Episode 1 of VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising
This is a three-part audio series documenting the event ‘VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising’. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Naarm/Melbourne, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya/Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and ACE in June 2022. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Arlie Alizzi, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Khan and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices. A group of attendants including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia were invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Seated in a circle, the event was structured around a rolling conversation and a series of performances. For full details on each attendant and theme, please download the VERS program.
This is the first episode of VERS, where we listen to a conversation between Brian Fuata, V Barratt, Daniel Jaber and Frances Barrett held on 17 June 2022.
This episode has a strong language warning.
Credits
This project was commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art and presented on site and in association with Samstag Museum of Art and ACE. It has been supported by the City of Adelaide. VERS graphics by Hana Shimada. VERS performances curated by Frances Barrett. Audio setup, technical support and recording by Mosaic Audio Visual. Podcast editing and production by Tilly Balding, Solstice Podcasting. This podcast is supported by Solstice Podcasting, Monash University Museum of Art and Samstag Museum of Art.
Transcript
This is a three-part audio series documenting the event VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising. Initiated by Monash University Museum of Art, VERS took place over two days on Kaurna Country in Tarntanya Adelaide at Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Arlie Alizzi, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Kahn and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices.
A group of attendants, including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia were invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Seated in a circle, the event was structured around a rolling conversation and a series of performances. For full details on each attendant and theme, please download the VERS program from the MUMA website, the link to which is in the episode description. This audio series is structured in three parts. This is the first episode of VERS, where we will now listen to a conversation between Brian Fuata, V Barratt, Daniel Jaber and Frances Barrett, held on 17th of June, 2022. My name is Frances Barrett, and I hope you enjoy.
[Short music clip]
[Audience applause]
Frances Barrett: Thank you so much, Erica. So my name is Frances, and I’m a lecturer here at Uni SA teaching into the contemporary art program. I’m also an artist and curator, and I’ve been working with Archie and with Mel, with MUMA, Samstag and ACE to develop VERS. And so this has been a long time coming, we’ve been working on it for a few years now, and due to COVID it has sort of stretched out over time and space, so it’s really wonderful to have it here situated at Samstag and in Tarntanya Adelaide. And I’d just like to say thank you to all involved: Hannah, Mel and Francis Parker from MUMA, Grace, in particular, from ACE and all the team, Gill, Teresa, from Samstag. So tonight initiates the program VERS, subtitled On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/organising. And it aims to create a triangulation between the program that’s being held at Samstag at the moment - so between Rot, between Exosmosis, and between VERS. And so rather than sort of create an explanation of each of these three programs, I thought maybe having a conversation that draws out the connections or the dissonances between these three projects. And to also initiate, I guess, this event as a conversation. So what we’ll do is, Daniel, V and Brian and I will be in conversation, then we’ll open it out to everyone here for questions. Please feel free as well to come into the inner sanctum of the circle. So you’re very welcome to move in. And, I guess, [laughs] please, please come in.
Daniel Jaber: Oh, it’s already feeling better. That’s nice. That’s nice. Come in, get in there. Thanks.
Frances: And so Erica already introduced each of the artists talking today, and I guess Daniel being a choreographer and dancer, who is doing an endurance performance Rot in Gallery 2. And when I think of your work, Daniel, I think about the tentacles of desire, when I... [laughs]
Daniel: Okay!
Frances: V, you’re an artist, who I’ve known for a long time now, and we’ve yeah, been in dialogue about...
V Barratt: Of no relation.
Frances: Of no relation, V Barratt, Francis Barrett, but of no relation. And when I think of your performance, I think of the bodies without organs and that as a real starting point and connection between us. And Brian has been a long term inspiration of my work. And I guess, when I think of Brian, I think of joy as a destabilising force. And so each artist works with performance and whose practices I consider extend our conceptions of desire, of embodiment, and of temporal spatial registers. And each of their practices challenge institutional frameworks for the presentation and reception of bodies.
So I thought maybe just starting with three quite direct questions about each of your practices and the projects you’ve recently been presenting, and then we might sort of think about what the connections are between each of the works. So it might be about a 30 to 40 minute conversation and then open out to audience. So Daniel, you are presenting three performances at Samstag, which are across 2022. And the title of these performances are Rite, Rot and Dirt. Could you talk about, I guess the overall intention of this series of performances and what I guess each of them focus on?
Daniel: Yeah. Yes, I can. Microphones are my least favourite things in the world. So, okay. Yes. So I’m creating a performance trilogy being performed here at Samstag throughout the course of this year. And as Frances had mentioned, there… the three pieces, Rite, Dirt and Rot, for me, I guess the overarching or the umbrella thematic that I’m really preoccupied and concerned with exploring in a creative and performative way is how we embody and carry guilt and shame around identity and also around sex and sexuality and sexual freedom. So the works kind of for me sit very simply in a sort of timeline or a chronology. Rite was sort of this angsty inner child stuff that I still deal with and this kind of pent up punk, teenage, anger problems. And then Rot is actually the conclusion of the trilogy, it’s just being performed second, but that’s a minor detail I don’t think any of us should spend too much time on.
Rot has to do with death and this question of all of life absurdities, I guess, and how we live with so much tension and conflict and issue. And at the end of the day, I guess, for what, is my question? What is going to matter when I’m hopefully laying on my death bed? And then Dirt is kind of, I guess where I’m sort of sitting at the moment, which is kind of this ability to have simultaneous clarity as well as be really still very confused about why I feel so shameful and guilty for being who I am. Not all the time, just sometimes, most of the time I think I’m great and really embrace, you know what’s happening, what choice do you have. But yeah, the three pieces just basically sit in this timeline, start, middle and end really. So I hope that answers your question.
Frances: I think it’s a good introduction. And V, I was wondering, last night you presented Exosmosis, which is a collaborative performance installation with Em König, and that does, as Erica mentioned, centres on annihilation and transformation. And so I was wondering, as a starting point for this performance, was a concept that Eli Moss shared with you about imaginal discs. Can you talk to what imaginal discs are and how that, I guess, has informed the performance and installation?
V: Yeah, I mean, I’m not a biologist or a bug fancier. I mean, I am a bug fancier actually, but at a purely you know kind of gut flora level. So my understanding of imaginal discs is that these are the discs that exist inside, say pupae, a caterpillar, for example. And these imaginal discs are the things which facilitate transformation of that grub into a bug. So the discs hold information about certain parts of the bug’s body. So there are leg imaginal discs and wing imaginal discs and so on. So those discs or cells contain that information, but that information is only available once the grub has annihilated itself, if you like. So it enters into this process, this kind of autophagic process where it secretes digestive juices and then eats itself and becomes goop. And then once it’s goop, those imaginal discs are free to proliferate.
Having done some more reading, what’s also interesting about the imaginal discs is that they are first detected by the caterpillar body as an intruder cell. And so the caterpillar really tries to resist transformation, but ultimately it is overwhelmed by the proliferation of the imaginal discs, these cells, and it becomes bug, butterfly, moth, whatever. But I guess what is interesting about this process is the fact that it can’t become part butterfly, you know I want to keep this part of the caterpillar, and I just want to be this part moth. It has to completely annihilate itself and into a state of, I guess, what I would call undifferentiated materiality before it can become a completely different form. So that’s the basis of what an imaginable disc is, and a very kind of simple building block and connection point for expanding on other kind of existential concerns that I’ve had since I was in the womb.
Frances: And Brian, so recently you presented a performative installation and it was called Errantucation (mist opportunities) as part of the Asia Pacific Triennial at GOMA. And this project was a significant new direction for you because it sort of signaled the end of the ghost. Who or what was the ghost, and what does it mean to kill off the ghost?
Brian Fuata: So I said goodbye to 11 years of the ghost practice, similar to V in regards to this idea of autophagy. We look at an artist’s practice as a body of practice that empowers itself. After eleven years, ran out. Had nothing. So the APT performance was a closing night, closing weekend… I had to kind of like, I had to say goodbye to the ghost, and I thought, maybe a way is to expose, expose the strategies, the techniques, the forms, composition strategies, techniques, forms that shaped the ghost and … autophagy. How to recycle. The ghost was always this kind of evasion. Evasion of representation. How to not perform being brown? How to not perform being gay? How not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform, how not to perform, and how not to perform, and that is the fucking performance, not performing. Not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, not to perform, perform, perform, perform, perform, perform, perform, buh beh, buh beh, buh beh, buh beh… Mike up.
So post-ghost, I’ve been thinking, shadows. Sssss. Buh. Uh, ah, ssse, ssse. Or, k, k, buh, uh, ah, sse, sse, or, k, k… Black. [sings dramatically] Is the colour… of my true love’s hand. Buh, uh, ah, sse, sse, or, k, k… [sings] is the colour of my true love’s hand. Mike drop uh iirrr zzr. Pause. Pause. See, fuck, occasionally, forget to put the timer on. So let’s just put one minute. Pores, open. Pores, down. Pores, open. Pause, like a cat. Pause, for dramatic effect. Pause, for sensation, pause for reverb, pause...
Frances: And at this point it might be nice to say thank you so much to Heather from the Deaf Butterfly Effect for interpretation this evening. And maybe leading from that, thinking about the role of improvisation in your practices, maybe V and Daniel, you could talk to improvisation and how you approach that.
V: Improvisation is terrifying. Terr-i-fying. And I guess, I think that it is more of an accumulation of affect. So, I need to be able to trust my kind of affective flow and maybe kind of know where I’m going, but also just fucking chill and be open and as always attempting to access the flow state. And actually, I think that is the key, is flow state.
Frances: Could you talk to what flow state is?
V: Yeah. So for me as a neurodivergent person with multiple, kind of, whatever diagnoses, I experience a lot of panic and anxiety. I try to access a space where I am not doing a narrative about - this is what I’m feeling now, this is what I’m doing now, how am I feeling now, what am I doing in the world, where’s my hand, where are my feet, where’s my head, where is my guts, where - you know. Is my head on my body, are my hands attached to my arms and so on. So I need to be able to find a place where I drop out of that and into a different kind of experience of the world where I’m... Hyper fixation, okay, hyper focus - I think that’s just what I’m talking about. I’m talking about hyper fixation, hyper focus, which is a super power as also an ADHD person, it’s a super power if you know how to harness it. And I have certainly used it in the last months of my PhD and it’s been a fucking incredible discovery, actually a really incredible discovery.
Hyper focus is amazing. It’s just the upshot of that is that you have to cut off your arms and your legs and everything else and have only the cognitive faculties and potentially your eyes, and also your fingertips for your keyboard in order to... No scrolling. No scrolling, potentially no eating. Also, maybe also no sleeping. But I found the last few months of my PhD really quite pleasurable. I know shocking, but hyperfocused, hyper fixation. And when I’m in a hyperfocused or hyper fixated space, then I can be calm and it can flow and there are no institutional blockages in my body. I have destroyed the institutionalised blockages in my body to the affects which arise. I don’t feel embarrassed, or shy, or constrained in any way. I will say and do and feel whatever the fuck I feel when I’m in that hyper fixated space, which is a very nice flow. Now I know I seem to have gone a long way away from that thing, which I’ve lost the word for, improvisation, but I haven’t. That’s what it’s about. It’s about dropping in hyper fixation flow, but also a lifetime of accumulated knowledges, a lifetime of accumulated affect, which you can tap into and spit like Brian fucking spits. You spit, you’re awesome.
Frances: Daniel, do you spit? Or how do you spit?
[Laughter]
Daniel: I’m not sure how to answer. [Laughter] In a conservative manner that won’t get me in trouble, or have someone call the police?
Now I’ll use the microphone because that was a bit dirty. Just didn’t want you to hear that. So for me, improvisation, I’m not sure if I spit. For me, improvisation is like... It’s exactly like the dressing up box or the treasure test. So it’s where I go to find things. It’s where I go to become a renewed version of myself. It’s where I go and try to put something on that I never would’ve tried on ever before. That could be a wig or a pair of pants or stilettos or, I don’t know. I just think that I rarely use improvisation, I think as a tool or a modality for exploring ideas that are already there. And for me, a lot of the time, the process of improvisation is to find what to do next.
Actually, all of these three pieces were basically discovered through day long durational improvisations in a studio where I came across a feeling or something that was happening in my body and then I get the opportunity to reflect and expand and articulate that and figure out what it is. And then I kind of feel like I have somewhere to go. But also different to the context, I guess, of improvising as a dancer, which can be for training, for technique, for composition, for generating content for a work or blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But for me it’s about finding, it’s the place of the unknown.
Frances: And from spitting to pleasure, I’m wondering, Brian, when or where do you find pleasure in your work?
Brian: It’s ripping off what Dan and V said in regards to this choreography of affect, right? Improvisation is never free. You are relying on the literacy and archive of gestures, of affective kind of orchestrations that you go, okay, cool, if I make this sound, I know that generates some kind of... [intake of breath] And then it becomes sculptural, right? And then in relating to what Dan said in regards to, it’s a research process, it’s a strategy within which to generate material. In our work at ACCA, that strategy was given an actual term, which is about divination.
And so this hyper fixation, this hyper focus is this... There’s an eros in that, there’s a total erotic moment where you are in the ecstasy of having found an image or a position of an image. There’s also duality, because there’s the image in which you go, okay, cool, I think this is a nice kind of thing. But then also the image of improvisation which within which I’m also relying on the audience to contribute to their reading of the work. But going back to pleasure, pleasure needs boundaries, right? And so improvisation needs also grounding. And so, conviviality, a casual kind of… a humour becomes a way for me to make the audience supple within which then these poetic rhapsodies are allowed to exist and abstraction can come forth. Yeah.
Frances: I watched an interview that GOMA did with you, and you talked about the lens of joy and humour as being important to introduce into these institutional spaces. And so I was thinking, yeah, is humour and this idea of lens of joy, how does that antagonise or challenge those spaces?
Brian: On a basic level, on an everyday level, on the ground level, this relationality of joy was also exercised with these genuine connections that I had with the floor staff, with the cleaners. And so the political project of improvisation that generates material from the world at large includes also relationality as a material. And so that’s intangible. You can’t really qualify that in regards to a kind of institutional paradigm or qualification. So joy then becomes also both visible and invisible in the way that the gallery has clocked that. Does that make sense? My relationship with the staff is not clockable, right? But they know and also the curators know, they’re like, okay, you’ve created this unseen material within which your material, your performances, will also sculpt. And so they quite often become complicit to these like impromptu events. So joy is both material and also this sincere goofy moment of interaction.
Frances: And so it’s using, I guess, the relationships that you forge along the way, using that as both material, but also as a force of the work or something.
Brian: Yeah. And that joy is not also just wishy washy. There’s a political paradigm that necessitates some kind of shift within which how the staff even operate with each other. I was working in the research library for quite some time, and the lovely aunties who looked after me didn’t even know the cleaner who had been working there for five years. I was like, that’s intense. And so joy then becomes this palpable, real thing that then also confronts them and the fact that they don’t know fucking Maria.
Frances: And V and Daniel, do you want to respond to the idea of pleasure in your work or to what Brian said?
V: Yeah, that’s making me think about collaboration, which I consider to be the work, not the act as such, but collaboration itself is the work. And that I think that possibly pleasure and joy couldn’t exist within this, for me, within this institutional notion of a solo career or something like that.
So, you know, all of my works - I feel uncomfortable actually saying my work, or having people say that, hey, V, you were amazing. It’s like, my voice only exists in relationship to M, who was on the sound desk, Lauren, who was distant, doing remote work within relationship to my sister, who cooked me a meal last night, within a relationship of all of those people. And I wouldn’t be able to experience that joy without acknowledging and… not acknowledging, but living within, as a politics, as a daily praxis, within an extended relationship to all other beings: sentient, non-sentient, and so on. But I was also thinking about joy and pleasure as this kind of contested concept. I don’t really know what they mean as a person who has experienced anhedonia only a lot in their life, which is a complete absence of joy in a diagnostic framework.
Joy is this really intangible concept I’m always reaching for. And I feel somehow less than or lacking if I don’t chase pleasure or joy. My life is a little bit sad if I don’t have pleasure and joy, if I don’t, you know, have lots of orgasms or I don’t, you know, experience social or sexual pleasure, somehow I feel like my life is potentially lacking. I think...
Brian: Can I just add to that, for me joy is then... My praxis of joy is really dumb. It’s so dumb. And there’s this stupidity in that, that is actually really enga... I find that, the fool - a medium of joy.
V: I feel like you’re then creating joy through that vocality, and you’re like, ‘Maaaate’. The shape of that sound, that actual vocality, wraps around somebody and draws them in. That’s a really beautiful thing. Daniel, just thinking about how you discover pleasure when you’re in, watching... Sorry, I wasn’t talking into my microphone. When you discover pleasure in performance, that’s also just something you discover on the fly. And watching Daniel perform Rot this morning, I was like, that’s interesting, I know more about you than I knew before. I know that you’ve made some choices around this performance and you’ve made them because they bring you pleasure. So that’s a something.
Daniel: That is indeed a something. The question of pleasure is really interesting for me because, um, I think... Well, all week V’s been walking past little rehearsals upstairs saying, you are such a masochist, how long are you going to do this for? You are such a masochist.
[V laughing]
V: In a good way, in a good way.
Daniel: Yeah in a really good way. And if somebody says that to me, I don’t immediately think that there’s a judgment being cast upon me because it’s actually very true and really beautiful and actually a part of this whole dealing with guilt and shame and blah, blah, blah, that I really love and accept and own, now. But yeah, this idea of actually pain and pleasure and that potentially for me, and maybe it’s... I don’t know why, but I think for me, pain and pleasure is like a flick of a switch. It can be the same experience or the same context or the same permission or asking or task or something. And on one hand, on one flick of the switch, it’s excruciating. And on the other flick of the switch, it’s absolutely, immensely pleasurable, life changingly pleasurable. What’s the word? Transformative. Yeah.
So yeah, I find pleasure’s really interesting for me. I mean on a really simple, simple level, I’ve just loved dancing since I was four. And then the times in my life where dancing has been taken away or that the visibility of dancing my life as a career, as part of who I am, as my way of expressing myself, when that was foggy or cloudy, I was so afraid, scared of life, scared of who I would become, what I would become. And also just really lonely because it’s a big part, you know, what I do and that I get to wake up every day and do it is pleasure, I think.
Frances: And perhaps my final question to you, is, who do you perform for? Human? More than human? Community? Yourselves?
V: I kind of don’t know the answer to that question, but I also know that it’s important to me to perform in order to maintain my integral self. Although my performance is basically about annihilation and the fact that the integral self is a complete fallacy, there is no such thing. But that, yeah, I think I may... I don’t know, I would just [blows air out], maybe disappear if I wasn’t doing it. Maybe for myself. But also what you were saying before, I know that if I make this noise or if I use, a particular, tone, that I can make something happen. So in that sense, I am trying to make something happen. So it’s not just entirely for me.
Brian: I perform for and to the public.
[Brian laughs, general laughter]
Yeah, I perform for people, and it’s necessary because otherwise, I guess my training in theatre was really kind of set up… this relationship, and this fucked up politics around theatre, the proscenium arch lens within which desire, and um, there’s a masochism there. Because I remember Chris Ryan, who’s a dear friend of ours who taught us when we were kids, was like, ‘In theater, the actor wants the audience to love you.’ And I was like, ‘Ah, shit.’ And I guess in that sense there are traits to that. But then I wonder in my practice, post black box, how to manipulate that situation and then use the different tropes of theatre to engage this relationship that blows the paradigm of quotidian, banal, performance of self, and then these heightened staged characters and persona. And so that can only be a public relationship. And I guess for us as artists, we’re having to negotiate the different types of publics and how we can choreograph different relationships of the person in public space and of public space.
Frances: Daniel.
Daniel: Okay, I’m going to say, I think I should mention it because it comes to mind, but also I think I understand also how naff it’s going to sound coming out. But I had an experience when I was young, like a child, going to see a dance performance that really just significantly shifted my entire perception of not only the world and how the world could be viewed, but also my sense of belongingness.
So I guess after seeing this piece, I felt like I had tribe, or I felt like, oh, there was some other kind of really wacky person out there that’s saying these things that I think, that I don’t get access to in a more conventional upbringing that I’m experiencing. And I think that in a way, despite the nudity or the shitting or the pissing or the throwing up or the masturbating, in a way, all of my... I don’t know, I perform to have that moment with someone over the course of... I don’t know, I just, I don’t know, I want someone to look up and kind of go, oh, okay, I can find something in you that’s a commonality. And I think that goes back to pleasure. The thing I love the most about making work and performing is connection and communication. And I may not do that articulately through language, but through vision and visuals or through choreography. So I think that they are hand in hand, those two things. But yeah, I think I do it for that little queer boy on the farm that’s a different colour to most of the other kids really. Or anyone that’s suffering from being the outcast and the weirdo.
Frances: Maybe an opportunity to, if there’s a question for you to each other, are there any questions that you have of each other?
V: I wanted to know what your relationship to plosives is.
Brian: What’s plosives again?
V: Plosives. P, p p p. G, g, b b b, b.
Brian: I guess mean it sounds really naff, but the mouth is an instrument and so I do kind of like get myself into certain sounds that I like, and p p p p, quite often, when it’s combined with a kind of physical gesture, the gesture then also then kind of expands on how the plosive might then turn into another sound.
V: It’s like a stop where you can build up some energy.
Brian: It’s a resting moment too. Yeah. I mean these are also kind of formal, formal, ah... They’re practical things. So if I go um, stop-puh stop-puh stop-puh, the ‘puh’ is a kind of plateau and how it stops, the brevity of it, allows me some space to then think of some more content. [V laughs] So, ‘puh’, and you let the expiration come out and you go, ah, cool, now I’m going to go k k k k k k k k k.
Frances: It’s like when politicians say, ‘That’s a very good question’.
Brian: Yeah [laughs] [laughter]
Frances: They’re just biding their time.
Brian: That’s a really good question. K k k k k k k k k k [laughs], puh, buh, buh [laughs] [general laughter]
Frances: Thank you. Just like to say thank you for everyone to come and to remind everyone that VERS starts again at 1:00 PM tomorrow. So I’d like to welcome you all back. There are programs available, for free, at the front desk...
Brian: Pleasurable… free…
Frances: Just like to thank Erica and Samstag, Hannah and MUMA, Heather and the Deaf Butterfly Effect, Grace and Ace. So thank you so much and have a great night. And we might head to the West Oak for drinks, so everyone’s welcome. Thank you.
[Applause]
[Short musical phrase]
You’ve been listening to VERS, recorded at Samstag Museum of Art on the 17th of June. This audio document is supported by Solstice Podcasting, Monash University Museum of Art, and Samstag Museum of Art. Edited and produced by Tilly Balding in Tarntanya Adelaide in September, 2022.
[End of transcript]