it was cheaper than other cities. Economically, Berlin was a good place to live.
You know, the West—part of America—is very much about understanding and things like American pop culture. It helped me a lot. I went to San Francisco because of this hippie movement. The Beats helped a lot too.
The West Coast of America? I like it. Especially San Francisco, Los Angeles—you know? They know how to enjoy life.
P: How so?
S: They had humor. They didn’t take things too seriously. They were reaching for something they didn’t know, without worrying about the goal. I like that approach.
P: Like your work, which is very open to chance. Such as the Dog Competition [Swansea Jack Memorial Dog Swimming Competition]. How do you balance your own ideas with what happens unexpectedly?
S: My work isn’t about showing what I’m good at. It’s about challenging myself to do what I couldn’t do before. That means I naturally collaborate—with people, with the world, with accidents. It’s like walking down an alley without knowing where it goes. That’s the fun part.
P: You’ve lived in Kobe, Berlin, and now Okinawa. How have these environments shaped your way of thinking?
S: Each place has different light, air, and rhythm. Kobe and Okinawa both have the sea and mountains. Berlin doesn’t. Its streets are straight—Japanese streets twist. These things influence how you think.
But maybe more than that, I’ve always been a stranger. Even in Kobe, people asked where I was from. In Berlin, of course, I was a foreigner. In Okinawa, my accent sounds like a tourist. So maybe location doesn’t matter—I’m always a stranger.
P: What have you been curious about lately?
S: Baseball. (laughs) You should watch more sports.
P: Why?
S: I think artists should watch more sports. Athletes have a completely different sense of space. Many artists move slowly—or not at all. But in sports, everything moves fast. They have this ability to know where everyone is without looking.
I find that way of seeing very interesting. I want to collaborate with them someday.
P: That’s unexpected, but it makes sense—the movement, the awareness.
S: Yes. I especially like watching Shohei Ohtani. His performances lift our spirits in this gloomy world. In that sense, he’s a true artist.
P: It goes back to your definition of art: it must make your heart dance..
S: Yes. You should watch. It’s starting tomorrow.
Peery Sloan (she/her) likes to dig—sometimes literally—to see what’s beneath the surface: worms, bones, histories, the things we’ve learned not to notice. Her practice asks how art might collapse into daily life, and what gets unearthed when it does.
Shimabuku: Born in Kobe, Japan 1969 Lives in Naha, Japan
After living in Berlin, Germany for 12 years, Shimabuku moved to Naha, Okinawa, Japan in 2016 where he is currently based.
From the beginning of the 1990s, he has travelled to various places in Japan and overseas, creating performances and installations that consider the daily lives and cultures of people he encounters, as well as new forms of communication. He also works in a diverse range of media including sculpture, film and photography. Full of poetic sentiment and humor while also inspiring people in metaphorical ways, his style has gained a worldwide reputation.
Friendship on Film
Rose Lewis with Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth
“I do feel like there’s a social ideology where it’s teleological, you’re moving from friendship where you learn relational dynamics to romantic relationships. But what if it’s not that kind of linear progression, right? What if friendship can be the foreground, rather than the thing that leads to something else?” – Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth
Friendship is the most generative site of collaboration within my own practice. Almost everything I do becomes more interesting when done with friends. Despite friendship’s primacy in my own life, we still inhabit a culture that privileges romantic connection over all else. I prize cultural depictions of other relationships, collegial, comradely, or complicated. I decided to discuss the question of friendship on film with one of my dearest friends. Note: This interview contains detailed discussion of Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends–proceed with caution if you haven’t seen it and want to preserve the mysteries of its plot.
Rose: I think that friendship is the main form of collaboration that I have, and of course you’re one of my very dearest friends of all time.
Zoe: Well make sure that your readers know that you and I were first and foremost class friends. I am your friend who’s also an academic and teaches film. We first met in an academic context. All of those discussions were collaborative discussions about texts.
Rose: Knowing that you’re teaching the Greta Gerwig class and that a lot of your academic work is around film, you seemed like an excellent person to talk to about filmic depictions of friendship. I know we have so many depictions of romantic relationships on film andI thought it would be really interesting to talk about other kinds of relationships. And I have a couple films depicting friendships that I love, but I would love to hear what you love. What are your favorites?
Zoe: I think one of my all time favorites was Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, from 1978. I’ll tell you all about it because I think that it would be very relevant to an art student. It’s a “woman becoming an artist” movie. [The film centers on] this woman, Susan. She is similar to the director, Claudia Weil, who was a young, Jewish woman director.
[Susan] is becoming a photographer at first, mostly specializing in shots for a rabbi, like bat mitzvahs and weddings, but then branches out into her own avant garde photography. The movie opens with her taking these photographs of her roommate and friend, Anne, while Anne is sleeping. Anne is like, “stop taking these photos of me,” and Susan is like “the light! It’s just right!”
The entire movie is their friendship and tension around Susan’s artistic ambitions taking center stage while Anne also wants to be a writer but then ends up getting married to this nothing of a man and moving to Vermont or upstate New York.
The thing about Girlfriends is “how do I keep this bond with my girl friend, who pushes me forward while also navigating the desires around love, creative expression, earning money,” right? I think one of the big tensions is that Susan makes a living through her art, while Ann doesn’t. She’s supported by her husband.
There are some ideas about collaboration and compromise–Susan wants to paint the walls of their apartment red, a very intense, bright red and Anne is like, “I don’t want to do that.” Susan gets her way and is able to paint the walls of the apartment the color she wants because Anne has moved out. But it’s very sad for her, right? The compromise would’ve been better than having this relationship become kind of estranged.
Susan seems very headstrong and sure of herself, but then also has this [process of] finding herself, grappling with being without her close friend. It was very clear that she and Anne had a really special friendship that was important, sustaining, and inspiring to both of them.
The movie ends [as] the friendship is re-formed, on the same night that Susan has her big first gallery opening. Anne’s husband comes to the opening and Susan asks “where the hell is Anne?”
The husband says, “she stayed home to do some writing and she said you would understand.” So then Susan goes out to see Anne, and it turns out that Anne has had an abortion because she had had one child and thought “to become a writer, I need to stop having these kids. I can’t be mothering and trying to pursue writing and going back to school to do the writing.”
It becomes a really nice moment, with both of them sitting together and joking around. Anne says “I think you seem like you have it all together,” And Susan says, “what are you talking about? I don’t know what I’m doing as much as anyone.”
Rose: I love hearing about movies and watching movies where abortion is not treated as some hugely tragic, traumatizing mistake that someone’s gone through, but as just a necessary and straightforward decision.
Zoe: Yeah. This is in 1978, right? Pretty cool movie! Greta Gerwig borrows a lot of parts of it for Frances Ha–really the premise of Frances Ha is Girlfriends.
I feel like what both of these movies have in common is like the [theme of] becoming an artist on your own terms. You’re mourning the seeming end of a friendship, but then it isn’t really the end, it’s actually a new stage or part of its development, which I think is interesting.
The friendships are not without their problems, but they are still sustaining and important. Each of these characters forms their identity relationally, with this other person in their twenties.
Rose: I think that there’s something really crucial in that, and I hope that young people these days still get to have the underemployed period in your twenties where you haven’t quite settled upon your great life’s career path and you get to focus on generative goofing off with your pals.
Zoe: Oh yeah, exactly. I think that that was important for both of us. And it was definitely important for [the character in] Girlfriends, you know, drifting around, taking these photos. And Frances, she’s crashing on a lot of couches at different points.
At some point she moves from being the backup dancer in the dance company’s troupe, basically kind of like Gerwig herself, right? Frances moves from dancer to choreographer, similar to how Greta Gerwig moves from actor to then screenwriter and director.
I do feel like there’s a social ideology where it’s teleological, you’re moving from friendship where you learn relational dynamics to romantic relationships. But what if it’s not that kind of linear progression, right? What if friendship can be the foreground, rather than the thing that leads to something else?
Rose: Right? Absolutely. It’s not like the more important category grows out of the other.
Zoe: Yeah, exactly. And I think that both Girlfriends and Frances Ha make that really clear.
Rose: A movie about friendship that I watched recently that I hadn’t even necessarily thought of through this lens before was The Sting. I re-watched it in memory of the maestro, Robert Redford. I think that what was so cool about that movie is that all of the characters’ motivations have to do with friendship. All of the guys that are coming together to take down the bad mobster are all doing it through their bonds of friendship. For all of the characters, their primary relationships are friendships, even though there are a few romances on screen. And I thought that was really beautiful. We’re talking so much about the male loneliness crisis these days, and what if the answer to the male loneliness crisis is that guys have got to form crime rings again?
Zoe: Speaking of the male loneliness epidemic, [Tim Robinson’s Friendship] also did a good job skewering those guys, right? Satirizing the way in which they’re like, “I am so lonely.” Really? There is nothing that you could do perhaps differently? Perhaps you’re contributing to this loneliness epidemic.
Rose: I watched that movie on a plane and it was a really bizarre experience because I think that if I had watched it with a group of friends in a theater, the comedy notes of it would’ve hit the hardest. But I think because I had just been rushing through the Chicago airport at the end of this long odyssey that I had been on, visiting a whole bunch of different friends in a whole bunch of different cities, the tragedy of it really came through. The tragedy of his marriage, the tragedy of his very off-putting personality, all the many different ways in which he hasn’t really been able to fit in throughout his life. I just thought, “this is poignant.”
Zoe: And also, who hasn’t had the experience of thinking, “man, this friend of mine, we are really tight,” and then you meet the rest of their friends and you think, “oh no.” He wants so badly to fit in with that group, but they’re into acapella. [He thinks], “Ooh. The other friends of this friend have me doubting the character of the person that I have chosen to all align myself with.”
A friendship movie that we’ve watched together and we both really like is Muriel’s Wedding. The title makes it seem like it’s going to be primarily about romantic relationships, but in fact it is about helping your wild and crazy friend when she faces hardship and disability and being like, “I wanna have my friend with me all the time.” Muriel gets married to this hunk, right? But ultimately that isn’t the thing that gives her pleasure or satisfaction.
Rose: Yes.
Zoe: Yeah. I feel like the turning point in that movie where the friend has the disabling event–oh my God, totally unexpected– shifts the course of the entire movie. These things that happened to our friends deeply affect us and absolutely shift the course of our lives as well. Friendship is just as deeply pivotal as romantic love, if not more so, for a lot of women.
Rose: And I think what’s particularly special about that movie is the way in which the friendships kind of move her personal development forward. She’s able to start developing her own sense of independence and identity through the support and strength of this much more empowered, liberated character.
Zoe: Exactly. But then she gets to actually have a caretaking role when that character becomes disabled and starts seeing the world differently. You know, she still has her spunk and spirit and such, but isn’t going out for a two-guy three-way.
Rose: Yeah. I also just really love the scene where she accidentally unzips the beanbag chair when she’s trying to fool around with that guy.
Zoe: You and I watched that movie during the time that I was in Portland following that very traumatic, difficult life event for me. And I do think it was a good reaffirmation of our friendship through this comedic work of art.
Rose: Yes! I loved our little mini film fest we did when you were staying with me. There were so many times where I would say “oh, you know, I haven’t seen this,” and then you would say, “oh, you know, I watched that recently, but here’s a related title.” I feel like one of the great pleasures of talking to you about movies is that pretty much any movie that I could name, you have seen it, and have a very cogent thought about it.
Zoe: I do love to do that for my students, my own little Zoe Criterion. If I’m teaching Cleo from Five to Seven, I can say “If you liked this more Left Bank, French New Wave, film, maybe you should watch Hiroshima Mon Amour.”
I found out recently, when teaching The 400 Blows, there’s a very tragic scene where his friend bikes away to go visit him at the juvenile detention center and then isn’t let in to visit him, and you just see the child banging on the glass. You can’t hear what’s happening, but you can see the friend being told to go and then biking away. I guess Truffaut’s friend who did the cinematography for The 400 Blows actually did that–it was semi-autobiographical. The collaborations that one has with one’s friends are definitely different, structurally and in terms of power, than the collaborations one has with one’s lover and partners.
Rose: Speaking of Truffaut, and 400 Blows, of course one of the great friendship classics is Jules et Jim.
It’s so funny. When I first watched that in high school, it blew my mind. I love it so much. I re-watched it in college and I still really loved it, but at that point I was also struck by how strange it is and the dynamic these guys have with each other and the different ways that they’re expressing themselves. And in the final moments when they’re realizing what’s happened to Catherine, the only thing they can say is, “well, there’s her car”.
Zoe: Yes, I remember seeing that, I think like at the Paramount in Austin on some French new wave double feature. And I’ve only seen it that one time, but I definitely can remember the final shot of the car wreck, and thinking [so much of the film is about] sustaining homosocial bonds, right?
Rose: Very Barbara Kruger, in that they construct intimate rituals to allow them to touch the skin of other men.
Zoe: Yes! Like [Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick, Between Men! In teaching Girlfriends, I also contextualize it with the male buddy comedy where the viewer thinks, “this is to the exclusion of women.”
This has been such a good conversation, dude. You know I love to rant and rave about movies, so, I would do this anytime.
Rose: It’s one of my favorite things to talk to you about. I’m so happy that we got to do this. Whenever you come up in conversation with my mom, she always says, “I remember when you said, mom, I met someone who’s smarter than me.”
Zoe: Not true! I just talk really quickly, like Martin Scorsese. I just talk fast because I’m from the east coast, which in Texas is to my detriment, but elsewhere people do think it’s a smart person thing.
Rose: I definitely think it’s a smart person thing. And I love the comparison with Marty, one of the greatest. I actually got my appreciation for Martin Scorsese before I’d even seen any of his work. He was interviewed extensively in a documentary about Joe Strummer, about their friendship and how they had met when he briefly cast the Clash in as background actors in The King of Comedy.
I loved the way that he talked about his early experiences of punk and being in New York at the time that that was all happening. [He got] to know The Clash when they were first coming to America. They were obsessed with this image of New York that had partly come to them through his movies.
That was just such a beautiful basis on which to form a friendship and a collaboration. I thought that was really lovely.
Rose Lewis is an artist, musician, and general busybody based in Portland, OR. Her work is deeply rooted in the DIY tradition of the global punk community and encompasses media including drawing, printmaking, zine-making, show booking, painting in oil and watercolor, writing, electric guitar, and soup. Find her work at rose-lewis.space.
Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas State University. Prior to her arrival at Texas State, she held a Mellon grant-funded postdoctoral fellowship in digital humanities at the University of Texas where she received her PhD in 2022. Zoe’s research examines the nexus of contemporary cinema, new media, and literature, particularly poetry and theories of the lyric. Her current book project examines poetry-savvy narrative films, many of which also foreground new media forms, in the twenty-first century. The project contributes to discussions of intermediality, the lyric’s ongoing adaptability and survival, and new approaches to theorizing formalism in film and literature.
She is also interested in digital humanities projects that increase public access to archival holdings and contextualize media artifacts.
We Can’t Leave Each Other Behind
Clara Harlow with Suzy Messerole, Seniz Yargici and Sharon Mandel
“The communication that happens in the water is making me a better human being outside of the water.” – Suzy Messerole
In August of 2025, I found myself across the pond for the first time on a wedding trip of someone I didn’t know and whose wedding I didn’t attend. I learned early on that when someone invites you to come on a trip with them, you say yes and figure the rest out later. Much to my delight, there happened to be a show up at the Design Museum all about swimming. I’d been doing the bulk of my graduate work on the aesthetics and relationships of the swimming pool, so this felt like a serendipitous gift.
It was within the aqua walls of the Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style exhibition, where I first discovered the Subversive Sirens synchronized swimming team. I stood completely captivated by the imagery of all sorts of bodies in relationship to one another above and below the water’s surface in a short film made by artist Xiaolu Wang about the team. So naturally, the first thing I did when I got home from London was cold email them to learn more about what they were reenvisioning together in the pool.
The Subversive Sirens is not like any synchronized swimming team. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the team is made up of folks of all backgrounds who have come together around their passion for swimming, activism, and how these two can intersect. They swim for Black liberation, equity in swimming and aquatic arts, radical body acceptance, and queer visibility. Every Saturday morning the team gathers in 4 lanes at the Phillips Aquatic Center, which is part of the Phillips Community Center, in the heart of Minneapolis. Although they spend this time swimming and rehearsing for the annual IGLA Aquatics Championship or the Gay Games that happen every 4 years, they see this time as a regular act of collective care and rejuvenation. This fall I had the pleasure of sitting down with Subversive Sirens members Suzy Messserole, Seniz Yargici, and Sharon Mandel to learn more about what we can do in the water that we can’t do on land and what we can do together that we can’t do alone.
Clara: As a former competitive swimmer, the pool has always held this tension for me in being both a site for competition and camaraderie. A site of individual striving and profound teamwork. I’m wondering if that friction comes up in synchronized swimming and how you make sense of that as a team?
Sharon: I haven’t competed yet, but I’m thinking about freedom and expression in the water as individuals, and how that works as a team. And that’s a really interesting thing for me. I’m the newest on the team, and I think it’s a really interesting challenge to be free and creative, and also do all the technical aspects that it takes to perform as a team. So there’s the creativity part, and then there’s the kicking someone and getting water up the nose part, so it’s a real combination of learning skills and still being creative and being yourself while doing what’s needed to create something with a team. There’s no riffing in Synchro. And our spacing is supposed to be very close together. Synchronized. So the technical aspect does outweigh creativity during the practices, I think. I don’t know if it outweighs fun, but it is a lot of hard work, too.
Clara: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m curious if you could talk more about how you guys are thinking about the liberatory potential of the pool space?
Sharon: I think just being there, in our bathing suits, in our bodies, which are bigger and different-shaped. That, right there, is giving maybe some hope for others that it’s okay to be in whatever suit you are, in whatever body you are, and to feel comfortable. I think a big part of our liberation politics is encouraging people to really feel okay about who they are, and to enjoy the water doing that if they wish.
Suzy: I think that’s beautiful, Sharon. I also think that our priority is the seven of us. Well, the eight of us with our coach. And, in doing so, I think we are setting an example for communal care, for setting time aside for your own rejuvenation, so that you can go out back out into the world and be a better participant in the journey to justice.
But as Sharon said, the little kids come and watch us do the routines. You know, I’m one of the white members, but most of the members are Black. Many of us are bigger-bodied and we bring the joy wherever we go. We are so happy to be together in the water, in our swimsuits, to the best of our ability.
Sharon: Two of the members of our team are directors of theater programs, too, and I think that has an influence. Signy, who’s not here, but is one of the co-founders of the team, is very vivacious with her face, with her body gestures, with how she interacts with people. It’s got a theatrical feel to it, so when the Sirens show up, it’s got a zing to it.
Seniz: That’s a vibe, for sure.
Suzy: And I also think, you know, some of the most fun I’ve had in a pool has just been something free, intergenerational, and you get a DJ in a pool.
Clara: You’re so right about that. It reminds me of going to water aerobics classes with my mom. She goes every day, so me and my sisters will go with her whenever we’re back in Omaha. And there’s just something about it. You just can’t not be smiling and joking around, and laughing. Like, it really brings me back to a feeling of being 10 years old and goofing off together. It’s fun to do that with other people in your adulthood, to witness each other in that joy at, like, 6 AM, you know?
Seniz: It’s so true. I’m a youth worker by trade, and I think the reason I love being around kids and watching them play is that it’s just, like, humanness in the purest form, and we lose that sense of play as we get older, and we actually have to work toward that play over and over again. And I do feel like water is a really fast train to feeling young again. Like being in the water is a sensory thing, right? Just poof, it brings you right back to that feeling of being a kid and freedom.
Sharon: I think too that, you know, it’s a process to accept your body in this world as anybody. It’s a process to accept yourself, and water provides a little cover for that. So, I often hear in the water aerobics class that I go to, which has you know, music, intergenerational, and swimming, that people are comfortable because you can modify your style of exercise, and people don’t even know it, because it’s covered by the water. So, everybody’s still getting exercise, the water provides for everyone. You don’t have to be in a gym with everybody looking at you. You know?
Clara: Speaking of the water providing for everyone, I’m curious if you could talk a bit about the public events y’all host for folks to get to try out these synchro techniques and skills. How do you make it accessible to a public audience?
Suzy: For Learn to Synchro we all start in the shallow end with the real basics, like just floating. And then we teach how to skull moving backwards, and then skull moving with your feet first, and then there’s a few really fun things that are easy. We always do a splash mob, that is like a flash mob, but it’s in the shallow end, so people are standing there to dance. The splash mobs are so darn fun. What were they like for you two?
Seniz: I felt really trusting that these people know what they’re doing. I mean, we all know this, all four of us here right now, what it’s like being in a pool with other people, and doing a thing together. It’s like we’re sharing an environment in a way that we normally wouldn’t. It’s like we’re being held all together in this thing, and we’re changing it and moving it, and it’s not something that we get to do often, and I think that’s what’s really special about it. It’s like, we can be artists, we can be swimmers, but creating a thing together in water just has a different vibration. You know? So I think what’s really cool about those big events is inviting people into our vibrations.
Sharon: I would also add that we always do an introduction of ourselves about how the team is connected to human rights and justice and body positivity. So that’s a big part of our events, too, and there’s a real sense of pumping up the audience to feel comfortable, to be excited, to feel good in their bodies, to feel good in their bathing suits, and to have a really good time. And then we have a good sound system, and underwater speakers that are really exciting and fun for everybody. So, that’s another component that really adds a lot of liveliness to it.
Seniz: Oh, I also think the detail of providing nose plugs and goggles for those who need them, and noodles for people, and swim caps even is important too.
Suzy: And that is really important, because there are so many people in our community that haven’t had access to pools. If they do have access to pools, they have been policed at pools, they have been harassed at pools, they don’t feel comfortable at them, you know what I mean? Like, there are a lot of people in our community that need the extra welcome, to feel even comfortable enough to walk in the door, right? Like, we are at the door welcoming people. Because this site, which is so joyful and playful and amazing for me, has been a place of oppression for other people. And Minnesota has the highest percentage of drownings for kids of color in the country.
Sharon: We practice at the Philips Aquatic Center Pool, and that pool took many years and much work to open, just for the reason that Susie was talking about. I’d like to add that the Splash Mob events also invite people of all ages who are interested in synchronized swimming, which is how I got to know about the team. I was 40-something when I heard about… well, let’s be honest, I guess I was 50-something. And I had asked lifeguards and people all over, and looked online and tried to find something, but the teams for synchronized swimming were mostly young white girls, and I couldn’t find any team that I could really fit in on. But, I found out about the Sirens through a lifeguard at another pool where elder synchronized swimmers swim, and I got to participate in a splash mob that way. It was hard to find a synchronized swim team to practice with. We are it.
Suzy: And I think, Sharon, what you said earlier about our connection to social justice and human rights is that we are much more a liberation collective than a synchronized swimming team. Like, we don’t have open auditions every year. If people are interested, we go out for coffee with them, we talk to them about their life, and then we invite them to do Saturday swims with us, and just swim with us for a while, and see if it’s a fit. Because we really are rooted in using Synchro as a communal care for activists, but also as a liberation practice. And you could be the best, most amazing, artistic swimmer, but if you’re not rooted in liberation practices, then this isn’t the formation, right?
Clara: Yeah, it seems like your values really lead. I’m curious what surprised you guys the most about being a part of this team?
Seniz: I mean, honestly, it’s the skill and athleticism required to do this kind of swimming.
Suzy: Yeah, I think one of the things that has surprised me the most is the level of communication that occurs in water, that water radiates the communication back and forth between people. You know, when you are upside down and trying to count and do all of these moves and hold your breath and keep yourself up. Keep your periphery vision open to everyone, and where you are in a form, and keep a form. It really, for me, has made me a better person in movement work because I am practicing liberation in the water, in a method in which you can’t leave anyone behind. Right? Because you’re trying to synchronize, and you are practicing being uncomfortable.
As a white activist in the Movement for Liberation, everything is built for my comfort, and being uncomfortable in the water has really helped me. My duet partner, Signe Harriday, is just a stronger swimmer than me. Like, I didn’t grow up in a town large enough to have a swim team. I didn’t compete in swimming. And so there have been duets in the past where it has taken me 3 months to learn a move that she can do. And so, it’s like, I’m gonna stick with this, I can try and stretch, I can try and grow, I can try and see if I can get this, and then if I can’t, I know that she’ll adjust. It’s hard to explain, but the communication that happens in the water is making me a better human being outside of the water.
Seniz: For sure. I feel like what you said—we can’t leave each other behind—it’s that piece of being in tight formation, trying to keep up with who we can see, and also allowing the next person to keep up with us. And I do feel like for me, and I’m not successful at this 90% of the time, but it’s a practice of continually opening that awareness and that way of remembering with all of the variables happening, which is life, right? All of the variables happening, and I’m checking in, I’m checking in, I’m checking in all around me.
Clara: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that way of de-centering the self allows you to sort of be in relationship with each other in a different way. Being a part of a whole, moving together, making little adjustments as you go along, it can be such a transformative experience. I feel that in the classroom often too, that way of being responsive and getting to be a part of something larger together.
Seniz: Something that is worth mentioning, too, is that our bodies are so different from each other’s, and we all have different ways of moving in the water, so it’s a very physical manifestation of coming from different places, you know? And so being aware of each other’s bodies and movement, and we’re all different heights, we’re all different sizes, so we truly are all moving as one. We all have to do totally different placements for different skills to achieve the same effect, and so there’s a lot happening underwater that might be different from each other that creates an effect outside of the water that is similar.
Clara: Yeah, that’s a really powerful metaphor, I think.
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The Subversive Sirens members are Tana Hargest, Signe Harriday, Zoe Holloman, Sharon Mandel, Suzy Messerole, Roxanne Prichard, Seniz Yargici, and their coach Ana Mendoza Packham.
Suzy Messerole (she/her) is a theater artist, activist & lover of water. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Exposed Brick Theatre whose mission is to tell untold stories, center omitted narratives & create art at the intersection of identities. In theater, she works as a director, particularly for new plays, as well as an Intimacy Director. She is also a lead organizer with the Million Artist Movement, a global vision and movement that believes in the role of ART in the campaign to dismantle oppressive racist systems. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her wife & daughter.
Seniz Yargici (she/her) is a youth advocate, artist, and play-centered experience creator whose work is rooted in creativity, connection, and community. She’s a parent, a lover, and a cancer-surviving one-tit wonder. Şeniz is the founder of OYNA: Family Wellness through Play (oynatoday.com) and is currently an Experience Developer at the Minnesota Children’s Museum (MCM.org). Şeniz performs long-form narrative improv, loves to play guitar and sing, is deep into an epic D&D campaign with her junior high pals, and cherishes time with her two hilarious teenagers, magnetic partner, and extended family.
Sharon Mandel (she/her) is the newest member of the Subversive Sirens. She was adopted and grew up in the Twin Cities. She’s an educator, union organizer, tuba player, single mom, survivor of severe abuse, cancer survivor, and advocate for the homeless and all oppressed.
Clara Harlow (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator interested in the question of how we can make today different than yesterday. Her work operates as an invitation into themes of celebration, exchange, and alternative ways of measuring time and value. Through unconventional parties, workshops, and interactive objects, Clara is invested in how we can turn the dilemmas of the everyday into an opportunity for experimental problem solving and collective delight. Her practice aims to create responsive public containers for unexpected joy and connection, but if she can just get you to forget about your To Do list for a little while, that’s pretty good too.
A Bounce House at the Block Party
“I’m a person who believes that making the world a better place isn’t just going to happen magically, that it takes work and effort and everyone working together to make it happen. I sometimes struggle with wondering, what is my part in that? And what can I do beyond what I’m already doing?”
With larger-scale problems feeling so hard to chip away at, the importance of knowing your neighbors comes back to me again and again. When I did anti-surveillance work in New Orleans before I moved to Portland, a lot of the older folks we would speak to about safety and surveillance would say, “We didn’t used to need cameras, but now I need a camera to feel safe, ’cause no one hangs out on their porches anymore, and we don’t know each other.” We can start to organize ourselves right where we are to make a safer, more sustainable way of life, and perhaps those small actions can give a new sense of hope. That’s why I wanted to interview my neighbor Devin Harkness, a school counselor who lives two houses down from me and often acts as a bit of a neighborhood glue. It turns out Devin’s a big believer in hope and conversations, too.
Lou: What makes you interested in conversations with people who might be different than you?
Devin: It feels like that’s the way to understanding. I feel like there’s no number of things that can happen online that will increase understanding. And that the only way for real understanding to happen is just people sitting down, face to face, talking to each other and seeing each other as human beings. There’s a dehumanization that has happened, and our salvation lies in rehumanizing everyone.
Lou: Cause you do that in your work, especially when there’s a conflict or disagreement. That’s the only way to approach it that would be effective, right?
Devin: Every day. Every day. I’m a school counselor, and I work with kids all day. Part of what I try to do is give them tools to make the world a better place and to connect with other people. A big thing I try to do is help them figure out positive ways to resolve conflicts. ‘Cause a lot of the problems we’re having right now in the world are unhealthy ways of resolving conflicts. I try to give the students the experience of sitting down with a person face to face and working things out, whatever that is, whatever that takes. Even big conflicts, like if somebody has hurt somebody physically.
Lou: What is it like to do that work?
Devin: My favorite thing is to take kids that have a conflict, sit down with them and try to help figure out what creative way of resolving the conflict we can come up with. Sometimes it’s just talking. Other times, it’s some combination of talking and doing something that actually bonds us together and reminds us that we enjoy hanging out together, like playing a game. And when they come up with something different, it’s better than anything that I could have thought of.
Lou: How did you get into school counseling? How’d you know you wanted to do that?
Devin: My dear friend Rafe, with whom I had been very close friends for a long time–we had worked together in two different jobs. He left the job where we were working together, an international student exchange program, and he went back to school to get his school counseling degree. And I was like, “That’s awesome. This sounds like so much fun. I’m going to do that too.”
Lou: It’s good to have someone to follow sometimes.
Devin: Yeah, he has kind of been my role model in many different areas of my life. He also purchased a house, and I was like, “Ooh, I can purchase a house too, I think, because you just did that.” That’s why I bought this house, because of him basically. He inspired me to do that.
Lou: Do you guys still hang out?
Devin: Oh yeah, he’s family. We met in the summer of ‘98 cause we both got hired at this day-camp in Seattle. And he was the first trans person I ever knew, and he introduced me to that world. I was definitely not identifying as straight at the time that I met him.
Lou: Seattle in the nineties. How could you be straight?
Devin: I know! But he introduced me to this queer world that I hadn’t experienced before. And I was just like, “Oh my God, I feel at home.” I’d never felt that level of acceptance before. Not that I didn’t feel acceptance, but people saw me in a whole new way that I hadn’t ever been seen in before. Nobody assumed I was straight, which was just the best feeling. I don’t even know why that feeling is so good, but it’s so good.
Lou: It’s something about being seen, right? It feels good to be seen for all your human complexity. And all the different things that make you.
Devin: There’s nothing like that. It’s a euphoric feeling.
Lou: Absolutely. It’s funny thinking about neighbor stuff. I feel like, especially nowadays, a lot of the queer and trans people that I talk to sometimes are like, “I don’t wanna talk to my neighbors ’cause what if they’re transphobic or homophobic?” And I’m like, totally, that is a risk, and it’s important to think of in the context of all your other privileges and identities, but to take that risk feels important. ‘Cause more often than not, people are accepting when you’re right in front of them.
Devin: I think so, too. I have to believe that. And you might be the first trans person they’ve ever met or talked to. Knowingly. And you might be that person who makes them go, “Maybe if my neighbor’s that cool, trans people aren’t all bad!” I don’t know.
To me, it all starts with just one person sometimes. Maybe you have a person in your family, and because of that, you learn more about their identity or politics, and you’re a little bit more open to these ideas. I have to believe that people want to connect with other people, and that’s the way forward, these single connections.
Lou: That’s something I think about a lot. I’m really curious about what makes people feel safe.
Devin: For me, it’s partly that I see human connection as our way to a better world. And also because I’m just super curious about people. Ever since I was really young, I’ve always loved just talking to people and figuring out what makes them tick and what they care about, and what their stories are like.
It started when we lived in China for a year when I was ten years old. We lived on a university campus in a dorm, and I would just go out and wander around our campus without my parents or anything like that. I’d meet security guards or people building a brick wall, and just talk to them and try to learn about them, and have conversations with people.
Then, when I was a little older, like my late teens, I started carrying around a tape recorder. And I would just interview people and talk to people. And I carried it on my travels and backpacked through Central America and interviewed people from all over the place and just talked to them. Just asked them questions and heard their stories.
So I have these archives of interviews that I’ve done with people from all over the world and all different sorts of places that I’ve never quite figured out what to do with. I want to create some kind of podcast, an interview podcast. There are all these people that I want to interview. I just can’t quite figure out what the crossover point is for all of them. Or what the focus is.
Lou: But could your curiosities be the focus, and could that be enough? I think it’s enough. Maybe it’s because that’s what I’m doing. Laughs. What kinds of people do you want to interview?
Devin: All sorts of people. Mostly people whom I respect. Or people who have done something that I think is amazing. That could be a person who’s an amazing parent, or a person who creates something that I think is really amazing or important, or just somebody whose point of view I want to hear—someone who I want to help tell their story.
I want to go around our neighborhood and interview all the people who have been here for a long time in the neighborhood, especially the families of color, the black families who are still here who have not moved away. There were so many black families on our block here in Northeast Portland when I first moved in. And now they’re all gone. Mostly—they’re almost all gone.
Lou: Gentrification and redlining are such a part of this area of Portland’s history, right?
Devin: I want to find a way to preserve that information. ‘Cause so many of these families are moving away, and then there’s just no way to get that information anymore. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Lou: What do you imagine you might find or discover?
Devin: No idea. I want to know, though—just the history of this place. I want to know more about it.
Lou: What do you know about this block or this neighborhood?
Devin: Not much other than just my own experience. Cause I moved into that house in 2003.
I know that the person who lived there before me was a woman who was, I think, in her seventies maybe, a white woman, who I think had a black husband who died. And she had a couple of kids, or at least one daughter, and then the grandkids lived with her because the daughter was either incarcerated or she was MIA. The kids were maybe three or five. That age. They were very young kids.
When they moved out, there was a lot of stuff left behind, including this stack of letters that had been written from the father of the children, who was in prison, to the daughter. And it just tells a story, a very common story, of families being torn apart by incarceration and the impact of that trickling down. It shows the impact that the incarceration system might have on kids–the cycles of oppression, violence, and all that stuff.
Lou: Do you still have the letters?
Devin: Yeah. I have a whole box of stuff. Artifacts that I collected from the house.
Lou: Is there anyone else on the block who you feel like you know?
Devin: I know a lot of the neighbors really well.
Lou: How’d you do that?
Devin: Just being here for a long time.
Lou: If there was one thing you could do to make the neighborhood better, what would it be?
Devin: I think getting people together, giving people opportunities to be together, spend time together, and to get to know each other. That’s the best thing I think. It takes time and it takes effort, and you have to create opportunities for people to get to know each other.
Lou: Can I ask you a deep question?
Devin: Of course.
Lou: What is your orientation towards hope right now? Do you have hope for the future, or do you struggle with that?
Devin: Definitely. I find myself constantly having to pull back into the present moment, whatever that happens to be, and just try to live there as much as possible. I’m also a person who believes that making the world a better place isn’t just going to happen magically, that it takes work and effort, and everyone working together to make it happen. I sometimes struggle with, what is my part in that? And what can I do beyond what I’m already doing?
I feel like my chosen career path is part of my hope for the future.
I have hope that we can make the world better. And I have hope that we can make things better in our country. I know everything that’s happening right now is destroying a lot of things that have taken a lot of time to build. I think that I can’t give up on the idea that things can be rebuilt and regrown and that there will be a rebound.
And because we are in this two-party system, we’re stuck here, and I don’t know what to do to get us out of that. I don’t hold that much hope that it is going to change in my lifetime.
I see a lot of kids doing really cool things, and especially queer kids. And I want them to have hope. A lot of the kids I work with are very insulated from a lot of the horrible things that are happening.
Lou: Yeah. But you get to see what’s possible when they have resources and support, or as much as they can.
Devin: My school in terms of our support for queer students, it could not really be much better. There’s always more you can do, but our queer kids feel as comfortable as I think kids are likely to feel in school. So many kids are out, and people don’t seem to be afraid to say, “I’m non-binary,” “I’m trans,” or “I’m gay,” or whatever.
There’s lots of kids still figuring it out. We had a big queer party at the end of this school year which was created by the students and my intern, who is a non-binary trans person. And they had what they called an L-G-B-B-Q at the end of the school year, the kids just latched onto this idea, I dunno who came up with it. It was just this big beautiful queer party. That was really special.
Lou: I feel like it helps a lot, being present and being with kids. I’m looking for ways to feel a little more hopeful. I feel hopeful on a small scale, like my relationships with people and the garden and things changing, the seasons continuing—but definitely less of it on a large scale.
Devin: What happens four years from now? I know that the next four years will just mean one thing after another that goes beyond my ability to predict or even sometimes comprehend of how awful and bad it is.
But after that, where is our hope?
Lou: That’s why I think it’s great that even after working in an intense job that you’re still interested in investing into the neighborhood and building a closer community. Cause those are the people that are going to have your back if something happens, like a disaster or something. But it does take effort, right? And it does take work. But I commend you for making that effort. We’ve got to celebrate each other, too, right?
Devin: I feel like part of why I want to get to know my neighbors is because—it sounds weird—but I’m a little bit lazy sometimes, and I want my friends to be like right here. I don’t want to have to go far away.
Lou: That’s a great reason. I’m psyched about the block party. I’m about to leave town for a few weeks, but then I’ll be back. Let me know if I can help.
Devin: So you’ll be here for the block party!
Lou: I wish I had a slip and slide. That could be fun.
Devin: Oh, we’ll get a bounce house like last year. That was pretty epic. Our 5-year-old would be very sad if we didn’t. And even the adults…
Lou: Yeah. When do you get to go in a bounce house as an adult?
Devin: At our block party!
Lou Blumberg is an artist, facilitator, and educator with ties to San Francisco, New Orleans, and Portland. With a belief that a better world is possible, their deeply personal practice deals with conflict and its impact on our relationships and lives; surveillance and safety; and joy in despairing times. They are part of the MFA Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University and a co-organizer of Techies 4 Reproductive Justice.
Devin Harkness is a school counselor dedicated to uplifting student voices, with a particular focus on supporting queer youth, students of color, and neurodiverse students. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his role models: his radical partner and children.
Spirit as a Portal: Death, Ghosts, and Hauntings as a Door to Other Realms of Possibility
Nina Vichayapai with Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
“When you think about family and your place in the world, you also think about death and dying… My thought was that if visitors meditated on the finitude of their own existence, it would lead to living a more meaningful life.”
When I recently visited the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle to see Spirit House, the timing could not have been better. I had just returned from a trip back to my birth country of Thailand. While there I had begun to feel as though I were being haunted. The feeling took hold in sudden moments. Moments like when Thai words I thought I had lost came together on my tongue with ease. Or when I immediately and accurately identified smells I hadn’t encountered for several years. As bizarre as it sounds, I felt as though I were somehow being haunted by a “more Thai” version of myself.
The sudden lapse in my usual spiritual ambivalence primed me well to find resonance with the themes of Spirit House. Within the company of the exhibition’s 33 artists of Asian descent exploring the boundary between life and death, I found the language to describe the haunting I had been experiencing.
Curated by Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Spirit House was initially exhibited at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford in 2024. The show’s themes are deeply personal to Aleesa’s own background in which a significant part of her youth was spent living in Thailand. There, the separation between the living and the dead are blurry. Aleesa was inspired by this casual acceptance of ghosts as entities to coexist with and respect. Aleesa’s curation explores the importance of hauntings in all their forms ranging from the ordinary to the monumental. War, migration, political revolution, break ups, loss of language, and moving homes, represents just a selection of subjects that the Spirit House artists reanimate as ghosts in need of tending to through their work.
Nina: I just want to start off by saying that I really relate to a lot of your background experiences that you shared in the Spirit House catalog. I was also born in Thailand and have also struggled with sleep paralysis. You say that you’ve always had these experiences with hauntings in your life that have influenced you. I’m curious if you could talk about what some of those early experiences were?
Aleesa: The concept of the show being called Spirit House is directly tied to my earliest memories of engaging with Thai spirit houses when I was a child. Having been born there and spending a lot of my early life there, my family would go back and forth between British Columbia and Bangkok. I thought of spirit houses as magical portals that invite you to consider other realms, people who have passed on, and the spirits that live in the space around you. So for me, it was a very natural part of everyday life. My family would tell ghost stories, and it was not something that people scoffed at. The supernatural or the otherworldly was just a part of everyday life. When I moved here to the States, I found that the Western-centric point of view does not take those world views very seriously.
Nina: That’s interesting because I did initially go into Spirit House feeling like I wouldn’t resonate with the show’s themes so much since I don’t consider myself to be very spiritual. But when I was there it really made me think a lot about how this version of spirit that was being explored could relate to my immigration experience. It felt like you were presenting this expansive version of spirit. I’m curious if that was an intentional choice?
Aleesa: Oh yeah. I mean, I wanted it to be a very expansive interpretation of what we could describe as the spiritual realm. I think everybody has a different relationship to some version of spirituality. The degree varies with each person. But the show really came from many conversations I had with artists about their thoughts on intergenerational inheritance, trauma, joy, and collective memory. Then there’s the sadness, the gaps, and the narrative loss that come with migration. And for some of them, being second-generation and not knowing their mother tongue.
It all comes together in this bittersweet way. All those things haunt a lot of people in ways both agood and bad, and also just relatively neutral. So I wanted to think about it in terms of the things that people bring with them when they migrate, the memories attached to those things, the new ones they create, and how they make sense of finding themselves and their families in a new environment home. When you think about family and your place in the world, you also think about death and dying. Spirit House was also informed by a somewhat Buddhist perspective. When I was living in Thailand from eight to 11, Buddhist culture was a very big part of our lives. My thought was that if visitors meditated on the finitude of their own existence, it would lead to living a more meaningful life. Which is a pretty straightforward form of Buddhist philosophy focused on mindfulness. But also, depending on who you talk to here, many people prefer not to have direct conversations about life, death, or passing on.
Nina: That is really powerful. I feel like it’s just so different from the way we think about spirituality in the West and under a Christian colonial context. In the show there’s such an openness and curiosity to the different versions of spiritual relationships that are out there. But it was interesting for me to read that some of the artists don’t believe in ghosts. And many of them are coming from different backgrounds that are informing their approach to the theme. What was the process like in working with the artists? Was choosing the work for the show a collaborative process at all?
Aleesa: Yes. I was able to speak to almost every artist in the show, with the exception of Do Ho Suh and the late Dinh Q. LeWith everyone else, I have some kind of nice relationship with them and had been doing studio visits for many years in preparation for the show.
Some artists’ work really informed the conceptualization of the project. Like the photographer Jarod Lew and his body of work about his mother from his series In Between You and Your Shadow, which is about his mother’s relationship to Vincent Chin [a Chinese American man who was murdered by two white autoworkers]. It’s such a powerful series and really encapsulates a lot of what I was trying to explore with the project
I’ve also been slowly collecting towards the show. About a third of the works in the show are from the Cantor’s collection. I had acquired them thinking that eventually those pieces would be in this show. In other cases, I would do a studio visit with an artist, and after I had done enough to really feel like I wanted to build a checklist, I would go back to some of them to say, “I would love for you to be in the show.”
We would then have a conversation, and they might have another work that they thought was a better fit.. In certain cases, some of the artists made new works for the show. Heesoo Kwon made the only commission in the show. But she’s based in the Bay Area, so I knew that it would be easy to collaborate with her on that. Stephanie H. Shih, Cathy Lu, and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, all made new works because they felt inspired by the theme. I was really flattered by that. Having new works created by artists who felt compelled to make them truly enriched the show.
I always endeavor to be as collaborative as I can, especially with living artists. I just think that it makes for a more meaningful and interesting project for everybody.
Nina: What has it been like for you to see the show travel from the Cantor to the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle?
Aleesa: It’s nice to be reminded that it’s still having an impact out there in the world. It initially opened over a year ago at the Cantor. I’m looking forward to going back and seeing it again in October, and to celebrating with artists, many of whom have become very close friends and important people in my life. I put every last bit of myself into that project. But what I got out of it was even more than that. I’m really pleased to hear from visitors of the Henry exhibition, including yourself, who have reached out about the show. It’s great to know visitors are having meaningful encounters there and learning about artists who will eventually become important to them.
Nina: That’s amazing. Well I’ve certainly been very moved by the work I saw and it was incredible to learn about so many artists who are new to me. I’d love to know if there’s ways you like to learn about or keep up to date with contemporary Asian artists?
Aleesa: Well at this stage in my career, I’m lucky enough, depending on how you look at it, that I receive constant emails from different galleries, artists, colleagues, and arts organizations. People know what Marci and I are doing, so they send things our way to check out. Or a gallery will reach out and ask if I will do a studio visit with an artist. I also look at biennials too, like Prospect New Orleans or the Whitney Biennial. Of course, that means I’m being sent artists at a particular stage in their career. And I don’t want to be institutional or hierarchical in that way. So, I also look at social media, like Instagram, to see who ends up just coming through on my feed.
I also do a lot of studio visits. I’ve done so many in L.A., the Bay Area, New York, and virtually. I love doing studio visits in new places I visit as well.
Nina: And could you tell me more about the Asian American Art Initiative that you organize as well?
Aleesa: The Asian American Art Initiative is the project that I co-direct at Stanford. It was co-founded by me and art history professor Marci Kwon. I started at the Cantor in 2018, and we’ve been doing it since then. We’re focused on building a preeminent collection of work by Asian American artists, among other things. I collect work that ranges from historical to contemporary. We also enjoy supporting emerging or early-career artists when possible, especially when we’re potentially the first museum to acquire their work. That can make a significant difference in their future. When I started at the Cantor, we had like 30-something objects by Asian American artists out of our collection of 41,000. And now we have something like 800 or more.
We’ve done more than ten shows related to the initiative here at the Cantor. Marci teaches courses out of my exhibitions as well.
Nina: That sounds like such an undertaking to sort of have to go back into history and sort of fill the gaps.
Aleesa: It’s fun. I like being able to do both. I like not being confined to either historical or contemporary work.
Nina: That does sound fun. I’m curious if you could talk about your time in the Pacific Northwest and what that was like for you? It was cool to learn that you had studied at Willamette University and spent a lot of time here.
Aleesa: I lived in Oregon from when I was around 12 years old to when I was 24, which is when I left for graduate school. I lived in Salem for all those years and went to Willamette University. I mean, you know, everything in life has its high points and low points. The best part of going to Willamette was that even though it’s a small liberal arts college, it has its own university art museum. So I got my first museum job working there. That is when I realized that working in museums was what I wanted to do. And specifically at a university art museum. So that’s really where I got my start.
I have great relationships with the people who are still in Salem, and I had one very beloved art history professor whom I kept in touch with until he passed away a couple of years ago. He’s one of the people I dedicated the Spirit House catalog to.
Since Oregon is predominantly white and was my first real home in the United States, I assumed the entire country was similar to Oregon. I wasn’t aware that things could be different. It was very common for me to be the only Asian American/person of color in a room. And since I’m mixed race, it’s complicated in a different way, as I am not always perceived as a person of color. That’s a separate conversation.. But I didn’t learn about any Asian American artists at Willamette. I didn’t even think to really look for it. Maybe that’s my own lack of imagination, but I think if you never see something, you don’t even think to look for it.
It wasn’t until I left that I realized that it could be different. There are places in the United States that are more diverse. I did an internship at the Art Institute of Chicago after I graduated, and it was amazing to finally be in a big city. During the last year of my PhD program, I lived in New York City. It was such a relief to finally feel like I had fulfilled that high school dream of living in such a vibrant art scene, where so many things are happening and there’s much more diversity. That was so revitalizing for me.
Living here in the Bay Area, of the things I love most about it is that it feels extremely Asian American. It’s just a part of life. It’s the food that everybody eats. Asian Americans have been here for a very long time. San Francisco was one of the most important historic ports and has the oldest Chinatown in North America. Many of my colleagues are Asian American. So we have Asian American curators, people who work in galleries, and people who work in the arts. I’m not the only one, and I love that so much. It’s part of the reason why I do the work that I do here. So it’s wildly different than when I was in Oregon. That really changed me, knowing that it could be different. But it did take leaving.
Nina: Thanks for sharing that. That’s all very relatable to me. I also had no idea it could be different until I left the Pacific Northwest for the Bay Area when I went to college. The experience of being in non-predominantly white spaces was so somatically different then what I was used to.
I’m curious about what you just shared about how working at the museum at Willamette University led you to want to work in more university museums. What is it about university museums that you like over other kinds of museums or art spaces?
Aleesa: Well, being able to support myself by working in an art museum while I was in college had a profound impact on my life. I love working with students because many don’t even understand that museums are an option in the world if you’re interested in art.
As far as the type of work I do, I feel like university art museums are allowed to do more experimental projects. Projects that have a more distinct point of view and are more critical of American or institutional history. All of the things that this current administration is trying to suppress.
The Cantor, for example, doesn’t charge admission. And that impacts the work that you do as a curator. Because at many other museums they’re concerned with revenue and ticket sales. You have to make sure the projects you do bring in droves of people. I, of course, want people to see my shows, but I think what’s more important is the impact an exhibition can have on specific individuals. And that can’t always be reflected in the number of people who come and visit the show. We make art accessible and take chances that other larger museums might have a harder time doing.
Nina: I definitely love that university museums are free. It provides so much access for people.
Aleesa: I want people to be able to just come to the Cantor even if it’s just for a few minutes. Take a break, chill, and look at something, without the commitment of spending $35 to enter a museum and feeling like you really have to stay and get everything out of it. $35 is a big entry fee. And you’re going to want to feel like you really got everything out of your visit that you could. So it kind of forces you to have a particular way of engaging with art. And I want people to have many different ways and approaches to engaging with art.
Nina: Definitely. The art museum kind of becomes a theme park at that point where you feel like you really need to get the most out of it.
Well I really just have one question left for you. Do you have a favorite ghost or ghost story?
Aleesa: Oh yeah, I was very traumatized as a child by a story of a particular ghost in many Southeast Asian cultures. Her name in Thai is Phi Krasue. The ghost is basically the floating head of a woman attached only to her viscera. She floats around and I believe she eats livestock, rotten food, whatever she can find. She would be in Thai soap operas that I would watch growing up and was the scariest thing that I could fathom. I was very afraid of horror films and ghosts growing up. Now, I love horror films. I think horror as a genre can be such a great form of subversive critique or an expression of culture.
So, I grew up being afraid of something–scary movies–that ended up becoming something that I really love as an adult. I think that’s a good way of moving through the world with the things that we are afraid of. There’s a reason for it. If you figure it out and you confront it, then maybe there’s something there for you.
Nina: Yeah, I love that. That’s a really great way to look at it. The second you started talking about Krasue I could just see it in my mind. So many movies with her. I feel like there is just something about the ghosts in Thai and Asian cultures in general. Like, they’re so scary!
Aleesa: Truly! There’s just something amazing about that, too. That they’re willing to go there. I’m also interested in horror that doesn’t rely on Christian theology and philosophy. I want different source points beyond that. So that’s also why I love Asian horror.
Nina: Yeah, it’s definitely cathartic for the culture it seems. They are willing to go there for sure. Well, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate being able to chat with you.
Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander (she/her/hers) is the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. At the Cantor, she is the curator of Spirit House (2024), Livien Yin: Thirsty (2024), East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (2022), and The Faces of Ruth Asawa (2022 – ongoing).
https://www.instagram.com/aleesapalexander
Nina Vichayapai (she/her) makes art that explores what it means to be at the intersections of margins and peripheries. Her interdisciplinary practice includes anything from soft sculpture, public art, pie making, dog petting, and eavesdropping. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Letter from the Editors
Who do you look to in sticky situations? As we bump into dilemmas both mundane and monumental, we are fortunate to have so many in our extended social practice circle who we can turn to for support.
In this issue we look to Social Practice alumni, faculty, and peers in similar fields to find new perspectives and understanding, a seasoned radio host on the power of the local, a first grade teacher and painter who’s discovering new ways art can be present in everyday life, and a curator about the importance of centering care in arts institutions while chopping vegetables for a museum meal. Inside these conversations we find comfort, connection, and a way through that we might not have seen as possible previously. We hope you find some guidance in these pages too.
Your Editors,
Nina, Lou, Clara, Sarah, Dom, Gwen & Adela
Cover Design by Sarah Luu
Place-making
A conversation between Chariti Montez and Adela Cardona Puerta
“Here’s the ideal of what we want and over here’s the bureaucratic process to get there and I had the skills to walk between the two. Going back to being the interpreter or the translator of the two worlds: I can build this house by hand, but if it’s not legal in the place where I live, it’s vulnerable. I think that’s when I realized that I could live in both and help people navigate this bureaucracy”
I met Chariti Montez for the first time with my cohort to figure out if we (the Art + Social Practice Program) could work together to make Assembly, our event of experiential projects, workshops, and performances, with the Portland Office of Arts and Culture.
Chariti was sweet and passionate in sharing her hopes for placemaking through art in Portland in her current role as the Director of the Arts and Culture Office. That excitement and the fact that she is a Latina in a position of power in government cultural spaces made me curious to know more.
When we met for this interview, we walked to the park together and as we did, I asked her what language she would feel most comfortable speaking in: English or Spanish. The fact that she felt more comfortable speaking English prompted a personal and vulnerable conversation around the wound and baggage that language carries when you have mixed backgrounds or come from a family that has been forced to immigrate from one culture to another.
Language, therefore, became the thread to unravel just a speck of the brilliance of this woman that inhabits the borders between the US and México, and between Art and Government. I hope you too enjoy this chat with a fellow translator of worlds.
Adela: As a Colombian, who is also a descendant of Syrian-Lebanese people, that does not speak Arabic, I too understand that the feeling of inhabiting a language is a wound, a scar that sits in the place of war, displacement, and resilience. Could you tell me more about what your experience with language has been like as the daughter of Mexican and American parents?
Chariti: Absolutely. In my case, it has to do with the fact that my dad was deported when I was a kid. My mom is white: she’s an English and Scandinavian descendant, from Danish Mormon pioneers. My dad is a Mexican immigrant from Tierra Huichol, in Jalisco, in the mountains. And like everybody from his village, he came to the United States to work because that was what my grandma had done. He did so as an undocumented person, like a lot of other migrant farm workers.
When he was working on Mount St. Helens, planting pine trees, Mount St Helen started blowing ash, and they realized the trees weren’t gonna live because the ash was coming down on them. So the company stopped planting them. As his whole crew leftWashington on a Bus, crossing back over into Portland, they were detained. My dad said he was detained for a week before he was deported, and they didn’t tell us anything.
Adela: So your dad fucking disappeared for a week?
Chariti: Yeah. And then he was gone. And this is before there were cell phones; he’s from a village, a ranchería that doesn’t have running water, electricity, or roads. He’d never been to a big city, he’s never even been to Mexico City to this day.
My mom looked for him. She couldn’t find him. We just didn’t know what happened and we moved back to Portland. He came back, years later, to look for us at the house that we lived in in Salem, and nobody was there.
He had no other way of reaching us because he is from an indigenous village, he doesn’t read or write. And so he wasn’t able to find us. And we weren’t able to find him.
Adela: That is really fucked up.
Chariti: Yeah, it is. My mom speaks Spanish well. But after my dad was deported, I didn’t grow up around Spanish for a while. Until my mom remarried my stepdad who is Afro-Mexican, and who I feel I was raised by. I have two little brothers who were two and three when our parents got married, they mostly grew up in Acapulco. And they tell me that I sound like I learned Spanish in a textbook.
Adela: Oh my God. That must be like a dagger to your heart.
Chariti: Yes! So, they think that I’m fresa and I’m not.
So because of my history, I just feel that language is so confusing.
For example, I have friends who are white and don’t have any identity tied up in it, and they learn Spanish so easily. I think it’s because they don’t feel the same pressure of practicing it, hence they feel comfortable making mistakes. For them, it’s just a cool thing to get to learn. It doesn’t reflect on them and their core identity, or this part of it they are missing. And that’s just Spanish. My dad’s from an indigenous town, and we don’t speak that language. So it just keeps going. It’s a sort of wounding around language.
The one other thing that I think is fascinating is that, because I was born on this side of the border, I have a very different privilege than my siblings. Because, even though I was raised very poor, I was raised very poor in the United States. Which means I have access to things that my siblings who were born in Mexico don’t.
I eventually reunited with my dad because he got amnesty and had a new family, and I have five half-siblings from that side who all live in Nevada. To my ear, my siblings speak perfect Spanish.. But most people think ‘they sound like country bumpkins, have poor grammar and bad Spanish’.
The other difference lies in the fact that since they left as children, they haven’t been back to Mexico. I, on the other hand, because my stepfamily is also Mexican, have been traveling to Mexico for the last 20 years or more. So we have a different relationship with Mexico.
We had this moment of meeting each other as adults and trying to understand what my life was like on this side of the border and their side of the border. And since my dad was still working in the United States, they didn’t feel like they had their dad either. The border just divided everything.
Then to think that because my parents have switched countries, my mom has lived in Mexico for 20 years and my dad’s been in Nevada, our relationship with Mexico and with the United States is like two sides of the same coin. It’s messy.
Adela: It’s really convoluted. And that experience is what I got from when we first met when you were talking about placemaking. It’s clear what you have been doing all your life, because you have been put in a space where you didn’t grow up having an actual place, both spiritually and physically. Which means that you’re inhabiting the in-between,
And even though that is a very hardcore experience, it’s also something that makes you a translator of worlds in a way that is an essential part of your career in between art and government. Isn’t it?
Chariti: Exactly, I feel like that’s the part that I have leaned into from my identity: I am bisexual, I am Biracial, I am bicultural, I am only kind of bilingual, not really (laughs). In fact, until recently, I was the only biracial person in my family. Because I have half-siblings who are white, I have half-siblings who are Afro-Mexican, but both of their parents are Mexican, so they don’t feel mixed in their identity in the same way.
So whether I choose it or not, I lean into that bi-experience with my identity: I am an artist and a musician, but I’m also a bureaucrat. I represent the government, I work for the “Man”. It is an interesting place, the place of an interpreter.
Adela: Yeah, that is something that I wanted to ask you about since you are this person that inhabits different places and that creates their own third space constantly: What are the places, not just physical, but also metaphorical in terms of music, people, and food that you find belonging in?
Chariti: One thing I’ve noticed in the United States, in college, is that I felt really comfortable with other mixed-race, bicultural people, even though they didn’t have the same mix as me. And that is more intense because I grew up in Oregon and Washington, which means I did not meet a lot of folks who had one American parent and one Mexican parent who were my age.
I had a lot of friends who were Mexican nationals or Mexican immigrants. And now I see younger people, who are mixed race or have a parent from each country. But back then, I felt very isolated. When I was in elementary school, there were only two Mexican families besides my half-family in an entire elementary school. Can you imagine that?
Adela: That’s intense. I mean, you grew up in one of the most white places.
Chariti: Yeah. So I learned early on that I was really comfortable with the other kids whose families were different from the American dominant culture norm. And I felt that even more so in college, a place to finally experience our identities and meet people who were not from the same towns and cities.
Something that also makes me feel a sense of belonging is music. For me, music is not about performing or being the center of the stage. It’s about building community. I love being in a group, and playing music with other people because you are creating something outside of yourself, even though it’s ephemeral.
When you play, you learn a non-verbal language with your bandmates; you’re communicating without talking, while you are playing together. But then there’s also that mix of creating community through that music.
I first did that with the Brazilian music community in Portland. I just fell in love with Brazilian music when I was like 12 years old because I played the tenor saxophone and one of my parents’ friends gave me that album of Stan Getz.
Adela: The black and orange one? I love that one.
Chariti: Yes. And that’s how I found out what you could do with the saxophone, and it turned into a gateway for Brazilian music and these rhythms. I ended up in a Forro band, with Brazilian bandmates. Forro is from Northeastern Brazil. We started playing out and people came.
There was such a community around it, that I would see people in our audience singing, swaying, and singing along to the songs. We had folks who would tell us that they hadn’t danced like that since they left home. This is why having that third place, even though it’s in a nightclub, transcends that through culture and sharing musical knowledge.
Because I am mixed-race and ethnically ambiguous-looking, though, and I was on stage singing in Portuguese, people would be like, oh, are you Brazilian? And I kept saying, no, I’m Mexican.
Which finally led me to learning Mexican music. I started studying the Mexican Son Jarocho and working with a whole group of people in Portland to bring teachers up from Mexico to do a cultural exchange. Those became talleres and Fandango.
And even though I’m not from Veracruz (where the Son Jarocho is from), I am not Jarocha. That music has become a really important way for me and for many communities in the United States to have a connection with their culture.
Adela: Was there any specific workshop or Fandango that you remember as being especially impactful to you?
Chariti: Yeah, a few. There’s an event that’s been going on for years. It’s called the Fandango Fronterizo, there have been stories in the New York Times about it. It’s at Friendship Park at the border wall, south of San Diego and Tijuana.
And the organizers do an incredible job, they would get a permit to be in Friendship Park, which is a militarized zone on the US side, it’s so wild. With the permits, you can just be in this one area where we would put the tarimas up against the border wall, that it’s like mesh, layers of malla that you can kind of see through.
Then on the Mexico side, in Tijuana, they would do the same thing and people would be barely able to see each other through the wire but the sound traveled. So we’d be singing and playing music across the border to each other. And that in itself was so impactful. Full stop.
It would be a daytime event, but afterward, folks who could cross the border would go over to Tijuana and have a Fandango all night.
One of the things that was moving was that on the US side, a lot of the roads washed out and we had to get rides to drive back with the tarimas on the back of a border patrol vehicle. And I was talking to the border patrol agent, and he was Latino, asking ‘What is it like for you to be Latino and a border patrol agent?’ And he was like,’ No, it’s great. I get to use my skills and my community connections, and I’m able to help these people. And in my head, I was like wow, ‘how is it that that’s what you think you’re doing?’ That was fascinating to me.
And then I think that another moment that really broke my heart was on the Tijuana side. That side was just incredible, there was so much life, a stark difference: on the US side, you’re surrounded by barbed wire and there’s border patrol going up and down as well as all these lights. You have to get a permit to exist in that US space between these two countries for just a few hours.
And on exactly on the other side of the wall, in Mexico, people were painting a mural on the border wall with all the names of Mexican Americans who had fought in US wars. And then there were people doing their Quinceañera photos and having a book festival on the boardwalk. There was so much life, beachgoers, and lowriders, people were just right against the border as if the border didn’t matter. As if saying ‘We’re still living our life right up to the edge’. It was just so interesting.
I cherish that and I think about that space a lot. I mean we’re sitting in a park right now, I work for the government, for Portland. I used to work in parks. And now that I work in arts and culture, I keep that image in my head about what it looks like on the US side versus what it looks like on the Mexico side.
Later that night on the Mexico side, I wandered off down towards the water and there was a young Mexican man who had a very rural accent and had been swimming out in the middle of the night trying to get out past the wall to the US. It was heartbreaking.
And there’s border patrol right on the other side of that wall, and they were patrolling with lights and he was just getting tossed by the waves in all of his clothes. And I was like, are you okay? And he was not wanting to be seen, just trying to hide in the shadows, trying to get the strength to swim out into the ocean. Far enough to get past the wall.
Adela: Oh God.
Chariti: And I just… there are no words for it, you know?
Moments like that make me think a lot about what I look like: I’m a light-skinned person and you would never think that that border has any impact on my life. But my stepbrother and his wife tried to cross last year and got detained and I had to find them and figure out where they were and send money. They had all their documentation taken away when they were released on the Mexico side and I had to help get back home in Mexico City.
It just feels like the pain of that border doesn’t end. It hasn’t ended.
Adela: First of all, thank you for everything that you just shared. It is very vulnerable and I hold it in my heart. And secondly, I feel like you are one of those people for whom where it hurts is where you end up working your butt off to make it better.
Do you feel like this way in which you inhabit the world in the in-between made it so that you could code-switch and jester your way into change and placemaking for underrepresented people in the government from the inside?
Chariti: Yeah, actually, I decided right after college, that I was gonna have more access to power if I was on the inside, to affect change that way.
Adela: How did you come to that conclusion? It is interesting to me where people who want to make change decide to stand from and why.
Chariti: I did Sustainability Studies for my major. My focus was Earthen Architecture and natural building. I studied with a Welsh architect and with a Mexican architect in Mexico. I was ready to change the world and thought we were all gonna live in Earthen buildings, and a lot of us do in the world, and they’re beautiful.
But at some point, I realized that we have a different seismic situation in Portland and that’s not necessarily the right thing for here. I thought that just by knowledge I was gonna change how architecture and our relationship to built-in environments work; but whilst working with some of my mentors, I realized that we had codes to follow: seismic codes, engineering codes, and building codes. And I also understood that you can work through the permitting system for those codes to make what you imagine legal.
And because of that, we were able to build a straw bale house. I drew the plans for a couple with compromised immune systems in Thurston County (WA), outside of Olympia and it was permitted. I was able to work with the government people at the permit counter to have it exist legally in that space.
So that made me come to terms with the reality that here’s the ideal of what we want and over here’s the bureaucratic process to get there and I had the skills to walk between the two. Going back to being the interpreter or the translator of the two worlds: I can build this house by hand, but if it’s not legal in the place where I live, it’s vulnerable. I think that’s when I realized that I could live in both of these worlds and I could help people navigate this bureaucracy.
No wonder my first full-time job with the city of Portland was in the permitting department, where I was able to use my background in architecture to help people navigate this complex regulatory permitting system. And I never stop playing on the side.
I would be at the permit counter, during the day, and then my coworkers would see me working the door at a Club on the weekend or see my band playing at the summer concert at Sellwood Park. I kept inhabiting both places.
One of my mentors, when I first got a job in the city said: ‘Be careful Chariti, it’s like being in golden handcuffs, make sure this is really what you want and like, check in with yourself every couple of years’.
And I took that really seriously. But also that mentor came from a place of privilege that I didn’t come from. So I was, like ‘golden handcuffs to you. You have the choice not to work in a job like this, but I don’t necessarily have that choice. This is an amazing job for a poor kid who used to be unhoused…look at what I’m doing here. That feels pretty amazing’.
Adela: It does sound dreamy! How did you transition to working in parks programming and arts engagement then?
Chariti: The thread was music. My band played at the outdoor Summer Free for All Parks concerts, and I realized it was somebody’s job in the city to produce those events. And I was like, let me have thissss.
It took a few years, but I did move over to the parks department. A lot of what we do we’re producing events, but a lot of it was also helping people who wanted to produce their own events outside understand how to do it, how to navigate that process. So there’s always been this layer in my work of making awesome ephemeral places and also helping people navigate through the system.
In the events we were doing, I saw them reflected on what I experienced as a young person in Portland because the summer is beautiful here. And I was always at every outdoor free concert I could be at when I was a kid. So when I stepped into that role, I could see that community happening around the movies, the concerts, and the cultural festivals that we were creating as part of Summer Free for All.
I remember we did a concert in the park near my house and I walked out of my door towards the park and other people were walking out of their doors and they were walking towards it too. I was like, ‘These are my neighbors, and even though we don’t even talk to each other, we are all headed to the same place right now to go do this thing that it doesn’t matter if we know each other or not, or if we have the same politics or not, we are in the community right now experiencing this’. I was doing ephemeral placemaking, simply by providing the infrastructure.
We had to bring in the stage, the sound, the band and the tarima. And by making that container something really special happens and then it’s gone. And that’s part of the beauty of it. It’s a ritual that happens every year. It comes with the seasons, but it’s part of this larger cycle and I just find that so beautiful.
Adela: It’s amazing, the power of holding space for togetherness, identification, and catharsis through music is something I also hold dearly. And When you were talking about that ephemeral placemaking, I was thinking that you’re both making containers for these transient places of belonging, but you’re also being a Wayfinder because you’re helping people navigate the grants and governmental system in order to get with them where they need to be
Reading about the Summer Free World and how back in 2015 you saw that the people that attended these events were of the dominant culture. I am curious about how you have worked to make it so that people from different communities of Portland can both have a place, but also learn to navigate to become the place makers themselves. Both before and now as the Director of Arts and Culture.
Chariti: With Summer Free for All, at the movies and concerts, we slowly shifted who we partnered with. We made sure that we were partnering with culturally specific community groups so that they had a say in when, where, and what movie in the band was shown.
We also started doing movies in languages other than English. And the first movie that we did in Spanish with English subtitles, I got hate mail because people were so offended that we did that movie in their park in Spanish, even though we made sure that we played that same movie in another park in English. But the team at the city stood behind us a hundred percent. And I went to the event that night, and there were 300 smiling brown faces watching the movie.
So, we kept doing more movies in more languages, translating our schedules into 16 languages when I was working there. And we made sure that there were community members who spoke those languages to write them.
On the other hand, I’m interested in the fact that you called what I do wayfinding. I’ve never thought of it that way. But I do remember sitting with a leader in the Tongan community, helping them navigate the event production process, sitting in my office together, because we were in our second or third year of doing the Tonga Festival. That’s an immigrant community that’s been here for decades and still feels marginalized. It was so valuable to be able to provide access and help people navigate those systems.
Adela: And how have you been doing that wayfinding and place-making in the Office of Arts and Culture?
Chariti: At the Office of Arts and Culture, it’s all very new, and there’s so much change at the city government level. But, the work we’re trying to do is making sure that we’re supporting arts organizations, and cultural organizations, and not letting things fall through the cracks while we are all undergoing all of this transition that is happening.
Specifically, we have a cultural plan called Our Creative Future, and we’re working on the Portland implementation plan for that, called the Portland Action Plan. And I think that there are ways that we’re going to be engaging with the community more around that plan.
Adela: And how does that actually look at the government level? When you say that you are gonna engage with the community to make that program happen, what does that look like? Do you go to neighborhoods and town meetings? Do you make surveys?
Chariti: There are a lot of ways that we do community engagement and government. Sometimes we hold meetings in community spaces. For some of that specifically our community is also arts organizations and arts leaders. And I do my best to go to them and to see their programming and to build a relationship that way first, to understand their work. We also do lots of one-on-one conversations.
When the transition to being districts was happening, we did arts talks in each district in the community space, oftentimes the community center (parks have lots of community centers, so that’s awesome). We have been doing that combo where we are going to people’s events just to build a relationship with the community and also inviting people downtown to be with us in the Portland Building. Now that we have hybrid meetings, on Zoom, that also makes it possible for people to participate from other spaces, which wasn’t accessible before the pandemic.
My team is now building out a community engagement plan specifically for the Portland Action Plan with the cultural plan that exists with seven different jurisdictions, and multiple governments participating. The plan was led by a 21-person community steering committee that did around 50 focus groups, as well as surveys, and town halls.
And even though I don’t think we have caught our breath enough yet, there are a couple of examples that we have done with the whole team. One is that the city arts program manager who was in the program before we expanded it to the Office of Arts and Culture, worked with these federal funds and made a contract with the NAYA(Native American Youth and Family Center) because they looked at the lack of Indigenous representation in public art and wanted to do something about it.
So it contracted with the NAYA to work directly with indigenous artists to commission the pieces, which are now going off on the 42nd. There’s a piece: Raven’s Welcome that’s already unveiled and then there’s another piece on the PCC campus; those pieces will be part of the city’s permanent public art collection.
Adela: Did the NAYA choose them or did you choose them collaboratively with the Office of Arts and Culture?
Chariti: The NAYA made that selection. On the other hand, there are the pieces you all saw that are in the Portland Building. Generally, all of our public pieces are selected by a community panel of artists. And our partners at RACC (the Regional Culture Council) are the ones that invited the Indigenous artists that are on the first and second floors.
As the Arts and Culture Office, we are being intentional about public art specifically by encouraging representation of all Portland communities, with a focus on commissioning and purchasing artworks from BIPOC artists for our permanent collection.
However, we don’t just think about it as a public, physical art, we also work with school districts across the city. They receive funds from the Arts Access fund, from the arts tax, so that every elementary school in Portland has an arts teacher or music teacher.
And there is a wonderful event that Portland Public Schools has been doing for like 10 years, called the Heart of Portland that just wrapped up which showcases part of that work. They had it at the Portland Art Museum (PAM) with a visual art component, an exhibition in the gallery space, and performances.
In the past, those performances have always been in the Portland Public Schools. This year, the Office of Arts and Culture and the Arts Education Coordinator worked to bring in this idea of doing student art in our gallery on the second floor of the Portland Building. We also did student art in the Literary Arts in their bookstore, as well as an exhibition in the Goat Blocks, in a vacant building. The kids that get to exhibit are of all ages, from different school districts. So, Reynolds and David Douglas are represented.
Finally, at the Heart of Portland closing event, there are performances from youth from Park Rose and from other school districts that are a little farther away from the central city, who we’ve been working to bring into the larger Portland City arts scene, experience, and education.
I think that’s something my team –and especially the Arts Education Coordinator– has been really great at: centering youth and kids, seeing them as creative people, as artists, and as an important part of our civic community in Portland. And I’m so proud of my team for that and so happy to see those kids react to it too.
Adela: That must be amazing, to go back to the experience of you not feeling like you were being seen in art within Oregon itself. What a wonderful effect it must have on a kid to have their own fucking art on the wall.
And, speaking of youth and education, nobody teaches you how to be a living artist. I am still super intimidated by applying for grants, for example. Is that something that the Office has thought about? Making more educational opportunities to make those processes more accessible the way you have made it for people one-on-one in the past?
Chariti: We do that a lot with our partners because we can’t do everything, we are 8 people (laughs). So we work with the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the friends of IFCC and Music Oregon to do grants to individual artists. Everyone who runs a grant program for us helps people get through the process of applying for the grant.
And because we are hearing that professional development is something people want, what we are asking ourselves is: how can we find existing organizations that already work on that to invest in?
Adela: Absolutely. It’s the question of: how can you assemble with other people who have the educational capability of doing that with you since you are 8 people? I feel like that’s something that I’m hearing you’re very good at: assembling, which is also translating. Because in order to bring people together you have to use the language of one and then the language of the other, to create a common one.
This is why it is so exciting to work with you and the Office of Arts and Culture to bring forth Assembly 2025, our event of experiential projects, workshops, and performances. I can’t wait to keep finding new ways to place-make together.
Chariti: Yeah! Excited to see what we can do!