(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) Meghan Moe Beitiks - Performing Resilience For Systemic Pain-Routledge (2022)

Performing Resilience for
Systemic Pain
How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and
pain, in humans and ecologies?
While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of
Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma
Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New
Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research,
Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy,
Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer
that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making
the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored
within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like
trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to
commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience
and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential
utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values
explored in the work and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling work to be
done.
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet
presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive,
destructive realities.
Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and dissociations

of culture/nature/structure. Her work has been published in Performance
Philosophy, Performance Research, Journal for Artistic Research, Unlikely Journal
for Creative Arts, and World Futures. The last chapter of her project A Lab
for Apologies and Forgiveness is a book with Candor Arts. She is currently an
Interdisciplinary Studio Art Lecturer at the University of Florida.
Routledge Advances in Theater and Performance Studies
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and
edited collections. Considering theater and performance alongside topics,
such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are
characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative
studies on emerging topics.
Female Aerialists in the 1920s and Early 1930s

Femininity, Celebrity & Glamour
Kate Holmes
D’Oyly Carte
The Decline and Fall of an Opera Company
Paul Seeley
Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850–1950

Making Tracks
Gilli Bush-Bailey and Kate Flaherty
Performance of Absence in Theatre, Performance and Visual Art

Sylwia Dobkowska
Commedia dell’Arte for the 21st Century

Practice and Performance in the Asia-Pacific
Corinna Di Niro and Oliver Crick
Christoph Schlingensief ’s Realist Theater

Ilinca Todorut
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain

Meghan Moe Beitiks
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre – Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS.
Performing Resilience for
Systemic Pain
Meghan Moe Beitiks

First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Meghan Moe Beitiks
The right of Meghan Moe Beitiks to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-46958-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-17227-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03897-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367469580

For my mom, Kathleen Marie O’Donnell Beitiks
Contents
List of contributorsix
Acknowledgmentsx
1 The necessity and danger of empathy (Moment 1) 1

WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY EMILY BEITIKS AND AN INTERVIEW
WITH SHELBI BRETZ
2 Trauma and theory (Nebraska) 9

WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY EMILY BEITIKS
3 Human/nonhuman/more-than-human relationships
(New York) 36
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY KATIE MURPHY
4 Categories, stigma, and listening (Installation One) 58

WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY EMILY BEITIKS
5 Failure that lives in the body (Portrait): (AKA:

“Androgynous [gender] queer white wom@x#y!n
looks at her actions, things, feelings.” For your
privileged parts.) 81
6 What I can’t see (New York 2) 101

WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY KATIE MURPHY
7 Surrender, separation, distance (Moment 2) 111

CREATED WITH KATIE MURPHY
viii Contents
8 Water and other obvious connective forces (Santa Fe) 120
WITH AUDIO DESCRIPTION BY ADAM HARVEY
9 Systems of pain/networks of resilience (Exhibition) 135
Index161
Contributors
Emily Beitiks, San Francisco State University, Menlo College, USA.

Beitiks received a Ph.D. in American Studies with a focus in Disability Stud-
ies at the University of Minnesota. She has taught at the University of Min-
nesota, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Davis, and is currently adjunct faculty at
Menlo College. She is the Associate Director of the Longmore Institute on
Disability at San Francisco State University, where she continues her work
as a scholar and advocate of disability to showcase how disabled people bring
unique value that can benefit us all. There, she is codirector for Superfest
Disability Film Festival, the longest-running film festival of its kind in the
world.
Adam Harvey, actor and James Joyce scholar, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
USA. Harvey is currently working on content for his continuing web
series, “DON’T PANIC: it’s only Finnegans Wake” – interpretive animations
of, and tutorials on, Joyce’s great cryptic masterwork.
Katie Murphy, freelance audio describer, autistic self-advocate, and
higher education professional based in the San Francisco Bay Area,
USA. Accountable to her vibrant local disability community, her audio
description explores the social context and power dynamics underlying
visual representations. At the same time, her work emphasizes the aesthetic
possibilities of audio description through lush detail, clever wordplay, and –
pause for effect – timing.
Jane Phillips, photographer, New Mexico, USA. Phillips’s work graced
the Santa Fe New Mexican for 19 years and has garnered awards and acco-
lades year after year. She has exhibited in New York City, Maine, Santa Fe,
and South Africa, and her work has been published in a range of magazines
and books. Phillips earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New
York City. Before moving out west, she worked at New York Newsday,
the New York Times, the New York Post, UPI and both the Maine and
Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. She continues her freelance work with
both national and international clients.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Timucua and Seminole peoples, on whose land I’m sitting and
writing.
Thanks to all interviewees for taking the time to talk to me and for seeing
the work through multiple iterations and transformations.
Thanks to everyone whose work is cited in this book for putting words and
efforts out there to build on.
Thanks to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Chris Cook, Holly
Kranker, and Ellina Kevorkian for being the first to see the potential in and
support the work. Thanks to my cohort of Bemis residents, including Toisha,
Slinko, Sean, Kuldeep, Gabby, Micol, Erik, Joy, Elizabeth, and Josh, for being
an amazing community to make work with and in. Thanks to Residency 108,
Jamie Morra, and Anne-Katrin Spiess for their support of the “(New York)”
chapter; and Markus Guschelbauer for being pleasant and supportive company
in that surreal context. Thanks to Studio Arts Midwest, Carla Markwart, and
Mark Holmes, as well as the Knox College and its Box Gallery, for support of
(Installation One). Thanks to the Santa Fe Art Institute and its staff for its sup-
port of (Santa Fe) and especially for Toni, Nuttpahol, and Mildred for their
support and dialogue.
Thanks to Cecilia Vargas for seeing the potential of the work and support-
ing its final exhibition at the Dickson Center at Waubonsee. Thanks to Grand
Valley State University for their financial support of my participation in that
exhibition (also: don’t let West Michigan Nice hold back your equity work).
Thanks to my colleagues at GVSU, including Dulcee, Anna, Sigrid, Guin, and
Durwin, for making life in Grand Rapids livable and Paul for his support of
my work.
Thanks to the editors and publishers who saw merit and value in the chap-
ters of the work as they emerged, including the Journal for Artistic Research,
Sacha Kagan and World Futures, and interconnections: journal of posthumanism.
Thanks for the folks who willingly took their time to read drafts of this
book: Toisha Tucker, Susan Misra, Eric deLuca, Suellen Semenkoski, Vanessa
Sparling, Sarah Curran, Jill Casid, Anna Campbell, Jenny Kendler, Andreina
Fernandez, Kira O’Reilly, Kenya (Robinson), Kathleen, Mike and Emily
Beitiks.
Acknowledgments xi
Thanks to my close friends, who have been talking each other back into the
present since we were 10 and 13: Jun-Dai, Lucia, Brigid, Adela and her Kamil,
and Mariel and her Jeff.
Thanks to Della Mosely and Pearis Bellamy for their incredible work with
Academics for Black Lives, which came around at a point of crucial develop-
ment for the book; to Tucker for reminding me that I cannot attribute woke
hindsight to myself; and to Kenya for constantly challenging me in my under-
standing of whiteness.
Thanks to Lynn Tomaseweki and Onye Ozuzu for giving me the structural
and emotional support I needed to write this book in the middle of a pandemic.
Thanks to everyone who has held pain for me and who has allowed me to
hold pain for them.
Thanks to family: Mom, Kevin, Mike and Emily, Aija and Carver, Caitlin,
Scott, and Grandma Maggie. Thanks to Grandma Anna for her relentless love
and Grandpa August for having kept her happy.
Thanks to Robin Deacon for his incredible mentorship.
Thanks to every queer, marginalized, oppressed and intersectionally feminist
artist who puts their work out there and faces down the vulnerability.
Thanks to the Illinois Vipassana Center for providing the space to learn
meditation, face pain, hold the present, and spark the inspiration for the project.
Thanks to Cookie, my childhood cat; and Lee Baby, for holding on long
enough to find a place that respects her needs. Thanks to my fish and snail
cosmonauts.
Thanks to Aloe for always inspiring, Pothos for surviving, any and all remain-
ing coral reefs, and trees in general. Also, fresh air.
Dad: I know you were trying really hard to keep your pain to yourself. It’s OK that
you weren’t always able to. A lot of my pain did not originate with you. I hope that
by facing it in my lifetime I can hold it in place – though I know the reality of pain is
ubiquitous and infinite. I am always learning resilience. This is not me writing your book
for you. This is not the book you would have written. But I hope it puts a period at the
end of a sentence. Thank you for believing in me.
1 The necessity and danger of
empathy (Moment 1)
With audio description by Emily Beitiks1 and
an interview with Shelbi Bretz
An introduction
STAGE DIRECTION: Longer Pause. MOE spreads out tablecloth, begins arrang-
ing tablecloth and oranges. (Lamps flashing.)
SHELBI: I was sitting with my friend Amy, who I was really close to this
whole time, in the basement of a coffeehouse, well, it’s a basement
coffeehouse called Crescent Moon, we were sitting in kind of this
back corner in two chairs next to one another, and it was sort of dim
lighting.
And we were having a conversation and something she said, like,
not anything – it was just something normal she said triggered a
really intense memory for me, and it was at a time when that was still
happening very frequently.
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: The artist assembles the oranges, stacking them in
a pyramid, rearranges items on the table, and places the oranges all
in a line.
SHELBI: Um, and usually what happens if I go into flashback mode is
I just sort of zone out, and um, my friends describe it as I look like
I am no longer “behind my eyes”.
Um and so, usually they know to say my name, to touch me,
things like that, and so what she did was she immediately grabbed
my hand and she started naming the things that were around me.
And she said, “There is a picture on this wall, we are sitting in
Crescent Moon, you are sitting in a green chair, you have coffee
next to you, we were just talking about this,” um, and, I just sort of
listened to her for a while and then she would say “where are you,
what day is it,” and you know, just kind of ask, questions that they
ask you after you’ve been unconscious in the hospital, kind of.
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: More rearranging on the table, the lamps continue
to flash on and off.
2 Necessity & danger of empathy (Moment 1)
SHELBI: Um, and then, you know, once I kind of came out of it, she
continued to hold my hand, continued to stay close to me, um,
and then just made sure that I was okay after that, and she said, you
know, usually she would ask me, “do you want to tell me what you
saw?” and sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t, um, at that
moment depending on how I was feeling or, or the nature of the
memory that I was experiencing.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE slams a big knife on the table.
SHELBI: Um. But yeah, that happens often, and my friends are, they’re
adorable, they’re just, they know exactly what to do, and they don’t
act weird or get weird about it or treat me weird afterwards, you
know, Um. It’s just yeah, it’s really, it’s kind of, it’s almost like they’re
saying “Bless you” after someone sneezes, like it’s just become sort
of second nature to them, um, and I, you know, it’s made me feel
a lot better because I do think that my body and my brain have felt
safe enough around these people to let me escape when I need to,
process when I need to, um, as annoying as it can be sometimes.
I would rather it happen around people who love me and are willing
to take care of me than around people who aren’t or even by myself.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE puts knives in vase. Gathers the tablecloth.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience was an art-piece-project-thing. It was a video/

installation/performance piece in multiple chapters and separate works. It had video
and sound and involved talking. It happened in multiple locations and involved
the investment of many people’s time. It came out of the experience, in 2015, of
transcending a prolonged moment of pain through meditation and observation, a
minor moment of triumph over a deeply carved neural pathway of hurt and despair.
A moment that opened up hunger for more perspectives, tools, explorations.
I interviewed people with personal and professional experiences with processes
of recovery at multiple locations and spliced quotes from the interviews into
scores for videos, installations, and live performances. The project evolved from
that moment of transcended pain over the course of about three years (2015–
2018), largely developed within artist residencies that supported the work.
It was a belief in pain as a universal/unique, horrible/generative experience
that drove me to explore it. Interdependency is a reality that is not always visible.
I try to draw connections between things in my work, as a way of articulating it.
My artistic practice is research-based, but I am not a scholar. In this context,
I mean: I have not sought a doctorate degree. My research process comes from
growing up around journalists and working alongside curious artists, from tak-
ing and teaching university-level courses, and from collaborating with researchers
outside of my discipline. I have advanced degrees in performance-making. This
means I am also (somewhat) unburdened by the presumption of academic author-
ity (I do teach; I am writing this thing). The work is informed by multiple fields.
Necessity & danger of empathy (Moment 1) 3
In many cases, sanctified precedent in one field is similarly established in
another field, just using different words. We can all be looking at the same text,
artwork, process, and be using a chorus of different terms to describe it. One
of the lies of silos – disciplines, academic structures – is that information must
speak the insular language of each separate canon, or it isn’t acceptable or valid.
Disciplines draw imaginary lines around materials and ways of making (this is
drawing, that is sculpture, this other thing is performance), even when they
draw upon similar spatial, mark-making, time-based ways of knowing. Another
is that knowledge can, and therefore must, be accessed in a particular order,
according to a previously established singular, linear, timeline of progress, or
what each field imagines are its basic initial tools.2
But we don’t always have the means, context, or access to approach knowledge
in such a manner. Sometimes, we have to reverse engineer the problem, attack it
with the tools we have, drawing upon our available communities and resources.
We look it the fuck up. We read Marcuse before Marx, we make a dance before
we’ve learned first position, we learn how code behaves before we’ve fully grasped
what the individual commands mean. Sometimes, we have to listen to wisdom in a
language that isn’t immediately recognizable as language. That is to say, I am always
learning. And I am trying to articulate something in the languages I have available.
Still, I’ve cited the hell out of myself in an attempt to pay respects not only to
bodies of knowledge but to communities. Those citations are juxtaposed with
the creative work and with the experiences of various people. Look out also for
the links to media throughout the book. They’re also the work.
Here are some things I know: how to make a raw carrot cake. How to set a
rehearsal schedule. How to determine the number of technicians a performance
will need, how to find them, how generally to compensate them. How to make
good popcorn. How to compost. How to troubleshoot a lighting or speaker sys-
tem. How to ask a performer about their needs. How to make Latvian piragi. How
to hang and circuit a stage light. How to work a wrench. How to change the filter
on a diesel engine. How to write an artist statement. How to prune a tree. How
to design a space for a performance. How to set up a microphone. How to arrange
a portfolio in a residency application. How to route an audience. How to make a
clean cable run. How to speak from my diaphragm. How to read a bibliography.
How to find a good hairdresser. How to polka. How to feed a goat. How to
apologize. How to click into the truth of my own experience. How to ask people
I admire for their time. How to say things in Latvian and Russian. How to attune
to an ensemble. How to write. How to watch a performance.
How to observe my breath.
Undoing systems of oppression means urgently honoring experiential knowl-
edge. How we observe is culturally shaped. Observation, as a conscious process,
is a tool in ecological research, psychological therapy, meditation practices, artis-
tic practices, relationship maintenance, basic survival. So many contexts.
How ecologies are perceived affects humans’ management of them.
In every location I worked for this project, I asked people about their work,
their stories, how they saw things, experienced things, recovered from things.
Shelbi Bretz was one of the first interviewees for the project.
This interview struck a deep chord with me. For Shelbi, recovery was a
process of observation and description, of reminding herself where she was and
what her relationships were to the place and things around her. Her friends did
not mock, dismiss, or label her for her symptoms but rather see themselves as
agents in her recovery.
This hit me powerfully and personally. I know in a bodily sense how it feels
to be wholly in your thoughts, cut off from the world around you. I know
the kind of overwhelming, demanding pain that drives you to pull back from
everything as a gesture of self-protection, and how mockery and dismissal can
compound the pain, extend that distance. I know it as a woman, I know it in
my (gender) queerness, I know it from experiences of being bullied, I know it
from the legacy of trauma in my family and in my body.3
It made me want to position description and observation as universal, trans-
cendent healing tools. There’s a number of different reasons why that’s a prob-
lematic impulse – not the least of which is that it’s based on projection: the idea
that what works for me works for everyone or, worse, that the folks who don’t
use this particular process or agree with this particular method (describe all the
things!) are somehow unenlightened.4
It is a very privileged impulse. My whiteness has made invisible the immi-
gration of my father and grandmother to America within the space of my own
lifetime: it has given me social safety and financial access that would not have
otherwise been available to me, including resources to even partially heal from
the transgenerational trauma of war, moral injury, and otherness. No one asks
me where I am from with threatening undertones: no one looks at me and asks
about histories of slavery. My pain is enabled in its transference to the universal
by race: it is not compounded by experiences of racism.5
Trauma theory has come to inform a number of different fields, as we gain
more and more comprehensive understandings of how thoroughly it affects our
lives, experiences, relationships with other people, and perceptions.6 Trauma
is an emotional and physical response to a disturbing event.7 Trauma is painful.
It is relative: events affect people in different ways – something that doesn’t
register as traumatic to one person might prove to be profoundly disruptive to
someone else.8
So my perspective on things is limited by my whiteness, even as other inter-
secting oppressions expose me to prejudice and trauma. My understanding of
pain is limited by what I have been protected from. It has rendered me oblivi-
ous to the pain of many others who do not have its protection. As museum
educators Hannah Heller, Nikhil Trivadi, and Joanne Jones-Rizzi have written,
“white people have constructed whiteness to be rendered both normalized
and invisible in our daily lives – a challenge that is also true for oppression
more broadly . . . Because white people’s internalized white supremacy endows
themselves with the power and ability to speak on any topic.”9
I’ve sought structures that did not presume superiority before – it turns out
such cultures are inescapable. This book is about, in part, what it means to face
them, internally and externally, and survive.
It’s about an art project, about performance, and about my own process of
learning and healing.10 I had an impulse. I developed it in conversation with
sites in Nebraska, New York, and New Mexico because those were places
I had professional and financial access to: I imagined according to my means.
I developed it in conversation with communities local to those sites and read-
ings relevant to the work as it demanded.
When it was done, additional sources emerged that served this reflection.
Much of the research in this book came after the project, not during, as my
reading lists and bibliography burrows deepened in conversations, in seeking
answers to questions, in hearing references to folks who were exploring similar
ideas. Since the project completed, new works by Resmaa Menakem, adrienne
marie brown, and others have emerged, new ideas around trauma and embodi-
ment have developed. I found Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work as
I was finalizing this text. They offer urgent articulations of trauma’s relationship
to race, to genetic legacy. They offer urgent articulation of healings’ relation-
ship to interdependent networks of care, community, resilience. I’m piecing
together what I knew and understood about those ideas on a bodily, expe-
riential level and pairing here it with existing research and documentation.
Creating a comprehensive reflection on the world of the work and the way in
which the ideas around it have evolved. Putting the work, a conversation itself,
in dialogue with other sources.
My hope is that this book opens up shared avenues and tools for exploration.
My hope is that it is itself a moment to be present with and reflect on pain
and its relationship to the cultivation of resilience, within and beyond various
human bodies.
Pain can be a device for learning, a signal, and it is never fully separate from
the structures that enable recovery. Interdependence is both a source of resil-
ience and an eminently fallible concept.
Acknowledgment
Portions of this work appeared in “Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience
(First Compilation),” Journal for Artistic Research (Issue 14).
Notes
1 Emily Beitiks is a Disability Studies scholar, administrator, and advocate from whom
I first learned about audio description as well as many other resources around disability
and accessibility. She is also my sister-in-law.
2 “In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re
an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across disciplinary
lines. To understand that system, you will have to be able to learn from – while not
being limited by – economists and chemists and psychologists and theologians. You will
have to penetrate their jargons, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can
honestly see through their particular lenses, and discard the distortions that come from
the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses. They won’t make it easy for you”
(Meadows, 183).
3 I appreciate Hil Malatino’s description of this experience as a protective instinct in Trans
Care (2020).
4 So what do I cite here – the entire history of colonialism? One of the many articles that
points to a start-up company that built itself around a solution and was tanked for being
off the mark? Inventions for solutions that turned average things into problems in order
to justify their own existence? How about a story of my break from one culture of solu-
tionizing? I used to drive with biodiesel buses that traveled around the country, giving
workshops on sustainable methods, choices, and processes. I taught biodiesel workshops,
was a road manager and eco-carny. I decided to walk away from one organization when
our director sent out an email to our subscribers, saying, “Let’s spread the California
consciousness to the rest of the country!” I’m from California: a year-round growing
season does not make one immediately more “conscious.” I did not want to be part of
that supremacist narrative.
5 Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, suggests the following pub-
lic statement for European immigrants and their descendants: “When our ancestors
came to America, they were looked down upon and denied opportunities because of
where they came from. Eventually they were accepted as full citizens and normal human
beings – but at the cost of diluting their heritage and becoming ‘white’ people. We reject
that identity. We are not content to passively accept the identity and perks of whiteness.
We are proud to be [Latvian-Irish-French-British-American], and we stand together
with African Americans, Chinese Americans, and the descendants of immigrants from
any other nation against the constraints and dehumanization of white-body supremacy”
(270).
6 “Trauma is never a personal failure, nor the result of someone’s weakness, nor a limita-
tion, nor a defect. It is a normal reaction to abnormal conditions and circumstances,”
writes Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother’s Hands (205).
7 “Trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural
disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions
include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships and even physical
symptoms like headaches or nausea” (American Psychological Association, “Trauma,”
www.apa.org/topics/trauma/).
8 “Trauma is the experience of a world unmade and undone,” writes Philipose (61–62).
9 Hannah Heller, Nikhil Trivadi, and Joanne Jones- Rizzi, “Uncovering White
Supremacy in Museum Work,” March 4, 2020, https://incluseum.com/2020/03/04/
white-supremacy-culture-museum/.
10 Auto-ethnography and Autotheory are other terms the work butts up against.
Bibliography
Armentrout, Alicia. Personal Interview (Child Care Specialist, resident of Omaha,
Nebraska), 2016.
Berkeley, Sarah. Personal Interview (Artist, resident of Lincoln, Nebraska), 2016.
Bingeman, Mike. Personal Interview (Hospital Chaplain, Lincoln, Nebraska), 2016.
Blanchard Kraft, Jill Y. Personal Interview (Eagle Eyes), (Housekeeper and Ojibwe, Mohawk,
Blackfoot, Metis, Tribal Community Member, New York), 2016.
Bradshaw, Kate. Personal Interview (Animal Behavior Specialist, Nebraska Humane Soci-
ety), 2016.
Bretz, Shelbi. Personal Interview (Teacher, resident of Lincoln, Nebraska), 2016.
Cales, Peter. Personal Interview (Artist, resident of Omaha, Nebraska), 2016.
Fader, Sean. Personal Interview (Artist in Residence, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art),
2016.
Ferrer, Alex. Personal Interview (Physical Trainer, YMCA Omaha), 2016.
Foster, Joel. Personal Interview (Artist, resident of Wassaic, NY), 2017.
Goler, Miriam. Personal Interview (Farmer, Pine Plains, NY), 2017.
Green, Christie. Personal Interview (Artist, Designer, Activist, Santa Fe, NM), 2017.
Groenfedlt, David. Personal Interview (Executive Director, Water-Culture Institute, Santa
Fe, NM), 2017.
Heller, Hannah. “Uncovering White Supremacy in Museum Work.” March 4, 2020.
https://incluseum.com/2020/03/04/white-supremacy-culture-museum/.
Jedd, Theresa. Personal Interview (Political Scientist, Drought Mitigation Center), 2016.
Leaverton, Bert. Personal Interview (Artist and Veteran, resident of South Omaha, Nebraska),
2016.
MacDonald, Melissa. Personal Interview (River and Watershed Coordinator, City of Santa
Fe, NM), 2017.
Malatino, Hil. Trans Care. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
McCloud, Kathleen. Personal Interview (Artist, resident of La Cineguilla, NM), 2017.
Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publish-
ing, 2008.
Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Morra, Jamie. Personal Interview (Site Manager and Art Historian, Clermont, NY), 2016.
Nohner, Emily. Personal Interview (Humanitarian Professional, resident of Omaha,
Nebraska), 2016.
Otto, Andy. Personal Interview (Executive Director, Santa Fe Watershed Association, Santa
Fe, NM), 2017.
Pelletier, Jill. Personal Interview (Housekeeper and Volunteer Horse Caretaker, member of
Metis Tribe, New York), 2017.
Philipose, L. “The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire.” International Feminist Journal of
Politics 9, no. 1 (2007): 60–81.
Phillips, Jack. Personal Interview (Naturalist, Hitchcock Nature Center, Honey Creek, IA),
2016.
Shoumatoff, Tonia. Personal Interview (Writer and Producer, Wassaic, NY), 2017.
Spiess, Anne-Katrin. Personal Interview (Artist and Landowner, Clermont, NY), 2016.
Stonehill, Mark. Personal Interview (Farmer and Educator, Pine Plains, NY), 2017.
Toro, Jessica M. Personal Interview (Conservation and Restoration Planning Specialist,
New York), 2016.
“Trauma.” In American Psychological Association, n.d. www.apa.org/topics/trauma/.
Tucker. Personal Interview (Artist-in-Residence, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art),
2016.
Winsby-Fein, Jill. Personal Interview (Farmer near Wassaic, NY), 2017.
Yoshimoto, Jave. Personal Interview (Artist, Omaha, Nebraska), 2016.
2 Trauma and theory
(Nebraska)
With audio description by Emily Beitiks
Things are active agents in trauma, and reconnecting with them is a form of
healing. Things make our worlds: our narratives, places, cultures, understand-
ings of ourselves are in part built upon the assumption that trees, chairs, walls,
winds, ideas will all behave in the manner that we are accustomed. Or – that
if they change, they will change within our understanding, at speeds we com-
prehend, within the norms we hold dear. Separation from things as we know
them can be traumatic: and being fully present with them is difficult, necessary,
and reparative.
Let’s not avoid pain but get straight to it, sit with it.
In describing torture, Elaine Scarry writes, “The room, both in its struc-
ture and its content, is converted into a weapon, deconverted, undone. Made
to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that
everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civi-
lization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no
refrigerator, no chair, no bed.”1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-2
10 Trauma and theory
Scarry articulates how the “performance” of torture corrupts our relation-
ship to objects – and that this unmoored relationship becomes part of the
physical trauma. She continues:
. . . in the conversion of a refrigerator into a bludgeon, the refrigerator

disappears; its disappearance objectifies the disappearance of the world (sky,
country, bench) experienced by a person in great pain; and it is the very
fact of its disappearance, its transition from a refrigerator into a bludgeon,
that inflicts the pain. The domestic act of protecting becomes an act of
hurting and in hurting, the object becomes what it is not, an expression
of individual contraction, of the retreat into the most self-absorbed and
self-experiencing of human feelings, when it is the very essence of these
objects to express the most expansive potential of the human being, his
ability to protect himself out of his private, isolating needs into a concrete,
objectified, and therefore shareable world.2
In becoming extensions of violence, in being made to betray us, things separate

us from the greater world, force us to retreat inside ourselves. Things with agency
in trauma include misogyny, racism, homophobia, isolationism – even things that
are inventions of other things (colonialism having created a number of traumatic
things).3 It is not just the physical objects that hurt us, but the systems of power
and inequity that weaponize them, systems which are weapons themselves.
But objects in and of themselves are impossible to comprehensively under-
stand. Their lived experience, however that might be articulated or defined,
is forever inaccessible to us. We will never understand the experience of a
refrigerator turned bludgeon or what it means to “be” misogyny.
Performance is a space for human bodies to connect with things in mean-
ing. We connect as witnesses to performance or as performers ourselves. In
performance, we can take our bodies out of the everyday relationships dictated
by systems, social norms, and practical demands, and reconsider their connota-
tions and context.4
For the first chapter of Systems of Pain/Networks of Resistance, I worked on
the floor of the warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska – on Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux)
Territory. My ability to engage with these sites is enabled by the history of
colonial land theft – the meaning of work I make at these locations is not
separate from that same history.5 Land acknowledgments are common practice
in many countries attempting to reconcile with their pasts – to call the tribal
territories and histories out loud is seen as an initial, albeit small, step in healing
and reconciliation.6
Building the project began in a space – an east-facing, barren, white-bricked
room with a wood floor. A floor in a warehouse in Nebraska with a number of
windows along one side. A cold, dusty room with a high ceiling and furniture
I had bought at thrift stores, a special table built by artist Jason Friedes, and
some charcoal.
Trauma and theory 11
In the space itself were a number of tables. A table from a local thrift store,
expanded without its center leaf, lying on its side. A small pine table, stained
dark, built for the purposes of the performance. There were also a number
of house lamps, wooden chairs, basic wood panels that I had found in the
Bemis storage. A tablecloth, silverware, tangerines everywhere. Tangerines and
oranges because they fit the color palette and seemed to drop in straight out of
a still life, out of a composed picture. A domestic space but disrupted, broken
into pieces. Tables on ends.
In The Third Table, Graham Harman articulates the object’s ultimate
unknowability and the precarity of human understanding. He expands upon
physicist Arthur Eddington’s concept of two tables, as experienced by humans.
Eddington argues that within the same object exists a table of everyday experi-
ence and a table of science – consisting mostly of empty space. Harman’s table
exists somewhere in between. “The arts are in a unique position to give us the
third table. They can never give it to us directly – there is no direct access to
reality.”7 The real is something that can be “loved, but never fully known.” Art
opens space for the love that comes from attention, attunement, the recogni-
tion of other.8
The table
is something deeper
than any relations
in which
it might become involved,
whether with humans
or inanimate entities.
the table in practical use

does not exhaust the table’s reality.
. . . just as the table
could not be identified
with the one we saw,
it was also not the same
as the one we used.9
I wrote the words of Harman’s text repeatedly all over the space in charcoal,
over the white-painted bricks and drywall. I spent a long time sitting in that
space, moving the furniture, assembling and disassembling it, examining my
expectations for the things, and trying to disrupt them.
In her book Queer Phenomenology,10 Sarah Ahmed breaks down the centrality
of the table in philosophy and connects it to social orientation. “Acts of domes-
tication are not private; they involve the shaping of collective bodies, which
allows some objects and not others to be within reach. To put this in simple
terms, a ‘we’ emerges as an effect of a shared direction toward an object.”11
I can’t make a universally shared direction. But in crafting a performance, I can
shape orientations toward objects, including the object of my own body.
There’s a fuzziness around the language of building performances if you’re
working at the center of the theater/performance, art/performance vocabularies. It’s
rehearsal, studio time, devising, or experimenting, among other words, depending
on who you are working with, in what context. Essentially, I was trying to
understand the objects and the space, and to connect that performance space
to the world outside of it.
In attempting, as part of this process, to understand the interconnection of
recovery from trauma, human experience, site, and ecologies, I talked to peo-
ple. I invited individual people to talk with me about their own processes of
recovery. I found people through my own interactions and through a public call
made through the residency.
This means there were a couple of limiting factors in terms of who I got to
talk to. They had to be either open to being approached by an unknown artist
or a known residency. They had to be comfortable and willing to talk about
either their work or their personal histories. And they needed to be willing
to let me record their words and recontextualize them. The narratives I could
draw from were articulated, and limited, by my social and cultural network.
The interviewees in Omaha included an animal behavior specialist, a veteran,
several women who had survived abusive relationships, a physical therapist,
several artists, a hospital chaplain, a professional humanitarian, and a naturalist,
among others. Interviewees signed a fairly comprehensive release form after
I had explained the nature of the work – I would be editing their interviews
into short sound clips, which would be juxtaposed with my own movements,
as well as the words of others. We established within those boundaries that I am
not a therapist, not someone with the training to facilitate emotional upheavals,
nor someone who requires it for their work.
We would talk. We would talk about whatever it was they felt comfortable
talking about. I’d ask questions about the steps they took to heal (regardless if
they were healing themselves or supporting another healing process), the meth-
ods they used to support healing, the challenges faced, the things that worked.
If they hesitated or seemed resistant, we moved on to something else. The
talks lasted between 20 minutes and more than an hour. Sometimes, the discus-
sions were pleasant rememberings or unpackings of process, but often, the folks
who chose to speak with me did so because they were ready to talk about pain.
“We all will know pain, both physical and emotional,” writes Dominic John-
son in an analysis of the legacy of pain in performance art. “We will know it
from the minor twinge of the stubbed toe to the full ruin of devastating injury
or illness; from the temporary sting of personal insult, to the enduring crisis of
emotional or psychic desolation.” Pain is inescapable, but the experience of it
12
is not universal. The social, political, and economic systems that are thoroughly
painless to some exact unrelenting pain on others. Pain lives in our bodies and
our interactions, is delivered upon them through mechanisms of power.
The challenge in working with the interviews was to honor their specific
meaning, while allowing space for the relevant or inescapably shared experi-
ences of others. Editing the interview audio, I would listen for phrases that
were potentially expansive in meaning, words that had room for other conno-
tations or subtext, interpretations that spoke to one another without intending
to. I went looking for meaning beyond the disciplinary, contextual, or even
species-specific connotations. Then I would play the sounds as I moved. My
body became a site of projection and a physical extension of the narratives at
play.
Here are excerpts from the script of a live performance at the Bemis Center,
given during Open Studios. It includes an audio description, a literal descrip-
tion of the action in the work: more on that in a bit.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE sits on the ground, holding up a corner of the table.
Reaches behind her for the spare table leg.
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: An androgynous person sits all in black in the
center of an open warehouse. Large open windows light the brick-
walled room. The scene includes overturned tables and chairs, four
lamps, several oranges on the floor. A lamp on the far end of the
room turns on and off, the person, wearing gloves, reaches to grab a
table leg off the floor, then puts it in place to repair the table.
JACK: So it’s this idea, that the images, um, the distance between you and
the object that you’re seeing, uh, is overcome to the point where
the distinction between subject and object are, are, is blurred. And
you have the sensation of nature actually flowing through you. And
of course, we’re a part of nature, part of the problem here is that we
(we) can’t talk about nature without talking about ourselves, we can’t
get any distance from it. It’s like trying to talk about your mind. You
know, so in epistemology and philosophy, it’s a big problem – how
do you talk about your own mind because you’re using it while
you’re talking about it? So you can’t get any distance –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE places the fourth leg and backs away from the table.
SHELBI: The other thing I think it helped me do was to objective, like to
objectively look, um, at a lot of what happened to me –
Shelbi describes emotional distance and observation as important to her

healing process – that she needed to take a step back from a relationship to be
able to acknowledge the things that had happened to her and their awfulness.
This was not everyone’s experience. For other people recovering from abusive
relationships, moving on and forgetting were more important than analyzing
the past.13 But observation held space as a potential tool for healing.
Mindfulness-based therapies, which often involve noticing and observing,
have become common in some communities focused on wellness.14 One popu-
lar technique for the treatment of PTSD involves naming objects in the room
surrounding the person who is in a heightened, triggered, or traumatized state.
Author Shawna Potter, in her community organizing handbook Making Spaces
Safer, encourages something similar to de-escalate tense and traumatic situations:
When someone is in “crisis mode,” they are not in the present moment
with you. They are reliving a past trauma. You need them to communicate
with you in order for you to help them, so you’ll need to get them back
to the present with grounding techniques. It’s an effective tactic whether
they’ve been harassed, were just in a car accident, or are having a panic
attack. Use one of these three grounding techniques:
• Breathe: Ask the victim to take 3 deep breaths with you. Their body
will take over and start to follow your breathing. Keep going until they
match your slow, even breath.
• Three Things: Ask the victim to name three things they see, three
things they hear, and three things they feel.
• Describe: ask the victim to describe an object in the room in great
detail. By focusing on one tangible things so intensely, their brain
physically can’t also focus on negative thoughts.15
Observation can be grounding. It can root us where we are. It is a method

for understanding our context and a possible method of connection. In fact,
the inability to describe one’s feelings and surroundings can be a symptom of
trauma. “Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness, or anxiety immediately
helps us shift our perspective and opens up new options other than our auto-
matic, habitual reactions,” writes Bessel van der Kolk in his book The Body
Keeps the Score. “Mindfulness puts us in touch with the transitory nature of
our feelings and perceptions. When we pay focused attention to our bodily
sensations, we can recognize the ebb and flow of our emotions and, with that,
increase our control over them.”16
In performance, the entire point of a period of rehearsal, experimentation,
whatever you might call it, is to try things out, see what they do (observe), and
then adjust as necessary.17 What constitutes the finished or final work varies
by technique or process. The finished work could be a structure; it could be
a perfect cadence of language, an attunement to an ensemble, a choreography
so thoroughly absorbed by a performer’s body it does not require conscious
thought to execute. You do a thing and look at it, or you are looked at doing
it, and adjust and go again. “Performance is experienced as the completion,
presentation, and passage of the present,” writes Erika Fischer-Lichte in her
book The Transformative Power of Performance.18
As a performer, the observation is continuously internal as well. You are
examining your own body in relation to the space and others, scanning for
the full execution of the intended movement, as well as monitoring for signs
of injury or strain. You’re having to watch your own somatic and emo-
tional experience of the space, the relationship of those feelings to the work.
Sometimes you can use them to serve the piece: sometimes you just need
to survive them to keep working.19 It can get to a point where whatever’s
going on in your mind and body needs to pass through the work, become
secondary to it.
KATE: Humans are scary./SEAN: Like are you fucking serious?

TUCKER: I am only responsible for my own feelings. And I think that’s
when, like, so I then I started trying to, like, live that way? Like –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE sits in the chair and slumps.
AD: The person begins rearranging the room, places a chair down in a
new location, hangs a picture on the wall, then sits and slouches back
in seat a few times with slouch increasing.
THERESA: And it was that risk equals hazard times vulnerability, and then
we decided, well, we need to understand what vulnerability is. So
now, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] defi-
nition of vulnerability is that it is a function of exposure multiplied
by sensitivity. And here’s the debate: it’s either subtracted by adaptive
capacity or divided by adaptive capacity. But the idea is that, our
ability to adapt to these changes is something that can cut how sensi-
tive we are to changes themselves.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE moves on to station 2, places chair and wood panel.
BERT: And it’s not that I let it go: and I’m not going to bury it again
because when it does come out with a vengeance, then, uh, you
know, it’s hard to deal with, it’s very difficult. And as a veteran,
I know the things that I can and can’t do –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE slumps in chair 2.
Audio description is an observational process – the describer must look at what

is happening in a video or film clip and describe essential action for the vision
impaired or blind. Often, there is more going on in the image than can fit in
the time allotted for the description, so some crucial decisions must be made in
terms of what gets described and how. Describers aren’t typically included in
the editing process, are often added on as an accessibility afterthought. Addi-
tionally, describers have some guidelines they can follow that establish what
constitutes “objectivity” for their field20 – though there isn’t a practice or regu-
latory body to enforce this – and many describers don’t see “objectivity” as the
end goal.
In asking for the work to be audio described, I hoped not only to make
the work more accessible but to provide an opportunity for the audience to be
present with their own perception of the action in front of them: presence as
something that is cleanly articulated in the performance.
Bertolt Brecht would describe what was coming in many of his plays before
every scene – the Verfremdungseffekt, meant to disassociate us from the emotional
arc of the story and look at the action with a cold anti-capitalist lens. Comedian
Hannah Gadsby recently used a similar technique in her show Douglas, telling
us the entirety of its content before beginning, as a way of reminding the audi-
ence that everything they’re experiencing is the result of conscious craft on her
part.21
SHELBI: And you’re gonna watch a light move back and forth with your
eyes, and I’m going to tell you to think about something. And when
the light turns off, you’re gonna tell me what you noticed.
AD: The person gets up, rights another chair, hangs another picture on the
wall, then sits in chair. All the lamps in the room rapidly flicker on and
off. The person slips in the chair to an exaggerated slouched position
again, then rights their body with perfect posture, then again slouches
MIKE: Uh, sometimes people are a little more trusting than others, and
I can only work within the trust that they extend to me. And I,
the . . . there are certainly different levels of trust, I suppose –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE moves chair to table against wall, tips it against wall,
and slumps against it.
MIKE: – nah, levels might not be the right word, but, but really, the
assessment comes by being present with people, and meeting them
in conversation, and, uh, engaging in empathetic and reflective lis-
tening. Like, those are the, the key tools that you might say that that
I use as a chaplain, and I think what that does is it helps me not only
get an understanding of what it could be like to be them, but it helps
the patient or oftentimes the patient’s family member know that
they’re not alone in this part of their journey.
The goal of the audio description is to describe the action in an image or

video, to communicate the visual experience of the work to those who have
no access to it. What constitutes an “accurate” description is, however, hedged
by both practical and social constraints. There are some professional guidelines
for things, like race,22 which are disputed within the describer community.23
Sometimes, an audio describer needs to cram as much information into a small
amount of time. The result, in many films with a lot of dialogue, is that while
the rest of the video clip is advancing at a normal pace, the audio describer
often sounds like they’re an interrupting auctioneer or sportscaster, speedily
recounting the action as efficiently as possible.
Here is a sample audio description of the movie Gravity, by Fred Brack. In
this format, Brack has indicated warnings or “cues” for the recording of his
description with the letter Q – the last line of spoken dialogue in the film. The
passage that follows must be said quickly enough that it’s completed before the
next line of dialogue begins:
Q MAN DOWN MAN DOWN. Shariff has been hit hard. A storm of
debris envelopes the spacecraft and astronauts. Kowalski and Stone are
separated. The arm to which Dr Stone is attached spins wildly around in a
circle as the crippled spacecraft revolves from having been struck. Suddenly
the base of the arm is struck by debris, separating it from the spacecraft.
Still attached to the arm, Dr Stone spins off into space, gyrating wildly.
Q DO IT NOW. Dr Stone struggles with the clip attaching her to the arm.
PAUSE Q 2ND I’VE LOST VISUAL WITH DR STONE. When the
clip opens, Dr Stone flies off into space head over heels. As her body
continues to revolve, she is flung into space far away from the battered
spacecraft, a mere speck against the background of earth.
Q 2nd I CAN’T BREATHE (AND GASPS) . . . From the perspective of
Dr Stone’s torso, earth rotates in and out of view behind her, and her body
is alternately lit by the sun and cast into darkness as she continues to tumble.
With eyes wide and staring straight ahead, her rapid breathing fogs the
lower part of her visor.24
The description is quick, intense, and as thorough as possible. In Systems of

Pain/Networks of Resilience, the hope is that the forced distance of observation
pulls the sighted viewer back into the reality of how they are looking at things,
pulls them fully into the present.
Presence is crucial to performance. It is how the form happens. This is not
to say that all performance must be live and in-person,25 just that it necessar-
ily unfolds in proximity and over time. Performance, as an act or action, is also
deeply entwined with our everyday lives. We perform jobs, social cues, indica-
tors of identity, signs of approval, acceptance, disapproval. Pain is experienced
and inflicted in our nonverbal actions, even the seemingly innocuous ones.26
And yet, culturally, we do not always exhibit awareness around these social per-
formances, roles, or body languages.27 People are often ignorant or unwilling
performers, unaware of our performances, or unable to articulate their craft.
Which makes it harder to find words or make adjustments when we don’t per-
form “correctly,” as expected. It makes it harder to hold bad actors accountable
when they lack self-awareness or perform ignorance. Social exclusion, miscom-
munication, and failures to “perform” can inflict their own form of trauma.
Performance is a space of both art and not-art, lived experiences and crafted
alternatives, belonging and escape. It is a space of entangled binaries and bril-
liant spectrums.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE moves to station 1.

AD: The person picks up the chair where they were sitting, places it near
the brick wall, then sits in the chair and tips it back to balance on two
legs against the wall. Next to the person, a coffee table also balances
against the wall.
ALICIA: (laughs) You know. Like, I can let some feelings in when they
happen, but I make the conscious effort to be like, you know . . .
I just can’t think about it like that. Right now I’m in the moment.
Again, it’s the mindfulness piece of like, what’s the moment right
now? Right now I’m here with this person Annie, right now I’m
with my friend Sylvia, and WE went hiking here all these other
times, just really just, and again focusing on that moment, like: in
this moment, it doesn’t really matter what happened in the past. In
this moment, this is who I’m here with, and this is what we’re talking
about and that’s all that really matters. So.
AD: While balancing against the wall, the artist slouches from side to side,
then stands back up. The person moves a light, which flashes on and
off, then stands on top of an overturned broken chair, leaning from
side to side.
THERESA: Vulnerability is, it’s not just a topic in climate science –
AD: The person jumps off the chair then looks down at it with an
intensely serious gaze, tosses off their gloves and drops them down
near the still overturned chair.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE begins gathering oranges. Places on windowsill.
AD: The person gathers the oranges that are scattered on the floor and
places them on the windowsill.
BERT: It’s not that something’s wrong, but that there’s, you know, thoughts
going on in my mind that necessarily I don’t want to share –
Engaging directly with the thing of oppression,28 Johnson summarizes her

research findings in an outline of the conceptual framework for her somatic
process:
• We learn oppression implicitly and relationally, through everyday experi-

ences of social and political life.
• Our experiences shape (and are shaped by) multiple and intersecting social
identities.
• Our bodies are a primary locus of these intersecting social identities.
• We learn about social systems through interpersonal nonverbal interactions.
• The nonverbal component of social interaction is one of the most power-
ful, ubiquitous, and insidious means of social control.
• Oppressive social relations are characterized by asymmetrical nonverbal
interactions across a range of behavioral categories.
• Trauma is mediated through the body and manifests in embodied experi-
ences of post-traumatic stress symptoms.
• Oppression is traumatic.29
We can see in Johnson’s work, and its complex understanding of oppression,

the legacy of the idea of intersectionality – defined in part by the scholar-
ship of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and other Black feminists,30 who have
experienced and researched oppression within multiple intersecting identities: as
Black people, as women, and as Black women. That oppression is systemic and
traumatic is a fundamental tenant of liberation psychology, among other fields.31
The experience of oppression produces its own knowledges of and from
trauma. It happens in movements and words. The movements and words accu-
mulate in our bodies. Performance can be an entangled space for reclaiming
both language and movement, and the relationships that weaponize them. It is
a space where we can know what’s coming or may have surrendered ourselves
to the unknown (within, hopefully, safe boundaries).

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE puts knives in vase. Gathers the tablecloth.

AD: The person puts several knives into the vase.
JACK: I just had this very momentary flash of –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE uses the big knife to split apart the table at its seam.
JACK: – experiencing the world as it really is.
AD: The person pulls everything off half the table, then uses the large
knife to cut directly into the wooden table and divide it into two
semicircles.
JACK: It was just a moment where I just had this very extraordinary sense
that I had an awareness of the whole. And so just for that moment
I really felt, um, very beautifully and very originally connected.
STAGE DIRECTION: Brings chairs to either side of the split seam. Sits in one
chair and looks at the other.
AD: Person sets two chairs on either side of empty half, adds vase of
knives to this portion of the table and sits down, slouches in chair
again as before.
PETER: You know, hardwoods are harder, um, you know they’re harder
to work with because they are more dense and –
AD: The person grabs a basket and starts putting things from the table
into it, then sets it on the floor.
MIKE: And uh, I think that’s where the work that I do is different than
having someone have a nice conversation with you. ’Cause I think
that the way that – I’ve been, in my training I’ve learned how to
I guess listen for the details and make different observations about –
usually with the words but also in body language, too – it gets tricky
when people have different, uh, communication issues, whether
they just can’t talk because of the condition that they’re in, or um,
have, or are confused, that gets things a little tricky too –
AD: The person grabs another chair then sets it on top of the table, then
sticks the cornucopia through the slats of the chair.
EMILY: Trauma is the complete decimation of self-worth.
Pain is part of our accumulated sense of self: trauma can redefine that self
entirely. And as our life is bound up with things, the pleasure and pain they pro-
duce gives us a sense of who we are, where we are, and what to expect of the
world. Severing, upending, or distorting that connection can be deeply traumatic.
In writing about soldiers’ experience of the Vietnam War, Jonathan Shay
reflects on the ways in which every aspect of the landscape became a torture
device.
Every familiar item of the physical world could be made to be or to conceal

an explosive by the Vietnamese, whether a shiny aluminum rice carrier, a
Parker-51 fountain pen, a bicycle, a coconut, Coke cans, C-ration cans, and
discarded American artillery-shell casings. The trained, safest response, to
being fired upon was to take cover; the Vietcong prepared some ambush
sites with small boards mounted with barbed spikes, which they would con-
ceal in the vegetation, spike side up. When American troops dove for cover,
they would impale themselves on the spikes. In such warfare nothing is what
it seems; all certainties liquify; stable truths turn into their opposites.32
In entering landscapes of war, American soldiers justified their violence against

the Vietnamese with racist language, referring to them as “gooks,” rendering
them as other, not human. Many soldiers became alienated not just from their
surroundings, but from their fellow human “enemy.” When we are severed
from our contexts, when things and people are transformed into weapons,
when change happens faster than we can process or adapt, we are nonconsen-
sually unmoored from reality, destabilized not only in our understanding of the
world but of ourselves.33
The goal of many mindfulness techniques is to focus our attention so com-
pletely that we remain focused on only the present moment. Only on the
time and space and place we are currently in. We can’t speculate, within this
focus, which of the myriad endless possible threats and harms that exist in this
landscape are coming down the pike. We can’t dwell on past mistakes or spiral
into the analysis of uncorrectable histories. We are wholly and completely
where we are, with the things and people that are here with us. Description
has that capacity to return us to the present, to the object as a nonthreatening
entity, to place, to sense of self.
Like many veterans, my father’s body carried resonant echoes of the past. He
had a scar in his cheek from a shot through the mouth: a dimple. When I was
a kid, I would run my hands over his scar and draw it into our family portraits.
I knew from a very young age that the dimple meant my father had been shot in
the face. That he survived because he had his mouth open to talk to a friend. That
it was a dimple and not the cause of his death because someone had been there,
immediately afterward, to tend to the wound and make sure he could breathe.
In the house that I grew up in, there are some rubbings in a display case from
the Vietnam War Memorial, a public artwork in Washington, DC, by Maya
Lin. The wall lists names of the dead. My father made rubbings of the names of
men he had fought alongside, men who were important to him. At one point,
my mother asked him to write down who they were, as a kind of archive. On
the back of one name, he wrote:
He was shot and killed by a Vietnamese sniper after putting a bandage on

my wound, stopping the flow of blood. I can still feel the weight of his
body falling on mine.
The display case with the rubbings was in our dining room. I walked past them
every time I went to the kitchen, every time I went from the living room to
anywhere else in the house – if I wanted, I could stare at them while seated at
the dining room table. I did not understand until years after the fact that the
perpetual reliving of a single moment that my father had described in this note
was a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The rubbing and its
descriptive notes were agents in both trauma and healing.
As defined by the American Psychological Association, resilience is the ability
to adapt in the face of adversity.34 As a term in ecology, it is often described as
the ability of fundamental functions of an ecosystem to persist, despite extremes
of disturbance or the time needed to rebound from a disruptive event.35 Within
my life (as a white person in the late 20th/early 21st century living in the United
States in a generally middle class context), resilience is often defined as an ability
to respond as if nothing were wrong. As if whatever were collapsing, breaking, deci-
mating, aggressing were not troubling, no different than the everyday or, if differ-
ent, then not to an extent that merits exponential (spectacular) response. Bonus
points if you are unbothered by something that others are clearly bothered by.36
It is often seen as the result of sheer will. “Will yourself out of the trauma
of gendered violence or racialized violence or economic violence. Get over
it,” says religious studies scholar Donavan O. Schaefer. “That’s the same sort of
moralistic logic of willpower, which ultimately is conformable to a neoliberal
understanding that doesn’t recognize that bodies are not sovereign over the way
that they react to their world. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that
people can fail to take resources that are in front of them in order to improve
their circumstances.
“But there’s no way that you can just get over something. You can’t abolish
trauma by an act of will power. Trauma makes you as a traumatized subject
who has absorbed a certain pattern of response to the world. People who are
traumatized want to get over it. The will is there.”37
The idea that responses to trauma are acts (or failures) of willpower is deeply
stigmatizing to those who are experiencing them. This narrative of resilience
can sometimes produce a “performance” of strength rather than genuine
growth and adaptation. Stigma creates cultures where individuals experienc-
ing symptoms of PTSD, traumatic injury, or mental illness may feel they have
to “fix themselves” or, worse, choose not to seek out treatment at all. Some
studies have shown that two-thirds of those affected with mental illness don’t
seek treatment due to stigma and an inability to access care.38 Pain, in the form
of diminishment and dismissal, is delivered constantly by those unaffected by
prejudice, even when there is no overt intent to harm. To be symptomatic
is to be damaged. “In today’s America,” writes Resmaa Menakem, “we tend
to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’ve healed
from that brokenness. More often, healing and growth take place on a con-
tinuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.”39
My Dad was a boisterous guy with an active social life, a well-respected writer
for a major daily newspaper, a Pulitzer Prize nominee. He was hilarious and
absurd and loved our family deeply. He also yelled a lot. Became terrifyingly
upset over absurd ideological debates. Flipped out on us over small things, like
literal spilt milk. Spaced out, with a blank look in his eyes, for long periods
of time – daydreaming, I thought. He was also, unbeknownst to me, having
nightmares and flashbacks that my mom would have to bring him back from.
Writing was his main source of self-treatment, my mother was a major source
of support. She would offer emotional encouragement, but also describe his
angry reactions back to him as a form of accountability, visibility. We never
named it as PTSD. To seek professional support would be admitting a level of
non-functionality, of flaw, of pain.
Stigma and prejudice are barriers to healing, in part because, in terms of
health and recovery, they can assign disproportionate power to the strength of
will. Schaefer asserts, “[W]hatever will is, we need to understand it as some-
thing that is not a metaphysical property but is something that is nurtured,
something that is cultivated. It’s an effect of the circumstances, relationships,
and economic location within which you find yourself.”40 That is: will is not
something we cultivate in isolation – we are assisted in building resilience with
a network of resources and support.
Things, people, ideas, and places help us heal: we do not only heal ourselves.41
JAVE: I was quite fearful for my life, I felt powerless, it was like this giant
monster walking into a dark room and I didn’t quite comprehend
what was happening, uhm –
KATE: I try to pet them, I try to pick them up by the scruff, and then put
my hand under them, and basically, if they don’t bite me they’re good –
AD: The person lies with their back on the floor under the table halves
and throws oranges in between them.
SARAH: I guess I’ve just learned to work with the structure of my body as
it is and to strengthen certain things and stretch things and just know
that I can’t live my life the way I did before –
AD: The person on their knees pulls up on a chair, rests their arms on it,
and throws oranges at a table. Then picks up a chair, carries it over
their head, and sets it down in front of a different table.
MIKE: And the healing process might be miserable for a while like, you
might have to go through, you know, with your physical body,
sometimes you have to go through physical therapy, and that’s a
very painful experience, from what I hear. With our emotional
lives, I feel like sometimes, the process of healing can be equally
painful, but in a different way. Um. So depending upon where we
are in that journey, um, maybe it’s time to embrace the pain, and
to work through it.
Our ability to reach for others for support, and support others ourselves,
is impaired by oppression, history. Populations who experience bigotry and
prejudice on a regular basis often experience stress from it, are made more vul-
nerable to an array of health conditions because of it.42
Back in Omaha, Political Scientist Theresa Jedd drew parallels between eco-
logical definitions of vulnerability and experiences of emotional vulnerability
in my interview with her.
So now, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] definition

of vulnerability is that it is a function of exposure multiplied by sensitivity.
And here’s the debate, it’s either subtracted by adaptive capacity or divided by
adaptive capacity. But the idea is that, our ability to adapt to these changes is
something that can cut how sensitive we are to changes themselves . . . So, in
some ways, I think, um, in climate science vulnerability is, it’s kind of peel-
ing back the layers and seeing which segments of society would be more, um
likely to get, to be hurt –43
Being vulnerable makes you more likely to get hurt. Often touted as a necessity
in wellness circles, social media memes, slick video talks, and creative commu-
nities, vulnerability is not necessarily in and of itself a healing experience. In
an era of social media oversharing, emotional guidance soundbites, and “real-
ity” programming, it’s easy to forget that misperception and misunderstanding
impacts us differently.
Performance is often celebrated as a space to connect to a shared human experi-
ence, to process collective events and emotions. Vulnerability is endemic to perfor-
mance, but performers are not equally vulnerable. For marginalized performers, it
can be a liability that must be negotiated boldly and carefully. Depending on
the performer and their context, a performer might not be able to trust that
they will be seen separately from stereotypes of their bodies and selves. They
might not be able to trust that they will be seen as artists with a conscious prac-
tice and craft. Worse, their work might not register as work at all, instead being
absorbed by the audience subconsciously and appropriated in another form,
reproduced without citation of their authorship.
Not all audiences deserve our vulnerability; not all communities will have
the tools to process the work. Sometimes, doing the work actually means
taking on seemingly absurd questions, ideas, or premises. It means enter-
taining the stuff that seems ridiculous. A performers’ vulnerability can be
mocked, satirized, exploited, or used to make misguided judgments about
their character.
How might ecological entanglements expand our human capacity to sup-
port? The relativity of trauma opens up questions for its significance beyond
humans. Nonhumans can be traumatized, can have their intelligences denied,
unrecognized. Nonhumans can be vulnerable to levels that humans cannot
experientially comprehend. What might our processes of healing share? How
might we support each other in healing?
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE walks to BREAKAWAY TABLE.

Long pause. MOE throws the table.
AD: The person sits at the table, slouches, sits upright, then overturns the
table suddenly. It breaks.
AD: The person gets up and gathers the broken table’s pieces and reas-
sembles it.
STAGE DIRECTION: Moe tries to rebuild the table. Pulls it over to the lamp.
EMILY: To reinsert yourself in a society that doesn’t look like anything or
feel anything like the one you’ve lived or known or studied, but you
want to, because you know that you need to have a place called home –
AD: A lamp in the distance begins to flash on and off.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE takes a ratchet strap and puts it around the table.
BERT: Taking yourself out of the situation by just walking away, is good,
by doing some breathing exercises, is good, by putting yourself in an
area that’s peaceful and calm and safe to you, because your biggest
concern is your safety –
AD: The person continues to reassemble the table, pulls out a long orange
strip of material, and uses it in repairing the table.
PETER: Pine is so, uh, soft and open-g rained that it’s, uh, it’s splintery –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE puts table upright, sits at it, and slumps, observing
the table.
ALEX: Yeah, so, we’re definitely gonna focus on, um, a little on that list
that I gave you, but also, not bending over, a lot, um so, any of our
hamstring stretches, we’re going to, if you get numb at all. . .
AD: With the tie-down wrapped around the table, the person rights the
table and sits back down at it. All the lamps flash on and off.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE stands on her chair, attempts to stand on the table, stops.
THERESA: And I’m thinking of like my last relationship and one of the
things I was trying to do, and apparently he was too, after we had
kind of debriefed, was to be more vulnerable, to be more open, and
be more susceptible to hurt, and kind of exposing our imperfections.
So in some ways, I think, um, in climate science, vulnerability is, it’s
kind of peeling back the layers and seeing which segments of society
would be more, um likely to get, to be hurt –
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE steps off the table. Takes work gloves. Exits.
AD: The person stands on top of the table then gets back down and stands
next to it, looks down at the table. The person then walks off out of sight.
During the development of this whole performance, the absurd questions

I’ve been asking myself include these: how do I listen to a table? How can I be
present with both the object and the language that is imposed on it at the same
time? How do I stay in this moment, resisting the urge to enact or depict the
narrative in the words of my interviewees – while letting the space and things
describe their own narrative with my body? Can I create connections that are
not just projection? Can the work be more than just my body moving things?
I am tempted to lean on a rational, descriptive “reality” – an idea that a com-
prehensive detailing of the table will suffice as a performance, healing process,
metaphor, research subject, and universal humanistic tool. But Sarah Ahmed
reminds me that even my own “orientation” toward the table is inconsistent.
“For despite the self-sameness of the object, I do not see it as ‘the self-same.’
I never see it as such; what ‘it is’ cannot be apprehended as I cannot view the
table from all points of view at once. The necessity of moving around the
object, to capture more than its profile, shows that the object is unavailable to
me, which is why it must be intended. It is a table, so I am hardly surprised to
walk around, and from each view, to see a profile that matches what I expect to
see. It might have four legs, or a wooden top – all of the things I would expect
it to have if it is a table. The table’s sameness can only be intended.”44
I can’t cubist-view a table from all points at once, can’t be in empathy with
a table. I need to be mindful of our vulnerabilities, our absurdities, our ridicu-
lousness. Despite all this, can performance be a space for humans and nonhu-
mans to better understand one another, to heal together?
How do I share space with processes of recovery in a way that respects and
embodies them? In a way that opens up space for nonhuman healing?45 How
or why is this important when the lives and bodies of oppressed peoples are
under threat? How does reaching out to the nonhuman embody an expansion
of empathy, of healing, that can center the marginalized?
How do I even begin to understand what that healing might be?

Acknowledgment
(First Compilation),” Journal for Artistic Research (Issue 14) and interconnections:
journal of posthumanism (1.1).
Notes
1 Scarry, 40–41.
2 Scarry, 41.
3 Johnson, “Grasping and Transforming the Embodied Experience of Oppression,” 85.
Describing the ways in which oppressed people are traumatized by sexism, racism,
classicism, ableism, and homophobia, Johnson writes: “Many theorists and research-
ers in the field of traumatology suggest that much of the violence and abuse resulting
in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exists within a larger context of societal
oppression.”
4 “[T]he possibility of mutual transformation of both the observer and the performer
within the enactment of the live event is extraordinarily important, because this is the
point where the aesthetic joins the ethical. The ethical is fundamentally related to live
art because both are arenas for the unpredictable force of the social event” (Phelan,
“Marina Abramovich,” 84).
5 At the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. All Native Land acknowledgments are
sourced through https://native-land.ca/, which explicitly refers to itself as a crowd-
sourced, not an academic, reference: “it is more akin to Wikipedia than an academic
text,” write its creators in its 2019 Teacher’s Guide (https://native-land.ca/teachers-
guide/). This means that some acknowledgments may be inaccurate. I’m choosing to
embrace the nonacademic nature of this source, trusting its general reliability with the
understanding that new information may emerge that complicate or dispute some of
these references.
6 Mills.
7 Harman.
8 I also reference this work in Beitiks, 1–9.
9 Harman.
10 I didn’t get into Ahmed’s work until the entire project was completed, in part because
of an internal stubbornness, a determination to approach the work on my own queer
terms. I was also resistant to a scholarly framework of phenomenology that insists on a
self-referential, singular language of human experience: writes Maxine Sheets-Johnson,
“Phenomenology is thus not something one turns to and does on a lazy Sunday after-
noon, nor some general term to be used indiscriminately.” I do my best work on lazy
afternoons, and the entire project introduces indiscrimination and generality into words
and disciplines. So yeah. According to Ahmed, my firsthand experience has value that
can be couched within phenomenology. According to Johnson (“Phenomenological
Methodology,”), unless I’m following proper scholarly protocol and contextualizing
myself within a Western canon that put the onus on me to prove my relevance, I can go
fuck myself. I prefer Ahmed’s work.
11 Ahmed, 117.
12 Johnson, “Those Who Have Suffered Understand Suffering,”, 49.
13 In Trans Care (2020), Malatino describes a superhuman ability to withdraw internally
as an adaptation to the trans experience of constant scrutiny. “We do what we need to
do to keep going. For me that meant tuning the whole world out. The folks that are
closest to me now are the ones that knew how to cut through that silence. This means
that caring for us – and our practice of caring for one another – is no simple task; we’re
sometimes swaddled thick in completely justified defenses. We might not be able to hear
you, or each other, very well at all.”
14 Lang, “Mindfulness in PTSD Treatment,” 40.
15 Potter, referencing Shupak. But similar techniques are described in Smith. Descriptive
techniques are also used in the therapeutic research of Edna B. Foa (Prolonged Exposure
Therapy) and Yvonne Dolan (Resolving Sexual Abuse). In addition, there’s been extensive
research on mindfulness-based therapies for the treatment of PTSD.
16 Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 295.
17 Noë, Action in Perception, 15, talking of perception: “Your tactile impression that things
are arranged thus and such consists not in the sensations in your hands and feet, but
in the way those sensations result from attentive movement through the space. What
is informative is the fact that you bump your foot here, that you cannot press forward,
there, and so on. You perceive the furniture layout when you understand the way your
sensations are fixed as a function of movement through the space. In this way, sensation
and sensorimotor knowledge work together to produce the perception of the spatial
layout of the room. For this reason it seems plausible that feeling alone is not sufficient
to enable you to learn about or discover the properties of objects or layouts around you.”
18 2008.
19 I’m not trained as a drama-, dance-, or movement-based therapist, so I won’t presume
authority in those fields. If you’re looking for relevant reading, however, performer and
dramatherapist Drew Bird reflects on performance processes in the context of practice-
based research, heuristic inquiry, and drama therapy in “How Can Arts- Based Research
in Dramatic Performance Illuminate Understanding of the Therapeutic Relationship?”,
279–292.
20 For instance, Snyder / American Council for the Blind.
21 #haterbating. Gadsby.
22 Snyder, 10–11.
23 Reid “Black on Audio Description,” August 15, 2018.
24 Reprinted with permission of the describer, Brack.
25 Peggy Phelan has famously disputed this (and then reconsidered herself) in her past
work. She summarized her book Unmarked by saying, “In live performance, the poten-
tial for the event to be transformed by those participating in it makes it more excit-
ing to me – this is precisely where the ‘liveness’ of live performance matters” (Phelan,
“Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart,” 295). Since this publication, she
has expanded on understandings and definitions of performance. Here, I’m pointing to
expanded understandings.
26 The edges of performance have long been a topic of research within performance stud-
ies. “We have entered a realm of all performance-all-the-time. This is not to say that
‘the real’ has disappeared, but it is to acknowledge that it is impossible to recognize ‘the
real’ without a concept of performance in view. I think that the recognition of the cen-
trality of performance to contemporary life and thought reflects some shifts in the aca-
demic scene, but these shifts are themselves responses to a more pervasive performance
world-view” (Phelan, “Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart,” 292). See
also: “The boundaries between performance and not performance are constantly being
tested, challenged and remapped by artists and theorists alike” (Bial, 60).
27 Johnson, “Grasping and Transforming the Embodied Experience of Oppression.”, 83.
“Scholars in nonverbal communication have long recognized the significance of our
bodily comportments and argue that nonverbal behavior affects our relationships and
interpersonal environments in intricate ways, providing insight into emotional states
and influencing perceptions of competence, sincerity, authority, and vulnerability . . .
In fact, some researchers argue that the nonverbal component of social interaction
(rather than institutional structure) is the locus for the most common means of social
control.”
28 Mar’i, S.K. 1988. “Oppression involves institutionalized collective (policy) and individ-
ual (interpersonal) modes of behaviour through which one (powerful) group attempts
to dominate and control another (weak) in order to secure political, economic, and/or
social-psychological advantages. As such it necessarily involves the objectification of the
others through transforming them into objects in order to justify and facilitate manipu-
lation and control.”
29 Johnson, “Grasping and Transforming the Embodied Experience of Oppression.”, 86.
30 Popularized by Crenshaw but originated in many works, such as that of the Cohambee
River Collective or the work of Patricia Hill Collins.
31 “Trauma is chronic when the factors that bring it about remain intact. The social rela-
tions of individuals are not only the cause of trauma; maintaining those social relations
is what feeds and multiplies the number of traumatized individuals. Psychosocial trauma
thus constitutes the concrete crystallization in individuals of aberrant and dehumanizing
social relations, like those prevalent in the situation of civil war . . . this means that the
chain tends to break at its weakest link (the most unprotected social sectors), or the link
subjected to the greatest stress (the sectors most directly affected by the conflict and
warfare),” Martin-Baro, 1994, 125.
32 Shay, 34. He further notes that unlearning racism is a crucial aspect of healing: that sol-
diers are unable to recover so long as they think of the Vietnamese as evil other. “Restor-
ing honor to the enemy is an essential step in recovery from combat PTSD. While other
things are obviously needed as well, the veteran’s self-respect never fully recovers so long
as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy” (115).
33 “Pain is biography” (Philipose, 62, evoking Donald Nathanson).
34 Palmiter et al. “Building Your Resilience.”
35 Gunderson et al., Foundations of Ecological Resilience, 4, 424.
36 “. . . resilience is often misunderstood. It is typically viewed as the ability to bounce back
from adversity, often in a heroic, individualized act. Furthermore, that ability is often
seen as something learned or acquired in childhood – the result of supportive parenting,
the presence of other caring adults, and so on. But the full picture of resilience is much
border and much more organic” (Menakem, 50).
37 Schaefer, 51.
38 “Health is Mental: Infographic Data,” 2013.
39 Menakem, 12.
40 Schaefer, 51.
41 Gilbert, M84. “Symbiosis is the strategy that supports life on earth. Rhizomal bacteria
interact with legumes, allowing nitrogen fixation, the basis of terrestrial life. The coral
reef ecosystem and the tidal sea grass ecosystem depend on the symbionts of corals and
clams. These major symbiotic webs rule the planet, and within these big symbioses are
the smaller symbiotic webs of things we call organisms. And within organisms are the
products of even more ancient symbioses called cells, and the products of other ancient
symbioses, which we call genomes. Symbiosis is the way of life on earth; we are all
holobionts by birth.”
42 Sonke et al., 22.
43 Jedd, Personal Interview, 2016.
44 Ahmed, 36.
45 Puig de la Bellacasa opens up this question in response to Bruno Latours’ idea of “matters
of concern” in her book. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sarah. Queer Phenomenology. Durham and London: Duke University, 2006.
Armentrout, Alicia. Personal Interview (Child Care Specialist, resident of Omaha, Nebraska),
2016.
Beitiks, Meghan Moe. “The Artist as Facilitator: Being Present with & Loving the Unknown.”
Performance Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–9.
Bial, Henry. “What Is Performance?” In The Performance Studies Reader, 2nd ed. New York
and London: Routledge, 2007.
Bird, Drew. “How Can Arts-Based Research in Dramatic Performance Illuminate Under-
standing of the Therapeutic Relationship?” Drama Therapy Review 5, no. 2 (2019): 279–292.
Brack, Fred. “Gravity Primary Script.” Audio Description Script, July 24, 2014. NC Museum
of Art.
Bradshaw, Kate. Personal Interview (Animal Behavior Specialist, Nebraska Humane Society),
2016.
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Poli-
tics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (n.d.). http://chicagounbound.uchi-
cago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
2016.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Gadsby, Hannah. Douglas. Los Gatos, California: Netflix, 2020.
Gilbert, Scott F. “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concentration of
Cooperative Processes.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the
Anthropocene, Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Gunderson, L, C.S. Holling, and Craig Allen. Foundations of Ecological Resilience, Eds. Lance
H. Gunderson et al. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009.
Harman, Graham. The Object and the Arts. Institute of Contemporary Art London, 2014.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0GR9bf00g.
Johnson, Dominic. “Those Who Have Suffered Understand Suffering: Notes on the Body
(in Pain).” In Agency: A Partial History of Live Art, Ed. Theron Schmidt. Bristol: Intellect,
2019.
Johnson, Rae. “Grasping and Transforming the Embodied Experience of Oppression.” Inter-
national Body Psychotherapy Journal, The Art and Science of Somatic Praxis 14, no. 1 (Spring
2015).
Lang, Ariel J. “Mindfulness in PTSD Treatment.” Current Opinion in Psychology 14 (2017).
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Mar’i, S.K. “Challenges to Minority Counselling: Arabs in Israel.” International Journal of the
Advancement of Counselling 11, no. 6 (1988).
Martin-Baro, Ignacio, “War and the Psychosocial Trauma of Salvadoran Children,” Writ-
ings for a Liberation Psychology, trans. Anne Wallace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994.
Mills, Selena. “What Are Land Acknowledgements and Why Do They Matter?” Local Love,
March 18, 2019. https://locallove.ca/issues/what-are-land-acknowledgements-and-why-
do-they-matter/.
Noe, Alva. Action in Perception. Representation and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004.
Nohner, Emily. Personal Interview (Humanitarian Professional, resident of Omaha, Nebraska),
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Palmiter et al. “Building Your Resilience.” In American Psychological Association, 2012. www.
apa.org/topics/resilience.
Phelan, Peggy. “Marina Abramovich: Witnessing Shadows.” In The Performance Studies
Reader, Ed. Henry Bial, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, n.d.
———. “Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart.” Journal of Visual Culture 2,
no. 3 (2003): 291–302.
Politics 9, no. 1 (2007): 60–81.
Phillips, Jack. Personal Interview (Naturalist, Hitchcock Nature Center), 2016.
Potter, Shawna. Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You
Work, Play and Gather. Chico and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2019.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Reid, T. “Black on Audio Description.” Reid My Mind Radio (blog), August 15, 2018.
http://reidmymind.com/reid-my-mind-radio-black-on-audio-description/.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Schaefer, Donovan O. “ ‘Trauma Makes You’: An Interview with Donovan O. Schaefer.”
Bulletin for the Study of Religion 45, no. 2 (June 2016).
Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York:
Atheneum: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994.
Sheets-Johnson, Maxine. “Phenomenological Methodology and Aesthetic Experience:
Essential Clarifications and their Implications.” In Performance Phenomenology: To the Thing
Itself, Ed. Stuart Grant. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019.
Shupak, Amanda. “Here’s an Easy 2-Minute Trick to Calm Your Racing Mind.” SELF,
January 28, 2016. www.self.com/story/trick-to-stop-racing-thoughts.
Smith, Sara. “5-4-3-2-1 Coping Technique for Anxiety. University of Rochester Medi-
cal Center.” Behavior Health Patterns Blog (blog), April 10, 2018. www.urmc.rochester.
edu/behavioral-health-partners/bhp-blog/april-2018/5-4-3-2-1-coping-technique-for-
anxiety.aspx.
Snyder, Joel. Audio Description Guidelines and Best Practices. Alexandria, VA: American Coun-
cil of the Blind, 2010.
Sonke, J. et al. “Creating Healthy Communities through Cross-Sector Collaboration
[White Paper].” University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine/ArtPlace America,
2019.
New York), 2016.
2016.
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin, 2014.
3 Human/nonhuman/more-
than-human relationships
(New York)
With audio description by Katie Murphy
Sometimes it takes horses a very long time to trust humans again because of what
they have been made to painfully endure. Occasionally, aggression and anger are
vented towards some humans due to a lack of positive human imprinting. Lee
Baby is kept in her secluded field for her protection. RHH [Retirement Home for
Horses] wants her to feel secure knowing that no one will challenge her, that she
has nothing to fear, that she is well-fed, that all of her needs are being met, and
that she is loved. It is hoped that in time Lee Baby will learn to trust humans again.
Until then, she can roam her paddock freely, chat with her neighbors and live her
life the way she wants to.
– Text on a paddock for a horse named Lee Baby at the Mill Creek Retirement
Home for Horses in Florida
According to Paul Gregory, a member of the Retirement Homes for Horses

staff, this sign blurb is developed through a combination of veterinary consul-
tation, volunteer experience, and the terms dictated by the horse’s behavior.
The phrase “for her protection” is not just a poetic reframing: horses that bite
people, even in self-defense or as a reaction to provocation, run the risk of
being euthanized by the state. In Lee Baby’s case, being isolated for biting
other horses made her visibly lonely and depressed. The staff’s solution was
to give her a private paddock, at a safe distance from the public, that was still
approachable by other horses. This sign is offered as an educational explanation
to visitors.
This educational blurb is a unique combination of human projection, veri-
fied research, perspective from the professional field, and consideration for the
horse’s experience. Volunteers observed the horses’ behavior – they considered
the possibility that the horse was expressing itself in languages outside of their
normal vocabularies, and developed a plan to care for the horse in consultation
with veterinarians with deep disciplinary knowledge of nonhuman health and
behavior.
I visited the Retirement Home for Horses while writing this book – it
prompted reflection on the second chapter of Systems of Pain/Networks of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-3
Human/non/more-than-human relationships 37
Resilience, which took place at a residency in Upstate New York, on Mohican
territory, and took on attempts of something akin to this signage.
It began on a farm, at Residency 108 – named for its 108 acres. Artists at the
residency are dropped off at a house in Upstate New York and then left to work
independently in between weekly visits from the director.
Upstate New York has some landscapes that until that point, I had only
thought existed in cartoons. Rolling hills with bright green lush grass and
swarms of songbirds that greeted the day and provided a soundtrack for the
arc of the sun through the sky. It was spring at the time (you can hear the
music playing already), with clear bright sunshine, a small farm of goats and
sheep, and the luxurious resource of time (lah deeeeeee dahhhh). I would work
mostly alone, checking in and occasionally swapping assistance with another
artist in residence – we would start the day with a breakfast and a check-in,
and eat dinner together most every evening, with the director coming up to
check in on us once a week. Being left alone for long stretches at a time left
many hours for wandering the landscape, sitting with and contemplating the
livestock and scenery. In setting out to make ecological work, I was surrounded
by an environmentally idyllic context.
I had a camera and a tripod: I would set it up on a tableau and try to see
what might happen. As I recorded video of improvised performances, I also
continued to interview people locally: the residency landowner, an environ-
mental restorationist, the house caretaker, and her daughter, both members of
local indigenous tribes.
In the editing, these Upstate New York voices combine with the voices of
interviews from Omaha and are juxtaposed with footage from my movements
around the landscape.
38 Human/non/more-than-human relationships
Sarah Ahmed writes, “We are turned toward things. Such things make an
impression upon us. We perceive them as things insofar as they are near to us,
insofar as we share a residence with them. Perception hence involves orienta-
tion; what is perceived depends on where we are located, which gives us a
certain take on things.”1 I’m attempting to approach knowledge based on my
location, my being at this gorgeous site.
Interviewing was an attempt at gathering knowledge that was located in
a specific place and incorporating it into a greater pool of experiences. An
attempt to honor the experiences that are generated in part from their connec-
tion to place, and to connect those experience to meaning beyond that place.
I was not seeking out narratives of conflict but rather experiences and under-
standing. Yet as Martin Sökefeld writes, “The close linkage between space/
place and conflict is not accidental; rather, it is the consequence of the fact that
all human action ‘takes place’ in places – even if in virtual ones. Place is a cru-
cial resource for action and is therefore almost necessarily disputed in cases of
unrest.”2 That is to say: conflicts that arose in the interviews were invariably tied
to the place I was talking to people in, whether they were about land manage-
ment or marriages. Power, conflict, place, and trauma are deeply interwoven.
Beyond the interview audio clips, I’m also trying to include the landscape
itself, putting my body in various contexts and attempting to be present with
what emerged. Sometimes I had an idea about how to move: sometimes
I would just end up holding long, uncomfortable, awkward, and curious eye
contact with a goat.3
In an essay on performativity, Judith Butler expands her consideration of the
term to the nonhuman: “are the human and object worlds that together make
a performance possible also what make up the performance, such that there
is a nonhuman dimension to all performance? That is, is performance always
engaging the nonhuman conditions and components of our own action? Are
such worlds carried and conveyed, made or unmade, in the performances that
we do and are, the ones we see and hear or register in some other way, those
that lay claim to our responsiveness and, by acting on us, tacitly restructure how
we sense the world at all?”4
My response to these questions is basically, “Um . . . yes,” and the work, a
video, a montage of mundane moments and actions underscored with inter-
views, audio description, and the sounds of local birds, is another attempt at
answering.
BERT: And it’s not that I let it go: and I’m not going to bury it again,
because when it does come out with a vengeance, then, uh, you
know, it’s hard to deal with, it’s very difficult. And as a veteran,
I know the things that I can and can’t do –
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: In front of a barn, a person wearing work gloves

and a back brace approaches the charred remains of a firepit. They
scoop the ash and burnt charcoal into a mason jar.
KATE: You put your coat on and take it off again, or pick up your keys,
and put them down again, and act like you’re gonna leave, but then
you don’t, so the dog will not, will start to not associate those things
with you leaving, so they won’t get as amped up while you’re gone,
and they won’t panic like until you’re gone, because they won’t see
you go or know that you’re leaving, potentially forever in their mind.
AD: From a hook inside the barn, the person removes and then replaces
an orange harness made of two rachet straps.
The songbirds were gorgeously relentless; they ate from a series of feeders
outside the kitchen window. I spent long periods listening to and recording
them, hoping to include them in the conversations within the work.
Nathan Pieplow has done some fascinating work attempting to draw paral-
lels between bird sounds and human phonetics.5
There are, for instance, a number of different ways I could transcribe a
recording of birds from Upstate New York. I could use a cultural placeholder
for the sound of birds:
tweet tweet
chirp chirp
Coo
kikirigi
I could attempt to literally transcribe the sounds, using the phonemes and let-
ters available to me in (Californian) American English:
Wakwakwak pewpewpewp grkgrkgrkgrkgrkgkrgkrgkrgrk tiii pewpewpewpewpew

grkgrkgrkgrk ptptptptpt dididididi gweegwee gweegwee piwpiwpiw gweee trrrra
trrrrraaa kaww gragragragragrafra weeeeh weeh weeeh weeh pitpitdyadyadya
dyaaaahhh ggggggggggggg gaaaa pipipi
I could transcribe the sounds into the International Phonetic Alphabet, used by
linguists to transcribe and analyze languages, and by actors who are attempting
to perform specific dialects or accents. Here is that same passage:
weɪkweɪkweɪk pu:pu:pu:p gɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:k ti:i:ɪ

pu:pu:pu:pu:pu: gɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:k ptptptptpt daɪdaɪdaɪdaɪdaɪ gwi:gwi:gwi:
gwi: pu:pu:pu: gwi trrrə kɔ: grəgrəgrəgrəfrə wi:i:i:eɪ wi:i:i:eɪ wi:i:i:eɪ
pɪtpɪtdədədə dɪeɪɑ:ɑ:ɑ:hh ggggggggggggg geɪɑ:ɑ:ə paɪpaɪpɪ
I could even use some of the words that Pieplow has employed as formal
descriptors or categorical terms for some bird sounds:
Tsew, tsit, tsip, psit, squeep, tseereet, tseew, weet, tew, pweew, vreer, cheet,
kew, tsook, tewee, pwut, squawk, khow, zweew, kleer.
Pieplow eventually lands on the analysis of spectrograms as a visual way of

“describing” birdspeak. He breaks down the shape and directionality of sound
patterns by kilohertz as a way of deciphering tone, cadence, patten, rhythm,
and therefore: some kind of identifying species.
Here is a spectrograph of my recording of Upstate New York birdsongs:6
There’s a lot of grain in the image: it’s a long file with a lot of background
noise. But you can see more if you zoom in on one section:
The pattern in the middle is what Pieplow would call a “nasal sound”, a
combination of multiple simultaneous whistles on different pitches that we
perceive as a single sound. Each of the stacked stripes in that pattern is called
a “partial”. Wider spacing between the stripes on the spectrogram means a
higher pitch to the whole sound.
To me, it sounds like the sound you make when you blow on a blade of grass
between your thumbs or if something small, plastic, and delicate produced a
musical fart. According to Pieplow, birds with nasal voices in Eastern North
America include the red-breasted nuthatch, the black-billed magpie, and the
pinyon jay.

Transcribing birdspeak feels like understanding. It makes birdsong a physical

presence, despite the fact that it was already “there.” Mimicking or “reading”
that birdspeak feels like communication. It feels like the transmission of infor-
mation. I might even get to the point where I could repeat birdspeak and
influence bird behavior. I could employ various devices or recordings for that
purpose. But I’ll personally never be fluent in “bird” or be able to claim com-
prehensive understanding of every pip and squawk I hear and make in acous-
tic environments. Worse, if I play back or create these sounds to birds at an
attempt at communication, I might actually confuse birds and alter their behav-
ior detrimentally.7
“[B]iologically, there is no ‘transmitted information’ in communication,”
write Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, important systems thinkers
combining cognitive sciences and biology, among other approaches and dis-
ciplines. “From the perspective of an observer, there is always ambiguity in a
communicative interaction. The phenomenon of communication depends on
not what is transmitted, but on what happens to the person who receives it.
And this is a very different matter from ‘transmitting information’.”8
This idea that communication is what happens to the receiver redefines relation-
ships. I could send a lot of signals to birds, knowing nothing of what I was
sending until I witnessed their effect on their behavior. In politics, social media,
communities, personal relationships, there is a lot of discussion about what
constitutes offensive language and its effect on learning environments and com-
munities. Wave after wave of new terms emerge: more accurate, more specific,
more considerate words arise as we struggle to articulate the complexities of
human experience and acknowledge the painful histories that are our collec-
tive legacy.9
But the idea that communication is what happens to the receiver releases us a bit
from the expectation that we will ever develop a “perfect” language that is
welcoming, safe, and inclusive to all, and reminds us that offense is, at its core, a
term for what happens when someone gets hurt. That maybe instead of focus-
ing on whether we used the correct words or not, we could pay attention to
the power dynamics of a given exchange, the histories in the room with us.
We might look at who is getting hurt, how, and why, and be sensitive to those
dynamics.10 We might remind ourselves, ultimately, about the necessity of clear
and unambiguous consent, because we are always in ambiguous communica-
tion with power, with oppression, with ecologies.
Performance is articulated to a great extent by its audience, however that
audience is delineated. A performance can be for a crowd of ticket holders, a
passerby on the bus, a fellow performer, a camera, a plant, a table. The “suc-
cess” of a work is often determined by its effect on the receiver. If they are
moved, made emotional, reactive – it might be “successful”. If the audience
were brought into a state the artist didn’t intend: boredom, elation, and so on –
it might be called “unsuccessful”.
But there’s a long history of artworks and performances being vehemently
rejected by an audience of receivers that were later hailed as important – as well
as deeply damaging works that perpetuated systems of oppression, like min-
strelsy, being widely accepted and celebrated.11 So we can’t say that the value of
a gesture or performance lies only in its effect on the receiver. Just that it opens
up greater considerations, a potential inviting in of the world.
Fritjof Capra, a deep ecologist and systems theorist, interestingly, uses lan-
guages of choreography to describe nonverbal communication and listening in
his analyses of systems:
In a human conversation our inner world of concepts and ideas, our emotions,
and our body movements become tightly linked in a complex choreography
of behavioral coordination. Film analyses have shown that every conversation
involves a subtle and largely unconscious dance in which the detailed sequence
of speech patterns is precisely synchronized not only with minute movements
of the speaker’s body, but also with corresponding movements of the listener.
Both partners are locked into this precisely synchronized sequence of rhythmic
movements, and the linguistic coordination of their mutually triggered ges-
tures lasts as long as they remain involved in their conversation.12
This sounds like a gorgeous back and forth of some kind of utopian ecological
attunement. But power dynamics also unfold in nonverbal, indirect actions.
Exclusion, discrimination, retaliation, and oppression also happen in the “pre-
cisely synchronized sequence of rhythmic movements” that Capra articulates,
realized in movement, action, signal, material.13 Abuses of those dynamics accu-
mulate in the bodies of marginalized peoples, in the form of stress and transgen-
erational trauma. Inequity and its histories are always present with us in every
exchange, even when our individual bodies contain privileges and oppressions
unique to our present moment. This could be embodied in transgenerational
trauma, or in the inheritance, as Ahmed describes it, of whiteness.14
My body has inherited whiteness, as been assigned whiteness: the legacy of
colonialism has shaped the structures I work within. I can say these things, but
addressing pain is not just a matter of finding certain ways to describe things.
It is also a matter of looking, uncomfortably and directly, at the way in which
we are moving and acting in the world; looking, uncomfortably and directly,
at the effect that our actions and performances are having on others, including
things and ecologies themselves.
Cultures that presume supremacy are inescapable: I enable them simply by
not questioning them. I might default to the dismissal of some voices, through
pure oblivion, in the same way that I might be protected or isolated from the
effect I have on the environment. Though my actions have an impact, I am
protected from those repercussions by a system that prioritizes my comfort.
MIKE: Uh, sometimes people are a little more trusting than others, and
I can only work within the trust that they extend to me. And I,
the . . . there are certainly different levels of trust, I suppose – uh,
levels might not be the right word, um . . .
AD: In the barn, the person sits on a wooden chair, engaging a nearby
goat with their stare.
MIKE: But, but really, the assessment comes by being present with people,
and meeting them in conversation, and, uh, engaging in empathetic
and, and reflective listening. Like, those are the, the key tools that
you might say that that I use as a chaplain, and I think what that does
is it helps me not only get an understanding of what it could be like
to be them, but it helps the patient or oftentimes the patient’s family
member know that they’re not alone in this part of their journey.
AD: Outside, a bull rests in a cowshed shared with a table that has six legs,
two of which swing out from the side.
eyes, and I’m going to tell you to think about something. And when
the light turns off, you’re gonna tell me what you noticed.
AD: Inside the barn, a lamp switches on and off.
JILL: I mean, you can tell, you can actually tell when any animal is sick.
Because they just don’t act right.
AD: The goat stands on a platform, staring into the camera curiously.
KATE: Immediately start, ’cause it’s defensive, they’re trying to get you to
go away, ’cause humans are scary (mm).
Donna Haraway observes that listening is a key component to any modicum

of nonhuman communication in her book Staying with the Trouble: making Kin
the Chthulucene.
In fact, it is the performance of listening that in part determined a farmer’s
success: “Farmers bad at listening to their animals, bad at talking to them, and
bad at responding were not good farmers in their peers’ estimation. The ani-
mals paid attention to their farmers; paying equally effective attention to the
cows and pigs was the job of good breeders.”15
The nonhuman presence is also inescapable in performance, as in any art
form, even if you’re not working outdoors with well-trained animals or plants.
Aside from any living moving things, there is the presence of the surfaces, air,
space, moisture, grit, dust, spit, sweat, bacteria, fabric, sound, feelings, projec-
tions, ideas, histories. In deeply attentive practices of art and science, the edge
between life and research blurs. “As each new scientific discovery reveals more
details of the complex interplay between human worlds and natural worlds, we
are also increasingly faced with our inability to tell these worlds apart.”16
In performance, to be present is a state performers seek out. To have pres-
ence means to occupy space, to be in tune with all that is and is happening, to
encompass a special quality that is engaging to the viewer.17
This moment of awareness, this achievement of presence, opens up avenues
for listening. When a thing has presence, we as audience members feel attuned,
connected with it. When a thing is present, we have an almost-inarticulable
understanding of its being. We may not be able to describe its history or biog-
raphy, but we are in communication with it.18 19 The work of performance, of
art making, that points itself to the cultivation of presence, becomes a necessary
act of facilitation. We achieve something akin to understanding.20
Describing presence primarily as “the inter-relational tool through which the
subject networks (and is networked by) the external world,” Gabriella Gian-
nachi articulates her definition of the term through research in cognitive sci-
ence. Presence is a heightened experience of a performer/thing, an experience
that reminds us of our entwined existence. It is, according to Giannachi, “an
ecological process that marks a moment of awareness of the exchanges between
the subject and the living environment of which they are part.”21
THERESA: And I’m thinking of like my last relationship and one of the
things I was trying to do, and apparently he was too, after we had
kind of debriefed, was to be more vulnerable, to be more open, and
be more susceptible to hurt, and kind of exposing our imperfections.
So in some ways, I think, um, in climate science vulnerability is, it’s
kind of peeling back the layers and seeing which segments of society
would be more, um, likely to get, to be hurt –
AD: In front of the lamp, the goat’s silhouette faces the camera, stepping
from side to side. Outside, the person hooks the orange harness onto
the table, and drags it across muddy grass.
JAMIE: Even when development does not destroy the entire meadow
habitat, the remaining fragments are usually small and have much
lower biodiversity value.
AD: In the barn, the person leans into different positions in the wooden
chair underneath the lamp. Off to the side, an orange rests on the
ground next to the table. In a smaller room, the lamp flickers on and
off. Three oranges lie on the ground in a triangle. The person leans
the chair back until the headrest is pressed against the wall. They
cross their right leg, holding their knee.
PETER: You know, hardwoods are um, you know they’re harder to work
with because they are more dense and –
AD: In a pasture, the person gently pets the bull’s forehead while horses
graze in the background.
KATE: Well, I guess, understanding their motivators is important to
understanding why they’re behaving the way they are (OK) so
I guess when I get a call, I ask them, I ask the person, so why do
you think, like if a dog is being aggressive, well, what do you think
is triggering that dog, and is it scary to them, and do we need to
counter condition (what’s counterconditioning?). Um, giving them
a positive with their negative stimulator, so basically give them a treat
when the scary thing is happening.
AD: They remove their hand and the bull approaches, sniffing their waist.
Startled by something, the bull abruptly turns and walks away.
Research suggests being present with “nature” is healing for us. Experiences
of the outdoors can improve sleep, reduce stress, decrease risk of mental ill-
ness.22 They can reduce blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease,
improve mental and social well-being, and reinforce healthy behaviors, like
physical activity.23 The psychological well-being of a community can be associ-
ated, in part, with its proximity to street trees, gardens, water, and other green
spaces.24 Being close to a green space can support our health. Traumatized folks
who find themselves unable to connect with humans might find solace in the
companionship of other mammals.25 Things, people, and places help us heal:
we do not only heal ourselves. Environmental justice efforts are not just about
acknowledging the ways in which racism and environmental destruction are
intertwined. They are also about who has access to what kind of healthy spaces,
about who has access to healing.
Beyond proximity, relationships with nature are also a potentially key aspect
of health.26 In cultivating relatedness to nature, presence, and observation are
attempts at understanding, ways of reminding ourselves of our context, our
connection. Even a conscious engagement with our most involuntary ecologi-
cal entanglement, the exchange of carbon dioxide with oxygen – that is, mind-
ful breathing – is shown to help us regulate our own emotions and process our
experiences.27
Humans can help things and places heal. They can consider the needs of
plants, microbes, animals, managing healthy ecosystems, designing for the
environmental context, incorporating bioremediation into new development
projects. The volunteers at the retirement home for horses were able to per-
form appropriate care for Lee Baby the horse by observing her behavior, move-
ment, and building a space for her to heal on her own terms.28
But how we plan for healing, how we understand what constitutes a ben-
eficial action to something that does not speak in words, is shaped by our
experience and perception. As a place where we connect to things in meaning,
performance is a crucial framework within which we articulate and reenact our
entangled existences.29
In contemplating conscious engagement with places, Sondra Fraleigh offers
the following “Map for Being in Nature” in her article “The Phenomenology
of Being Seen”:
Remember that being seen can be a matter of responsivity. Take a walk

in an appealing environment. Select the place, a mountain trail or lonely
beach, anyplace away from business and talk. Walk alone, so you can be
quiet, and listen. Let the sounds carry you. Let the feeling of your feet on
the ground carry you, your breath carry you. When you find a place you
want to stop and rest, sit or lie down, and be held by the place. Allow this
place to touch and see you.30
Places hold us, help us heal.

So here we are, with this stuff, in this place that is holding us. In looking
at materials and things and objects in philosophy and culture, many writers
turn to list making. You see lists of objects in writings by Timothy Morton,
Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, Sarah Ahmed, and Graham Harman. The list is a
minirecord of things, often in the author’s immediate view, sometimes instead
of a particular assemblage (glove, pollen, rat, cap, and stick)31 that is used as a
tool for harnessing the present moment with things, a chance to reflect on the
expansive systems that connect us to the nonhuman.
These lists and descriptions often include the immediate act of typing the
text itself or a reflection on the writer’s (and reader’s) present perspective.
adrienne marie brown, in her influential book Emergent Strategies, begins by
describing her own moment of writing:
there is a trail of ants moving along the ceiling of my room, and the sounds
of a small jungle town coming in and out of the screened open windows,
birds cawing, laughter, children’s delight emerging from that, then tears.
A car backfires and I flinch, a lizard peeks at me from the door. It’s been
raining for a few days and the air feels thick.32
So here I am, in this object-oriented tradition, with my own palpable things.

In my moment in time, a singular thing is affecting human behavior globally:
COVID-19, a coronavirus. It is aided in its movements by water droplets, spread
by human talking, sneezing, coughing, breathing, and touching. As a safety meas-
ure, humans are severing physical contact and connection to one another, “shel-
tering in place” at home, and avoiding the outdoors except for essential trips, like
food and care for others, in anticipation of the arrival of the vaccine-thing. Whole
countries have been on lockdown for months. Grocery and health workers are on
the front lines. There was a shortage everywhere of face masks and hand sanitizer.
This virus-thing has enabled both the systemic things of racism and preju-
dice and the thing of mutual support. Cities and towns worldwide have seen
staggering protests in response to American police brutality and the move-
ment for the lives of Black people. Hate crimes have risen against people of
Asian descent, enabled by the discriminatory language and policies of the US
president.33 Beyond the “performance” of isolation, the virus has also dictated
human behavior in the form of thorough, constant handwashing, the forbid-
ding of face touching, the enforcement of mask wearing, and an avoidance of
coughing or sneezing in public. Despite the dangers, there’s been a stunning
rise in networks of mutual support. Social media groups, resource sharing net-
works, online performances, emergency funds.
So in this particular instance, the narrative of “I type these words in my
home, where I am surrounded by things” takes on quite a different meaning.
I am not in my home because I choose to be here (though I often do and am
wildly privileged in having an apartment I can work from by a full-time job
with a salary that is sufficient for my needs). I’m here because I cannot risk
access to the studio office, libraries, cafés, or other places I might be able to
work from. Outside, people are losing things, as landlords demand rent even
when jobs are nonexistent, bills keep piling up, and communities surrender and
share resources to stay afloat. Stress or trauma from economic precarity can be
compounded by a lack of agency. The most pervasive “present” thing in this
landscape is a virus that is dictating the performed actions and lives of millions
of people and the virtual networks available via my laptop.
Among the things I have noticed are every twinge and dull patch of my
body. Every tingle is either a potential indicator of viral infection or a normal
everyday bodily function or adjustment.
To be fully present in the current moment is a necessary process in perfor-
mance. If you’re not present, you can’t be fully aware of what you’re doing,
you lose some of the deliberateness of your craft. To be present with ecologies
is to recognize ourselves as not separate from nonhuman landscapes and cycles.
By observing the things around us, we are pulled out of the isolated space in
our minds, the space that is potentially preoccupied with stress, trauma, and
the experience of isolation – into a world of systems and networks that include
us but extend far beyond our knowing. It is to recognize the urgent ways in
which we need things and they need us. It is a way we can act as agents in our
own healing.
But knowing that “nature” is beneficial to us opens up the danger of reduc-
ing, for instance, ants, pollen, breezes, lizards, and trees to their confirmed
“healing properties,” ignoring the aspects of their existence that serve greater
ecologies, other species, or their own capacity to thrive.34
And when part of what you have to be present with is a reality that is out to
harm you – whether it’s a reality infused with a virus, bugs, or bigotry – being
fully present is an extreme form of vulnerability and potentially an unwise com-
promise to your own safety.35 Seasoned performers engaging with potentially
risky processes, like bloodletting, body manipulation, emotional processing, or
nudity, set clear boundaries and engage in safe practices – they do not reck-
lessly sacrifice their present and future bodies to the work. We cannot approach
presence as a kumbaya cure-all, a normative signal of creative mastery, or even
a universal human need. Because the landscape we come to be present in is
different for every body within it, and observation can easily be weaponized.
EMILY: Um, to reinsert yourself in a society that doesn’t look like any-
thing or feel anything like the one you’ve lived or known or studied,
um, but you want to, because you know that you need to have a
place called home –
AD: A time-lapsed shot of the table inside a small, outdoor pen. Clouds
roll forwards and back as the footage rewinds and replays. In the pen,
the person uses the orange harness to pull the table across the grass.
At times, the table seems to resist like a farm animal might. The per-
son bolts back to the two swung-out legs off the now unharnessed
table.
JESSICA: So a lot of times we warn people that there’s an ugly phase to
restoration.
ANNE-KATRIN: Maybe the bird population is very happy with the vines,
we should leave them, or certain animals really thrive on them, but
the consensus was that no, the vines are really killing the trees and
the birds are happy just with the trees and they don’t need the vines
so we finally decided to start taking the vines down.
AD: Two oranges lie in a shallow creek.
In her book Slow Looking, a cultural analysis of the act of observation, author
Shari Tishman asserts, “To describe something is to make a subject/object dis-
tinction. To have the vantage point of an observer, we imagine at least part of
ourselves outside the thing observed.”36 To observe is often to imply a separa-
tion, a removal, some form of distance.
In a culture of supremacy, the presence of a person of a powerful race, gen-
der, or other status might be treated as invisible, nonexistent, a cultural given.37
When the act of observation means that all actions are monitored, including
the actions of populations that are marginalized, observation has the potential
to become not just an act of looking – but a form of surveillance. “Put nega-
tively: no surveillance can occur without the execution of operations of obser-
vation,” writes Christian Katti.
Surveillance and observation result in something that one can call a “blind
spot” analogous to that of the eye; the blind spot is something that sur-
veillance and observation cannot see, cannot observe, for systematic rea-
sons. [. . .] In order for something to be made observable at all, other
things – certain fields that ambiguously linked to observation and organ-
ize it in a certain way – drop out of the same observation. In brief, the
paradox emerges that by means of producing something (an observation),
we unwillingly also produce its opposite (concealing).38
The idea of a dispassionate, separate observer conceals the observer them-

selves. But thorough observation means taking everything into account, even
assumed or underlying logic. There is no truth separate from the reality of the
observer. Karan Barad unpacks this in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway,
describing all the different nonhuman actants (including a cigar, gender dis-
parities, and various socioeconomic inequities) that influence the outcome of
a single scientific experiment. There is no reality in which we are not already
present.39
Though residencies are not experiences of isolation any more than labora-
tories are, there can be some level of distance within them from the normal
aggressions of everyday life. Part of the loveliness of residencies, beyond the
idyllic settings, time, and space, is that you are in a place that has chosen, by the
fact of your presence, to honor your perspective as an artist. You have applied,
or been recommended, and been given access to resources that allow for the
build of your practice. Residencies are spaces that embrace a multitude of sub-
jective approaches to the expression of experience and the articulation of life.
Every community has its own form of surveillance, and no residency is fully
separate from systems of oppression. But feeling honored can lift a weight off,
allow an artist to settle into their surroundings a bit, might lessen one potential
threat (lack of trust in one’s expertise), might allow for prolonged looking, deeper
presence, extended listenings to birds as needed. In Upstate New York, I took
in long moments to watch the birds, to take walks and look at the rolling hills.
In their comprehensive book Observation and Ecology, Pauchard and Sagarin
make the case for rational observational studies that are consciously present with
human affect as a central practice in ecological research:
The core activity of ecology is “observation.” Humans have been keen

observers of the natural world as long as we have lived on earth. Obviously,
this has served a critical purpose – observing immediate dangers as well the
relationships of biological organisms with one another and their changes
across seasons were all essential to survival. But from the first recordings of
human observations – pictographs, carved fetishes, and cave paintings – we
can see also a great awe and wonder at the natural world. We don’t think
these two drivers of human observation – the informational content and
the emotional returns – need to be separated when considering an obser-
vational approach to ecology.40
So when it comes to “communication” with the nonhuman, language is not

all-encompassing, action transmits more than we know and understand, obser-
vation gives us information. But we can’t deny our own effect on how that
information is shaped or how we are impacted by the nonhuman. We can’t
ignore the fact of our very presence or absence as a statement in and of itself.
So: communication, including between humans, is mostly nonverbal, much
enforcement of social inequity comes from nonverbal actions (crossing the
street to avoid someone, ignoring the email or résumé from marginalized appli-
cants, basic evil glowering). Things listen to actions. Plants follow sunlight,
dogs follow hand signals, cats chase fingers, horses look you in the eye, neutri-
nos pass through you without notice, fish follow the weird blob that you are on
the other side of the glass, invisible chemical and molecular exchanges abound.
AD: The person places the table onto the creek in front of the chair and
a basket of oranges. They sit down in the chair. Shown on shadows
cast onto the creek, the person puts a white tablecloth on the table.
JESSICA: Bringing in more diversity in the hopes that there’ll be a greater
resiliency to climate change.
AD: A wide shot of the creek. The person rearranges the oranges lined
up on the table.
BERT: Taking yourself out of the situation by just walking away is good,
by doing some breathing exercises is good, by putting yourself in an
area that’s peaceful and calm and safe to you because your biggest
concern is your safety.
AD: In the pasture, the person tries to bait the bull with the white table-
cloth. Despite their best efforts, the bull looks away disinterested.
The person glances at the camera befuddled. In a field of tall grass,
the person sits with a hand resting on the table. The table’s two
extra legs are swung out. The person looks at the table and removes
their hand. They flop onto the grass – again and again as the foot-
age replays. In the cowshed, the bull rubs his face on the table. The
table’s two extra legs are outswung.
The nonhuman landscape is constantly communicating its intentions and
needs, and we are negotiating these signals consciously and unconsciously as
we navigate space. Changes in light affect our mood, dying plants change color
and smell, chemicals and toxins stir the beginnings of cancer in our bodies,
oxygen filters through our lungs with every breath, ensuring that we live long
enough to take the next one. But most of this communication may not read as
such, may be largely experienced as some kind of background or set dressing
to the drama of our lives.
Donna Haraway imagines a time when we can speak and read things not
even previously recognized as language, as communication.
“Do you realize,” the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, “that
[once upon a time] they couldn’t even read Eggplant?” And they will smile
at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read
the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.41
It’s the utopian vision at the end of her articulation of the Chthulucene, an era in
which “the bioatic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story,” but human
responses to nonhuman needs and prompts are urgent and hugely consequential.42
Awareness of resilience enables one to see many ways to preserve or enhance a

systems’ own restorative powers. That awareness is behind the encouragement
of natural ecosystems on farms, so that predators can take on more of the job
of controlling pests. It is behind “holistic” health care that tries not only to
cure disease but also to build up a body’s internal resistance. It is behind aid
programs that do more than give food or money – that try to change the cir-
cumstances that obstruct peoples’ ability to provide their own food or money.43
Attunement to the other, within the experience of presence that is cultivated

in performance, has the capacity to cultivate space for understanding and seeing
ecologies, landscapes, the nonhuman.44
It’s by listening, learning, and observing to her that Lee Baby’s caretakers are
able to devise an effective system to support her healing.
In working toward attunement, we are present in the work not only with the
landscape, the things of our material realities, but with the cumulative actions
and support that brought us here to this moment. Everything that enables
the performance’s existence also shapes its impact, including perceptions and
understandings of the performer. This means that barriers to full presence come
in material and cultural forms.45 Sarah Ahmed writes, “The ground into which
we sink our feet is not neutral: it gives ground to some more than others.”46

Acknowledgment
(First Compilation),” Journal for Artistic Research (Issue 14).
Notes
1 Ahmed, 27.
2 Sökefeld, Spaces of Conflict in Everyday Life: Perspectives Across Asia, 23–24.
3 We did not make each other cry. https://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com/
4 Butler. “Performativity,” 2016.
5 Pieplow, 2010.
6 Created with Raven Lite, a free spectrograph software available from the Cornell Lab at
http://ravensoundsoftware.com/
7 “Playback changes the behavior of wild birds. It simulates a territorial challenge, or in
some cases a threat from a predator, creating a situation to which birds must respond
aggressively. What birders may call ‘cooperative’ individual birds may in fact be extremely
agitated” (Pieplow, 2017, 32).
8 Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: Biological Roots of Human Understanding, 196.
9 See: Coates, “The Importance of Being Politically Correct.”
10 Do yourself a favor and listen to Patton Oswalt’s stand-up comedy album Talking for
Clapping (A Special Thing Records, 2016) and his loving rant on identity terminology.
To quote: “If you get hung up on words, you’re going to let a lot of evil motherfuckers
slip through.”
11 Morris, “For Centuries, Black Music, Forged in Bondage, Has Been the Sound of Artistic
Freedom. No Wonder Everybody Is Always Stealing It,” August 14, 2019.
12 Capra, 290–291.
13 Johnson, 83. “One of the most significant findings of this [nonverbal communication]
research is the conclusion that asymmetrical interactions are a hallmark of the nonverbal
exchanges between individuals from dominant/subordinate social groups.”
14 “Whiteness becomes a social inheritance; in receiving whiteness as a gift, white bodies –
or those bodies that can be recognized as white bodies – come to ‘possess’ whiteness as
if it were a shared attribute. Inheritance can be understood as both bodily and historical;
we inherit what we receive as the condition of our arrival into the world, as an arrival
that leaves and makes an impression” (Ahmed, 125).
15 Haraway, 129. It should be noted that the work of Temple Grandin did a lot to change
a livestock management culture in which listening was not a pressing concern.
16 Bubandt, G125.
17 Fischer-Lichte, 2008. “Presence marks not an expressive but a purely performative
quality. Through specific processes of embodiment, the actor can bring forth his phe-
nomenal body in a way that enables him to command both space and the audience’s
attention. It can be assumed that the performer’s ability to generate presence is based
on his mastery of certain techniques and practices to which the spectators respond – be
it from his first appearance on stage and throughout the performance or only for very
specific moments. To the spectators, who are struck by this presence as by lightning – a
‘stream of magic’ – it appears unforeseeably; its inexplicable appearance lies beyond their
control. They sense the power emanating from the actor that forces them to focus their
full attention on him without feeling overwhelmed and perceive it as a source of energy.
The spectators sense that the actor is present in an unusually intense way, granting them
in turn an intense sensation of themselves as present. To them, presence occurs as an
intense experience of presentness.”
18 Fischer-Lichte, 2008. “By emphasizing the bodily being-in-the-world of humans, embod-
iment creates the possibility for the body to function as the object, subject, material, and
source of symbolic construction, as well as the product of cultural inscriptions.” Marina
Ambramovich famously unpacked this in her work The Artist is Present, which showed
at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. A year later, I satirically put a plant in a chair
and positioned it as an artist. www.meghanmoebeitiks.com/the-plant-was-present/
19 Noë discusses attunement in perception of the nonhuman in Action in Perception (20–
21): “For the active animal, the ground is directly perceived as walk-uponable, and the
tree stump as sit-uponable.”
20 Beitiks, “The Artist as Facilitator: Being Present with & Loving the Unknown.”
21 Gianacchi, 54–55.
22 Bratman et al., 3.
23 Shanahan et al.
24 Bratman et al., 2.
25 Van der Kolk, 121. “it has become widely recognized that when adults or children are
too skittish or shut down to derive comfort from human beings, relationships with other
mammals can help. Dogs and horses and even dolphins offer less complicated compan-
ionship while providing the necessary sense of safety. Dogs and horses, in particular, are
now extensively used to treat some groups of trauma patients.”
26 Shanahan et al., 5–6. “We found that higher levels of nature relatedness predicted greater
feelings of social cohesion and higher levels of physical activity . . . A limitation of stud-
ies so far within this area is that they are often single time-point studies, and research is
needed to whether actively altering this trait might influence health and wellbeing.”
27 Doll et al., 305–313. “attention- to-breath both decreases amygdala activation and
increases prefrontal integration of the amygdala during aversive emotions, independent
of effects on breathing frequency.”
28 Swanson et al., M4. “We live on a human-damaged planet, contaminated by indus-
trial pollution and losing more species every year – seemingly without possibilities for
cleanup or replacement. Our continued survival demands that we learn something
about how best to live and die within the entanglements we have.”
29 Barad. “Agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an
enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements. So agency is not about
choice in any liberal humanist sense; rather, it is about the possibilities and accountability
entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production, including
the boundary articulations and exclusions that are marked by those practices.” (“Interview
with Karen Barad: Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers.”)
30 Fraleigh, 107.
31 Bennett, 4. A really beautiful passage, one of the original lists.
32 Brown, 1–2.
33 Serhan et al.
34 Shanahan et al., 6. “Ongoing efforts to unpack the nature-health relationship will be
vital to combat the emerging public health challenges associated with urbanization, and
to ensure that investment in green space provides value for money.”
35 The uselessness in offering presence and generosity to antagonistic entities is wisely
summarized by the Buddhist concept of “idiot compassion.” See: O’Brien.
36 Tishman, 54.
37 On the trans experience of surveillance, Malatino (2020) writes: “The panopticon is
real, and it is gendered, and we are constantly, constantly reminded of this . . . Passing
is a fragile art, dependent on, among many other variables, the light. Flood lights are
transphobic. Hypervisibility and the drive to transparency, and the technologies that
enable it, are not trans-friendly.”
38 Katti, 53.
39 Barad, 161–168.
40 Pauchard and Sagarin, 45.
41 Haraway, 57.
42 Haraway, 55. “Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the
Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with
in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and
the sky has not fallen – yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas
of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only impor-
tant actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is
reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of
this earth are the main story. However, the doings of situated, actual human beings mat-
ter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others.
It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across taxa which
and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects
of futurelessness. Like it or not, we are in the string figure game of caring for and with
precarious worldings made terribly more precarious by fossil-burning man making new
fossils as rapidly as possible in orgies of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Diverse
human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently
needed Chthulucene story.” There are clear parallels here with Indigenous cultures.
43 Meadows, 78.
44 Fischer-Lichte, 2008. “As the analysis of mediality, materiality, and semioticity revealed,
each has their share in constituting the performance as event, and they influence one
another throughout. In other words, not just performance as a whole occurs within the
feedback loop’s autopoiesis but also each of its individual elements. Materiality is not
given as an artifact but occurs as the result of the performative generation of corpore-
ality, spatiality, and tonality. The actor’s presence, the ecstasy of things, atmospheres,
and the circulation of energy ‘occur’ in the same way as the meanings brought forth as
perceptions or the emotions, ideas, or thoughts resulting from them. The performance’s
aestheticity is manifested in its nature as event: the spectators respond to what they per-
ceive just as the actors react to perceived audience responses and behavior patterns.”
45 Barad. “I know that some people are very nervous about not having agency localized
in the human subject, but I think that is the first step – recognizing that there is not this
kind of localization or particular characterization of the human subject is the first step
in taking account of power imbalances, not an undoing of it.”
46 Ahmed, 160.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sarah. Queer Phenomenology. Durham and London: Duke University, 2006.
Nebraska), 2016.
Barad, Karen. “Interview with Karen Barad: Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and
Remembers.” In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van
der Tuin, 48–70. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Open Humanities Press, 2012. https://
quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/-new-materialism-interviews-
cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext.
———. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Beitiks, Meghan Moe. “The Artist as Facilitator: Being Present with & Loving the
Unknown.” Performance Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–9.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. London: Duke University Press, 2010.
ety), 2016.
Bratman, Gregory N. et al. “Nature and Mental Health: An Ecosystem Service Perspective.”
Science Advances 5, no. 7 (2019): 3.
brown, adrienne marie. Emergent Strategy. Chicago and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017.
Bubandt, Nils. “Haunted Geologies, Spirits, Stones and the Necropolitics of the Anthropo-
cene.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., G121–
G141. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Butler, Judith. “Performativity.” Arts Research Center at University of California, Berke-
ley, and The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2016. http://intermsofperformance.site/
keywords/performativity/judith-butler.
Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York:
Anchor Books, 1996.
Coates, Ta-nehisi. “The Importance of Being Politically Correct.” The Atlantic, May 29,
2009. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/05/the-importance-of-being-
politically-correct/18471/.
Doll, A. et al. “Mindful Attention to Breath Regulates Emotions via Increased Amygdala –
Prefrontal Cortex Connectivity.” NeuroImage 134 (2016): 305–313.
2016.
Fraleigh, S. “A Phenomenology of Being Seen.” In Performance Phenomenology, Eds. S. Grant,
J. McNeilly-Renaudie, and M. Wagner. Cham, Switzerland: Performance Philosophy,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Giannachi, Gabriella. “Environmental Presence.” In Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance
and the Persistence of Being, Eds. Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, and Michael Shanks,
53–61. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucence. Durham and Lon-
don: Duke University Press, 2016.
2015).
Katti, Christian. “Systematically Observing Surveillance: Paradoxes of Observation Accord-
ing to Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory (1999).” In CTRL [SPACE]:Rhetorics of Sur-
veillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Eds. Thomas Y. Levin, et al. Karlsruhe: ZKM/
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. The Tree of Knowledge: Biological Roots of Human
Understanding. Reprint. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc, 1987.
Meadows, Donella. “Dancing with Systems.” The Donella Meadows Institute, 2001. http://
donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/.
Morris, Wesley. “For Centuries, Black Music, Forged in Bondage, Has Been the Sound
of Artistic Freedom. No Wonder Everybody Is Always Stealing It.” The New York Times
Magazine, August 14, 2019. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/
music-black-culture-appropriation.html.
Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Representation and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004.
2016.
O’Brien, Barbara. “Buddhists Don’t Have to Be Nice: Avoiding Idiot Compassion.” Rethink-
ing Religion, February 21, 2017. https://rethinkingreligion-book.info/buddhists-dont-
have-to-be-nice-avoiding-idiot-compassion/.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Pauchard, Anibal, and Rafe Sagarin. Observation and Ecology: Broadening the Scope of Science to
Understand a Complex World. Washington, Covelo and London: Island Press, 2012.
Pieplow, Nathan. Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2017.
———. “The Vowels of Birds.” Earbirding (blog), December 26, 2010. http://earbirding.
com/blog/archives/2578.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, 5th ed. Vancou-
ver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020.
Serhan, Yasmeen, and Timothy McLaughlin. “The Other Problematic Outbreak.” The Atlan-
tic, March 13, 2020. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-
covid19-xenophobia-racism/607816/.
Shanahan, Danielle F. et al. “Health Benefits from Nature Exposure Depend on Dose.” Sci-
entific Reports 28551, no. 6 (2016). https://doi.org/doi: 10.1038/srep28551.
Sökefeld, Martin. Spaces of Conflict in Everyday Life: Perspectives Across Asia. Bielefeld: Tran-
script Verlag, September 2015.
Swanson, Heather et al. “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,
Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., M1–M12. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
2017.
Tishman, Shari. Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. New
York: Routledge, 2018.
New York), 2016.
2016.
4 Categories, stigma, and
listening (Installation One)
With audio description by Emily Beitiks
So before analyzing, before classifying, before thinking, before trying to “do”

anything
– we should listen.
Categories and classifications play a large role in the institutions of mental health
care for veterans, in the education of mental health professionals, and as tentative
guides to perception. All too often, however, our mode of listening deteriorates
into intellectual sorting, with the professional grabbing the veterans’ words from
the air and sticking them in mental bins. To some degree that is institutionally and
emotionally necessary, but listening this way destroys trust.
At its worst our educational system produces counselors, psychiatrists, psychol-
ogists and therapists who resemble museum-goers whose experience consists of
mentally saying “That’s cubist! . . . That’s El Greco!” And who never see anything
they’ve looked at.
“Just listen!” say the veterans when telling mental health professionals what they
need to know to work with them.
– Johnathan Shay1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-4
Categories, stigma, and listening 59
So listen, I go to the customer service counter, I approach the luggage rack,
I cross the lobby. I put my luggage in the overhead bin, I rest it on the floor
next to me, I look in my backpack, my pocket, my shoulder bag that looks like
a purse. I’m not looking at anyone, I have my back to you, I am looking you
right in the face. “Excuse me, sir,” you say, and ironically, I am suddenly acutely
aware of the day, time, location, your gender, your race, your clothing, what
I’m wearing, how I’m standing. There’s not usually anything significant about
the moment, but my brain scans the scenario regardless.
It’s happened when I’ve had long hair, when I’ve had short hair, before I’ve
spoken, after I’ve spoken, at all times of day, but most frequently, at transporta-
tion centers, so much that a friend jokingly referred to it as my “bus gender.”
It’s happened at least once when I was wearing a long coat and a skirt. I could
speculate endlessly about how and why it happens. Because I’m tall. Because
I move with a kind of “harrumph” about me, as opposed to, say, gentle swerves.
Because I’m not skinny. Because I used to be more aggressively genderqueer,
using my presence as a monkeywrench to the binary, deliberately confusing
people about what they thought they knew, and now I . . . just enjoy wearing
pants and being myself? Many things.2
You correct yourself with a “sorry, ma’am.” Not because I correct you. Not
because I ask you to. I may not have missed a beat. But because you take a
minute longer to look at me, or I speak, I look at you with what I hope is a
nonplussed expression but which I’m sure carries a subtle tension of scrutiny.
Anyway, you take a minute and reevaluate your assessment, and we both go
about our business.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Happens all the time.”
It’s been happening off and on for about 20 years.
60 Categories, stigma, and listening
The Box Gallery in Galesburg, Illinois, located on Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Sauk,
Meskwaki, Bodéwadmiakiwen, Miami, and Sioux territories, shared a space
with a wallpaper company. They didn’t call themselves a wallpaper company:
they referred to themselves as “wall coverings.” Maybe because it’s not strictly
paper anymore or their offerings go beyond full-pattern plasterables. Their
inventory was nostalgic and retro: flowers, sailboats, plaids, raised patterns,
stripes. Their website listed various categories of wall coverings: “Country”,
“Kitchen and Dining”, “Florals”, “Stripes”, the vaguer “Traditional” and
“Transitional”, and then finally, “Kids” and: “Masculine”.
When I first saw it, I nearly spit my tea. The “Borders” section had cat-
egories for “Girls” and “Guys” as well as “Masculine”, but no “Feminine”.
Were wall coverings meant to be “feminine” or “non-masculine” by default?
In the world of domestic wallpaper, did only men and younger folks have
gender? Where I grew up, “Dude” was a gender-neutral term. Could there be
a “Dude” wallpaper? Would it evoke nonbinary-ness, California beaches, or
bearded beer-drinking men in bathrobes?
The “Masculine” section contained a few gendered tropes – bricks, logs,
sailboats – and some patterns that were both refreshingly and questionably out
of context. “Santa Fe Stripes”, like someone had taken a desert paintbrush to
khaki. A “Navajo Medallion” pattern. . . because indigeneity is masculine? Or
because access to indigeneity is synonymous with white male explorers? We’re
likely assuming everyone who buys wallpaper is white? And . . . associating Navajo
culture with men or a masculine Western trope?
But my favorite was “131105 Pine Trail Wallpaper”. It was a repeating pat-
tern of tiny curls of pine branches. Dainty curls. Swirls of pine. Tree as a glori-
ous curling challenge to standards of masculinity.
I went into the shop. I asked for the “Masculine” section. They weren’t
arranged by category in the shop but by number. Shelves of rolls of wall cover-
ings. I described the wallpaper. They found it. I’m using it for an art piece for
the show next door, I explained, and also, I asked, inhaling sharply: can you tell
me why this is labeled “masculine”?
The owner looked at me, stunned. He shrugged.
“Like, are there any specific qualities about it that read ‘masculine’ to you?
I’m just curious,” I asked.
“It’s just masculine,” he said, shoulders up near his ears. As if it were obvious.
As if the question itself were uncomfortable, unexpected, even rude.3
I know that sense of the obvious.
It’s a conflation of projection, experience, and social conditioning with
observable reality. It’s a failure to really see or listen, which Johnathan Sayer
describes as a point of frustration for recovering veterans.
It’s upended every time someone tells me, “Sorry, ma’am.”
I bought two rolls.
In her book Slow Looking, an examination of observation across disciplines

and histories, Shari Tishman notes, “There is much we can and should do to
learn about our own biases, and appreciate the limits of our own knowledge.
But we can’t not have a subjective vantage point.”4
(Installation One) went up in the Knox College Box Gallery in Galesburg,
Illinois. The wallpaper went up on the wall in charcoal-smeared strips, held
down in places by black cloth gaffer’s tape.
I had one of the wood panels from (Nebraska) with me, hung that on the
wall, along with framed quotes from research and interviews, scrawled in black
charcoal.
In the space in front of the walls, I put a dining room table, the classic heavy-
wood kind, round, with the center leaf removed. On one half of the table, a jar
of ashes and hardware, overturned, spilled out. On the other half, a cornucopia
of oranges tumbling onto a tablecloth piled in loose folds.5
Oranges on the floor below the table, piled in a corner at the base of a lamp.
The lamp’s power cord ran along the wall in big swoops, over the wallpaper,
between the framed words, held in place by hinges and hardware. A smoky trail
of blended charcoal ran along its curves.
Also plugged into this cord were two digital frames, which screened short
videos in a looping rhythm. They played video clips from the performance
in (Nebraska). The interview voices in the video were subtitled – the words
appeared as part of the video. Audio description from both videos floated into
the space, sometimes clearly audible by themselves, sometimes overlapping one
another.
In performance and its studies, ideas of embodiment come up often. In act-
ing, performers embody characters. In making performance art, the bodies of
the performers have material meaning. Bodies mean things. Invariably, identity
presentation becomes a crucial issue, within which gender is a central concern.
So we come back to Butler, who perpetually revisits ideas of performance
and gender from multiple angles in her work in a considered expansion of
performativity:
Performance is always an action or event that involves a number of people,

objects, networks, and institutions, even when performance takes place
without a stage and in the briefest of moments, gathered up and dispersed
in evanescence. For it is for and with someone or some set of nonhu-
man things and movements, always relying on a ground or background, or
social world – a fleeting act for a passing crowd – that performance comes
forth as “performance” at all. Even when infrastructure fails, something
or someone takes up some space, pointing to that loss. So performance is
not the self-constituting act of a subject who is grounded nowhere, acting
alone. If performance brings a subject into being, it does so only in terms
of the social and material coordinates and relations that make it possible or
that form its scene of intervention.6
Gender is one of many things that is not fully separate from its community,
context, network.7 In the same way that will and pain are not ours alone,
our identities8 are not just solo performances of expression but part of a net-
work of cultural influences, social norms, and punishments, materials with
gendered and racial connotations, layers of self that are something other than
those signifiers.9
This is not necessarily how performers, however, are consistently perceived.
In narrative works, a person is written as behaving a certain way consistently,
as best suits the storyline. The character is an essential component of narrative
theater and filmmaking: it is how we understand stories.10 If she tumbles in the
first five minutes, she’s going to be a klutz or she will be tripping again at a key
moment. At the very least, the fall is going to end up having some monumental
significance that tells us about the time and place that we are in, and who this
person is who is falling. It is never just falling.
And while many a hardworking actor has lent complexity to roles that have
been themselves written with complexity, the character can still be a flattening
structure. Miguel Guitierrez, a performance artist whose work is challeng-
ing, complicated, and aggressively defiant of norms, sums the complexity of
expanded performance practices up wonderfully in describing his own rela-
tionship to character in performance:
The notion of ‘character’ disinterests me because it suggests an integration,

a united self, or a representation of a person. Instead what fascinates me are
the nuances and fluctuations of a turbulent self: the way someone is and is
not simultaneously, the multiplicity in any given body, and the virtuosity
it takes to change states, approaches, actions in the blink of an eye . . . I
see character as useful when it becomes a door to the plasticity we have
as channelers of various versions of ourselves. I am always suspicious of
solidity. I get nervous in a performance when someone appears to have
no critical distance from his or her attempt to authentically be one thing.11
The demand to be “authentically one thing,” specifically a thing that is sub-

servient to a story, extends even to objects. A dramatic principle of Chek-
hov’s was that a gun introduced in the first act needed to go off by the final
curtain.12 That is: if an object wasn’t going to explicitly serve the plot, it
didn’t belong onstage. Like a tree only valued for its healing properties or
the quality of its wood – ignoring the value of the oxygen it produces, the
nutrients its leaves add to the soil, its entanglements with other trees, lichens,
animals, and bacteria. To reduce a thing to a singular role or value is a drastic
disservice to the thing in its own right. We are not singular entities, we are
ecologies of self.
So: people are complicated.13 Wallpaper appears not to be. It is flat paper
with an adhesive backing on one side and a design on the other. It’s bereft of
the whole extra layer of biological sex. It “reproduces” creatively and industri-
ally, not by some orifice or appendage that connects it to another of its wall-
paper species and which might be confused with gender. But it does create
ambience, mood, space, and those things can be heavily gendered.
What’s tripping me up about the gendering of the wallpaper is that the pat-
tern seems to be totally absent of anything that might stereotypically connote
“masculine” in Western culture – no logs, no bricks, no – what, Plaid? Stone?
Axes? Guns? Angry social media? Naked, muscular, oversexed bodies? Even the
predominant color – a muted yellowy beige – doesn’t point to anything much
except warmth. Its labeling as “masculine” renders both the framing and its
usual signifiers absurd. Here is Butler again:
Genders then, are neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. And yet,
one is compelled to live in a world in which genders constitute univocal
signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered discrete and
intractable. In effect, gender is made to comply with a model of truth and
falsity which not only contradicts its own performative fluidity, but serves
a social policy of gender regulation and control.14
In cultures with heavily (Western) normative understandings of gender (and

being real: race, sex, dis/ability. . .) to exist outside the norm, on any level, is
to suffer an endless scrutiny, a perpetual questioning of personal character (in
the real-life sense of virtue, wisdom, and personality), often to emotionally
or physically violent levels. In these social contexts, character, as a means for
evaluating the reliability of a real-life nonconforming person, is considered
in terms of integrity but actually has a closer relationship to a fictional entity.
What is being scanned for is not actually moral dependability but for a kind
of social avatar, a consistency within visual, verbal, and social paradigms. The
signposts of integrity are inevitably tied to gendered signifiers – what it means
to be reliable, consistent, dependable is first predicated on what expectations
are of the gendered norms. Scrutiny and punishment are performed both ver-
bally and nonverbally.15 Integrity is evaluated by often irrelevant parameters
(like skin color, clothing, or the consistent use of valued words) or strictly
according to social conformity.16
This utter failure of evaluative systems ties deeply to experiences and builds
of performance. For Fischler-Lichte, the very undoing of binaries is tied to the
reality of performance-making:
As performances destabilize the structure of binary opposites with

the help of which we are used to grasping and describing reality, they
raise the question whether such binaries construct a reality that con-
tradicts our daily experience. They seem to postulate a reality based
on an “either – or” rather than an “as well as” approach which would
be much more accurate. This is why these binaries are neither valid as
heuristic tools to illuminate and describe reality nor as rules governing
our behavior and actions. If performance approximates life in its unpre-
dictability and imponderability, it seems likely that parameters which
fail performance are equally ill equipped to illuminate and describe life
altogether.17
Performers are simultaneously ourselves and not-ourselves. Depending on the

construct of the work, witnesses to a performance might be expecting a per-
former to adhere to the expectations of a given character or to exist as them-
selves in a heightened state that is separate from reality. Our own bodies, our
own selves, are inescapable elements of the work,18 but the space they occupy
in a work is a constant negotiation of presence.19
In each chapter of this work, I had a conversation with the audio describer
about how they would describe me. Invariably, the subject of gender would
arise. I talked with the audio describers about describing me as how I was seen
or working, not what they knew me to be.20 I didn’t offer guidance on what
to describe or how, except if something had been inaccurately described – for
instance, a ratchet strap mistaken for a ribbon. That being said, I cannot claim
to have been purely impartial in my request for impartiality, and in some cases,
the describers knew my personal relationship to my gender outside of the
work. No one tried to describe me as a man.
The first describer called me “the artist,” as well as “the person,” which was
used in a number of subsequent chapters. In a live performance chapter, one
describer chose to name me “the arranger,” as someone who was arranging a
number of objects and materials in the piece.
In these descriptions, I am rendered literal but not by an objective, neutral
voice. We can hear the audio describer as a person. We might hear gendered
signifiers in their voice, which might change our understanding of how the
work itself is experienced. The pressure is on the audio describers not only
to deliver a lot of information but also in a short amount of time. Beyond
the basic requirements of their position, there is a lot that is framed as mat-
ters of both “concern”21 and “care”22 to communicate. But this is colored,
of course, by their own experiences and identities. Pauchard and Sagarin
unpack the difficulty in deriving conclusions from experiences in their writ-
ing: “There are good reasons to be cautious about inferring a process from
a pattern. . . [b]ut making sure that you are not ascribing causation to the
wrong factor is really a challenge common to all forms of ecological, and
scientific, understanding.”23
There is no such thing as a universal standard of objectivity – there are only
parameters that are most crucial to a given time, place, culture, experience.24
We will never get the whole picture, and we will never become one with total
rational detachment. And yet, some level of distance is what we need to strive
for, if we are to understand what we’re looking at.
The idea of being nonjudgmental is crucial in processes of both observation

and listening. It requires a conscious engagement. We must know that we do
not know everything – that our understanding is limited by our own percep-
tions, the information available to us, the color and bias that our histories and
perceptions inevitably bring.
That humans (with power) are inherently objective is the false Cartesian
presumption of whole facets of civilization, including legal systems, scientific
research, psychology.25 It often presumes a normative, white, seeing, hearing,
masculine, ableist body and positions that body as the owner of an “objective”
experience of reality. The perpetual challenge within Systems of Pain/Networks
of Resilience was to invest in the capacity of observation to connect us to the
present reality, while recognizing objectivity as a construct that is as devised as
performance itself. To negotiate the line between observation and surveillance.
Looking again at (Installation One): there was a set of two digital frames, clips
of the (Nebraska) performance with the original audio. Each short clip looped
endlessly. The audio description was subtitled (not a common practice for audio
description), emphasizing the literal description of the clip. The first perfor-
mance in the project became a memory within this installation, a reference for
the greater scope of the work. The audio from the video clips was staggered, so
that we only heard one clip at a time. It was a record of the past performance, a
reconstruction, a re-edit, not an attempt at archival, neutral documentation.
“[S]low looking emphasizes deferring judgement in favor of apprehending
the complexity of how things are in the moment . . . instead of emphasizing
change or improvement, slow looking emphasizes describing or depicting the
‘whatness’ of things as they are.”26
This commitment to “whatness” in Slow Looking acknowledges limits, opens
up space for new possibilities, stays attuned with the present, but maybe most
importantly, it assumes that things have something worthwhile about them,
something that is worth paying attention to, something that will offer informa-
tion and perspective.27
Observing and listening are key to opening up avenues for trust, emotional
safety, empathy.28 To be heard and understood is a fundamental human need. The
first action that Mental Health First Aid responders are asked to take to support
someone in a mental health crisis – after determining whether they are a harm
to themselves or others – is to “listen attentively and non-judgmentally.” Listen-
ing is the emotional equivalent of a tourniquet, of CPR, of an ambulance, of
saline hydration. It is a time-tested emotional bandage, as vital as water.29
This is, of course, not news to many cultures, especially not to women and
marginalized communities, who have historically done the emotional labor
for many privileged classes. adrienne marie brown writes, “In my experience,
healing happens when a place of trauma or pain is given full attention, really
listened to. Healing is the resilience instinct of our bodies, a skill we unlearn
as we are taught to pay for and rely on data and medicine outside of our own
awareness to be well.”30 This is pointedly important, as artist Kenya (Robinson)
reminds me, in a reality where Black people aren’t heard, aren’t believed, when
they speak the truth about anything ranging from their life and work experi-
ence, to whether or not they are holding a gun.
When we aren’t heard, aren’t seen for who we are – by anyone but especially
by people we care about or who hold power over us – we may not only be
unable to avoid trauma, we might be unable to fully resolve our pain. The pain
is part of ourselves, our daily experience of the world.31 Being heard is heal-
ing. “Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to
articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our
limbic brain and creates an ‘aha moment’,” writes Bessel van der Kolk.32
I wonder what this means for my wallpaper. I wonder how I listen to it.
I wonder how it would even define something like pain.33
These are the moments when I want the straightforward one-to-one meta-
phor (The wallpaper is me! It is a symbol for Butlerian ideas of gendered
performance! The wallpaper is genderqueer! It is androgynous labeled mas-
culine! A stand-in for humans’ narrow understandings of nature! Gender is
equivalent to the false construct of the Sublime! NATURE IS FEMME GEN-
DERQUEERRRRR).34 But instead, I have to acknowledge the network of
relatedness. A system, not a metaphorical binary. This wallpaper is similarly
subject to a landscape of projections, cultural pressures, structures. It has been
gendered when it did not want or need a gender, has defied categorization by
its very presence, is a sometimes-confounding thing.35
The wallpaper was categorized as “masculine” despite the fact that nothing
on it or in it is inherently such – whatever “inherently masculine” might even
mean. It has been assigned this category because of some association, projec-
tion, commercial need, cultural connotation that did not, could not even exist
in language because its purveyor had no words for the process of labeling and
its reasoning at all. The label simply happened, an instinctual assignment meant
to make the shop owner money, to guide shoppers to a familiar palette, trope,
or experience with which they could cover their walls.36
Does the fact that the wallpaper includes curving, soft tendrils expand under-
standings of masculinity? Does cutting it into stretched forms with black tape
position it as “submissive”, or is that just a projection of subcultural norms, a
moment of time when the color black evokes leather? Is the wallpaper reduced
to the viewer’s experience of it in the gallery at this moment? Or is it just doing
its thing, giving literally no fucks?
Ahmed sites any gendering of objects in their relationship to humans:
In a way, the writing table waits for the body of the writer. In waiting for
the writer the table waits for some bodies more than others. This waiting
“orientates” the table to a specific kind of body, the body that would “take
up” writing . . . Now, clearly, gender is not “in” the table or necessarily
“in” the body that turns to the table. Gender is an effect of how bodies
take up objects, which involves how they occupy space by being occupied
in one way or another . . . Bodies are shaped by the work they do on the
table, where work involves gendered forms of occupation.37
The wallpaper will change depending on placement, lighting, distance from the
viewer.38 Bringing it into the gallery removes it from its original gendered label
entirely – except for the fact that its nonconsensual gendering is the reason I have
chosen to engage with it in the first place, and am constantly referring to its
labeling in my own gallery labels. So I am complicit in its continued gendering.
I don’t know what gender the wallpaper identifies as.39
If it could laugh, at this point I’m sure it’s having a chuckle at my expense.
There’s a difference between observation and description, between being
present in the moment and attempting to articulate that moment with any
variety of words, gestures, tools available. They are related, but not the same.40
In the context of (Installation One), the gendering of the wallpaper is a bold
misreading, an act of description that is intentionally wrong. It is a labeling that
is wholly unconcerned with the reality of the wallpaper as it is, only in promot-
ing its own canon of gendered consumables.
In the context of the installation, the wallpaper is redescribed. It is juxta-
posed with new words in the picture frames, experiences of nature and inde-
pendent object-ness, experiences of vulnerability, and pure non sequiturs. It’s
removed from its narrative of “gendered thing for gendered consumption” and
places within new visual dialogues. Language is in the subtitles of the video; it’s
scrawled in black charcoal on paper in picture frames.
In reflecting on language as a material for artistic research, Daniela Cascella
notes, “Even at its most implicit, listening has to do with presence – both
active and not. It is tied to how knowledge is transmitted, to form another type
of knowledge, less depending on hierarchies and quotes, focused on what is
passed on, its cadence, its sense before it means.”41
So again, presence is a form of communication. It contains knowledge. Pres-
ence includes languages of material, space, movement. For Lipari, all language,
verbal, written, or silent, is “inherently dialogic.”42 This has potential because
dialogue, as defined by professional mediators, is a space within which we can
approach conflict resolution.43 It means that conflicts, and their potential reso-
lutions, are embodied in materials and their relationships.44
(Installation One) might aesthetically evoke a sense of conflict. It is a table
with the center leaf gone: two halves open and exposed. On the one side of
the table, a cornucopia with tangerines and a white tablecloth, à la still life; on
the other, a spilled-open jar of ash and hardware, from the table.
These things have their own domestic, holiday, ritual, and art-historic con-
notations. Trash hobo home. Wound. Tear, plenty. Burn, decomposition. Wild
squiggly lines. A dining room space disrupted, a place that looks like how
memory sometimes feels. A broken space I am building.
Beyond this greater composition, the individual materials have their own
million connotations.45 Their own presence is a dialogic entity. Lipari writes,
“As communication, the dialogic word is not an object, it is an energy, a liv-
ing vital force, elan vital. Because of these always already existing and infinite
future meaning possibilities, all communicative acts are always already vibrating
with traces or echoes of the resonance of other relations.”46 Though we might
ironically disagree on what to call them, all things are very much alive, are per-
forming, are in communication.47
The object, like a word (masculine), enacts meaning, is a connective force.48
The material is changed with context and labeling. Its integrity, in our own
sense of reliability, is part of what is healing for us – knowing a thing means
understanding to what extent we are safe to engage with it. But that integrity
is not solely a sense of dependability as fits our understanding. It is the character
of the thing as it exists on its own terms, beyond our ability to comprehend it
or place it within social norms.49
In this context, the wallpaper might be experiencing gender the same way
that I sometimes experience it: as something never to be taken as a given but
rather, an indicator of where power and perception rest in a cultural field.
Within the wallpaper itself are images of pines. Choreographed pines, drawn
pines, stand-ins for real pines. Posted on the wall, the wallpaper serves as a
nostalgic evocation of both home and nature in the romantic, beautiful sense.
In the conceptual space of this project, it gives me permission, later, to work
with real pines.
Stigma, labeling, and failures to listen prevent healing, prevent us from being
seen, from being understood, from integrating trauma and pain back into our
full knowledge of ourselves.50
“Listening with care,” writes Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “is an active process
of intervening in the count of whom and what is ratified as concerned; it affects
the representation of things, adding mediation to mediations.”51 As organisms
entangled with landscapes and nonhumans, to not make the gesture to know
a tree is as dangerous as not making the gesture to know a person. Even as
we acknowledge that human and nonhuman relationships are not equivalent,
we know that conflict between many entities has the capacity to destroy both
landscapes and lives.
Artist Pauline Oliveros is a master of listening and crafting spaces to listen.
The Environmental Dialogue below is from her Sonic Meditations.
Each person finds a place to be, either near to or distant from the others,
either indoors-or out-of-doors. Begin the meditation by observing your
own breathing. As you become aware of sounds from the environment,
gradually begin to reinforce the pitch of the sound source. Reinforce
either vocally, mentally or with an instrument. If you lose touch with the
source, wait quietly for another. Reinforce means to strengthen or sus-
tain. If the pitch of the sound source is out of your range, then reinforce
it mentally.52
The exercise embodies a gesture of attunement, of redescribing the auditory

landscape back to itself. In this and many other observational processes, descrip-
tion happens as a grasp at presence, an attempt to assign various languages to
the current moment, a connective gesture, an act of listening, a patient way
to work through stigma, an attempt at generosity, and a way to open up space
for both our own healing and the healing of others. “[I]in addressing trauma,”
writes Menakem, “each of us needs to work through it slowly, over time. We
need to understand our body’s processes of connection and settling. We need
to slow ourselves down and learn to lean into uncertainty, rather than away
from it. We need to ground ourselves, touch the pain or discomfort inside our
trauma, and explore it – gently. This requires building a tolerance for emotional
and bodily discomfort, and learning to stay present with – rather than trying to
flee-that discomfort.”53
It is not always the sexiest work.54 Part of the labor of describing is articulat-
ing things that by their very nature seem obvious or commonly understood.55
It can be boring and labor-intensive. But then, so are a lot of worthwhile
endeavors.56
It is the space between my lived gender and my perceived gender57 that
I keenly feel my own presence.58 Sometimes with discomfort. Sometimes
as an invitation for scorn, dismissal, judgment. I do not swell with the sud-
den bestowal of male privilege, nor suddenly feel myself to be handsome or
uniquely noticeable. I understand who I am beyond how I am seen, though my
own integrity is eclipsed by the mistake.59 On pleasant days the “Sir” is funny:
on bad days it is a confirmation that I am wrong and out of place, a poke on a
persistent bruise.

The immediacy of bodily reactions is mediated by histories that come

before subjects, and which are at stake in how the very arrival of some
bodies is noticeable in the first place. The most immediate of our bodily
reactions can be treated as pedagogy: we learn about ideas by learning how
they become quick and unthinking. There is nothing more mediated than
immediacy. You can be stopped by a perception. You can be killed by a
perception.60
As I wrote this, Candor Arts and Sming Sming Books premiered This Is not
a Gun,61 a book that features contributions from 40 artists, each creating a
visual, written, or poetic response to objects that police have “mistaken” for
guns and used to justify the deaths of Black people. Systemic racism distorts
the perceptions of the privileged. It removes the observer from the present
moment and separates them from the greater reality of the object. It turns wal-
lets, hairbrushes, cell phones, canes, and umbrellas into guns. Everything, as
Elaine Scarry writes, is a weapon. In this context, Black people are the subject
of torture, with bodily injury and death as a result. In My Grandmother’s Hands,
Menakem spends a large portion of the book writing about police bodies and
the importance of training officers on identifying trauma, calming and settling
their own bodies, and staying present with their bodies as they move through
experiences.62 Observation becomes not just a useful tool for healing but an
essential means for preventing harm to others.
Oppression is traumatic. Trauma is a disruptive, severing force: description
is not just one means for getting us back to the present, it’s a way to hold folks
accountable for their actions, to keep us in the moment of things as they exist
beyond the limits of our projections, expectations, and bigotry. It is flawed and
limited, manipulatable and distortable, and so points more to the urgency of a
particular set of intentions than a specific formula. The intention to approach
people, things, ecologies with full presence. The intent to genuinely listen, to
observe, to live in self-awareness and in the limits of our own perceptions. To
the intention to understand that the things present in our observations include
racism, misogyny, homophobia, and the blindness enabled by systemic inequity.
To not regard our individual self as so wholly and singularly objective and inde-
pendent that we value it over the lives of others. To understand the difference
between intention and impact, and work to close the gap between them.
I am constantly misgendered, but my race is never mistaken.63 Halfway
through the book, the pages turn black and invite the reader to take a break
from the narratives of violence to meditate.
“Observe,” the pages articulate, “how a connection to your breath keeps you
present in this moment fully.”64
Notes
1 Shay, 4–5.
2 Johnson, 84. “. . . part of the task of learning from the experience of oppression must
involve becoming more attuned to the nonverbal components of our everyday interactions
with others – to how we read (and are being read by) others on a body level. However, it
is important to recognize that these interactions are highly complex, fluid, and contextual-
ized, and they are not just external actions we perform, like clothes we put on or tools we
use. These embodied interactions are learned implicitly from our earliest social encounters
onwards, and are deeply entwined with our sense of personal identity.”
3 Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 13. “The rigidity of our social binaries –
male/female, white/ black, civilized/primitive, art/porn – are sacred to our Western
cultural ways of knowing, and theorists have long pointed to the necessity of inter-
rogating such foundational distinctions to discover precisely how they bolster the social
network as a whole, precisely what they uphold and what they exclude.”
4 Tishman, 62.
5 “A masculine still life, complete with wall covering,” as my friend and colleague Tucker
says.
6 Butler, “Performativity,” 2016.
7 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory,” 2007, 193. “Surely, there are nuanced and individual ways of doing
one’s gender, but that one does it, and that one does it in accord with certain sanctions
and proscriptions, is clearly not a fully individual matter.”
8 Sedgwick, 61. “After all, to identify as must always include multiple processes of iden-
tification with. It also involves identification as against; but even did it not, the relations
implicit in identifying with are, as psychoanalysis suggests, in themselves quite sufficiently
freight with intensities of incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, reparation
and disavowal.”
9 Among these layers: class, geography, community, sex, gender expression or presenta-
tion, sexuality, etc.
10 Fischer-Lichte, 2008. “In aesthetic theories, ‘presence’ and ‘representation’ were long con-
sidered oppositional concepts, wherein presence was equated with immediacy and seen
as the experience of opulence and completeness, as authenticity. Representation, in
turn, belonged to the grand narratives, exerting an authoritative controlling mecha-
nism. Apparently fixed and rigid in its meaning, it seemed suspect because its semio-
ticity only provided mediated access to the world. Within the culture of performance
of especially the 1960s and early 1970s, the actor’s body, and particularly their naked
body, was seen as the locus and epitome of presence. In contrast, the dramatic character
incarnated representation. Predetermined by the ‘authoritative controlling mechanism’
of the literary text and recreated by the actor as a physical representation of such textual
prescriptiveness, the stage character was considered proof for the text’s ultimate repres-
sion of actors and particularly their bodies. Their bodies thus had to be liberated from
the strangling chains of representation in order to break free into the spontaneity and
authenticity of their physical existence.”
11 Guitierrez, “Character.” Fischer-Lichte resists this, saying, “Both presence and the dra-
matic character are brought forth through specific processes of embodiment. The char-
acter does not come into being as a replica of an external, predetermined sphere but is
instead generated through the very process of embodiment. Each character is bound to the
specific corporeality of the actor who engenders it. The actor’s phenomenal body, their
bodily being-in-the-world, constitutes the existential ground for the coming into being
of the character. It does not exist beyond the individual body. When an actor portrays a
character, they are not replicating what is already given elsewhere, say in a text, but cre-
ating something entirely new and unique which can exist in this manner only through
their individual corporeality. If we want to retain the term representation to denote the
process of generating a character, it must be radically redefined. Yet presence and repre-
sentation are not one and the same. Even if the specific processes of embodiment are the
same – which is the case whenever an actor ‘playing’ a role appears present throughout –
the resulting perception differs significantly in each case. The difference between these
various kinds of embodiment is a result of perception, as the phenomenon of perceptual
multistability makes particularly evident.”
12 Valentine, Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom.
13 Malatino describes this complexity well in Trans Care (2020): “The identities we claim,
no matter how complex our list of modifiers, always seem to say both much more and
much less than I’d like. Years of dwelling in trans archives – both digitally and in brick-
and-mortar collections – have brought me headlong into this messiness, into the history
of terminological debates (between transvestites and transsexuals, ‘TVs’ and ‘TSs,’ between
transsexual and transgender, between intersex and trans, between hermaphroditisms of the
body and hermaphroditisms of the soul, I could go on and on) and their inevitable failure
to do justice to the lives they purport to label and thus, in a way, bear witness to.”
14 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory,” 195.
15 Ibid, 195. “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious
and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is essentialism
of gender identity after all. That this reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that
culture so readily punished or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of
gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge
that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically
necessitated.”
16 Johnson, 84.
17 2008.
18 Fraliegh asserts (101), in what is probably intended empathically but could be taken
rather threateningly: “you might suppose that shrouds and dances cover you. But they
don’t, not really. You cannot hide: for as you discover, people see who you are in the
role and the dance, and thus they understand the play or the dance through you. They
see you, and perhaps themselves through you.” In this statement, she attempts to posi-
tion the subjective viewpoint of the audience as the “truthful” read on the reality of the
performers’ identity. To me, it sounds more like a chorus of voices shouting, “Hello, sir!”
19 Butler, 2007, 187–188. “If gender is instituted through acts which are internally dis-
continuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity,
a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the
actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground
of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly
seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the
arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in
the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.”
20 Kershaw and Nicholson, 10. “Using binaries as a weapon against themselves is quite a
complex reflexive tactic. But it is an appropriate one in the context of drama, theatre
and performance research, which develops methods and methodologies that are related
homologically to the practices of drama, theatre and performance themselves. Compar-
ing like and part-like can help to detect similarities in differences, and vice versa, and
that is a key to opening up the mysteries of reflexive unpredictability in drama, theatre and
performance practices.”
21 Latour. “the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found
in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude – to speak like William James – but a
realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact.”
22 As defined by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa in Matters of Care.
24 Lipari, 51–52. “Moreover, we can recognize the degree to which we (mostly uncon-
sciously) elect to observe and/or ignore the innumerable sensations that surround us at
each moment. As described above, most of our conscious and unconscious selections
about what to notice and what to ignore come from culture. Etiquette, for example,
contains a set of ‘rules’ that govern what we notice or ignore. In some cultures, noticing
the smell of someone’s breath is standard greeting practice, whereas in other cultures it is
considered rude. Of course in addition to culture, our choices may also be shaped by our
gender, ethnicity, family, social standpoint, profession, and personality, to name but a few.”
25 Tishman, 8. “Specialists in different areas look closely at very different kinds of things.
Forensic anthropologists scrutinize skeletons. Mariners observe patterns of winds and
waves. Psychologists observe patterns of human behavior. Educators look closely for
signs of student learning. Though the things they look at may vary, the basic strategies
that experts use to make observations are strikingly similar across disciplines.” See also:
Pauchard and Sagarin.
26 Tishman, 149.
27 “A practice of reading landscapes helps us see plants and landscapes differently; knowl-
edge of changing landscapes gives us words for describing how forests have been used in
the past and how they might be used in the future. These words are resources for con-
temporary environmental politics and for producing different visions of livable futures”
(Mathews, G153).
28 Shay, 189. “To achieve trust, listeners must respect the narrator. The advice that veterans
consistently give to the trauma therapists is ‘Listen! Just listen.’ Respect, embodied in this
kind of listening, is readiness to be changed by the narrator. The change may be small
or large. It may be simply learning something not previously known, feeling something,
seeing something from a new perspective, or it may be as profound as redirection of the
listener’s way of being in the world.”
29 Mental Health Association of Maryland, ix.
30 Brown, 34.
31 Philipose, 62. “The interpretation of pain helps constitute the self – or, more precisely,
the history, experience and meanings of pain contribute toward a person’s sense of
selfhood. Understanding embodied pain as biography suggests that healing cannot be
accomplished without the erasure of the self. In this way, to allude to the pain of struc-
tural violence is not necessarily to demand a compensatory or therapeutic response
designed to eliminate pain. It is, more likely, to seek recognition that the self and the
pain are part of the same identity and the lived experience of a person. In this way, pain
and emotion are not pathological and in opposition to reason and rationality, but are, in
fact, both reasonable and revealing responses to structural violence. Ultimately, under-
standing pain and emotion is key to understanding the effects of structural violence in
the production of citizens, subjects and political actors.”
32 Van der Kolk, 327.
33 “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how
much expression they have!” (Stetson, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 650).
34 “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns
a back-somersault and there you are” (Stetson, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 653).
35 Capra, 267. “The structural changes in the system constitute acts of cognition. By speci-
fying which perturbations from the environment trigger its changes, the system ‘brings
forth a world,’ as Maturana and Varela put it. Cognition, then, is not a representation
of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world
through the process of living. The interactions of a living system with its environment
are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself is a process of cognition. In the
words of Maturana and Varela, ‘To live is to know.’”
36 Butler. “One finds oneself inside a category not of one’s own making. Of course, it is
this particular body who suffers and enjoys, and no other, but that suffering and enjoy-
ment is already a relational matter – gender is performed for a someone, even if that
someone does not yet exist.”
37 Ahmed, 59.
38 “That is why I watch it always” (Stetson, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 653).
39 Voegelin, 108. “There is a politics and an ethics in the refusal of art research to fill
the taxonomic frame of a Kantian consciousness, whose knowledge enables but also
demands and necessitates a categorical understanding of the world that relies on rather
than critiques the prejudices of its base. The lexical definitions of gender, race, class,
form, materiality, etc. describe normative identities whose certainty cannot be chal-
lenged with the language that categorises them so. Therefore while such categorical
understanding legitimises and strengthens the notion of abstract knowledge, granting
it authority, the socioeconomic asymmetries of its language reveal its construction and
the ideologies of its build. By contrast, the unspeakable of art and the plurality of its
processes, when speaking in its mother tongue, can question the ideologies of referential
definitions and can challenge its exclusions, generating actual possible fictions and as yet
impossible authorships. Because it is not only about what knowledge but also whose
knowledge. The heterogeneity of authorship is a central concern of artistic research,
circumventing the base of normative sense through the radical nature of a speech-
less production. Thus, rather than fitting the volatile sense of art into the academic
frame, scholarship has to question more rigorously the implication of its subjectivity and
authority, and the limitation of its language on what it can find out about the world.”
40 “Description and slow looking are frequently connected because they support one
another. In the process of looking slowly at something, it helps to describe what we see;
when we are composing a description, it helps to slow down to look more closely. But
though the two are linked, they needn’t be. For instance, description involves some sort
of representation or recounting of what one sees; however, there are mindful and medi-
tative versions of slow looking that emphasize being alert to the flow of sense impres-
sions as they wash over us without making a conscious effort to articulate or ‘re-present’
them” (Tischman, 55).
41 Cascella, 95.
42 Lipari, 116.
43 Chasin and Herzig, 1. “Dialogue is yet another way of talking that serves a distinct pur-
pose. An effective dialogue reduces stereotyping and increases mutual understanding.
Through dialogue, people who seem intractably opposed often change the way they
view and relate to each other – even as they maintain the commitments that underlie
their views. They often discover shared values and concerns which may lead to collabo-
rative actions that were previously unthinkable.”
44 This first struck me when watching Keijuan Thomas’ MFA thesis, “The Poetics of
Trespassing.” Keijuan, on hands and knees, lifted the white brush of a pushbroom up
with her mouth so that the bristles became a broad, overexaggerated, toothy grin, in
the style of racist figurines and caricatures: the smiling Black servant, white teeth against
Black skin. I understood suddenly how deeply racism was embedded in the very objects
around us. www.thisisunbound.co.uk/blogs/blog-1/keijuan-thomas-guest-editor
45 Tischman, 132. After giving an exhaustive and comprehensive description of her sta-
pler, Shari Tischman comments on description as a connective force. “Some of these
perspectives on the stapler are fanciful; others less so. But all of them bring to mind the
web of connections that link us to the objects of daily life. Often these connections are
invisible, sometimes imaginary. But they are also what tie us to each other and to the
world. Appreciating the complexity of perspective is a way of seeing the stuff and sys-
tems of the world in their larger contexts.”
46 Lipari, 117–118.
47 See also: Bennett, Beitiks.
48 Barad. “Independent objects are abstract notions. This is the wrong objective referent.
The actual objective referent is the phenomenon.”
49 Butler, 197. “Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and inces-
santly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or
linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily though sub-
versive performances of various kinds.”
50 Psychologists informed by ideas of intersecting oppressions recognize the complex
impact of categories in human experience, and use the following questions as guides:
“Who is included in this category? What role does inequality play? Where are there
similarities?” (Cole, 170).
51 Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 58.
52 Oliveros, viii. Smith Publications 1971.
53 Menakem, 14. He also includes a series of observational and somatic exercises in My
Grandmother’s Hands.
54 Anthropologist Andrew Mathews describes the observation of vegetation in Ghostly
Forms and Forest Histories: “This is hard work; it requires constant attention to form,
texture, and color, constant speculation as to pattern. I walk with a dozen speculative
possibilities in mind, some of which strengthen into impressions, many more of which
I soon dismiss or remain speculations. Is this tree like that one, this house like that one,
this wall like that one? Do all the trees on this valley have fire scars on their base? Does
that color of lichen grow only on oaks or on other trees also? This is mentally exhausting
work that requires close attention, and yet, paradoxically, it also contains an element of
speculation. It reminds of nothing so much as participant observation or ethnographic
interviewing, with its constant tension between here and elsewhere, accompanied by
close attention to the indeterminacy of what is going on in a particular encounter. What
kind of thing is this person telling me? What kind of thing is this tree?” (G147).
55 Brown, 261. “Everyone generally thinks they are standing still, being present, in the
present. Once people come into awareness of which way their attention is flowing, they
have increased agency. There is usually stuff in the past that needs to be resolved to be
able to look towards the future.”
56 In discussing her own work within the idea of afrofuturism, adrienne marie brown
writes, “Labels don’t excite me so much, but concepts turn me on” (Brown, 161).
57 Also possibly described as “gender identity” and “gender presentation”.
58 Butler. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory.” “No one really performs a gender alone, no matter how beautifully
idiosyncratic the performance might be. That does not mean that everyone is perform-
ing it in the same way – not at all. But even under conditions of extreme and punitive
isolation, the kind that follows from performing gender in ways that are considered
non-normative in highly hostile spaces, one suffers alone, but there is always the shadow
of company, of others who would be treated the same way were they present.”
59 Basiliere.
60 Ahmed, 145.
61 Levine.
62 Menakem, 218, 227–228.
63 Levine, 18. Artist Cara Levine, the artist organizer for This Is not a Gun, writes: “No
matter what identities of experiences we may share, each of our stories is uniquely our
own, and none of us can ever fully know or explain anyone else’s.”
64 Levine, 139. Similar invitations to observe and reflect emerge in the work of Menakem.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sarah. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2017.
———. Queer Phenomenology. Durham, London: Duke University, 2006.
2016.
Barad, Karen. “Interview with Karen Barad: Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires,
Yearns and Remembers.” In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Eds. Rick
Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, 48–70. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Open
Humanities Press, 2012. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/
– new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext.
Basiliere, Jae. “Staging Dissents: Drag Kings, Resistance, and Feminist Masculinities.” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 4 (2019).
Beitiks, Meghan Moe. “The Artist as Facilitator: Being Present with & Loving the
Unknown.” Performance Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–9.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. London: Duke University Press, 2010.
Blanchard Kraft, Jill Y. Personal Interview (Eagle Eyes) (Housekeeper and Ojibwe, Mohawk,
ety), 2016.
brown, adrienne marie. Emergent Strategy. Chico and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017.
———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory.” In The Performance Studies Reader, Ed. Henry Bial. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007.
Anchor Books, 1996.
Cascella, Daniela. “Something More and Something Else: Language as Excess and Mate-
rial.” In Artistic Research and Literature, Eds. Corina Caduff and Tan Wälchli. Boston, MA:
Brill, 2019.
Chasin, Laura, and Maggie Herzig. Fostering Dialogue Across Divides. Watertown, MA: Public
Conversations Project, 2006.
Cole, Elizabeth R. “Intersectionality and Research in Psychology.” American Psychologist 64,
no. 3 (April 2009): 170–180.
2016.
Fraleigh, S. “A Phenomenology of Being Seen.” In Performance Phenomenology, Eds. S. Grant,
J. McNeilly-Renaudie, and M. Wagner. Cham, Switzerland: Performance Philosophy,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Guitierrez, Miguel. “Character.” Arts Research Center at University of California, Berke-
ley, and The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, n.d. http://intermsofperformance.site/
keywords/character/miguel-gutierrez.
2015).
Kershaw, B., and H. Nicholson. “Introduction: Doing Methods Creatively.” In Research
Methods in Theatre and Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
2016.
Levine, Cara. This Is Not a Gun. Chicago: Sming Sming & Candor Arts, 2020.
Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Mathews, Andrew S. “Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged
Planet, Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., G145–G154. Minnesota: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2017.
Mental Health First Aid USA. Revised First Edition. Mental Health Association of Maryland,
Missouri Department of Mental Health and National Council for Behavioral Health, 2013.
Nebraska), 2016.
Oliveros, Pauline. Sonic Meditations. Baltimore, MD: Smith Publications, 1974.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Politics 9, no. 1 (2007): 60–81.
Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. London: Routledge, 1997.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2008.
Stetson, Charlotte P. “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” New England Magazine, January 1892.
Tishman, Shari. Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. New
York: Routledge, 2018.
New York), 2016.
2016.
Valentine, Bill T. Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom. New York: Philosophical Library,
1987.
Voegelin, Salomé. “Writing Sonic Fictions: Literature as a Portal into the Possibility of Art
Research.” In Artistic Research and Literature, Eds. Corina Caduff and Tan Wälchli. Boston:
Brill, 2019.
5 Failure that lives in the body
(Portrait)
(AKA: “Androgynous [gender]
queer white wom@x#y!n looks at
her actions, things, feelings.” For
your privileged parts.)
Culture is as biologically real for humans as the body . . . we are always both culture
bearers and bodies in every moment.1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-5
82 Failure that lives in the body (Portrait)
At the Wassaic Project, which is located on Mohican and Lenape territory, the
artist studios are in the barn. Every artist gets their own studio pen for their
own creative isolation (and in the spirit of Lee Baby, protection). Collective
meetings are held in what once was the livestock auction room. This lends itself
to all sorts of clever parallels. Artists as the commodity in the culture market/
exchange. Artists herded. Artists as farmed. Humans who are making work on
display. The pan-barn-icon.
The lived reality of the space is not a terrible metaphor. The barn is crisp
and cold, but mostly, it’s good for working in. There’s a soft breeze that some-
times passes through. That you can see into the pens around you means there’s
a ready conversation starter if you take a break to chat. Which might happen if
you get to feeling stuck.
The artists in residence gather often for artist presentations and general meet-
ings. It’s a bit surreal to have the residency meetings in the livestock auction
area, but it also means there’s ready stadium seating for artist talks. Group pics
happen in the space all the time. Very social-mediable. There’s a warm wooden
paneling that creates its own rustic backdrop up in the nosebleed seats.
I have and am a body thing.2 My body thing has the extra cellulite of stress
and sitting a lot at a laptop.3 It has a hunch at the nape of the neck from slouch-
ing my tall frame in order to not intimidate others. The body thing I am is
mostly hairy. It has a bit of a double chin because so did my parents. It has thick
farmer hands because I’m descended from Latvian serfs who got last names a
few centuries ago. It has white skin with freckles and is mostly strong except
when it fails completely. It is also not just me – it is a microbial landscape unto
itself.4 5
My body thing is a performing thing, as is orange, as is tablecloth.6 It’s a
thing I have a considerable amount of agency over – it is me – but what self
I have shares that agency with DNA, transgenerational trauma, thoughts I’ve
had over 40-some years, decisions I made in the past, and all the things my
present self is negotiating, including the work of this piece.
Present in the work and in the body thing are all the accumulated histories
and traumas of the performer. That is, there is continued evidence that behav-
iors developed in response to trauma, as well as genetic adaptations to trauma,
are passed down from parents to children. This became evident to researchers
in studies of families of Holocaust survivors but has proven relevant to fami-
lies in oppressed and marginalized communities and families with experience
of combat and war.7 Knowing this, we need to approach the presence of the
performer not just as a “symbol” or “character” or even just as a neutral or
abstract “action” but as an accumulation of generations of experiences, which
the performer is choosing to navigate within the structure and context of the
work. This is not to say a performer is only their history or that artists cannot
transcend their context8 – it just means we cannot pretend that trauma is not
present with us within the space of the performance.9 It is simply to acknowl-
edge its presence.
Failure that lives in the body (Portrait) 83
In performance, the body thing becomes a complicated site of meaning. It is
not always positioned as a fictional character, is not always a symbol for some-
thing else. In many performance practices, the performer is often themselves
in a different/heightened state, not their everyday self but a self in service to
the artwork.10
Honestly, right here is where I want to quote somebody, anybody, who
I can reference in order to justify the value of my own body and process.
I want them to say, “vulnerability is a unique kind of pressure” and “taking
on that vulnerability in a structured environment like performance can be an
act of generosity and growth” and “in performance we get the opportunity to
step outside our everyday roles, and also to be more fully our own bodies” and
“the vulnerability of the performer is an act of self-sacrifice, an opening for
communities to accept their own experiences more fully” and “performance
can be a healing process.” To be perfectly honest, there are a lot of sources that
have written exactly those things. My desire to cite (sometimes excessive num-
bers) of sources is one that seeks both legitimacy within, and defense against,
colonial (read: white supremacist) academic systems. What I need to defend
my hypothesis against scrutinies of legitimacy is a quote, ideally from a source
deemed legitimate in academic contexts; bonus points if the work is canonical.
My need to do this as an artist speaks to the time in which I am making art:
one where artists are expected to be both literate in, and defy, International
Art English,11 to be completely comfortable citing science, philosophy, and art
history as much as their own dreams. That I am heard and trusted at all, having
done this work, is part of my experience of whiteness.
I12 don’t13 mind14 research.15 It’s endlessly thrilling to discover other folks
from different fields and canons and histories that have stumbled upon similar
trains of thought, who articulate things I had no words for, who open up new
avenues of exploration. I often feel it will be impossible to cite everyone who
has subconsciously influenced me or who is running along a parallel track.
But goddammit, I know these things because I have personally lived them.
I should not have to quote someone else who has contextualized themselves
within Western intellectual and research-based canons that we know to be his-
torically misogynist, racist, heteronormative, and culturally inaccessible in order
for that process to be valued. I should be able to quote wisdom in any form,
whether it came from a meme, a neighbor, an accident, a plant, or my own
history. Technically, I can do this. I just have to steel myself for the scrutiny.
I have been in the perpetual, proverbial meetings where my words only land
after getting repeated by a white man. I have also felt myself, in colonial lock-
step, to have “discovered” ideas known in communities of color since forever.16
The desire to cite is overwhelming, a protective instinct, a guard against
microaggressions, a performance of legitimacy; and I often feel my whole self
overwhelmed by it, sometimes unable to speak without it.
So for this moment:
Words that are my body.17
My work and body are not absent of influence, rigor, history, or context.18
But they are their own authorities.
The human body is an astonishing example of a resilient system. It can

fend off thousands of different kinds of invaders, it can tolerate wide ranges
of temperature and wide variations in food supply, in can reallocate wide
ranges of temperature and wide ranges of food supply, it can reallocate blood
supply, repair rips, gear up or slow down metabolism, and compensate to
some extent for missing or defective parts. Add to it a self-organizing intel-
ligence that can learn, socialize, design technologies, and even transplant
body parts, and you have a formidably resilient system – although not infi-
nitely so, because, so far at least, no human-body-plus-intelligence has been
resilient enough to keep itself or any other body from eventually dying.19
Being bodies in a community of artists at a residency means observing each

other’s work, supporting it, critiquing it, offering perspective. Part of this is
giving other people the opportunity to get to know your work. Part of it is just
a social exchange. But a lot of it is that we want to better understand how our
work is viewed by our peers, what we might have missed in our own looking
on it, where it might sit in the local cultural ecosystem. It’s an observational
process where any objectivity is very clearly socially constructed and subjectiv-
ity mostly embraced and accepted.
Our view on our own work is limited.20 We might have strong intentions for
the work or an instinct of where it should go, but it’s impossible for us to get
fully out of our own heads and see the work from someone else’s perspective.
Often, it’s in dialogue with other artists that interconnection and patterns, new
directions and ideas for the work emerge.
While developing the first chapter of the project in a studio visit with another
artist in Nebraska, I spoke to my need for visual imagery that articulated both
peace and violence, calm and tension, torture and support.
She suggested still lifes. This clicked with me, made bodily sense. I under-
stood it immediately to have the capacity for duality and systemic intercon-
nectivity – while being visually familiar.
As a form, still life has a reputation both as a means of developing and show-
casing technical skill, and for providing a symbolic landscape. The paintings
provide a historical record of how reality was recorded and perceived in the
time of its making. But the painter’s depiction of a real fruit, for instance, is
always mitigated by intention, resources, cultural context – not just the truth of
the fruit or dead pheasant.21
There are many themes present in scholarly analysis of Western/European
still lifes: narratives of humans not present, economic conditions of the artist,
vanitas, science, reality, the passage of time, death.
Most of the objects depicted in still-life paintings were understood as

cautioning against the dangers of materialism and the pursuit of luxuries,
and thus as warning against the emptiness and existential wretchedness of
earthly life. The transient and temporary could be identified in the rep-
resentation of skulls, clocks, soap bubbles, blown-out candles, and wilted
flowers. These objects all function as reminders of the passage of time and
of the death that awaits every mortal being. These objects thus represent
death without including any visual representation of the netherworld or
of the doomed figures that populate it, and without representing either
battles or disease.22
Human communication is steeped in symbols and haunted by them. Art

is subject not only to the scrutiny of the canon of symbols ratified by
art history but to the symbols present in the artists’ communities and the
appropriation of the work to contexts outside of its original audience. Cit-
ing known art historical works is often seen as “smart” in current contem-
porary art practices – it demonstrates a knowledge of the canon, however
flawed those canons are, and asserts a placement of the artists’ own work
within it. Many notable artists have revamped canons in their own image
or reclaimed work from traditions that historically excluded them.23 The
still life as a visual vocabulary is not neutral, historically or otherwise, but
it does scream ART rather loudly and serves as a signifier for deliberate
composition and craft. (I MADE THIS, I MADE SPECIFIC ART-TYPE
CHOICES, I MADE IT WITH ART WORDS.)
For the bulk of the project, I used the elements of a still life. Not (entirely)
because I want to seem smart, but because I want to point to Art with a
capital A and use that framework as a tool for considering the meaning and
presence of things in this tension between safety and danger. There’s an
inventory of still life things at this point in the project that become their
own typically object-oriented list: a tablecloth, tangerines, the hardware
from the table I burned in a mason jar, my work gloves, a lamp, a hand
crank I can power and flicker it with, a panel of wood I found at Bemis,
orange ratchet straps, and the infamously gendered wallpaper. Art history,
maybe, as a pervasive, inescapable influence, the “ideally” composed image
broken into pieces.
During a studio visit at Wassaic, several fellow artists gathered around my
laptop, in my studio pen, and I got to show them the work up to that point.
I showed them videos and talked about interviews and recovery, about objects
pulled from still life imagery. They mentioned that I actually didn’t have a
moment in the work yet that was its own complete still life, its own staged
and complex composition. Without this moment, the separate objects weren’t
consistently identifiable as elements of that genre.24 OK. So that made sense,
and that’s what I had to do next.
I bring everything to the wood paneled auction hall.
I have believed in objectivity as a goal, a tool, something maybe not perfect
or attainable but rather imperfect and unattainable, in the same way anything
you really want actually is. I wanted to be objective, I want to be able to
articulate a kind of objectivity that could live in both rational and emotional
world that could be picked up on a cultural level and serve as a tool for
undermining prejudice and stigma. The desire for universality is very White
of me.
I set up the tripod.
Robin DiAngelo writes, in an ironic act of description, “The belief in objec-
tivity, coupled with positioning white people as outside of culture (and thus
the norm for humanity), allows whites to view themselves as universal humans
who can represent all of human experience.”25 This universalism pervades his-
tories and embodiments of feminism as well, enabling white bodies in our
denial of the intersecting oppressions of Black women and limiting the scope
of feminist work.26
I clip a light to a pole.
I did want the work to be universal because then I would be justified in my
personal desire to make it. It would not be unique to my awkward, hairy,
foldy queer body. If I could root myself in my humanness, I could both
shield myself against criticisms of self-indulgence and attack presumptions
of bias.
But that wasn’t going to be possible. One of those instances where self-
awareness has limits, where differences need to be acknowledged. That
I could move forward with any kind of trust in an idea of “universality”
and “objectivity” is a symptom of the conditions of my life, the same con-
ditions that allow me to assume any part of me or my actions have inherent
value, the same conditions that allow me to feel valued by citing external
sources.
In considering bias and the limits of perception, Pauchard and Sagarin assert
that “Pretending that bias doesn’t occur, or that we’ve washed it all away by,
say, randomizing our observations, won’t get rid of it. Rather, dealing with
bias requires another keen observational ability – that is, the ability to conceive
of and find potential sources of bias within a study or data set.”27 This “keen
observational ability” is also necessarily directed inward – an urgent cultiva-
tion of self-awareness, self-knowledge, the determination to see yourself clearly
within your own context.
I spread out the tablecloth.
The tablecloth is from a thrift store in Upstate New York. The tangerines
are from a recent trip to a local grocery store. The lamp, I actually ordered
online from a big-box store because at the time, it was the only way I could
get that kind of lamp, at a price I could afford. Because at the time, I was
out in the middle of a different farm in Upstate New York trying to make
this work.
With the stuff comes all the structures of industrial farming and factory
labor, the historic, ecological, and economic legacies that built those systems.28
That I am able to find relatively similar tangerines no matter what area of the
country or season I am in. That I am able to do an image search for the kind of
lamp I want-need on a laptop and then purchase it and then have that delivered
to me within a week. All this has a relative, cumulative impact on my carbon
footprint, the climate, the planet. All of it stems from various systems of com-
pensation and inequity.
Karen Barad writes, “Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undis-
torted mirror image of the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies,
and responsibility to the entanglements of which we are a part.”29 Communi-
cation is what happens to the receiver. We are accountable to the marks we
make on all our entanglements, including structures of power, landscape, social
systems.
I walk away from the stuff and take a break.
Wassaic has few means of social outlet. There’s a bar, pizza place, pool hall,
and general gathering spot. There is the actual residency exhibition silo itself.
There are several houses that we as artist residents occupy. Sometimes we have
each other over for dinner; sometimes we have gatherings.
No residency is purely equitable in terms of access. Most require some
form of application, with a portfolio and artists’ statement, the professional
norms of which you can absorb in art schools. The curatorial emphasis var-
ies per residency and, often, per round of applications, as residencies often
invite guest jurors to select that season’s residents for them. Jurors have their
own networks of artists and aesthetic languages they trust and are familiar
with. Who you know is not everything – but reputation, shared vocabular-
ies, values, approaches, connections – matter. So you might be rejected one
year by one jury panel and accepted the next – but you’re still out the cost of
any application fees. Once you’ve been accepted, many residencies charge a
fee for access, which can often be equivalent to or more than a month’s rent,
depending on where you live. But even if they don’t charge – some of the
most well-regarded ones pay the artists to support their process – there’s few
of them that offer some kind of travel support or stipend that will cover the
cost for you to make your way from wherever you are in the world to wher-
ever the opportunity is in the world. In short, participating in a residency
as a professional artist involves overcoming a series of cultural, professional,
and financial hurdles in order to gain access to the support and networking
opportunities available in these spaces. These barriers are steeped in sys-
tems of inequity, misogyny, heteronormativity, oblivious white supremacy.
Surpassing them requires cultivated networks of peers, resources, languages,
facilities, support.
These issues can come up in conversation during residencies. But the focus is
usually on the space and time you need to make work, and there’s a feeling of
support in knowing that everyone else there is facing the blank wall / pixelated
page / empty canvas every day, like you. It’s nice sometimes to share stories of
progress and frustration over meals.
Part of the safety of that social space is its temporariness. Whatever difficul-
ties arise, there is solace in the knowledge that you’ll be moving on at some
point. At one residency, I discovered that another artist was vehemently against
remodeling historic buildings for disability access and insisted on having big,
scary family-debate style rows about it at the dinner table. It became fairly easy
(and important) to sit at some distance from him for the week I had remaining
at the residency. Maybe something akin to scientists and researchers working
in the field together, you are in the same tight quarters not because of any pre-
screened or considered social compatibility or literacy, but because your work
selected you for this context. The community is sometimes not a reassurance
but a strain.
Mostly, I’ve lucked out, and everyone has gotten along fine. Sometimes
I’ve cultivated new, dear friendships and networks of professional support.
For me, having a simple space to share small wins and progressions, anxi-
eties and failures, uncertainties, references, and tiny gestures of support is
what keeps the work going. I like talking to people about the work and the
process of making it. I had pleasant (if sometimes awkward) breakfasts and
dinners alone in a house in Upstate New York with an artist from Austria
for a month: we kept a decent balance of being social and giving each other
space. In a warehouse in Omaha, my cohort of ten artists had potluck / slide
share / cocktail parties over three months that turned into social hours over
time. At one residency, I was the only white artist on-site as white suprema-
cists mowed down counterprotesters in Charlottesville.30 My understanding
of my job as a community member suddenly included being very sensitive
to my white presence in space, to primarily and urgently shut the fuck up
and listen, to check in with my fellow artists, but to be one-hundred-percent
accepting if they did not have any desire to talk to me that day. I am always
learning from these shared spaces.
It was from losing a friend at Wassaic that this urgency of listening became
painfully and personally clear.
Back in the auction hall, I roll out the wallpaper.
There’s a lot of guidelines that have emerged regarding communication,
informed by theories of nonviolence, positive psychology, regular psychology,
anti-racism, feminism, grassroots activism, collective organizing. Liberation
psychology and ecopsychology begin with the premise that inequity destroys,
distorts, and severs us from reality. Many of these are useful and helpful tools,
which introduce a consideration and deliberateness often lacking in human
communication. But like all tools, they are dependent in part on cultural con-
text. If you’re living in a context where direct communication is a cultural
impossibility, or inequity is drastically distorting dynamics, using the tools does
no good. “Subordinate people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the
luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct communica-
tion, free and open debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take
for granted,” writes Dwight Conquergood.31
I hang the wood panel on the wood wall.
If you’re coming from a community or perspective that has violently fucked
someone over in the past, if the person you are approaching does not trust
you, if they have never had the space to earnestly communicate directly,
if they have been conditioned by experiences of oppression or cultures of
indirect communication, if they simply feel unsafe talking about certain
things, it’s very likely that your efforts are not going to land. And even if
they do, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty that changes will stick. All
the warnings of good intentions mean that truly safe spaces are hard to
come by.32 Trauma accumulates in bodies. Racial trauma is what happens
when the cumulative, stressful effects of racism traumatize the bodies of
those experiencing it. That trauma is often not experienced individually
but as an extension of historic and systemic racism.33 Communication is
what happens to the receiver. We are responsible for the marks we make
on bodies.
“Many White Americans need to be confronted – firmly and compassion-
ately – on their white fragility. Yet much of that fragility is a trauma-driven,
lizard-brain defensiveness that quickly fights, flees from, or freezes out all such
caring confrontation. There is only one way through this stalemate. White
Americans must accept, explore and mend their centuries-old trauma around
the oppression and victimization of white bodies by other, more powerful
white bodies.”34 In many cases, the very framework of talent, gift, or genius
that many artists find to be empowering or healing can be violent in the way
in which it reinforces violent ideas of supremacy.
There is a mason jar full of hardware: I dump it out.
Find the Right Time. Talk Face-to-Face. Do Not Attack. Be Honest. Check
Your Body Language.35 It’s reassuring to think that if we just all follow a set of
guidelines, conflicts will resolve and life will be better, that communication is
ultimately about checking off a to-do list.
Depending on context, these tools can disrupt social norms and facilitate
change, reaffirm existing structures of power, or create more confusion, among
other unhappy endings. Cultures of supremacy are inescapable.
I fill the cornucopia with tangerines and place it on the seat steps.
Essential Partners used to be called the Public Conversation Project. They are
mediators known for brokering a peace between pro-choice and “pro-life”
activists in Boston in the ’90s and for producing groundbreaking research
on dialogue and facilitation in the process.36 Over time, they’ve come to
refine a mediation process that begins with pre-mediation interviews and
carefully screens for people who are invested in their specific kind of dia-
logue. It’s a heavy and prolonged process, the result of years of refinement
and experience.
If we race into dialogue without having fully explored the situation,

the effort may be ill-timed and bear no fruit. If credible, energetic
conveners are not involved, the enterprise may falter from inadequate
sponsorship. If the purpose and demands of dialogue are not carefully
and explicitly defined before the meeting, potential participants will be
unable to make an informed choice about their involvement. If we do
not know enough about where potential participants are coming from,
the range of opinions in the assembled group may be unbalanced and
the conversation compromised. If the goals of the dialogue are not suf-
ficiently focused or if they are too ambitious for the available time, the
effort may be frustrating or worse. If there has been no opportunity
for participants to have a hand in refining the purposes or shaping the
communication agreements before the first session occurs, the group
members may not feel much ownership or commitment to the dia-
logue effort. In sum, without thorough premeeting work, we may be
disrespectful, irresponsible, and ineffective. In an ill-prepared dialogue,
stereotypes may be reinforced, divisions deepened, distrust intensified,
and even violence provoked. Participants who are “burned” may vow to
avoid future dialogues.37
To wit: generative dialogue is an enormous amount of effort, including time,

vulnerabilities, and vocabularies that not everyone has at their disposal. It takes
a huge amount of preparation and can be torpedoed any myriad number of
ways, including malicious use of the tools of dialogue themselves. Not eve-
ryone wants to, or can, resolve conflict through dialogue. Communication is
what happens to the receiver. I am working, attempting to build this portrait of
me and things. It is a constant negotiation between them and me. The table-
cloth folds. The tangerines orange. The wallpaper tumbles down the stairs.
How do I light it so you can see the individual branches or threads? The lamp
along the edge. The lamp tipped over? No. The lamp not in the picture. The
lamp reflecting in a nearby window.
Me sitting. Me arms akimbo. Me staring at the camera, at the wall, at the wallpaper,
at a tangerine, at my knees, at the ceiling, at the ceiling, lying down, I am a thing. I am
a body thing.
Wooden panel, am I holding? On a step, looks like a step. Nail and hammer, on the wall.
Tablecloth, tablecloth. Tablecloth bright, too bright. Sit, take picture. Lie down, take
picture.
Light. Light. Another light. Another light. Another other light-light. My skin
is white, light blurs it out. Light explodes my face, my arm, makes dark shadows.
My glaring skin stands out against the wooden tones, my black pants, brown shirt.
I know the more evenly balanced I can light myself, the less I have to correct digitally
later. OK.
Another light, where the fuck am I going to put it? On this pole, on this column,
on this railing, I am putting a screw right here, fuck it, this is where I am hanging it.
Also from the ceiling, fuck, what is that shadow? Why is my nose a three-dimensional
thing?
I have several days of this. I’ve been on a few commercial photoshoots – they
involve multiple people, assistants, models, grips, done in a day or two? I figure
out where the wallpaper goes, and it’s lunchtime. I get more clip lights placed,
and it’s time for dinner. All throughout is the emotional negotiation of placing
my body in a fixed time and location, where it will be read in the context of
these objects.38
I do come to speak a material, temporal, spatial language by working with
the objects. I understand how the wallpaper falls, how the lamp clips, how the
orange sits. I can’t claim this allows me to understand them completely. But
I get something, I know something.
As I am doing this, there are other residents having encounters with other
objects. Paintbrushes, fake grass, cardboard, plaster, trash. Some of these encoun-
ters are intentional, curated, and some are out in the community. One resi-
dents’ experience, a friend’s experience, of the residency is changed fully – first,
by an encounter with a confederate flag, then a conversation steeped in racism,
then an exchange with me that plunges them into rage. I can’t tell their story.
I can only tell mine.
That one-sidedness might seem less like a respectful withdrawal and more
like a disregard of complexity, dissonance. “Ecological literacy includes the
knowledge that both sides of a conflict can be important, depending on the
context,” writes Capra, drawing parallels between ecological and social dynam-
ics and tolerance limits, “and that the contradictions within a community are
signs of its diversity and vitality and thus contribute to the system’s viability.”39
But the phrase “both sides” sends chills down the spine these days. In my
current political landscape, that phrase has been used to validate the perspective
of white supremacists and undermine the very real threats to the lives of people
of color.40 One of the things that a lot of conflict resolution language assumes
is that all participants have similar resources, capacities, and systems of support.
Which is another trap. Not only is the ground not level: it is weaponizable. It
can be made to torture.
“It should not be forgotten that there are serious limitations and misuses of
listening and hearing. Like speaking, listening can act for ill as well as good.
In fact, we might chronicle a veritable resume of listening misdeeds, which
could include secret listening, careless listening, faithless listening, and coercive
listening . . . listening is the invisible and inaudible enactment of the ethical
relation itself; upon it, everything depends.”41 Lipari herself uses some pretty
uncomfortable examples of listening in her book. One is a sample from a
Woody Allen script; the other is a reverent description of Michael Jackson
during a concert mic check. Both artists are held up as examples of powerful
or humorous listening without acknowledging their very public alleged abuse
of minors (read: willful refusals to listen). Consent is not addressed within her
scope of listening.42
Listening is not only listening when it is beautiful and pleasant – but it is
also not a universal cultural balm. A viral video of white woman Amy Cooper
depicts her calculated attempt to cry at the police and weaponize them against
Christian Cooper, a Black man who asked her to put her dog on a leash.
Cooper knows she will be heard and trusted by the authorities and uses this
power violently. She “performs” trauma, rather than face the reality: that she is
wrong for leaving her dog off-leash and threatening the local bird populations.
She chooses her racism over her integrity.43
Sometimes, people who are used to being heard are not ennobled by empa-
thy. They do not use the recognition of their own perspective as an opportunity
to reflect on the limits of their own perception but instead experience a kind of
enabling. They lack the capacity or desire to acknowledge the negative effects
of their own behavior or to respond to empathy with empathy. Encountering
this refusal to be present is a clear signal that vulnerability will not be respected
or honored: that this is a context that does not deserve our labor, whether
emotional or artistic. Often the force that enables this indifference is a system
of white supremacy.44
I am sitting in the Wassaic barn and looking at photos of things in my cam-

era. I am tired. I am feeling sensitive about the mushiness of my body, the hairi-
ness of it. Later, I will digitally remove some squishy moles from my jawline:
a year after, I would remove them in real life. There is a slow burn of internal
disapproval, cultivated from years of conditioning (Gordon Hall: “What’s more
ubiquitously human than feeling bad in relation to our bodies?”)45, but I’m not
thinking about my race, at all.
Reality takes more than a digital stamp to change. That fellow resident,
someone I cared for deeply and had cultivated a friendship with, is shaken
by their encounters with racism. I try to listen, be empathetic, offer solu-
tions, make jokes, be an “ally,” be supportive. I know the list of Don’ts.
Don’t be a White Savior. Don’t Presume to Understand. Grieve Outward.
Listen. Own your behavior. Understand your privilege. I have read all the
things.
I try to assist, to accompany, to advocate. Every effort is a microscopic failure
that leads to a crack in the relationship. I offer help in a way that unintentionally
implies a lack of trust. I make dumb jokes that not only fail to release tension,
they widen gaps of misunderstanding. Every single time I misstep, I own it and
apologize. I follow what I understand to be the best guidelines. I do not do that
specific thing again (and instead, fuck up in an entirely new way). When I am
frustrated, I direct it away from my friend. I know my perspective is limited. I
know what they are negotiating is more important than my discomfort.
But knowing these things does not magically alleviate my friends’ trauma.
Despite what many books say, I cannot perform attunement, understanding – they
can only be embodied. Knowing these things does not instantly undo the history
of supremacy and colonialism in my body and behavior, it does not separate me as
a white person from what a confederate flag symbolizes to a person of color, and it
does not preserve our fledgling friendship. I am not present with them in their pain.
A single, significant failure to listen on my part breaks the connection entirely.
I lose a friend because I fail to properly support them, to embody my respect in
a relevant or useful manner, to demonstrate that their process is more important
to me than racism or rules. I fail to fully respect their needs and boundaries.
My own experiences of othering and discrimination do not transfer.46 What,
ultimately, I needed to “perform” was resilience itself: a strength to hold my
friends’ pain, a strength to hold pain I am usually protected from.
I failed, pure and simple.47
While I was building this portrait, this thing that put my body in reference
to history, my friend was fighting the dangers embodied in the things around
them, the histories that turn objects into weapons. While I was working under
a pretense of creative safety, the illusion of safety had been shattered for them.
The narratives are wholly incomparable.48 Getting rid of the shadows on my
nose will not make me a better communicator, it will not fix the glitches that
keep me from connecting to others, from effectively holding myself and others
of my cohort accountable. I spend a few days crying. My crying does not fix
racism or solve communication.49 It does not absolve me of my mistakes. It is,
simply, a release of tension and ignorance. “Whiteness does not equal fragility,”
writes Menakem. “That’s a dodge created by white fragility itself.”50
It took about a week to get a still life photo that worked.
It took about the same amount of time for my friendship to fall apart.
Notes
1 Shay, 208.
2 For an important discussion of being in bodies, see Hall: “the sentence ‘I have a body,’
while totally normal, is not the sentence I really want to say, because I don’t believe in
what it implies. Who is this ‘I’ who ‘has’ my body? Is my body something I own? Am
I inside of it? Am I distinct from my body? What I really want to say in this instance is
not that I have a body, but that I am fundamentally and completely my body. There is
absolutely no version of me that is not this body. My mind, my spirit, and my sense of
self are all aspects of my embodiment. Of course, there’s no easy way to say this, because
even the sentence, ‘I am my body’ sets up the distinction just to erase it.”
3 Ahmed, 57. “we repeat some actions, sometimes over and over again, and this is partly
about the nature of the work we might do. Our body takes the shape of this repetition;
we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect of this work . . . The object on which and
through which I work hence leaves its impression: the action, as intending, as well as
tending toward the object, shapes my body in this way and that. The work of repetition
is not neutral work; it orients the body in some ways rather than others.”
4 McFall-Ngai, M65. “Human bodies can no longer be seen as fortresses to defend against
microbial onslaught but must be reenvisioned as nested ecosystems.” Holobiont, the
organism plus its persistent microbial communities, and the ways that this concept disrupts
the tenets of individualism that have structured dominant lines of thought not only within
biology but also in fields as diverse as economics, politics, and philosophy (Gilbert, M75).
5 “We are complex systems – our own bodies are magnificent examples of integrated,
interconnected, self-maintaining complexity. Every person we encounter, every organi-
zation, every animal, garden, tree and forest is a complex system. We have built up
intuitively, without analysis, often without words, a practical understanding of how
those systems work, and how to work with them” (Meadows, 3).
6 For an overview of thinking about things, see Kerr.
7 For an initial exploration of this, see: Dekel and Goldblatt, “Is There Intergenerational
Transmission of Trauma? The Case of Combat Veterans’ Children,” 281–289.
8 Philipose, 64. “The claim of embodied pain needs to be distinguished from the claim
of victimization. Pain as biography implies that subjectivity is constituted in pain or that
the self is constructed through emotion. This is distinct from what might be character-
ized as victimologies, that is, identity/authority claims made from the point of suffering
and by the one who suffers, with the effect of establishing a fixed subject who is reduc-
ible to the experience of violence, marginalization and oppression . . . To be in pain
is not to be victimized in the sense that a person is only one who suffers. Rather, to
know one’s pain is to already be an agent of interpretation and the making of meanings.
Further, to be self-reflective about feeling and emotion is to write a self that is politically
present and has a sense of agency.”
9 I developed some basic guidelines for safely facilitating emotionally and physically dan-
gerous performance work in “Risk and Performance,” a Creative Commons–licensed
document. www.academia.edu/28872052/Risk_and_Performance_v_1_2_
10 “Body-based researchers often find themselves – like Augusto Boal’s ‘spect-actors’ –
participating dually as spectators and performing participants, drawing upon their own
research. It is ultimately the bodies themselves that intervene in, disrupt or engage pro-
ductively among these binaries, opening new research pathways” (Parker-Starbuck and
Mock, 209).
11 www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english
12 In both the human and performer sense.
13 Rebellious (?) contraction.
14 Transitive verb: dislike. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mind
15 I describe myself as having a performance-based research practice or a research-based
performance practice.
16 “The personal is theoretical. Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is
more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To
abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory
back, to bring theory back to life” (Ahmed, 10).
17 FUCKING ME.
18 “How are bodies produced and encountered between theory and practice? How do
body-based researchers use lived experiences, memories and knowledges to inform
writing that works in productive gaps, tests the limits of comprehension or provides
moments of interpretation which respect the specific bodies of their research? In
responding to these questions, body-centered research methods frequently attempt
to intervene and disrupt ‘traditional’ binary distinctions, addressing Diana Taylor’s
cautions about the perceived authority of the traditional ‘archive’ and its oppo-
sitional positioning in relation to ‘the repertoire’ (the enactment of embodied
memory such as performances, gestures, dance). Body-centered researchers have
frequently positioned themselves between these difficult binaries.” (Parker-Starbuck
and Mock, 208).
19 Meadows, 76.
20 Capra, 42. “No matter how many connections we take into account in our scientific
description of a phenomenon, we will always be forced to leave others out. Therefore
scientists can never deal with truth, in the sense of a precise correspondence between the
description and the described phenomenon. In science we always deal with limited and
approximate descriptions of reality. This may sound frustrating, but for systems thinkers
the fact that we CAN obtain approximate knowledge about an infinite web of intercon-
nected patterns is a source of confidence and strength.”
21 Berger Jr, 5–6. “This is because still life is notable for its devotion to the special quality
of evasiveness Stephen Colbert calls ‘truthiness’: ‘Truthiness is what you want the facts
to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed
to what reality will support.’ Truthiness: the spirit of iconography; the objective of
the vanitas. Colbert’s critique of evasiveness reminds me of a similar critique voiced
by Shakespeare’s Lafew in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘They make trifles of terrors,
ensconcing themselves in seem-ing knowledge when they should submit themselves
to an unknown fear.’ ”
22 Berger, 39.
23 A contemporary example of this is the work of Kehinde Wiley.
24 Harman. “It is the nature of objects to withhold themselves.”
25 DiAngelo, 59.
26 Crenshaw, 154. “The value of feminist theory to Black women is diminished because it
evolves from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged. Not only are women
of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak
for and as women. The authoritative universal voice-usually white male subjectivity
masquerading as non-racial, non-gendered objectivities -is merely transferred to those
who, but for gender, share many of the same cultural, economic and social charac-
teristics. When feminist theory attempts to describe women’s experiences through
analyzing patriarchy, sexuality, or separate spheres ideology, it often overlooks the role
of race. Feminists thus ignore how their own race functions to mitigate some aspects of
sexism and, moreover, how it often privileges them over and contributes to the domi-
nation of other women. Consequently, feminist theory remains white, and its poten-
tial to broaden and deepen its analysis by addressing non-privileged women remains
unrealized.”
28 Ahmed, 41. “If phenomenologists were simply to ‘look at’ the object that they face,
then they would be erasing the ‘signs’ of history. They would apprehend the object as
simply there, as given in its sensuous certainty rather than as ‘having got here,’ an arrival
that is at once the way in which objects are binding and how they assume a social form.
So objects (such as the cherry tree) are ‘trans-planted.’ They take the shape of a social
action, which is forgotten in the givenness of the object. The temporality of ‘what
comes before’ is erased in the experience of the object as ‘what is before’ in the spatial
sense. For Marx and Engels, actions are generational and intergenerational (the point is
not about individual action). What passes through history is not only the work done by
generations, but the ‘sedimentation’ of that work is the condition of arrival for future
generations. Objects take the shape of this history; objects ‘have value’ and they take shape
through labor. They are formed out of labor, but they also ‘take the form’ of that labor.
What Marxism lets us do is to rearticulate the historicity of furniture, among other things.
History cannot simply be perceived on the surface of the object, even if how objects surface
or take shape is an effect of such histories. In other words, history cannot simply be turned
into something that is given in its sensuous certainty, as if it could be a property of an object.”
29 Barad “Interview with Karen Barad: Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and
Remembers.”
30 www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-car-crash-suspect-idd/index.html
31 Dwight Conquergood, “Interventions and Radical Research,” in The Performance Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Bial, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge), 2007, 370.
32 Johnson, 82. “For many, the life experience of being oppressed and oppressive creates
deep and lasting imprints of how to treat (and expect to be treated by) people differ-
ent from us, and how to negotiate power differentials among groups and individuals. It
shapes our identities and our worldviews, and informs our everyday interactions.”
33 Jernigan et al., 1–2.
34 Menakem, 104.
35 LoveisRespect.org.
36 Essential Partners. “An Overview of Essential Partners’ Early Work on Abortion.”
37 Chasin and Herzig, 17.
38 Halberstam, 96. “The queer artist works with rather than against failure and inhabits the
darkness. Indeed the darkness becomes a crucial part of a queer aesthetic.”
39 Capra, 303.
40 Grey. “Trump Defends White- Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both
Sides.’ ”
41 Lipari, 204.
42 For further information on the allegations, see Kristof, Tsioulcas.
43 Zeba Blay, “Amy Cooper Knew Exactly What She Was Doing,” Huffpost, May 26,
2020, www.huffpost.com/entry/amy-cooper-knew-exactly-what-she-was-doing_n_5
ecd1d89c5b6c1f281e0fbc5
44 DiAngelo, 59. “. . . universalism assumes that whites and people of color have the same
realities, the same experiences in the same contexts (i.e. I feel comfortable in this major-
ity white classroom, so you must too), the same responses from others, and assumes that
the same doors are open to all. Acknowledging racism as a system of privilege conferred
on whites challenges claims to universalism.”
45 Hall. “Why I Don’t Talk about The Body: A Polemic.”
46 Philipose, 62. “Pain is not necessarily a condition that demands specialized knowledge
to understand it in the self and in others, and it is the case that pain is often misun-
derstood and miscommunicated within and outside of psychiatric professions. Trauma
includes pain, but certain kinds of pain are embodied and become core components of
a person’s experience of the world.”
47 Johnson, 83. “Working through complex and sometimes subtle intersections of privi-
lege and discrimination, oppression is a life lesson.”
48 Ahmed, 136. “If whiteness allows bodies to move with comfort through space, and to inhabit
the world as if it were home, then those bodies take up more space. Such physical motil-
ity becomes the ground for social mobility. This extension of white motility should not
be confused with freedom. To move easily is not to move freely, and it is still a way of
constraining what bodies do ‘do.’ Bodies that are not restricted by racism, or by other
technologies used to ensure that space is given to some rather than others, are bodies
that don’t have to come up against the limitations of this fantasy of motility. Such bodies
are both shaped by motility, and they may even take the shape of that motility.”
49 Artist Kenya (Robinson) expounds: Whiteness is an emboldened psychosis. It is a break
with reality. It is a requirement that you live in a state of denial.
50 Ahmed, 105.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sarah. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017.
———. Queer Phenomenology. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.
Almasy, Steve. “Teacher, Ex-Classmate Describe Charlottesville Suspect as Nazi Sympa-
thizer.” CNN.com. August 15, 2017. www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-car-
crash-suspect-idd/index.html.
2016.
Barad, Karen. “Interview with Karen Barad: Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and
Remembers.” In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van
der Tuin, 48–70. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Open Humanities Press, 2012. https://
quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/ – new-materialism-interviews-
cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext.
Berger Jr, Harry. Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2011.
ety), 2016.
Anchor Books, 1996.
Chasin, Laura, and Maggie Herzig. Fostering Dialogue Across Divides. Watertown, MA: Public
Conversations Project, 2006.
Conquergood, Dwight. “Interventions and Radical Research,” in The Performance Studies
Reader, ed. Henry Bial, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge), 2007.
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Poli-
tics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (n.d.). http://chicagounbound.uchi-
cago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
Dekel, Rachel, and Hadass Goldblatt. “Is There Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma?
The Case of Combat Veterans’ Children.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 78, no. 3
(2008): 281–289.
DiAngelo, Robin. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011).
Essential Partners. “An Overview of Essential Partners’ Early Work on Abortion.” n.d.
https://whatisessential.org/resource/overview-essential-partners-work-abortion.
2016.
Gilbert, Scott F. “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concentration of
Cooperative Processes.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the
Anthropocene, Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., M75. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2017.
Grey, Rosie. “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both
Sides.’” The Atlantic, August 15, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/
trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-f ine-people-on-both-sides/
537012/.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Halberstam, Jack. Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Hall, Gordon. “Why I Don’t Talk about The Body: A Polemic.” Monday 4 (n.d.). https://
monday-journal.com/why-i-dont-talk-about-the-body-a-polemic/.
Harman, Graham. The Object and the Arts. Institute of Contemporary Art London, 2014.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0GR9bf00g.
Jernigan, Maryam M. et al. “#racialtraumaisreal.” Alumni Advisory Group, Institution for
the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture, 2015.
Johnson, Rae. “Grasping and Transforming the Embodied Experience of Oppression.” Interna-
tional Body Psychotherapy Journal, The Art and Science of Somatic Praxis 14, no. 1 (Spring 2015).
Kerr, Dylan. “What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?” Artspace, April 8, 2016. www.artspace.
com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-
art-53690.
Kristof, Nicholas. “Dylan Farrow’s Story.” The New York Times, February 1, 2014. www.
nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/kristof-dylan-farrows-story.html.
Leaverton, Bert. Personal Interview (Artist and Veteran, resident of South Omaha,
Nebraska), 2016.
LoveisRespect.org. “How Can We Communicate Better?” National Domestic Violence
Hotline, 2011. www.loveisrespect.org/healthy-relationships/communicate-better/.
Fe, NM), 2017.
McFall-Ngai, Margaret. “Noticing Microbial Worlds: The Postmodern Synthesis in Biol-
ogy.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., M51–
M69. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, and Roberta Mock. “Researching the Body in/as Performance.”
In Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, Eds. B. Kershaw and H. Nicholson. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, n.d.
Politics 9, no. 1 (2007): 60–81.
New York), 2016.
Tsioulcas, Anastasia. “Michel Jackson, a Quarter-Century of Abuse Allegations.” NPR, March 5,
2019. www.npr.org/2019/03/05/699995484/michael-jackson-a-quarter-century-of-sexual-
abuse-allegations.
2016.
6 What I can’t see (New York 2)
With audio description by Katie Murphy
This chapter can be read or listened to.

One way we can make room for understanding is to clear a space in which
we can tolerate the painful ambiguities of not understanding or knowing and,
in turn, of being misunderstood. For when we assume that understanding is
contingent upon continuity, similarity, or agreement, we leave little room for
discovery or for others.1
(I learned of legally blind artist Joel Foster after noticing a sign on the street
in Wassaic that read “Blind Person Area.” The residency directors connected
me with Joel, who rides his bike up and down the street with the sign. You’ll
hear him throughout this chapter, in italics, along with quotes from other
research, and my own parenthetical voice.)
“Pain annihilates not only the objects of complex thought and emotion but also the
object of the most elemental acts of perception. It may begin by destroying some
intricate and demanding allegiance, but it may end (as is implied in the expression
‘blinding pain’) by destroying one’s ability simply to see.2”
(Sound of a train.)
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Four oranges form a trapezoid on the dirt floor of

a charcoal kiln. Below the kiln’s open doorway, a floor lamp flickers.
JOEL: Constantly putting together little bits of information to eventu-
ally get some sort of idea or a visual – a visual that isn’t really there.
I mean, it’s created by my brain out of little pieces of information.
When I walk around my apartment, the different aspects under which it

presents itself to me could not appear as profiles of a single thing if I did
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-6
not already know that each of them represented the apartment as seen from
here or as seen from over there, nor if I were unaware of my own move-
ment and of my body as identical throughout the phases of this movement.3
AD: Across from the lamp and oranges, a person wearing a back brace sits
in a wooden chair, adopting different postures: swooping forward,
slumping down, slouching.
Sight isn’t actually my most favorite sense, or the most important. I think: touch. But
that’s just always been the way. I process things physically. Not so much mentally, not so
much visually. I’m not very visual, I mean it sounds odd, being a visual artist. It’s not
that important, you know, seeing the finished picture, it’s not that important, you know,
it’s the doing. I really enjoy making things. Physical. Very physical experience for me.
JILL: I think this is the case with anyone in any walk of life. You get hurt
if you’re tired.
AD: Outside, the person uses a ratchet strap as a harness, pulling a branch
forward as if the tree were a stubborn horse.
Everything goes to art. I mean, anything I learn that may not be traditionally con-
nected to art, I connect it to art, I thought of in terms of, whether it be a material, a
philosophy, you know, a trade, anything, went to art. I can’t say that I ever wavered, you
know, like “Maybe I’m on the wrong track.” I made my decision, and I’ve stuck with it.
You can certainly put some marine creatures into a beaker of seawater, drop
the pH a few points and see if they can still form calcified shells, and that is
important knowledge. But it’s going to tell you precious little about the fare
of those same creatures spread out across an entire ocean basin that is acidify-
ing due to carbon deposition in some places but not others as the organisms
navigate its swirling eddies and trash gyres, experience countless ecological
interactions, and evolve with the constantly changing conditions. In other
words, both the scale and the dynamics of small laboratory and field experi-
ments often bear little resemblance to what is going on in the larger world.
And then, even if we could get the funding and could work out the logistics
of experimentally testing and controlling for all these complex dynamics at
the scales at which they work, would it be ethical to do so?4
I think you have to start with the premise that life isn’t fair. It’s a given. I mean, if you
do good things, you’re not necessarily going to get a reward, I mean you’ll get a reward of
What I can’t see (New York 2) 103
some sort, but it will be more of a personal experience, a reward in growth or in attitude.
Just ’cause you’re living right doesn’t mean you’re protected.
I have talked with other leaders who got bumped into rock star status as
young organizers and almost all of us share a few core experiences: People
stopped seeing us. We became a place to project longings and critiques.
We lost touch with the fact that it’s OK to make mistakes. Then we made
the biggest mistake of our lives.5
While experimental approaches also are well suited to addressing basic
ecological questions, they have often failed to provide needed insight for
applied questions. For example, in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, which hosts
Friday Harbor Laboratories, the second-oldest marine biology laboratory
on the U.S. West Coast, ecologist Terrie Klinger was frustrated and embar-
rassed to find that almost none of the ecological studies conducted there
over the past century (which were mostly experimental) could help local
communities who asked her for scientific advice on conservation and res-
toration planning.6
MIRIAM: And so like the biggest thing coming out of there was like deal-
ing with the, like, the stress and the horse’s stress, and, like, how
the . . . and how to like gain their trust again and deal with both their
panic and my own panic. Um.
AD: In a wooded field, the person sits in the wooden chair, running
through a series of seated movements.
JILL: One knee, my left knee on the ground, and my right knee folded
up and I’m sort of scooting along hunched over doing the same
motion over and over again.
It’s not that big a deal: it really isn’t . . . because part of my artistic creed or whatever is
sort of imposing self-imposed limitations. You know, I like to set up little scenarios and
deprive myself of something, I guess it’s just the Yankee puritan or something in me,
I don’t know . . . I don’t often mix colors . . . I’d rather just use the ones I’m given, it’s
just a challenge, maybe disparate colors that don’t often go together.
I create my own limitations, whether it’s based on limits in time . . . there have been
limits imposed on me, and I’ve imposed my own limits . . . I have no central vision.
AD: Beside a railroad crossing, the person stands atop a ladder, watching
the red signal lights flash as a train approaches.
For those who see, it is difficult to resist the idea that being blind is like
being in the dark. When we think of blindness this way, we imagine it as
a state of blackness, absence and deprivation. We suppose that there is a
gigantic hole in the consciousness of a blind person, a permanent feeling of
incompleteness. Where there could be light, there is no light. This is a false
picture of the nature of blindness. The long term blind do not experience
a disruption or an absence . . . It’s because there is a way in which the blind
do not experience their blindness at all.7
I love visualizing things, I know this sounds contradictory, but visualizing things with
my eyes closed . . . I enjoyed constructing things in my mind. I have a visual sense and
I could see, whether it was putting two things together or painting a picture, I could see
it in my mind’s eye, I used that process. If I’m working on a current picture, I’ll work
out some details. I’ll bring the picture to mind, you know, the color and things, it’s just
THERE, on the screen of my mind, and then I can manipulate it. I can say, well,
know you, that line goes here, and then eventually it’s gonna connect here, and that
could be a trouble spot, and do I want to continue the particular color on to the next
panel, do I want something, you know, jarring, different, vibrant, do I want, you know,
monochrome, do I want, you know, polychrome, I just sort of put it together and, you
know, doodle in my mind and erase and, try another thing, and, so usually I have that
information when I come into my studio in the morning and then usually I don’t do any
of it. I ignore it completely, because as soon as I start, it suggests its own things. But there
are some mechanical issues or problems that I did solve the night before, that I do use as
a stepping off place.
eyes.
I was always horrible with eye contact, it would creep people out, growing up, I would
look at them through the corner of my eye. I don’t know if I was just shy, probably, but
maybe, you know, because this eye disease presents itself in a lot of people in childhood,
maybe there was, you know, a little bit of it. Maybe there was something about faces that
was just a little off or something and so I avoided them, but probably I was just shy.
AD: In the middle of a country road, the person sits in the wooden chair,
straightening their clothes.
THERESA: I think, um, in climate science, vulnerability is it’s kind of
peeling back the layers and seeing which segments of society would
be more likely to get – to be hurt.
AD: As a car approaches in the other lane, the person rehearses different
seated positions.
If I look down a straight road and there’s a car on it, coming at me, what I see is an
empty road going on into the distance. I see the pavement, I see grass on either side, trees
if there are trees – the only thing I don’t see is the car. And that’s disconcerting, because
I, you know, I just don’t see it.
(In the human brain, the amygdala sends a signal to the hypothalamus, which
controls blood pressure, heartbeat, and breathing, among other things, through
the autonomic nervous system. This fight-or-flight response is triggered when
we sense a threat, so we can be at the ready to battle or flee at will. But it also
activates in response to chronic stress. Some studies suggest countering this
response with exercise, conscious breathing, or relying on a network of social
support.)8
There are real language barriers – both literal and cultural – that mean we
often think we are hearing each other, but we actually have no clue what
others are saying. We all have filters, only some of which we are aware. In
a gathering, this can create the utmost confusion. Folks are using differ-
ent cultural references, different touch points and acronyms, coming from
widely different experiences and passions – even if what they are saying is
similar, they can’t hear and understand each other.9
(A friend used to send me long letters while I was away at summer camp during
high school. One time they sent me a letter that they had written, blacked out
with sharpie, and then inscribed with Wite-Out: CENSORED FOR YOUR
PRYING EYES. It was a redacted recollection of their childhood, a narrative
that alluded to emotional and possibly physical abuse and certainly neglect.
The most crucial and potentially brutal passages were blacked out, so it could
potentially be read as a slightly uncomfortable story, or as a horrific nightmare,
depending on what you imagined in the gaps. At the time, I understood myself
to be someone who needed to hold this for them, even the partial or redacted
knowledge of it. I did not pry further, I did not have the language of profes-
sional mental health help, and did not know how to seek it out for my friend,
or even how that might have been facilitated by mail or phone. I just held the
fragments of the story and wrote my friend back, expressing support, telling
them more about camp, as if nothing too dramatic had happened. Sometimes
it’s just not safe to be vulnerable, or we are not ready, and we express ourselves
as we can.)
TONIA: Take the glop and the muck from the pond and put it on top of
this hill and then put a big rubber cap on it that is four inches thick.
And then they had to put methane breathing spouts all around it
so that the toxic stuff that was in that muck, which included also,
by the way, arsenic, cadmium, and other stuff. It wasn’t just PCBs.
It was yucky, yucky . . . could breathe . . . and so now they’ve got
trails there and it’s a pretty space and it’s gonna be called the Thomas
Young Park.
AD: In a time-lapsed shot, clouds roll over a wooded hill and the empty
farmyard below.
JOEL: I’m not aware of a blank area or a dark spot or a black hole or a
shadow or anything. The brain just fills in with the ambient colors
from my periphery. It just fills in the space that it doesn’t see with
either a color or pattern.
Vision is a mode of exploration of the environment drawing on implicit

understanding of sensorimotor realities.10
AD: Sitting in the doorway of a barn, the person maneuvers into various
seated positions, lit by the floor lamp shining through a window.
EMILY: Um, to reinsert yourself in a society that doesn’t look anything or
feel anything like the one that you have lived or known or studied,
um, but you want to because you know that you need to have a place
called home.
It’s so subjective, you know, and it’s so neurological. You know, there’s no fixed thing.
I can say I have no central vision, I can say that I can look at you and you’re not there.
Um, I use my periphery a lot. It is sort of like having an obstruction, but at the same
time, I’m not aware of a blank area, or a dark spot or a black hole or a shadow or any-
thing, the brain just fills in with the ambient colors from my periphery, it just fills in the
space that it doesn’t see with either a color or a pattern.
AD:Obscured from the knee up by a fence rail, a pony putters around a

stable doorway.
TONIA: Because I’m close to those people, now I finally feel a connec-
tion to this area.
A lot of it is memory. Because this happened late in life. You know, patterns were
already established. Not always, but most of the time things behave in the way that they
would behave. Particularly in familiar surroundings, I would know “this is there, this is
there, this is going to be there –” you know, there’s a good chance that approaching the
counter that there are going to be things on it that I may or may not see. This may be a
cautionary danger zone or something. I have to allow for boiling pots of water or some-
thing that I may or may not see, but that I expect will maybe be there.
AD: Birds flutter about the eaves of a building.

MIRIAM: To sort of look from further back because then you’re like,
“Okay, right now, this seems like the worst possible thing that could
ever happen.”
MARK: “And I’m totally flipping out.”
MIRIAM: “And I’m having a total panic attack.” But, um, actually it’s
gonna be okay. Yeah.
AD: In a pen, a goat grooms itself right in front of the camera as other
goats eat hay in the background. Finished grooming, the goat stares
at the camera for a moment and then walks off-screen.
It’s a process, it can be a long process. Because when I walk into a room, or when I first
meet a person, I may get just a little information, you know maybe it’s a voice, you know,
it’s just a little information that, out of the corner of my eye, maybe I catch the corner of
the hair, a motion, stuff like that, and then, maybe over a period of, if I see this person
again, maybe on a regular basis, maybe over a period of days, weeks or months, each
time I get a little more information. So my brain has more to work with, to put together.
And it puts together, you know, a face. But then you know, it’s not necessarily what’s
there, you know, it has to go through a few revisions. You know, I recognize, I can see
the face, and things like that, and I say “that’s Mary.” But then I may catch her, you
know, at a different angle, at a different time, and you know “wait a minute, that’s –
I gotta revise this, you know, that’s not red hair, you know it’s sort of brown, and she’s
got wrinkles, you know, that I never saw before, so now I gotta add ten years.” It’s just
constantly putting together little bits of information to eventually get some sort of, idea
or, a visual, a visual, that isn’t really there, I mean it’s created by my brain out of little
pieces of information, sort of filling in the blanks over a period of time.
Human cognition involves language and abstract thinking, and thus sym-
bols and mental representations, but abstract thought is only a small part
of human cognition and generally is not the basis for our everyday deci-
sions and actions. Human decisions are never completely rational but are
always colored by emotions, and human thought is always embedded in
the bodily sensations and processes that contribute to the full spectrum of
cognition.11
Decide what pieces of information not to use. Because I’m fascinated, you know, “what
makes Mary Mary”? Because I’m walking into a room and I can’t see anybody. I mean,
it’s just a room full of milling sound and shadows and things. But, uh, I’ve gotten
pretty good at picking out people. And usually, you know, it’s something, it’s something
that I haven’t quite been able to put a finger on. It’s some information that I’m getting
subliminally and I don’t really know. It’s a posture, you know, maybe it’s a voice. The
voice is obvious, you know “oh, that’s my wife’s voice, she’s over that way,” and I’ll head
over that way. But sometimes it’s just a – it’s something, it’s a motion, a bit of her that
I recognize. And I’m constantly putting these things together.
It’s not nothing, I struggle with this every day, to put it into context. How much to
talk about it, how much not to talk about it, you know, do I tell a new group or a single
person about it, how much detail do I go into, you know, it’s just a part of my everyday
life. I mean it obviously informs what I do, that’s a real part of it, and it can be a real
positive part of it . . . most people interpret my problem as a problem. They think in
terms of fixing it. “Is there anything that can be done?” You know, “Are they doing any
research on it? Is there any chance that you can get your sight restored?” I generally don’t
think in those terms, you know, and I’d like to get people to not think in those terms.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not necessarily something I wanna change. I want to
understand it, I wanna use it, just like anything. Anything in my art, you know, how
can I apply this to my art?
Subjugated knowledges have been erased because they are illegible; they
exist, by and large, as active bodies of meaning, outside of books, elud-
ing the forces of inscription that would make them legible, and thereby
legitimate . . . What gets squeezed out by this epistemic violence is the
whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit,
intoned, gestured, improvised, coexperienced, covert – and all the more
deeply meaningful because of its refusal to be spelled out. Dominant epis-
temologies that link knowing with seeing are not attuned to meanings that
are masked, camouflaged, indirect, embedded, or hidden in context. The
visual/verbal bias of Western regimes of knowledge blinds researchers to
meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence, body
tension, arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise
and secrecy.12
Elaine Scarry writes of the torturer: “But the bond between the blindness and
the power goes far beyond the practical circles of self amplification. It is not
merely that his power makes him blind, nor that his power is accompanied by
blindness, nor even that his power requires blindness; it is, instead, quite simply
that his blindness, his willed amorality is his power, or a large part of it.”13
Thus, while many of us think we must understand in order to feel compas-

sion, the engagement with alterity instructs that I may not, in fact, be able
to understand. Events and experience may be unimaginable to me, beyond
my comprehension. They may destroy my categories of thought or violate
my beliefs about the world. Alterity reminds us, again and again, that our
idea of reality is not reality . . . so while an enormous number of obstacles,
ranging from denial and ignorance to the starker evils of complicity and
demonization, may interfere with an ethical response, the insistence on
making rational understanding the ground of compassion keeps us from
even listening to suffering to begin with.14
I don’t want to be entirely defined by it. Human nature being what it is, I’m either an
interesting, newsworthy oddity, filler on Good Morning America or something, I’m a
story. There are a lot of us, blind artists, I mean right there, that’s a story, let’s do that,
that’s a magazine article, that sounds interesting.
I cannot see your eyes, for the life of me I have no idea what color your eyes are, or
your hair or anything. You have a hat, I know. (I do have a hat. I have short red hair
underneath it, um, my eyes are hazel, um, I’m a super-white girl with freckles,
I’m wearing mostly black with some hiking boots, and like a fleecy thing.)
Sounds like all my relatives. My new granddaughter. Redhead, white skin, freckles.
(Sound of a train.)

Notes
1 Lipari, 160.
2 Scarry, 54.
3 Merleau-Ponty, 209.
4 Pauchard and Sagarin, 17–18.
5 brown, 99.
7 Scarry, 57.
8 Harvard Health Publishing, “Understanding the Stress Response.”
9 Brown, 217.
10 Noe, 29–30, referencing a 2001 work.
11 Capra, 274.
12 Conquergood, 370.
13 Scarry, 57.
14 Lipari, 82–83.
Bibliography
Nebraska), 2016.
ety), 2016.
Anchor Books, 1996.
Conquergood, Dwight. “Interventions and Radical Research.” In The Performance Studies
Reader. Ed. Henry Bial, 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge, n.d.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge,
2012.
Noe, Alva. Action in Perception. Representation and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004.
Nebraska), 2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
New York), 2016.
2016.
“Understanding the Stress Response.” In Harvard Health Publishing, 2011. www.health.har-
vard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response.
7 Surrender, separation,
distance (Moment 2)
Created with Katie Murphy
Restoring honor to the enemy is an essential step in recovery from combat PTSD.
While other things are obviously needed as well, the veteran’s self-respect never
fully recovers so long as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy.
– Jonathan Shay1
Moments of disorientation are vital.

– Sarah Ahmed2
(Moment 2) is the journey of the table through multiple chapters and sites of the
project. It’s an attempt to transform pain. I gave a soundless video from mul-
tiple locations to Audio Describer Katie Murphy, along with all my research:
quotes from my reading, the interviews. I asked her to decide what goes where,
in and among the descriptions.3
I haven’t talked enough about the table.
Sorry, there have been a lot of tables. I mean the table that Jason Friedes built
for me in the first chapter, (Nebraska). A practical table for that performance.
I needed a table that I could toss, break, and put back together. I knew Jason
to be an inventive carpenter and sculptor. So I asked if he had time to build that
table, and he did and sent it to me in Nebraska from Connecticut.
The legs connected to the table body with heavy magnets. When it broke, it
broke into shapely, intentional chunks. It was beautiful. It was pine, and I spent
hours throwing it and putting it back together. It was pine, and splintered easily,
and not always in the places where it was meant to.
As rehearsals progressed, the table split in increasingly new, awkward, small,
splintery places. So I started being more judicious about how often I would
throw it and the way I was throwing it. Eventually, it became the last thing in
rehearsal I would do so that the table could sit overnight with wood glue and
clamps and new screws and heal.
One practical way to think about this is: the table could have been made
with another kind of wood. But that would have been prohibitively expensive
to ship. Another way is: I should have learned from this table and made another
112 Surrender, separation, distance (Moment 2)
table myself, something more durable. But I wanted to spend my time com-
posing the piece, not attempting to master carpentry, and I was eager to work
with Jason, who I knew to be a skilled maker and artist. Another is: I shouldn’t
have been throwing a damn table in the first place. The poor table didn’t do
anything to me.
The table wasn’t an intellectual placeholder. It wasn’t a metaphor. It wasn’t
even an intentional bridge to, say, Harman’s thinking about tables, of Ahmed’s
thinking about tables, or any fucking writer or philosopher writing at, sitting
near, or contemplating tables, at first.
That aside, allow me to cite protection in advance, with a string of quotations
from Queer Phenomenology:
The failure of objects to work could be described as a question of fit: it

would be the failure of subjects and objects to work together.4
The idea to throw a table was borne from pure instinct and rage. It was recall-
ing a single conversation with a white male scholar,5 the cumulation of many
conversations, where I spent a lot of energy speaking respectfully, demon-
strating listening, competency, citing my sources, being vulnerable about my
feelings and the limits of my own expertise, proactively reaching out, dem-
onstrating personal and professional support, honoring boundaries, funneling
care and love down every available path, pushing my work forward, pushing
my character (in the real sense of integrity) forward, facing down internal and
external obstacles to growth, buying fully into the (white, abled, categorized
by refusals to listen) idea that if I just worked hard enough, that effort would
be seen for what it was. And still not being consistently heard or respected.6
Systems Thinker Donella Meadows writes, “Dominance is an important con-
cept in systems thinking. When one [feedback] loop dominates another, it has
a stronger impact on behavior. Because systems often have several compet-
ing loops operating simultaneously, those loops that dominate the system will
determine the behavior.”7 I was never going to get the automatic and unearned
respectability that comes with being a “sir”.8
So the appropriateness of the height of the table is itself dependent on

the body that uses it: Husserl’s table could be too high or too low for
me, depending on our differences of height. Husserl’s writing table would
work for him only if it were placed in a way that enabled him to write.9
I felt myself to be caught in multiple loops – having my vulnerability and

trust taken for incompetency. Being subject to violent projections, oppressions
masked as tests of knowledge and character.10 Walking away from that infuriat-
ing, gaslighting, condescending conversation with the urge to throw a god-
damn table, and having that urge reignite in my body every time I felt myself
being needlessly dismissed and ignored. Knowing that if I acted upon the urge,
I would be condemning myself further, inviting further scrutiny, gendered
Surrender, separation, distance (Moment 2) 113
phobia, misogyny. Knowing that not everyone is punished for acting out on
their frustration, and that in itself being a source of further frustration.
If this table does not work for me, I would “turn toward” it a different
way. I might then attribute my failure to write to the table, such that it
becomes the cause of the failure. Such a turning would be felt as a frustra-
tion, through which the table might be perceived as “too this or too that,”
or even as a bad object. . .11
The urge to break a fucking table was an internal rebellion against the com-
munication strategies that academic institutions cultivate, a screaming demand
to be heard on my own terms. It was a pure angry instinctual surrender to the
truth that the belief is heinously stronger than observable realities, that social
inequity often dwarfs the tools of diplomacy and learning, that some histories
and mistakes will always be in my body and will never leave.12
The table is “too high,” which means I cannot write at the table: the
“tooness” refers not to the table’s presence for itself but to how it is or is
not ready for me . . .13
I was angry, with good cause. My anger was conceptually relevant to the work:
I wanted to embody in the throwing of a fucking table.14 Plus, Jason put a lot
of work into it, and it was beautiful and built for the purpose.15
Objects do have qualities that make them tangible in the present. But these
characteristics are not simply “in” the objects but instead are about how the
objects work and are worked on by others.16
So I chose to embrace the fact that I was spending a lot of time mending a
table, a weapon, a breakaway, a process, a splinter-maker, a co-performer, for a
piece that was about healing and recovery.17
The present is both endlessly torturous and a source of strength. “Trauma
almost invariably involves not being seen, not being mirrored, and not being
taken into account,” writes Van der Kolk.18
The impulse to engage with a breakaway table was borne from systems of
both oppression and privilege, whiteness and otherness, agency and suppres-
sion,19 and these entangled binaries continued to shape the development of the
project.
White bodies do not have to face their whiteness; they are not orientated
“toward” it, and this “not” is what allows whiteness to cohere, as that
which bodies are orientated around. By not having to encounter being
white as an obstacle, given that whiteness is “in line” with what is already
given, bodies that pass as white move easily, and this motility is extended
by what they move toward. The white body in this way expands; objects,
tools, instruments, and even “others” allow that body to inhabit space by
extending that body and what it can reach. Whiteness becomes habitual
in the sense that white bodies extend their reach by incorporating objects
that are within reach.20
My fellow resident artists in Omaha spent a night out in a park, where we put
the table in a firepit and watched it burn and filmed the burning. We drank
and listened to music and gabbed about shit and looked at the sky. We stared at
the fire and had a night of it. I put the ashes in a jar and took them with me.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with them yet. I just knew they needed
to come along.
In this video, Audio Describer Katie Murphy’s voice is all the voices.21
KATE:
“Do you want to tell me what you saw?”22
A wooden table and chair stand in a room stripped to its bare bones, empty with
the exception of a hammer resting near the table and a broken chair lying on
its side some distance away. Wood boards of varying sizes form the table’s top.
Below, an orange ratchet strap cinches the table’s apron.
“No matter how many connections we take into account in our scien-
tific description of a phenomenon, we will always be forced to leave
others out.”23
A person in a back brace approaches the table.
“Place is a crucial resource for action.”24
They stand atop the chair.
“Many human activities are symbolic in character. Using visual, verbal or
tactile symbols, man ‘talks with’ his surroundings.”25
Placing both hands down to brace themself, the person carefully plants their left
foot on the wobbling table.
“In the new science of complexity . . . we learn that nonequilibrium is a
source of order. [E]cosystems maintain themselves in a flexible state,
ready to adapt to changing conditions. The web of life is a flexible,
ever-fluctuating network.”26
As they slowly lift their right foot from the chair, a board splits from the top and
soon the whole table collapses. The person catches themself and kneels beside
the broken table.
“While falling, people may sense themselves as being things, while things
may sense that they are people. Traditional modes of seeing and feel-
ing are shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted. Perspectives are
twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise.”27
“Pine is so, uh, soft and open-grained that it’s, uh, it’s splintery . . . I think
this is the case with anyone, uh, in any walk of life, you get hurt if
you’re tired.”28
Using a power drill, they remove fasteners and hardware from the table, piling
them on the chair. The pile grows larger and more varied as they take apart
the table.
“The pattern of organization of any system, living or nonliving, is the
configuration of relationships among the system’s components that
determines the system’s essential characteristics. In other words, cer-
tain relationships must be present for something to be recognized
as-say-a chair, a bicycle, or a tree. That configuration of relationships
that gives a system its essential characteristics is what we mean by
its pattern of organization. The structure of a system is the physical
embodiment of its pattern of organization.”29
“So, a lot of times we warn people that there’s an ugly phase to restora-
tion . . . I think what that does is it helps me not only get an under-
standing of what it could be like to be them, but it helps the patient
or oftentimes the patient’s family member know that they’re not
alone in this part of their journey.”30
In a wooded area at night, the person places the disassembled wooden parts of the
table into a small firepit. They watch it burn.
“The priorities of the present age revolve around the problem of organiza-
tion. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, ongo-
ing relationships between organic and non-organic systems. . . ”31
In a charcoal kiln, the person’s gloved hands scoop ash into a mason jar which
they then seal.
“Maybe it’s time to embrace the pain, and to work through it . . . and just
know that I can’t live my life the way I did before.”32
Outside of a barn, the person walks away from a firepit, holding a filled mason jar.
NO QUOTES HERE.
In a forest, the person stares up at a tree. They open the mason jar and sprinkle
the ashes onto the base of the trunk.
“Different organisms change differently, and over time each organism
forms its unique, individual pathway of structural changes in the
process of development.”33
“To reinsert yourself in a society that doesn’t look like anything or feel
anything like the one you’ve lived or known or studied, but you want
to, because you know that you need to have a place called home-”34
They shift a large flat rock so that it covers the ashes.
“Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not
only time horizons and thought horizons; above all it means expand-
ing the horizons of caring.”35
Before leaving, they dust leaves from the rock.
“I had an awareness of the whole . . . a world of warmth and coldness, of
magnetic fields and chemical gradients . . . very beautifully and very
originally connected.”36
Fade to black on a wide shot of the tree.

Acknowledgment
(Moment 2)”, Queer Convivialist Perspectives for Sustainable Futures, World Futures,
76(5–7) (2020). Thanks to Sacha Kagan.
Notes
1 Shay, 115.
2 Ahmed, 157.
3 Parker-Starbuck and Mock, 217. “Theorizing offers an engagement with other voices,
often as an attempt to better understand the bodies that frequently haunt researchers,
bodies that are no longer physically present whether in archives, personal memory, or
through aging processes. An ongoing desire and objective in body-centered research is
arguably to recapture and make sense of these bodies, to negotiate between absence and
presence.”
4 Ahmed, 50.
5 “When we talk of white men, we are describing something. We are describing an insti-
tution. An institution typically refers to a persistent structure or mechanism of social
order governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given community. So when
I am saying that white men is an institution, I am referring not only to what has already
been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure.
A building is shaped by a series of regulative norms. White men refers also to conduct; it
is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies
are occupied once they have arrived” (Ahmed, 152–153).
6 “Talking with another person to process what you learned or experienced doesn’t mean
having a friendly chat with them. It means describing an event that had meaning for you,
while the other person listens with caring, full attention, a calm presence, and a settled body . . .
Therapists call this active listening” (Menakem, 177).
7 Meadows, 44.
8 “I have called critical racism and critical sexism this: the racism and sexism repro-
duced by those who think of themselves as too critical to reproduce racism and sexism”
(Ahmed, 155).
9 Ahmed, 50.
10 “When conditions suddenly shift, once life-sustaining relations sometimes turn deadly.
The case of low-dose chronic exposure to radioactivity shows us what can happen when
symbiotic alliances are broken: essential gut microbes mutate into illness-causing ene-
mies. Symbioses are vulnerable; the fate of one species can change whole ecosystems”
(Swanson et al., M5).
11 Ahmed, 50.
12 “If thinking is a project of intelligible words, then art is the unthinkable. Not because it
might not use words but because the words it uses almost immediately cease to comply
with semantic meaning and instead drag communication into the opacity of the mate-
rial: its sounds, its breath, its graphic image, rather than what it meant to say” (Voegelin,
100).
13 Ahmed, 50.
14 See: Doyle.
15 Halberstam, 88. “As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already
in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit
the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.”
16 Ahmed, 50.
17 Scarry, 56. Again, on torture: “As an actual physical fact, a weapon is an object that goes
into the body and produces pain. As a perceptual fact, it lifts the pain out of the body
and makes it visible, or, more precisely, it acts as a bridge or mechanism across which
some of pain’s attributes – its incontestable reality, its totality, its ability to eclipse all else,
its power of dramatic alteration and world dissolution – can be lifted away from their
source, can be separated from the sufferer and referred to power, broken off from the
body and attached instead to the regime. Now, for at least the duration of this obscene
and pathetic drama, it is not the pain but the regime that is incontestably real.”
18 Van der Kolk, 93.
19 Artist Kenya (Robinson) has a structure for the white/Black binary: “1. Whiteness is
the myth/Blackness is Universal. 2. Whiteness always lies/Blackness always elevates. 3.
Whiteness tells the most lies about money/Blackness elevates the most outside of itself.
4. Whiteness is a performance of ignorance/Blackness is a performance of solidarity. 5.
Whiteness is committed pettiness/Blackness is committed to authenticity.”
20 Ahmed, 132.
21 Kershaw and Nicholson, 2. “If research methods in theatre and performance studies are
not primarily pursued to produce cultural authority for researchers but rather to create
diverse and dynamic research ecologies for the future, what does that imply for their
disciplinary ‘nature’ overall?”
22 Bretz, Personal Interview.
23 Capra, 42.
24 Sökefeld, 23–24.
25 Pask, 495.
26 Capra, 190.
27 Steyerl, 13.
28 Cales, Personal Interview.
29 Capra, 158.
30 Toro, Bingeman.
31 Burnham, 31.
32 Berkeley, Personal Interview.
33 Capra, 268.
34 Nohner, Personal Interview.
35 Meadows.
36 Phillips, Personal Interview.
Bibliography
2016.
ety), 2016.
Burnham, Jack. “Real Time Systems.” Artforum, September 1969.
———. “Systems Aesthetics.” Artforum, September 1968.
Anchor Books, 1996.
Doyle, Jennifer. Hold it Against Me: Emotion and Difficulty in Contemporary Art. New York:
Duke University Press, 2013.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Halberstam, Jack. Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
Nebraska), 2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Nebraska), 2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Pask, Gordon. “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics.” Architectural Design,
September 1969.
Sökefeld, Martin. Spaces of Conflict in Everyday Life: Perspectives Across Asia. Bielefeld: Tran-
script Verlag, September 2015.
Steyerl, Hito. “In Free Fall, a Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” In The Wretched
of the Screen. London: Sternberg Press, 2012.
Swanson, Heather et al. “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,
Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., M1–M12. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
2017.
New York), 2016.
2016.
Voegelin, Salomé. “Writing Sonic Fictions: Literature as a Portal into the Possibility of Art
Research.” In Artistic Research and Literature, Eds. Corina Caduff and Tan Wälchli. Boston:
Brill, 2019.
8 Water and other obvious
connective forces (Santa Fe)
With audio description by Adam Harvey
From the live performance program:

This (Santa Fe) chapter1 began with interviews with a few locals with relation-
ships to the Santa Fe River and adds their voices to a collection of interviews and
explorations gathered over the past year and a half.2 It incorporates local materials
and looks at water as a hotly contested thing, a strictly managed and controlled
thing, and as a sustaining source for ecosystems and homes and farms. It looks at
the river as something that survives a diversion through the city and a wastewater
process to reemerge and continue its path, subject to further diversions.
About the materials
Baskets
purchased from various thrift stores, occasionally found in still lifes.
Branches
laser-cut at MAKE Santa Fe from scrap material or gathered near the Santa
Fe River. Commonly used by beavers in the construction of their dams
and homes.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-8
Water and other obvious connective forces 121
Charcoal
sourced both locally and industrially.
Citrus Fruit
tangerines and oranges, ubiquitous in supermarkets and still lifes.
Glass Vases
purchased at a thrift store, used to hold water and flowers, often in still lifes.
Piñon Pine
purchased locally, pitch/sap can be used to soothe irritated skin – and as
a sunblock; can aid in the removal of splinters and glass from skin; and
promote the warming and healing of atrophied limbs. Tea made from
needles is high in vitamin C.
Pine Trail Wallpaper

categorized as “Masculine” by the Johnson Wall Coverings company in
Galesburg, Illinois.
Tablecloths
purchased from various thrift stores, occasionally found in still lifes.
Water
from two points in the Santa Fe River: south of the wastewater treatment
plant – just outside of the Santa Fe city limits – and from an elevation
northeast of the city in the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve.
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: The room is a perfect square,3 divided in the center

by a diagonal seam in the concrete floor along which broken piñon
branches are scattered. Half the room is lit naturally by vaulted sky-
lights which face one corner.4 At the opposite corner, lit primarily
by artifice,5 the event’s technical liaison.6 At an adjacent corner, the
event’s audio describer,7 and near the center, a person8 wearing a
back brace, seated in a wooden chair facing the piñon arrangement,
slouching forward, with elbows on knees.
122 Water and other obvious connective forces
THERESA: Vulnerability is, it’s not just a topic in climate science –9

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE slouches and straightens.
AD: The person alternately slouches and straightens.10 At the chair’s base are
seven glass vases containing Santa Fe River water.11 Resting atop each vase,
an orange. Another vase with river water and orange is against the wall to
the person’s left with a bright orange nylon strap ratcheted to its base.12
LIGHT CUE 1: The lamp flickers. 13
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE stares at it.

ANDY: So once an aquifer is depleted, it doesn’t come back 100%. There’s
some compaction of the soils that happens, and so, maybe it only comes
back at 85%.14
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE gets up and picks up tablecloths, folds unfolds, and places
them on the branches.
LIGHT CUE 2: Lamp out.
AD: The person regards a tall flickering lamp against the wall to the right. At its
base are a scrap of torn beige wallpaper,15 an orange, some wooden cutouts
traced from the wallpaper’s pattern,16 and a vase containing river water,
algae, and two small fish.17 Now adding tablecloths to the arrangement.
JOEL: Constantly putting together little bits of information to eventually get

some sort of, idea, or, uh, a visual, a visual, that isn’t really there, I mean,
it’s created by my brain out of little pieces of information.18
AD: The lamp is no longer flickering.19 On the opposite wall, a flat- screen
television displays the top portion of a Santa Fe piñon.20 A white tracing
of the wallpaper pattern is intermittently superimposed over the image of
the tree.
MELISSA: Water is just not that available.21 At different times of year we have,
uh, some rainfall, but it’s becoming more intense and less frequent, more of
it at one time, and, uh, it’s creating some ecological issues for sure, because
plant material prefers to have a little bit more consistency, and we’re really
getting into extremes now.22
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE begins dropping the logs onto the branches.
AD: On the wall between the describer and the lamp are thirty piñon latil-
las.23 The person carries them two at a time, one in each hand, over to the
center arrangement.24 And drops them.
DAVID: Everybody wants a healthy river, but they really don’t think, they really
honestly feel that it’s impossible.25
AD: Dropping latillas two by two onto the arrangement. Two additional scraps
of beige wallpaper can be seen attached to the room’s two unoccupied
corners.
EMILY: To reinsert yourself in a society that doesn’t look like anything or feel
anything like the one you’ve lived or known or studied, but you want to,
because you know that you need to have a place called home –26
AD: The pattern on this wallpaper bears a slight resemblance to the piñon
branches on the floor and television screen, but is more geometrical in
form, filling the negative space in a consistent and even style.27
JESSICA: So a lot of times we warn people that there’s an ugly phase to restora-
tion –28
AD: A charcoal line has been drawn at eye level along the wall,29 interrupted
only by two large metal doors on either side of the room, the television,
and a place where the charcoal line blossoms into an ornate pattern in the
same style as the wallpaper tracings.
ANDY: A couple things with Beavers, they (they) change their environment.
And so, um, they do things like the classic beaver dam, which holds back
the water, and they do it so they can build a lodge in the middle for defense
and that sort of thing, but what it does help do is, is increase that infiltra-
tion into the aquifers.30
AD: Working from left to right along the diagonal, the arranger31 has continued
to drop latillas onto the branches and tablecloths. This was done with little
regard to where exactly they may fall.32 The arranger pauses.
JILL: One knee, my left knee on the ground, and my right knee folded up, and
I’m sort of scooting along hunched over, doing the same motion over and
over again.33
AD: The lamp, which is topped by a smudged and crooked shade,34 pulses
on and off. Having completed a full pass with the latillas from along the
arrangement, the arranger starts a second pass with the remaining latillas.
LIGHT CUE 3: The lamp pulses.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE pauses.
KATE: Well I guess, understanding their motivators is important to understand
why they’re behaving the way they are, so I guess when I get a call, I ask
them, I ask the person, so what do you think – it’s like, if a dog is being
aggressive, what do you think is triggering that dog, and is it scary to them,
and do we need to counter-condition –35
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE begins to place logs more deliberately, in the places that seem
to need them.
AD: This second pass is much more considered than the first. The arranger is
no longer dropping the latillas haphazardly, but more deliberately, placing
them onto the arrangement in what appears to be direct relation to where
the others had been dropped.36
JOEL: I’m not aware of a blank area, or a dark spot or a black hole, or a shadow
or anything, the brain just fills in with the ambient colors from my periph-
ery, it just fills in the space that it doesn’t see with either a color or a pattern.
AD: The final two latillas are dropped at one end of the arrangement.
The arranger now turns to several wooden cutouts located beneath the ornate
charcoal drawing. These cutouts are fragile and prone to breakage, so the
arranger now works even more delicately, placing them in the center arrange-
ment with a steady and even distribution.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE begins to place the masculine, traced branches on the pile.
MELISSA: This last summer we’ve been working on creating swale systems along
banks that uh, we, that will slow the water, we’re planting, uh, cones, and
trees uh, to hold the banks, uh, we are removing invasive vegetation where
it conflicts with native vegetation, we’re being mindful of, uh, erosion
conditions when you remove trees, so we’re, we’re being very careful about
how we remove trees.
AD: The cutouts are of the same pattern mentioned before: curlicue branches
accented by small tufts of what might be pine needles. It is difficult to
know for sure what these tufts are specifically meant to represent, how-
ever, because the wallpaper design is too small to allow for that kind of
detail, and the tracings, though much larger in scale, remain faithful to the
abstract nature of the source from which they came.37
The arranger pauses.
JESSICA: Bringing in more diversity in the hopes that there will be a greater
resiliency to climate change.
AD: Having completed this stage of the arrangement, the person then gets up
and returns to their seat at the wooden chair, regarding one of the seven
vases. The lamp turns on and off slowly, but the person does not look to
see, rather returning to the exercise of slouching, straightening, slouching,
straightening.38
LIGHT CUE 5: The lamp pulses slooowly.
ANDY: They were recognized as being an issue, but then they disappeared. And
so, you know, some of the ranchers admit that they removed some, they,
they shot em, and trapped em, uh, some, like some of the game and fish
folks have said yeah there’s been some diseases that have come in and got-
ten beavers.39
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE is sitting in a chair, different motions.
AD: The lamp is off. At its base, the fish continue to swim in the alginated river
water where they were collected just downstream of the Santa Fe waste-
water treatment plant.
DAVID: My norm is, that natural river trumps the bypass channel.40
AD: The person moves the vases into a V formation towards the piñon arrange-
ment. This is done not by picking them up, but rather pushing them along
the smooth concrete floor. At no point does a vase lose contact with the
floor.41
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE is moving the vases filled with water.
KATHLEEN: It was, in terms of riparian restoration terms, it was a pretty trashed,
beat-up, river. Too hot, not enough shade to cool the river, um, you know,
many many problems, you know, not to mention the fact that it was efflu-
ent, so, we were depending on what the city’s doing to treat the water. So
it really was this um water that was under a lot of threat.42
AD: Having arranged the vases into a more or less straight line, the person starts
to push the vases into the piñon arrangement, which now resembles a bea-
ver dam,43 with twigs, poles and curlicues accented by blotches of orange.
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE sits alongside pile.
JACK: I just had this very momentary flash of –
LIGHT CUE 7: The lamp comes on. Flickers rarely.
JACK: . . . experiencing the world as it really is.44
AD: Having sat for a moment, spine erect, facing the wallpaper in the corner,
(wait for it)45
AD: The arranger now picks up the orange nylon strap and starts to walk away,
seemingly unaware that it is attached to the vase, for once the strap taugh-
tens,46 the person hesitates.
DAVID: We will, we will give water to the river, um, and in a normal year,
a normal year as defined by at least 80% of normal rainfall, we will give
1,000 acre-feet of water, roughly um, 20% of the river’s normal flow, we’ll
leave in the river. Now if we get less than 80 in an abnormally dry year,
which we have many, then the river has to sacrifice proportionally, so that
we have to have less water, the river has less water.47
AD: Carefully dragging the vase to a spot near the describer where a wicker
cornucopia, another vase with river water, and several oranges are arranged
on the floor in a still life.48 The person removes the orange from the vase
being dragged and places it in the still life.
CHRISTIE: You know, or how that particular plant propagates, you know, usu-
ally people are, they’re fascinated. I think there’s a genuine curiosity, I think
there’s a deep hunger for that connection, and for, for understanding.49
AUDIO DESCRIPTION: Now dragging the vase towards the exit.
LIGHT CUE 9: The lamp slowly fades on. Stays up.
MELISSA: Want to encourage the natural state of the river. So rather than chan-
nelizing, we always seek to be where the water wants to go.50
STAGE DIRECTION: MOE exits.
AD: The lamp is now consistently on. With the sound of the motorcycle,51 the
person drags the now orange-less vase out of the room, carefully so as not
to tip the vase as it travels over the taped power cable.52

Notes
1 Located on Jicarilla Apache and Pueblos Territory.
2 Within the Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience Project.
3 The gallery at the Santa Fe Art Institute, which is itself organized around a courtyard
that is a nice square.
4 Natural light features heavily in the design of the building, by Mexican architect Ricardo
Legorreta.
5 I thought this was an incredibly fancy way to say “a light”: the audio describer, Adam
Harvey, is a James Joyce megafan.
6 A nice human named Alberto Romero.
7 Adam Harvey wrote these descriptions and read them aloud live during this perfor-
mance. Throughout these footnotes, I’m going to open up the gap between our differ-
ent perceptions of the work: not as a commentary on his awesome work, just as a way
of noting the difference.
8 Me.
9 Theresa Jedd is an environmental policy specialist. For a definition of vulnerability, see
Adger, 268–281. These interview clips played over loudspeakers in the room, over the
faint sound of river water, which actually never gets described.
10 Most of my life is spent doing some version of this movement: I am either hunched over
a laptop or compensating for that hunch.
11 The Santa Fe River is the main local natural body of river in the city. It curves down
from the lakes in the nature reserve in the east, through the town, diverted a multiple
points, disappearing from satellite maps completely at some points. At the southwest
corner of the town, the local effluent plant dispenses its treated water into the riverbed
and rejuvenates it. So water levels are extremely low in the river until you pass the sew-
age plant – and then the river runs more briskly, with water that is somewhat alginated.
The vase water has been collected at two points along the river – above the effluent
plant and below it. The water from above the plant is clear: the water from below is
alginated and green.
12 I worked alongside Marissa Lee Benedict for a number of years – she used a lot of
ratchet straps in her work. This is the chapter where her influence becomes less uncon-
scious and more a deliberate means of digesting that collaboration. I thought a lot
throughout the project about whether to include ratchet straps because I knew them to
feature prominently in her past work. I decided to sit with them as what were, for me,
objects with now-personal connotations and inspirations.
13 Lighting controlled via dimmer and a laptop-controlled lighting software, cued by
Alberto.
14 This is Andy Otto, the executive director of the Santa Fe Watershed Association, dis-
cussing aquifer and watershed management.
15 The “Masculine” Wallpaper.
16 This is one of those moments where I had to dance a tricky line in terms of what
I reveal to the audio describer so as not to unduly influence them. We were rehearsing,
and at one point, he said, “these cutouts look like the same pattern as in that wallpaper.”
“They are,” I said. “That’s intentional.” “Oh,” he said. “I should include that.”
17 Gathered accidentally with the water, returned to the river afterward, part of the piece
during their life in the vase.
18 This is Joel Foster, the legally blind artist from Wassaic.
19 Just realizing now this doesn’t indicate whether it ended up on or off. I’m pretty sure it
ended up off. There is no video of the performance.
20 Filmed at the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens.
21 Are you in close proximity to water? This is just a reminder to stay hydrated. Drink
water. Seriously. Go get a glass or a bottle or a ladle or a capful or whatever and have a
sip and then come back.
22 Melissa MacDonald is the River and Watershed Coordinator for the City of Santa Fe –
she’s talking about rainfall as it feeds the Santa Fe River and ecosystems.
23 Commonly used in Santa Fe building and fencing, especially given the city’s stringent
construction codes, which dictate an adobe-inspired palette and encourage features like
local pine fencing.
24 There was a nice pause in the description here during the performance.
25 This is David Groenfedlt, the executive director of the Water-Culture Institute in Santa
Fe, who is constantly analyzing water-human relationships.
26 This is Emily Nohner, who had just returned home to Nebraska from years of touring
the world as a humanitarian aid worker. I initially interviewed her for (Nebraska).
27 The branches on the floor and TV screen are generated from this wallpaper.
28 This is Jessica M. Toro, conservation and restoration planning specialist, describing the
process used to restore ecological balance on a plot of land in upstate New York. In this
moment, she’s describing the period when they’ve removed parasitic vines from trees
and are waiting for the flora to regrow.
29 I had the urge to draw a charcoal line around the perimeter of the room as soon as
I walked into it. I know this is partly the conceptual pull of the material, the idea that
you can make a mark with something that is the product of a destructive force. But it
might also include a reference to the shelf that Marissa Lee Benedict built for her show
Multiplices at threewalls gallery in Chicago in 2013, which was also about water. It was
a wooden shelf, at eye level, that ran around the perimeter of the room. One of those
things that didn’t hit me until it was done. I’ve seen my influence and aesthetic show
up in other folks’ work – this blurry space between citation, influence, remix, and sam-
pling. I also gave a brief sound performance in response to Benedict’s work while it was
installed. Photos of Multiplices can be found on the artist’s website, http://marissaleeben-
edict.com/multiplices-2013, and an excerpt of the resulting book is here: http://media.
virbcdn.com/files/76/FileItem-289120-MULTIPLICES_Intro.pdf
30 There’s a bit of a controversy surrounding beavers in Santa Fe. Some local ranchers think
their dams divert water in ways that compromise their crop supply, and try to trap or
kill them. Other community members value them for the ecological and educational
presence – they’ve been known to actually restore aquifers by accumulating water in
proximity to their dams.
31 Adam decided that he needed a gender-neutral identifier beyond “person” and “artist”
– since I was arranging things, “arranger” seemed appropriate to him. I loved it.
32 Not entirely true, but apparently, it looked that way.
33 This is Jill Winsby-Fein, a farmer from Upstate New York, talking about a repeated
motion she performed while farming, which subsequently induced a slight injury/
soreness.
34 Accidentally, then intentionally, smudged and made crooked.
35 This is Kate Bradshaw, animal behavior specialist, of the Nebraska Humane Society,
who is describing the training of an anxious or traumatized dog or cat.
36 That is, this is happening slower and with more staring.
37 We didn’t talk too much about this, but Adam was intent on describing everything vis-
ible as he saw it from his own physical vantage point – which didn’t include the detailing
on the pine tufts. I appreciated his commitment.
38 Years after this performance, I would enter physical therapy in an attempt to correct the
toil that laptop time had taken on my body.
39 I think it says a lot about the forthrightness and politics of the Santa Fe community that
the ranchers would admit this openly: the beavers and their value were very publicly
debated.
40 David and I got into a prolonged discussion about social norms and values. In this state-
ment he is asserting his investment in allocating water to the natural Santa Fe River as a
cultural norm, rather than sending it down a bypass channel designed to divert the water
for urban and agricultural use.
41 Adam stated this last sentence very emphatically during the performance, as if it were of
supreme importance: I loved that he pronounced this as a gesture of significance, though
really, I just liked the sound the vases made as they scraped along the floor.
42 Kathleen McCloud is an artist and resident of nearby La Cineguilla, describing the Santa
Fe River before it was restored. I interviewed her in her studio and discussed some of
her work with her – long after I had left Santa Fe, she took me up on an offer to help
her with an artist statement (I enjoy trying to summarize others’ work). I now have a
print of a beaver that she made hanging in my studio.
43 This was my intention. Adam caught it and asserted, “that’s how I’m going to describe
it.” It was another aspect of the work he felt important to highlight, though a purely
literal description of the work might not have captured it.
44 Jack Phillips, a naturalist from the Hitchcock Nature Center in Nebraska, describing a
moment of pure connection to nature he felt while sitting under a tree.
45 Adam’s note to himself.
46 I love this word, and again, it seems an extra fancy way to describe it.
47 I think it’s interesting here that David describes the river having to make a sacrifice on
purely human terms.
48 “This looks like a still life.” “It’s supposed so, the still life is important to the work,
actually.”
49 Christie Green, an artist, designer, and activist from Santa Fe, describing people’s reac-
tion to her engagement with plants in her work.
50 I love that Melissa is a city official who must consider the desire of a river in her work.
51 The result of trying to record the sound of a roadside river – I left it.
52 This was, obviously, a very real fear. From here, I would walk the vase to the water
fountain in the hallway and leave it, retreat to my room to decompress. But the audience
started clapping as soon as I had fully exited the space.
Bibliography
Adger, W. Neil. “Vulnerability.” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 268–281.
2016.
ety), 2016.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
New York), 2016.
2016.
9 Systems of pain/networks of
resilience (Exhibition)
Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek goals, mend injuries, and attend
to their own survival in lifelike ways, although they may contain or consist of non-
living things. Systems can be self-organizing, and often are self-repairing over at
least some range of disruptions. They are resilient, and many of them are evolution-
ary. Out of one system other completely new, never-before imagined systems can
arise.1
All interconnected things succeed and fail on their own terms, according to
their own needs and contexts. No amount of storytelling, evidence-gathering,
or shared experience could ultimately give me my friends’ perspective or com-
municate my own to my colleague. I might never know what it’s like to look
at the world through a puce cupcake, like Joel Foster.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038979-9
136 Systems of pain/networks of resilience
The table might never fully understand what it is like to be me.2 But
the table and I are inseparably entangled in mutually shared realities. We
are made mutual by ecologies, industrial systems of extraction, processing,
production and capital, and cultural norms that require things like tables and
bodily relationships to them. We define each other’s interdependencies and
oppressions.
We will hurt each other, and the pain will be incommunicable. We will hurt
things and places, and compromise our own capacity to heal in the process.3
Some wounds will not heal, some wrongs will be unforgivable. But the pain
articulates connection – it cannot fully sever ties.
On an ecological, social, and cultural level, interdependence is key to devel-
oping resilience – our capacity to respond to survive and heal from pain and
trauma.4 None of us is completely self-contained in our actions or healing
processes.5 None of us is completely independent, even when working alone.6
Seeing, accepting, honoring, and negotiating difference is central to survival –
diversity makes us more adaptable and resilient, both as humans in bodies and
as entities within systems.7
Developing the capacity to genuinely sit with one another’s’ pain, to see it,
hear it, be present with it, is crucial not only to understanding ourselves, our
context, and our impact, but to responsibly honoring our interdependence.8
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience was an art project, a performance project,
and as such, it is deeply entwined with the entangled realities of the world.9 In
interviewing people for the project, I established clear boundaries: interviews
between twenty minutes and an hour, recorded audio only. If the interviewees
were not comfortable with something, we would not talk about it. I would
show and describe previous work with interviews so folks could see how their
words would be contextualized. I explained that I would seek both to honor
their original intention, and if I asked a question and it was met with hesita-
tion, we’d move past it. As we talked, I had to monitor my own reactions to
the content – prioritizing their story and experience, ready to wrap things up
if either of us lost the capacity to hold space for it.10 I set boundaries with the
hope of creating a space that was both safe and flexible.
The clear setting of boundaries is a tool, one that has helped and hindered
me in multiple ways. In stating your limits, you are also articulating your vul-
nerabilities. Boundaries were also tricky in developing the works’ display. I was
looking for a space to gather all the different chapters of the project, to display
pain and resilience as simultaneously intertwined entities and disparate, isolated
processes that are part of larger networks of relationships.
Curator Cecilia Vargas offered up the gallery at the Dickson Center at
Waubonsee Community College for an exhibition, on Kiikaapoi, Peoria,
Bodéwadmiakiwen, Miami, and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) territories.
While I installed the work in the gallery, Cecilia put me up in her guest
room. We had some mutual friends, one of whom had an artwork on her
kitchen counter. We talked over dinner, while building things, in between
Systems of pain/networks of resilience 137
making copies and labels and whatnot. We drank wine and watched movies.
It’s what neighbors do, it’s what relatives do, it’s what networks of support do.
It’s essential. As something that feels special or generous but is actually a kind
of cultural water or air, a vital nutrient. It is also, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-
Samarasinha reminds us, a form of work, something to be valued, never to be
taken for granted.11 Cecilia recognized, without my having to ask or advocate
for myself, that care was an essential component of our curator-artist relation-
ship: that in inviting me to put up this show, she made it her business to fill in
the gap between the demands of the work and the resources I had available to
make it happen.
Malatino frames our entanglements of care and impacts on bodies as “care
webs” in Trans Care:
A resilient care web coheres through consistently foregrounding the reali-

ties of burnout and the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics that result in
the differential distribution of care – for those receiving it as well as those
giving it. A care web works when the work that composes it isn’t exploita-
tive, appropriative, or alienated. This is the gauntlet thrown down by any
sustained attempt to collectively cultivate a care web: it challenges us to be
deliberate, to communicate capacity, to unlearn the shame that has become
attached to asking for, offering, and accepting help when we’ve been full-
body soaked and steeped in the mythos of neoliberal, entrepreneurial self-
making. It asks us to think carefully about what constitutes “good” care.
It prompts us to sit communally with the question of how best to care for
each other, with our differing abilities, idiosyncrasies, and traumas, with
our hard-to-love thorns intact and sometimes injurious (to ourselves and
each other).12
Cecilia enacted care through communication. In long phone calls and email
threads, she sent administrative forms and photos of the space – I sent back
documentation of the work and 3D renderings of the potential installation
in the gallery. In our thinking about layout of the exhibition, the boundaries
of the work become a question: each chapter of the work builds on mate-
rial generated from the previous one, so they aren’t entirely separate – but to
present them without distinguishing them from one another would be to fail
to respect the unique sites they were created in, and their status as works that
can each be taken in on their own terms.13 Beyond the works’ responsibility
to itself, there’s the consideration of the potential impact the work may have
on the viewer, not just in terms of how they navigate the space but on the
“neuropathways created through aesthetic conditioning,” which affect human
perspectives, behavior, and health. Art impacts people and places: it is a condi-
tion of the form.14 Art builds environments, actualizes and embodies research,
shapes cultures and their signposts – it sets boundaries for safe spaces and opens
up new possibilities.
Just as there are a lot of different languages around the act of creating a per-
formance, there are a lot of different languages around the encounter between
a creative project and its audience. In galleries and museums, the public may be
described as a singular/plural viewer or visitor. In design, currently, the audience
is one of users who engage with a user experience devised for a target market and
potentially built on firsthand interviews and surveys from that target popula-
tion. In performance, we are often using the terms audience or spectator (which
have various assumptions of, and reclamations from, passivity). Depending on
the boundaries of the work, the public might be framed as participants or fellow
performers. However they approach the work, their own emotional histories
are never separate from their experience of it, and for performers, the vulner-
able risk is in subjecting themselves to those to those accumulated histories.15
Back in the Dickson Center, the 3D renderings became maps for interac-
tion with the space. We came up with an arrangement of documentation and
artifacts from each of the chapters of the work, connected around the room
with a single, dark, heavy charcoal line. Every work had its own tiny explana-
tory depicting the expected title, date, length, medium. For (Nebraska), this also
included an internal nod to (Moment 1), and Shelbi’s quote that had resonated
with me.
The exhibition was its own system of project histories, archival material, tiny
worded explanations, evolution of language over time. A display of the accu-
mulated work without the goal of recreating it. Cecilia arranged for student
assistants to help me install and would come and visit the gallery periodically to
check on progress, plug in any logistical gaps, chat about life in general.
I had been looking for a place for the show for a while: Cecilia saw the
materials, trusted me, and signed fully on.16
(Nebraska)
2016
Performance for Camera
Video, 20 minutes
Filmed by Miguel Cedillo, Make Believe New Media
Edited by Meghan Moe Beitiks and Miguel Cedillo
Audio Description by Emily Smith Beitiks
Collapsible Table Designed and Built by Jason Friedes
Thanks to Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Originally a live performance, (Nebraska) sets the voices of a teacher,

a child care specialist, several artists, a naturalist, a carpenter, a physical
trainer, a humanitarian professional, a hospital chaplain, and an animal
behavior specialist against the arrangements and rearrangements of a dis-
rupted domestic scene, including flashing lamps and components of a
still life.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa defines care as, among other things, “the affective
remaking of relationships with our objects.”17 So here in the gallery, there’s
space to approach the stuff within it with care. To watch most of the videos
in the gallery, a viewer has to sit on a single chair. There were benches avail-
able, pine slats arranged vertically and joined by metal struts. But I brought in
wooden chairs from a local used furniture store, plus one that I had picked up
in Santa Fe, looking for chairs that were darker wood or at least a darker stain,
that had a certain sense of being worn, sensitive.
There was also only one pair of headphones for each video. My original
hope was that the audio for most of the videos would have been able to play in
the space, simultaneously.
That didn’t work. The gallery is a fairly large size, but that didn’t prevent the
sounds from clashing with one another, creating a low-stress cacophony. So,
every video got a pair of headphones, and the sounds we heard in the space
came from the digital frames in one of the installation areas.
A cacophony might have been conceptually truer to the immersive reality of
entanglement, but we are still boundedly rational agents/actants/actors in any
given perceptual system, constrained by the capacities of our own perceptions.
Part of the challenge of any installation is calibrating it to impact the senses of
the viewer in the manner intended – here, wanting to open space for potential
authentic listening and looking.
(New York)
2016
Video, 9 minutes
Audio Description by Katie Murphy
Thanks to Markus Guschelbauer, Jamie Morra, and Residency 108
Created for and with the landscape of Upstate New York. Built from
the voices of an artist, an art historian, a conservation and restoration
planning specialist, and several local tribal community members, as well
as the previous interviews collected for the project.
(New York) is a single-channel video. It is a moment to sit in a gallery and

watch moving images of a person spending time outside, with various voices
overlapping.18 This isn’t the seductive, gorgeous, dramatic depiction of capital
N “Nature”. It’s a bit prolonged and slow and uncomfortable. And maybe a lit-
tle bit awkward and painful. But it’s also an invitation to be present with pain.19
In choosing to be present with the uncomfortable, the slow, the painful – not
as an adrenaline-inducing spectacle rush but as an intentional form of listen-
ing – there’s an opportunity to flatten hierarchies. By attempting to listen to
something, we acknowledge that it is potentially worth listening to. There’s the
potential for what Fischler-Lichte calls the aesthetics of the performative.
The aesthetics of the performative reveals itself as a “new” Enlightenment.
It does not call upon all human beings to govern over nature – neither
their own nor that surrounding them – but instead encourages them to
enter into a new relationship with themselves and the world. This relation-
ship is not determined by an “either/or” situation but by an “as well as.”
The reenchantment of the world is inclusive rather than exclusive; it asks
everyone to act in life as in performance.20
Let’s be real: this is a single-channel video, a chair, and some headphones. The
average viewer to a gallery work spends about 30 seconds taking it in. But
performance is not just considered in a video: it’s in how you as a visitor are
invited to sit in the space, the presence you are invited to have with the things
in the room, the way the open areas are framed and made navigable. Whatever
amount of time a viewer spends with the work, it is the pause of a body in
space, a deliberate encounter.
(Installation Two)
2018
Audio Description by Emily Smith Beitiks
Found furniture, glass vases with local water, tablecloths, mandarins

(tangerines), gaff tape, charcoal, digital frames, performance documen-
tation of (Nebraska), “masculine” wallpaper (labeled as such by Johnson
Wall Coverings), hardware from a repaired and disassembled table, digital
photographs of (Installation One), lamp.
(Installation One) originally displayed at The Box gallery in Galesburg,
Illinois in 2016. Thanks to Studios Midwest/Knox College.
(Installation Two) is essentially a reimagining of (Installation One), including
photos from the first iteration and (Portrait). The table is on its side, wrapped in
the tablecloth and ratchet strap rather haphazardly, displayed without its center
leaf, legs partially removed.
It includes the same digital frames from (Installation One), with the docu-
mentation from (Nebraska), and the wallpaper, but torn into bits and reassem-
bled, tacked together with black gaff tape. The wallpaper has worked into
smaller and smaller pieces over the course of the project – shipped between
residencies, peeled off walls, smeared with scrubs of charcoal. But to me, even
when assembled in overlapping scraps, it still looks like a whole.
At this point in the project, I know these things. I know their textures and how
they will behave under certain pressures. I know the ways they will crumble,
fragment, and distort; I know their heft and color and something about how
they will catch an eye in the room. I’m trying as much as possible to lean into
these instinctual sensibilities: I can trust them, in part, because I have made
myself aware of them. I’m also aware that my body and brain and process need
honoring, need trust.21
Whatever else performance is, it is a kind of visibility, a demand of trust.
Performers, actors, actants in a system, are arranged – arrange themselves – for
deliberate, engaged encounters. Fischler-Lichte describes the way in which
artistic decisions and craft create presence, the way that things revealed as what
they are liberates us from “intrinsic meaning”:
Artistic and technical means have the task to enhance the actor’s pres-
ence and the ecstasy of things; they direct the spectators’ attention to their
phenomenal beings, and they render this phenomenal being conspicu-
ous. Thus, the body of the actor and the objects appear and show them-
selves to the spectators in their own ephemeral presence. When people
and things appear as what they are the world becomes enchanted. At its
core, enchantment comprises self-referentiality. It is the liberation from all
endeavors to understand and the revelation of the “intrinsic meaning” of
man and things.22
Later, a student will ask me why I put oranges on top of vases: I will tell him,
“Because I wanted to. Because part of being an artist is training your instincts
and then trusting them.” It’s not that I’m giving myself over to an indescrib-
able force so much as I am relying on a basic muscle I have been working to
strengthen.
(Santa Fe)
2017
Performance Documentation
Photos by Jane Phillips
Video and Audio, 14 minutes
Laser-cut pine patterns derived from “masculine” wallpaper (labeled
by Johnson Wall Coverings), glass vases of local water, tangerines
(mandarins), charcoal, gaff tape.
Audio Description by Adam Harvey
Technical Support by Alberto Romero
Thanks to the Santa Fe Art Institute and MAKE Santa Fe
Originally a live performance, (Santa Fe) brought the voices of local

residents and artists, watershed managers and water activists into the pro-
ject collection of interviews. Vases filled with water from two points
along the Santa Fe River were arranged along a collection of latillas,
laser-cut “masculine” pine branches, and still life components.
The video for (Santa Fe) is the looping footage of the pine tree that played
in the space during the performance, along with an audio recording of the live
work. There is no video of the actual performance because I could not afford
to hire another body to do it. The room was too big for my single camera to
capture everything, and everyone in the room was already too busy doing other
things to monitor a camera on top of everything else. The documentation is
shaped not only by my own artistic vision or understanding but by social, eco-
nomic, ecological forces.23
The images of (Santa Fe) are all in a rough line, about five feet off the
ground, with the video slightly higher. The images of the performance could
be “read” in “chronological” order, through the timeline of the performance,
but the other artifacts of the work – the wooden cutouts of the “masculine”
wallpaper pattern, the video loop of the actual piñon pine, must necessarily be
experienced nonlinearly, despite the charcoal line.
Throughout the project, I’ve used both charcoal I gathered from the remains
of the burnt table and art-supply compressed charcoal I purchased online. Aside
from being a common drawing medium, it’s also used in cooking and heating
worldwide. The production of charcoal is associated with global deforestation,
climate change, and, depending on its origin, slave labor.24 Its impact can be
mitigated with fuel efficient stoves, art, activism, informed consumerism, the
cultivation of alternative sources, and the enforcement of environmental and
labor laws.25 The line draws the viewers’ eye around the walls of the gallery,
connects the various spaces and materials within it. It’s a guiding tool and a ref-
erence to the various social and ecological systems from which the work is built.
(New York 2)
2017
Interactive Video, 9 minutes
Audio Description by Katie Murphy
Wallpaper categorized as “masculine” by Johnson Wall Coverings
Thanks to the Wassaic Project and Christine Shallenberg
An interactive video created in and with the landscape of Upstate New

York. Built from the voices of several farmers, a writer and producer, and
a blind artist, as well as previous interviews collected for the project.
(New York 2) is a video partially masked by the “masculine” wallpaper. Too

far away or too close to the screen and your view of the original footage is
blocked. The panels of the wallpaper slide up to conceal it. You can still hear
the audio description and the audio clips from interviews. But if you stand
where the ground is marked, at the edge of the safe boundary, the panels slide
away to reveal views of Upstate New York, birds, seated performances, blink-
ing lamps.
The wallpaper obscures the sighted viewer’s relationship to the work, forces
them to rely on the audio description, to gently reconsider their experience, to
sort through their own matters of care and concern.26 Photos of the first instal-
lation are staggered on either side of the charcoal line. The experience is frag-
mented. In thinking through how to change systems, Donella Meadows writes,
“Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expecta-
tions about the relationship between action and response. They are even more
important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip
a system from one mode of behavior to another.”27
When we think of systems or networks, we might look for broadly mapped,
disparate nodes, a data visualization of entanglement.28 This work is just a series
of fragments that quietly ask you to stay with them, to be with them.29
Observation is a limited tool, entangled with its realities.30 Engaging with

it forces some of us to reckon with the present and all the histories embedded
in things and bodies. It has the potential to help heal and to bring us in con-
tact with things that are uncomfortable or unsafe. It is not a springboard for a
kumbaya-universal-love. “I wish we could all begin with trust and love for each
other. But we can’t. There has been too much damage to too many bodies for
too many generations. But we can begin with respect, caring, and a willingness
to help,” writes Menakem.31
Approaching others with a willingness to change default relationships, a
willingness to grow and learn, can shift balances of power, heal traumas, and
chip away at oppressions. As Donnella Meadows reminds us: “Changing rela-
tionships usually changes system behavior.”32
Connections are never fully severed: we are always entangled in our shared
ecological-material-cultural-conceptual realities, and we need to be able to
protect ourselves and honor our own feelings without losing our empathy
completely. We need to listen to each other in order to heal.33
This is work that sucks, often. It means being uncomfortable. It means chal-
lenging what we know and even letting go of what we thought was expertise.
It means finding the tricky balances between generosity and self-care. It means
becoming aware of the various systems, ecologies, and resources we rely on,
without taking them for granted. It means knowing our limits, knowing our
privileges and vulnerabilities. We may need to take safe distances from one
another in order to protect ourselves, to protect each other, to accept that some
differences cannot be reconciled.
In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
lays out her take on confrontation, conflict resolution, trauma, and boundaries:
I think that oppressed people have a right to tell the person doing the
oppressing to get their foot off their necks. I think that anger is valid,
and that many people, particularly Black, Indigenous, people of color,
fat, working-class, and disabled people, get told we need to say it nicer
when we’re mad at things that aren’t right, and that kind of tone policing
is wrong. I also think there are times when people are capable of doing
emotionally abusive, completely out-of-pocket shit online that is destruc-
tive or crazy-making in the name of confrontation. I think that working
things out is often great; I also think that sometimes people have a right
to set boundaries, including cutting people the fuck off. I think trauma,
abuse and oppression have made it so we often have zero experience of
anything other than betrayal, so the safest way we know how to survive is
to rip someone’s face off or run. I think there is no hard-and-fast rule –
one person’s clusterfuck is another person’s righteous call for justice. All
I can do is rely on my own internal sense of what feels right and ask
friends for reality checks. A lot of things can be true at the same time.
You’re welcome.34
Clear boundaries are important, but we can’t expect everything to be laid out
for us, explained to us, especially if we’re in a position of privilege. Gaps in
our own perceptions and experience will blind us to various oppressions and
delude us into thinking we’ve got the whole picture. We must work to see.
On so many levels, interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible,
as your true self,” writes adrienne marie brown. “Meaning your capacity and
need are transparent. Meaning even when I don’t want to look in the mirror,
I am (and I choose to be) open to the attention of others.35It matters who sees
us, in what context, through what lens. It matters that we are seen generously,
and in consideration to imbalances of power, to shifts in the ground beneath
us. Because being seen can also include being surveilled, watched, scrutinized,
clocked, evaluated according to irrelevant norms, misunderstood. It can mean
becoming visible only in those moments when the pain breaks us, renders us
literal on a level of failure, poison, mistake, mess.
Perhaps counterintuitively, slowing down to listen to the world – empir-
ically and imaginatively at the same time – seems our only hope in a
moment of crisis and urgency. Our modes of noticing, however, are them-
selves monstrous in their connection to Man’s conquest. Much of what we
know about ecological connection comes from tracking the movement of
radiation and other pollutants. Contamination often acts as a “tracer” – a
way to see relations. We notice connections in part through their ruina-
tion; we see the importance of dinoflagellates to coral reefs only as the
corals bleach and die. It is urgent that we start paying attention to more of
our companions before we kill them off entirely.36
As an artist and a human organism, I am and make work that is entangled with
the painful, ugly, stupid of the world, with all the traumas of the past and pre-
sent, the presumptions of white supremacy, and moments of real listening. As
a member of local and global ecologies, it’s my responsibility to cultivate resil-
ience and enable healing, internally and externally, even and especially when
those healing processes are beyond my limited understanding and experience,
even as I fight pain in my body. Things help us become stronger and better for
both one another and ourselves, even if it doesn’t result in a gorgeous ecologi-
cal exchange of humming attunement.
This is an ethos, not an aesthetic. Resilience does not look a singular way.
Healing happens in multiple shapes and forms, including pain.37 And we will
have to communicate with other another – through words, materials, gestures,
all the things – in order to voice our needs, establish clear boundaries, set
expectations, learn our differences, listen to each other, navigate our various
dangers and interdependencies.38
Performance is a space where we can take on the absurd, the mundane, the
ridiculous, the unimaginable. This doesn’t always mean live human bodies –
sometimes it means considering, attuning to, or engaging safely with whatever
we encounter. In doing this, we may come to recognize things as something
other than what we have believed them to be. Survivors of abuse are seen
as having unique skills and strengths.39 Houseplants are urgent companions.
Microbes become choreographers. Oppressions crystallize and become unde-
niable. Healing is central to justice.40
While we can hope for utopias, or whatever balanced entangled attunement
we envision to be the ultimate form of social-ecological harmony, a world
without pain is neither possible nor necessarily desirable. For Mil in Trans Care,
community is an articulation of reconnection, explicitly in defiance of, but not
ever fully separate from, systemic oppression.41 Tools for gathering and healing
can be weapons, can be weaponized – by imbalances of power, by unresolved
traumas. The same university system that enables me to sit at home writing
demands that I push on daily basis to be heard, respected, and valued – it was
not designed to honor voices and bodies like mine. I navigate colleagues, in
multiple contexts, whose bodies and responses exhibit symptoms of trauma,
fight-or-flight reactions, scars of conditioning from those same systems, even
as they push against them.42 When I hang out with friends of color, there’s
still always the possibility that I will mess things up, will slip into a privileged
oblivion. Still, I work to be better – for Ahmed, the table finally “arrives” as a
support for queer gatherings.43 I know some of the work that it takes to build
resilience, to build strength enough to stay present. I have learned such things,
in part, from making, being with, and witnessing bodies in performance.
“Resilience is not a thing or an attribute, but a flow. It moves through the
body, and between multiple bodies when they are harmonized. It is neither
built nor developed; it is taken in and expressed as part of a larger relationship
with a family, a group, a community, or the world at large,” writes Menakem.44
My friends and I trade slow, quiet stories of pain. We reach out via phone
calls and video chats, socially distanced gatherings, brunches at our dining
room tables. We articulate the oblivion that inequity perpetuates (including
our own). We name the people and spaces that are safe. We hold people and
things accountable for their violence whenever possible, seeing that violence
for what it is, protecting ourselves from it. We navigate it, heal from it, learn
from it. We share tools for coping. We vent hot, hard feelings at one another.
We acknowledge those moments when things have succeeded in convincing us
that we are not enough, that we don’t deserve to be heard or seen, that we have
failed, or that our humanness is itself a failure.45 Talking about it, describing it,
makes things easier.
The challenge is always in protecting ourselves, without imagining ourselves
to be totally independent. We learn to be love-autotrophic, without forgetting
that we build that love from sun, water, soil, air.46
Support functions best when it is mutual: support as an action is sustaining:
conscious action is performance. We perform resilience for systemic pain when
we choose to both value ourselves and bodies, and hold space for the trauma
of other beings. When we recognize that pain makes everyone an “other,” and
strength comes from recognizing the limits of our own understanding. Art,
performance, hold space for reconnection, for pushing those limits. For taking
on the absurd possibility of actually understanding the world.
Shelbi Bretz began this project for me by articulating a healing process
that resonated with my own. Throughout this art/performance thing, I was
reminded of the limits of my own perspective and experience by communities,
people, things, landscapes. The process of making the work, the conversations
that happened around it, the lessons I learned from it, are not separate from the
work itself. Beyond that, the process of making art is a means for me to reach
out to, and stay connected with, people, ideas and things that are important to
me. And more often than not, that hope, that intention, dwarfs the reality of
the work entirely – even and especially when the relationship is difficult, or a
going through a process of mourning and letting go.47
My father’s tour in Vietnam exposed his body to Agent Orange, a defoliant
chemical which generated a cancer that eventually killed him. The assaults on
the landscape of Vietnam, the Vietnamese people, and his body are inseparable.
In trying to find ways to kill “the enemy” more efficiently, the US Military
indiscriminately carpet-bombed pain. Many landscapes where the chemical
was sprayed or stored are still contaminated. More than 3 million Vietnam-
ese are still suffering from deadly diseases as the result of exposure to Agent
Orange.48 The legacy of moral injury among American soldiers and officials is
profound. My body had always been imprinted with the legacy of inherited
trauma and white supremacy, as well as my family’s creative attempts to negoti-
ate and dodge those legacies.
In the many years between his diagnosis and death, my dad would continue
his life as he normally would. He would aggressively seek adventures: would
relentlessly talk to everyone; would write stories on everything from football
to dive bars to feature films to marathons. He was known for being able to talk
to anyone, from day laborers and ex-boxers to movie stars, athletes, and poet
laureates.
He also made it clear in his actions and affect that many systems were bullshit,
built by humans with narrow vision, and would channel his energy into dis-
rupting them. He’d creatively defy established journalistic writing standards,
fervently argue the importance of flannel shirts, invite the random guys on the
corner for a drink and a long talk, sing “Home on the Range” loudly in the
middle of the street, drive to the grocery store barefoot. The same symptoms
of PTSD that stigmatized him and our family also freed him from a certain
regard for systems he knew would not respect him. He went back to Vietnam
in his 40s to write a series of works entirely in the second person (“You’d come
back to Vietnam to see what had changed from the war, trying to understand
why you were there in the first place.”). Everyone who read it was implicated
in his narrative.49
He used the same format to describe the decades of gifts my sister and
brother and I would give him on Father’s Day, for a holiday piece in the San
Francisco Examiner, two years before he died. He describes his own performance
of fatherhood.
“Well, well, well,” you would say, turning to watch them watch you. “What
have we here?” Your mouth formed into a round ooooh when you opened
up the box to see a wax cactus cowboy, or a crushed-paper fez. One eye-
brow went up, slowly, for the Pure Disco CD featuring “Funkytown,” for
“The Corn Cob Polka” from “Polka Party Time” and for “Simpsons Sing
the Blues,” with Homer Simpson belting out “Born Under a Bad Sign.”
Your son’s kindergarten wall-hanging hand print brought a real smile. So
did the purplish-g ray clay face with the gonzo hair, formed from your
[younger] daughter’s first-g rade take on egg-yolk eyes and oblong grins.
So did her rendering of a round, immovable man sitting in a clay easy chair
watching a rabbit-eared TV, done in the colors of the Earth.50
My father got to a point where the stuff in his life pointed to the lives he helped
shape, the narratives outside of his own, the gentle goofiness of human experi-
ence. He got there in large part because of the unrelenting work my mother
did to care for him, as well as the unconscious impact of those things and places
of his life, including us kids. That healing did not come without cost to our
family – I feel the legacy of trauma very keenly in my own body and condi-
tioning. But there was also a relentless, absurd, and justified belief in resilience
in my father’s approach to life that stuck as well.
How we perform with our inescapable systems changes them, changes us.
Staying present in systems of pain can increase our capacity to survive them:
relying on networks of resilience can help us lessen, reframe, redefine the expe-
rience of pain.
Notes
1 Meadows, 2008, 12.
2 Capra, 268. “Different organisms change differently, and over time each organism forms
its unique, individual pathway of structural changes in the process of development. Since
these structural changes are acts of cognition, development is always associated with
learning. In fact, development and learning are two sides of the same coin. Both are
expressions of structural coupling. Not all physical changes in an organism are acts of
cognition. When part of a dandelion is eaten by a rabbit, or when an animal is injured
in an accident, those structural changes are not specified and directed by the organism;
they are not changes of choice and thus not acts of cognition. However, these imposed
physical changes are accompanied by other structural changes (perception, response of
the immune system, and so forth) that are acts of cognition.”
3 Johnson (writing of Patti Smith), 50. “. . . the full reality of pain is incommunicable,
and beyond representation, but this fact precipitates or enables a culture of pain, a com-
mitment to creating or styling the attempt to communicate our pain to others. The
obstacles to representing pain itself beyond showing its superficial signs, like a gash in the
skin, or a scream in the mouth-do not prevent us from listening intently to how another
tries to make her pain known.”
4 brown, 126. “Resilience is perhaps our most beautiful, miraculous trait.”
5 “[F]our fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by
our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to
restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others
by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding
a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology,
including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through
such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social
conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where
they can thrive” (van der Kolk, 96).
6 Ahmed, 170. “The queer body is not alone; queer does not reside in a body or an
object, and is dependent on the mutuality of support.”
7 “The web of life is a flexible, ever-fluctuating network. The more variables are kept
fluctuating, the more dynamic is the system; the greater is its flexibility; and the greater
is its ability to adapt to changing conditions” (Capra, 302).
8 “Suffering from the ills of another species: this is the condition of the Anthropocene, for
humans and nonhumans alike. This suffering is a matter not just of empathy but also of
material interdependence. We are mixed up with other species; we cannot live without
them. Without intestinal bacteria, we cannot digest our food. Without endosymbiotic
dinoflagellates, coral polyps lose their vitality” (Swanson et al., M4).
9 Carlson, 74. “Performance art, a complex and constantly shifting field in its own right,
becomes much more so when one tries to take into account, as any thoughtful consid-
eration of it must, the dense web of interconnections that exists between it and ideas of
performance developed in other fields and between it and the many intellectual, cultural
and social concerns that are raised by almost any contemporary performance project.”
10 “The right boundary for thinking about a problem rarely coincides with the boundary
of an academic discipline, or with a political boundary . . . It’s a great art to remember
that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered
for each new discussion, problem, or purpose. It’s a challenge to stay creative enough to
drop the boundaries that worked for the last problem and to find the most appropriate
set of boundaries for the next questions. It’s also a necessity, if problems are going to be
solved well” (Meadows, 2008, 98–99).
11 Piepzna-Samarasinha.
12 Malatino.
13 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 50. “Exhibition is how museums stage knowledge. They do
this by the way they arrange objects, broadly conceived, in space and how they install
the visitor. The experience, however visual it may be, is corporeal. The key sense – so
key that it is invariably overlooked – is propriocepsis or how the body knows its own
boundaries and orientation in space.” Fischle-Lichter unpacks something similar in
describing staging: “Staging is responsible for the performative generation of mate-
riality in such a way that the appearing elements attract the audience’s attention and
simultaneously highlight the very act of perceiving itself. Staging brings about situ-
ations in which even inconspicuous and ordinary elements become remarkable and
appear transfigured. Moreover, the spectators become aware that they are affected and
transformed by their experience of the movements, light, colors, sounds, odors, and
so forth. The mise en scène can therefore be defined and described as a process that
aims at the reenchantment of the world and the metamorphosis of the performance’s
participants” (ch.7).
14 Sonke et al., 16. “Aesthetic experiences . . . feel distinctly different from mundane expe-
riences. They often involve highly focused awareness on the present moment; a sense of
beauty, awe, strong emotion, or identification; and opportunities to see oneself or the
world differently in meaningful and lasting ways . . . the neuropathways created through
aesthetic conditioning can have significant implications – predicting behavior, health,
and well-being across the lifespan and subsequent generations . . . Finally, aesthetic
experiences – including those rooted in the arts – have the ability to shift perspectives
and to generate shared symbolic systems that motivate and transform individual and col-
lective behaviors.”
15 See: Doyle.
16 It’s worth noting that at this point in time, gender disparity in galleries and museums
is overwhelming: more than 80% of artists are white, more than 80% of those are men.
C. Topaz et al., “Diversity of artists in US Museums,” PLoS One, 14, no. 3: e0212852,
March 20, 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6426178/
17 “Here care stands for necessary but mostly dismissed labors of everyday maintenance of
life, an ethico-political commitment to neglected things, and the affective remaking of
relationships with our objects” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 66).
18 Pauchard and Sagarin, 175. “We now have the holistic vision and the tools to see at once
how each observation can connect to another, and how vast collections of observations –
culled from all over the world and across long gaps in time – can help us understand a
complex, interconnected, and relentlessly changing planet.”
19 “Pain-centered public spheres might be the places of human connection that challenge
colonial and neoliberal impulses” (Philipose, 64–65).
20 Ch.7.
21 Parker-Starbuck and Mock, 233. “Rather than discovering, observing and explaining,
the fundamental methods of body-centered research are locating sensing and listening
to the bodies around us, to our subjects, to each other and to ourselves.”
22 Ch.7.
23 Haraway, 33. “If it is true that neither biology nor philosophy any longer supports the
notion of independent organisms in environments, that is, interacting units plus con-
texts/rules, then sympoiesis is the name of the game in spades. Bounded (or neoliberal)
individualism amended by autopoiesis is not good enough figurally or scientifically; it
misleads us down deadly paths.”
24 US Department of Labor.
25 Madsen.
26 Meadows, 2001 “Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our
ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity – our rationality, our ability to sort out
truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.”
27 Meadows, 2001, 92.
28 Capra, 35. “The view of living systems as networks provides a novel perspective on
the so-called hierarchies of nature. Since living systems at all levels are networks, we
must visualize the web of life as living systems (networks) interacting in a network
fashion with other systems (networks). For example, we can picture an ecosystem
schematically as a network with a few nodes. Each node represents an organism,
which means that each node, when magnified, appears itself as a network. Each node
in the new network may represent an organ, which in turn will appear as a network
when magnified, and so on. In other words, the web of life consists of networks
within networks. At each scale, under closer scrutiny, the nodes of the network reveal
themselves as smaller networks. We tend to arrange these systems, all nesting within
larger systems, in a hierarchical scheme by placing the larger systems above the smaller
ones in a pyramid fashion. But this is a human projection. In nature there is no
“above” or “below,” and there are no hierarchies. There are only networks nesting
within other networks.”
29 “It is important here that we don’t consider ‘cultures’ as objects that are already given
and that come into contact to create a hybrid from the mixture of pure forms. Rather,
‘cultures’ come to be lived as having a certain shape, or even a skin, as an effect of such
contact . . . contact is ongoing but is ‘restricted’ by the very restriction of what it is that
we come into contact with” (Ahmed, 148).
30 “Observation will not be useful unless we connect it to conceptual constructs that can
be widely appreciated. The intuitive nature of observation-based ecology gives it a
natural foundation for these constructs, while it also provides a source of tangible and
readily accessible material with which to build connections between unique personal
experiences (such as those generated in a field course or on a nature walk with field
notebook and binoculars in hand) and advanced scientific knowledge” (Pauchard and
Sagarin, 166).
31 Menakem, 290.
32 Meadows, 2001, 17.
33 Shay, 119. “The impulse to dehumanize and disrespect the enemy must be resisted,
whether its basis is religious, nationalistic, or racist. The soldier’s physical and psycho-
logical survival is at stake.” And van der Kolk, 331: “Communicating fully is the oppo-
site of being traumatized.”
34 Piepzna-Samarasinha, 217–218. See also Beitiks (a 2016 social media post that became
its own value poem). https://siteprojects.co/portfolio/i-believe
35 brown, 93.
36 Swanson et al., M8.
37 In My Grandmother’s Hands, Menakem uses the terms clean pain and dirty pain to differ-
entiate between pain that heals and pain that retraumatizes.
38 “So how do you change paradigms?. . You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures
in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the
new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and
power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries: you work with active change agents and
with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded” (Meadows, 2001, 164).
39 Piepzna-Samarasinha, 232.
40 Piepzna-Samarasinha, 100.
41 Malatino. “. . . there is indeed, whether or not we like or desire it, a hierarchy of verisi-
militude that continues to reign in the majority of our social interactions. This hierarchy
determines, to a large extent, both whether and how we are understood as belonging to
collectivities and communities. It plays a significant role in the frequency, intensity, and
forms of violence to which we are or are not exposed. It plays out on the most mundane
levels and mitigates our possibilities for agency, autonomy, and action – in other words,
it informs how and where we may assemble our bodies and selves in interaction.”
42 Relevant to Ahmed’s ideas of critical racism and critical sexism.
43 “A table acquires a life through how it arrives, through what it comes into contact with,
and the work that it allows us to do. Perhaps this life is a borrowed rather than stolen life,
where the act of borrowing involves a pledge of return. The dancing table would be for
sure a rather queer object: a queerness that does not reside ‘within’ the table but registers
how the table can impress upon us, and what we too can borrow from the contingency
of its life” (Ahmed, 164).
44 Ahmed, 51.
45 Piepzna-Samarasinha, 58, describing her own struggles, hopes, and comedowns with
her disability- centered BIPOC communities: “[W]e experienced the places where
interdependence didn’t just magically work out as betrayal, letting each other down. We
had so many hopes for each other, so much belief that we could be everything to each
other, so much effortlessly and automatically, through shared identity. And we’d been
betrayed so many times before, by white disabled people and non-disabled people in our
lives, so we hoped that since we’d finally, finally found that BIPOC sick and disabled
community, we’d never fuck up (or be tired), always know the right thing to do, and
be able to do it. It turned out that, like every time I’ve come together with people I’ve
shared an identity with, there was bliss and also heartbreak when we assumed that bliss
would be easy and forever.”
46 “collective behavior of a particular group, such as ant colonies of a given species, evolves
as a set of relations that links a colony with the rest of its world” (Gordon, M136).
47 “Let go. Bring in all the actors and use the energy formerly expended on resistance to seek
out mutually satisfactory ways for all goals to be realized – or redefinitions of larger and
more important goals that everyone can pull toward together” (Meadows, 2001, 116).
48 Sagolj.
49 Beitiks, 1989.
50 Beitiks, 1999.
Bibliography
Nebraska), 2016.
Beitiks, Edvins Elmars. “Hey, Daddy-o!” San Francisco Examiner, June 17, 1999. www.sfgate.
com/style/article/Hey-Daddy-o-3079581.php.
———. “Vietnam: The Road Back.” San Francisco Examiner, August 6, 1989.
ety), 2016.
Anchor Books, 1996.
Carlson, Marvin. “What Is Performance?” In The Performance Studies Reader, Ed. Henry Bial,
2nd ed., 70–75. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.
Doyle, Jennifer. Hold it Against Me: Emotional Difficulty in Contemporary Art New York: Duke
2016.
Gordon, Deborah M. “Without Planning: The Evolution of Collective Behavior in Ant
Colonies.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al.,
M125–M139. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucence. Durham and Lon-
don: Duke University Press, 2016.
Johnson, Dominic. “Those Who Have Suffered Understand Suffering: Notes on the Body
(in Pain).” In Agency: A Partial History of Live Art, Ed. Theron Schmidt. Bristol: Intellect,
2019.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Performance Studies.” In The Performance Studies Reader,
Ed. Henry Bial, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Nebraska), 2016.
“List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.” US Department of Labor, Bureau
of International Labor Affairs, n.d. www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/
list-of-goods.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Madsen, Marianne M. “Charcoal.” In Encyclopedia of Science. Amenia, NY: Salem Press,
2019.
Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publish-
ing, 2008.
———. “Dancing with Systems.” The Donella Meadows Institute, 2001. http://donel-
lameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/.
Nebraska), 2016.
Fe, NM), 2017.
Politics 9, no. 1 (2007): 60–81.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, 5th ed. Vancou-
ver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020.
Sagolj, Damir. “Vietnamese Families Still Battling the Aftermath of Agent Orange.” The
Independent, April 4, 2017. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/
agent-orange-vietnam-war-us-damir-sagolj-a7664491.html.
Sonke, J. et al. “Creating Healthy Communities through Cross-Sector Collaboration [White
Paper].” University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine/ArtPlace America, 2019.
Swanson, Heather et al. “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Eds.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., M1–M12. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
New York), 2016.
2016.
Index
aesthetics of the performative 140 – 141 Bogost, Ian 46

Ahmed, Sarah 12, 29, 46, 51, 152; on boundaries 12, 20, 31, 47, 94, 112, 136,
disorientation 111; on gendering of 137, 138, 150, 151, 155
objects 68; on inheritance of whiteness Brack, Fred 17 – 18
42; on perception 38 Brecht, Bertolt 16
American Psychological Association 23 Bretz, Shelbi 152
arts as third table 11 brown, adrienne marie 5, 46, 150
attunement 11, 42, 51, 71 building performances 12
audience 3; art and 85; audio described bus gender 59
work and 16; and creative projects 138; Butler, Judith 38, 62, 63
performance and 41 – 42; performer
vulnerability and 25 – 26; Systems of Pain/ Candor Arts 72
Networks of Resilience exhibition and 138 Capra, Fritjof 42, 92
audio description 13; described 16; goal of care 5; to communicate, audio describers
17; Gravity (movie) example of 17–18; and 65; as curator-artist relationship
Installation One 62, 65–66; Moment 1 1–2; component 136 – 137; holistic health 51;
Moment 2 114–115; New York 2 101–102, for horses 36 – 37, 45; Malatino on 137;
103, 104, 105–107; Omaha, Nebraska mental health, for veterans 58; mental
work 13–14, 16–17, 19, 20–21, 24, illness and access to 23; Puig de la
26–28; Santa Fe project 121–130; Upstate Bellacasa on 71, 139; webs 137
New York work 38–39, 42–43, 44, 48, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
50; vision 101, 102, 103, 104, 105–107 (Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha) 150
Cascella, Daniela 69
Barad, Karan 49, 87 categories: and listening 58 – 73; masculine
Bennett, Jane 46 60 – 61; Shay on 58; of wall coverings 60
Beitiks, Edvins Elmars 158 character in performance 62 – 63
Beitiks, Emily 1, 6, 9, 58, 139, 143 cite protection 83, 112
Beitiks, Kathleen Marie O’Donnell v classifications, Shay on 58
bias/biases: being nonjudgmental and 66; colonialism 10, 42, 94
Pauchard and Sagarin on 86; perceptions communication: choreography and 42;
and 86; Tishman on 61; visual/verbal 108 Haraway on 51; Lipari on 70; nonhuman
binaries: Fischler-Lichte on undoing 64–65; 43, 49 – 51; nonverbal 42, 50; transmitted
healing and 23; performance and 18 information in 41; Wassaic Project and
bird sounds, transcribing 39 – 41; Pieplow 88 – 89
analysis of 39 – 40; spectrograph of 40 community 5; Capra on 92; gender and
blindness 73, 101, 104, 108 62; Menakem on 152; Potter on 14;
Bodewadmiakiwen territory 60, 136 psychological well-being of 45; racial
The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk) 15 trauma and 89; surveillance and 49;
body thing 82 – 83 systemic oppression and 151
162 Index
Conquergood, Dwight 88 – 89 151; performance and 83; places and
Cooper, Amy 92 45 – 46; resilience and 151 – 152; Shelbi
Cooper, Christian 92 on 14; things and 9; tools, description
COVID-19 pandemic 46 – 47 and observation as 4; tribal territories
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams 20 and 10; van der Kolk on 68
cultures of supremacy 89 Heller, Hannah 4
homophobia 10
describers 16; see also audio description
DiAngelo, Robin 86 inequity 10, 42, 50, 72 – 73, 88, 152
disciplines 3 inherited whiteness 42
Douglas (Gadsby show) 16 interdependence 5; resilience development
and 136
ecology: Bretz perception of 3 – 4; intersectionality 20
observation and 49; Pauchard and interviews: Bretz, Shelbi 1 – 2, 4; challenge
Sagarin on 49; resilience in 23 in working with 13; described 2; to
Eddington, Arthur 11 gather knowledge 38; in Omaha 12;
Emergent Strategies (brown) 46 Upstate New York 37, 42 – 43
emergent strategy 5, 67, 150 isolationism 10
emotional vulnerability 25
empathy 92 – 93; necessity and danger of Jedd, Theresa 25
1–5 Jones-Rizzi, Joanne 4
Essential Partners 89 – 90 justice, healing and 151
everyday experience, table of 11
Katti, Christian 48 – 49
Failure that lives in the body (portrait) 81 – 94 Kenya (Robinson) 67, 98, 117
Fischler-Lichte, Erika 15, 64 – 65; on the Kiikaapoi territory 60, 136
aesthetics of the performative 140 – 141; knowledge 3
performance and 144 Knox College Box Gallery 60; Installation
Foster, Joel 101 One 61 – 62, 66, 69 – 70
Fraleigh, Sondra 46
Friedes, Jason 10, 111 language as material for artistic research 69–70
Lee Baby (horse) 36, 45, 51
Gadsby, Hannah 16 Lenape territory 82
Galesburg, Illinois 60, 61 Lin, Maya 22
gender: Ahmed on objects and 68; Butler Lipari, Lisbeth 69, 70, 92
on 62, 63; in describing author 59, 65; listening: being nonjudgmental in 66; with
integrity and 64; lived vs. perceived 72; care 71; categories/classifications and
networks and 62, 68; performance and 58 – 73; dialogue and 89 – 94; healing
62 – 63; of wall coverings 60, 63, 68, and 149 – 150; Mental Health First Aid
69 – 70; Western cultures and 64 responders and 67; Shay on 58
genderqueer 59, 68 list making 46
Giannachi, Gabriella 44
Gravity (movie) 17 – 18 Making Spaces Safer (Potter) 14
Gregory, Paul 36 Malatino, Hil 137, 151
grounding techniques 14 – 15 masculine categories 60 – 61, 63, 68
Guitierrez, Miguel 62 – 63 material(s) 3; Capra on 42; with gendered/
racial connotations 62; language as
Haraway, Donna 43, 51 69 – 70; list making and 46; objects and
Harman, Graham 11, 46 91 – 92; performance and 62; realities,
Harvey, Adam 121 – 130 attunement and 51; Santa Fe 120 – 121
healing 5; barriers to 23 – 24; as binary 23; Maturana, Humberto 41
brown on 67; and justice 151; listening Meadows, Donella 112, 149
and 149 – 150; Menakem on 23, 71; media 3
nature and 45 – 47; nonhuman 29; objects Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad) 49
and 113; observation and 14, 72; as pain Menakem, Resmaa 5, 23, 71, 149, 152
Index 163
Meskwaki territory 60 perception: Ahmed on 38; bias/biases and
Miami territory 60, 136 86; of ecology, Bretz on 3 – 4
mindfulness-based therapies 14, 22 performance 151; audience of receivers and
misogyny 10 41–42; audio description and 16–18;
Mohican territory 37, 82 being present and 47–48; binaries and 18;
Moment 2 111 – 115; breakaway table, of fatherhood 153–154; finished work in
engagement with 113 – 114; described 15; Fischler-Lichte on 15, 64–65; gender
111; table, described 111 – 112; throwing and 62–63; Guitierrez on character in
table idea 112 – 113 62–63; healing and 83; of isolation 47;
Morton, Timothy 46 material(s) and 62; nonhuman dimension
Murphy, Katie 111, 114 – 115 to 38, 43–44; presence and 18; as space
My Grandmother’s Hands (Menakem) 72 to connect with things 10; of strength,
resilience and 23; trauma and 15–20,
nature, healing and 45 – 47 27–29; vulnerability and 25–28
network(s): Butler on performance and 62; “The Phenomenology of Being Seen”
of care, community, resilience 5; gender (Fraleigh) 46
and 62, 68; jurors 87; of mutual support Pieplow, Nathan 39 – 40
47, 136 – 137; presence and 44; of Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi 5,
resilience, relying on 154; social support 137, 150
105; virtual 47 places: engagement with 46; healing and
nonhuman(s): communication 43, 49 – 51; 45 – 46; unrest and 38
dimension to performance 38, 43 – 44; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 14,
healing 29; relationships 36 – 37; trauma 22 – 23, 30, 31, 32, 111, 153; PTSD
and 26 treatment technique 14
nonverbal communication 42, 50; Potter, Shawna 14
choreography as 42; Johnson, Rae on presence: Giannachi definition of 44;
31, 52, 73 performance and 18; vs. present 43 – 44
present: with nature 45; performance and
objectivity, describers and 16 47 – 48; vs. presence 43 – 44
object-oriented ontology 46, 85 psychology: communication and types of
objects: healing and 113; material(s) and 91–92 88 – 89; liberation, oppression and 20;
observation 3; being nonjudgmental in 66; objectivity and Cartesian 66
ecology and 49; healing and 14, 72; as Public Conversation Project 89 – 90
healing tool 4; as surveillance 48 – 49, 66 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 71, 139
observational process, audio description as 16
Observation and Ecology (Pauchard and Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed) 12, 112
Sagarin) 49
Očeti Šakowiŋ (Sioux) territory 10, 136 race 4; in culture of supremacy 48;
offense 41 professional guidelines for 17; trauma’s
Oliveros, Pauline 71 relationship to 5; Wassaic Project and
Omaha, Nebraska: interviews in 12; pain 93 – 94; Western cultures and 64
and interviewees in 12 – 13; trauma and racial trauma, community and 89
interviewees in 12, 25 racism 4, 10; covid-19 and systemic 46 – 47;
oppression: as traumatic 19 – 20, 72 – 73; environmental justice and 45; listening
undoing systems of 3 and 94; systemic 46 – 47, 72 – 73; trauma
and 89
pain 4; in form of diminishment and recovery: Bretz on 4; healing and 23 – 24,
dismissal 23; healing as 151; interviewees 29, 113; interviews dealing with 2 – 4;
in Omaha and 12 – 13; Johnson on 154; from PTSD 111; from trauma 12
as learning device 5; nonverbal actions relationships 36 – 51; communication
and 18; Scarry on 10, 117; self and 21; to receiver and 41; with nature 45;
transcended 2; as universal/unique, nonhuman, at Retirement Home for
horrible/generative experience 2 Horses 36 – 37; Upstate New York 36 – 37
Pauchard, Anibal 49, 65, 86 residencies 49
Peoria territory 60, 136 Residency 108 37
164 Index
resilience 5, 152; defined 23; in ecology 23; This Is not a Gun (Levine) 72
healing and 151 – 152; interdependence Tishman, Shari 48, 61
and developing 136 torture: Black people as subject of 72;
Retirement Home for Horses 36 – 37 Scarry description of 9 – 10
Trans Care (Malatino) 151
Sagarin, Rafe 49, 65, 86 The Transformative Power of Performance
Santa Fe project 120–130; audio description (Fischer-Lichte) 15
121–130; described 120; materials used in transgenerational trauma 42
120–121 trauma: audio description use in
Sauk territory 60 performance of 16 – 18; described
Sayer, Johnathan 61 4; grounding techniques 14 – 15;
Scarry, Elaine 9 – 10, 72, 108 interviewees in Omaha 12, 25;
Schaefer, Donavan O. 23 – 24 live performance, excerpts 13 – 14;
science, table of 11 nonhumans and 26; oppression as 19 – 20;
self, pain and 21 and pain interviews 12 – 13; performance
Shay, Johnathan 21 – 22, 58, 111 and 15 – 20, 27 – 29; Potter on
Sioux territory 60 de-escalating 14; project space, described
slow looking 66 – 67 10 – 11; recovery and 12; resilience and
Slow Looking (Tishman) 48, 61, 67 23; and theory 9 – 29; things and 9 – 10;
Sming Sming Books 72 transgenerational 42; van der Kolk on
social justice 17, 19 – 20 15; vulnerability and 25 – 28
social space, Wassaic Project and 87 – 88 tribal territories 10; Dickson Center at
social support, networks and 105 Waubonsee Community College 136;
Sökefeld, Martin 38 in Galesburg, Illinois 60; healing and 10;
Sonic Meditations (Oliveros) 71 Upstate New York 37; at Wassaic Project
space/place and conflict, linkage between 38 82
Staying with the Trouble: making Kin the Trivadi, Nikhil 4
Chthulucene (Haraway) 43 two tables concept, Eddington’s 11
still lifes 84 – 85
surveillance 48 – 49; community and 49 understanding 101
systemic oppression, community and 151 universalism 86
systemic racism 72 Upstate New York 36 – 37; bird sounds of,
system(s); see also Systems of Pain/Networks transcribing 39 – 41; interviews 37 – 38;
of Resilience exhibition: colonial academic landscapes 37; Retirement Home for
83 – 84; evaluative 64 – 85; of oppression Horses 36 – 37
41 – 42, 49, 113 – 114; of oppression,
undoing 3 – 4; performance and 10; van der Kolk, Bessel 15, 68, 113
of power and inequity 10; social 19; Varela, Francisco 41
thinkers/theorists 41, 42, 112, 149 Vargas, Cecilia 136 – 137, 138
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience exhibition Verfremdungseffekt 16
135–154; audience and 138; boundaries virtual networks 47
and 136; care and 137, 139; Installation vulnerability 25
Two 143–146; interdependence and 136;
languages 138; location of 136–137; Wassaic Project 81 – 94; body thing
Nature 140; Nebraska 138–139; New York in 82 – 83; citing works and 85;
140–143; New York 2 148–149; overview communication and 88 – 89; cultures
of 135–136; project histories of 138; Santa of supremacy 89; listening/dialogue
Fe 146–148; systems described 135 and 89 – 94; objectivity and 85 – 87;
overview of 81 – 82; quotes and 83; race
things 2 – 3; with agency in trauma 9 – 10; and 93 – 94; racial trauma and 89; social
COVID-19 and 46 – 47; as extensions space and 87 – 88; still lifes and 84 – 85;
of violence 10; healing and 9, 24; of universalism and 86
oppression 19 – 20; and performance 10; What I can’t see (New York 2) 101 – 109
presence vs. present of 43 – 44 whiteness 4, 113 – 114; inheritance of 42;
The Third Table (Harman) 11 Menakem on 94; universality and 86

(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) Meghan Moe Beitiks - Performing Resilience For Systemic Pain-Routledge (2022)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) Meghan Moe Beitiks - Performing Resilience For Systemic Pain-Routledge (2022)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Performing Resilience for

Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and dissociations

Female Aerialists in the 1920s and Early 1930s

Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850–1950

Performance of Absence in Theatre, Performance and Visual Art

Commedia dell’Arte for the 21st Century

Christoph Schlingensief ’s Realist Theater

Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Meghan Moe Beitiks

Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9780367469580

1 The necessity and danger of empathy (Moment 1) 1

2 Trauma and theory (Nebraska) 9

4 Categories, stigma, and listening (Installation One) 58

5 Failure that lives in the body (Portrait): (AKA:

6 What I can’t see (New York 2) 101

7 Surrender, separation, distance (Moment 2) 111

9 Systems of pain/networks of resilience (Exhibition) 135

Emily Beitiks, San Francisco State University, Menlo College, USA.

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience was an art-­piece-­project-­thing. It was a video/

. . . in the conversion of a refrigerator into a bludgeon, the refrigerator

In becoming extensions of violence, in being made to betray us, things separate

the table in practical use

Shelbi describes emotional distance and observation as important to her

Observation can be grounding. It can root us where we are. It is a method

KATE: Humans are scary./SEAN: Like are you fucking serious?

Audio description is an observational process – the describer must look at what

The goal of the audio description is to describe the action in an image or

The description is quick, intense, and as thorough as possible. In Systems of

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE moves to station 1.

Engaging directly with the thing of oppression,28 Johnson summarizes her

• We learn oppression implicitly and relationally, through everyday experi-

We can see in Johnson’s work, and its complex understanding of oppression,

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE puts knives in vase. Gathers the tablecloth.

Every familiar item of the physical world could be made to be or to conceal

In entering landscapes of war, American soldiers justified their violence against

He was shot and killed by a Vietnamese sniper after putting a bandage on

So now, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] definition

STAGE DIRECTION: MOE walks to BREAKAWAY TABLE.

During the development of this whole performance, the absurd questions

According to Paul Gregory, a member of the Retirement Homes for Horses

AUDIO DESCRIPTION: In front of a barn, a person wearing work gloves

Wakwakwak pewpewpewp grkgrkgrkgrkgrkgkrgkrgkrgrk tiii pewpewpewpewpew

weɪkweɪkweɪk pu:pu:pu:p gɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:kgɜ:k ti:i:ɪ

Pieplow eventually lands on the analysis of spectrograms as a visual way of

Transcribing birdspeak feels like understanding. It makes birdsong a physical

Donna Haraway observes that listening is a key component to any modicum

Remember that being seen can be a matter of responsivity. Take a walk

Places hold us, help us heal.

So here I am, in this object-­oriented tradition, with my own palpable things.

The idea of a dispassionate, separate observer conceals the observer them-

The core activity of ecology is “observation.” Humans have been keen

So when it comes to “communication” with the nonhuman, language is not

Awareness of resilience enables one to see many ways to preserve or enhance a

Attunement to the other, within the experience of presence that is cultivated

So before analyzing, before classifying, before thinking, before trying to “do”

In her book Slow Looking, an examination of observation across disciplines

Performance is always an action or event that involves a number of people,

The notion of ‘character’ disinterests me because it suggests an integration,

The demand to be “authentically one thing,” specifically a thing that is sub-

In cultures with heavily (Western) normative understandings of gender (and

As performances destabilize the structure of binary opposites with

Performers are simultaneously ourselves and not-­ourselves. Depending on the

1 The necessity and danger of empathy (Moment 1) 1

2 Trauma and theory (Nebraska) 9

4 Categories, stigma, and listening (Installation One) 58

6 What I can’t see (New York 2) 101

7 Surrender, separation, distance (Moment 2) 111

9 Systems of pain/networks of resilience (Exhibition) 135

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience was an art-piece-project-thing. It was a video/

So here I am, in this object-oriented tradition, with my own palpable things.

Performers are simultaneously ourselves and not-ourselves. Depending on the

Most of the objects depicted in still-life paintings were understood as

(New York) is a single-channel video. It is a moment to sit in a gallery and