Field-Notes

[*Alberto Pereira Jr. first made ‘Please, touch me’ for a 2019 workshop in São Paulo. His production notes are the third in a series that also includes a project abstract #movingtarget and creative writing, ELE. xo, Todd]

PT

Instigado por um workshop realizado no instituto Itaú Cultural, sobre estigma e produção artística contemporânea em relação ao tema HIV/Aids, realizei a minha segunda saída do armário: vivendo há 10 anos com HIV, criei a performance “Por favor, toque-me”, revelando meu status positivo e convidando o público a ressignificar a imagem pré-concebida de um corpo positivo.

[*Polish artist and architect, Jakub Szczęsny is helping to lead ACT III. LUV’s denouement is gonna be a blast! Stay tuned!!]

hi guys,

So, I’ve had an idea for you both for around 6 months now and have regrettably failed to share it in a robust form. I would like to do so now. 

We may thank Brad Walrond for texting with me overnight (why he was awake, I do not know:).  Jonathan, Brad archives Pony’s work and/or that of his house.

Jonathan, remember when I mentioned I wanted to talk to you on insta the other day. Well, maybe we can do that in person on February 9th. I want to invite you to a performance at the home of Livia Alexander. It is rumored that Brad will perform there/then. Pony, you are most welcome also. 

[*The pink elephant image is borrowed from a Facebook intervention made by Niki Singleton and Todd Lanier Lester several years ago called Coming out of the Web 2.0 Closet.]

There is definitely an HIV art establishment. I have met it in a few forms over the first 3/4 of Luv ’til it Hurts, a two-year project that also aspires to elicit a few forms. In fact, I guess this broad ’establishment’ may have factored into the form of LUV in the first place. I am an artist who works in organizational or immaterial form now for almost twenty-years. This can also be other things at the same time, like ‘site specific’ as was Lanchonete.org or a field-invading ‘sea change’ as I hoped freeDimensional would become. For the purposes of this field note, I would say that content or theme or issue inform the form(s) that are aimed for. LUV aspires to forge a philanthropic device (or mechanism) that can be taken and used freely at the end of the two-year process, which will be around July 2020 and when it is fully explained. I also think that style, affect and notions of gesture inform ‘forms’. In my own practice I understand that these styles, affects and attempts at gesture can be rehearsed over years and in different contexts. 

[* For the LUV site, this is part one of a set. Let’s call it the Elpenor Set. See part two, here.]

The purpose of this ’entry’ is to introduce Ismar Tirelli Neto. I’m writing a book right now. It’s called Variations in Worldmaking. I can’t wait until it’s finished because it might be driving me crazy. It’s like birthing a set of gremlins … or so it presently seems. The book covers the span of my three durational, multi-stakeholder, rights-focused works. freeDimensional was a ten-year focus on free expression, artist safety and shelter. Lanchonete.org was a site-specific (São Paulo) five-year focus on the right to the city. And, Luv ’til it Hurts is a two-year focus on HIV and stigma. I chose to begin the book in the same time period as the two years of LUV, July 2018-2020. I thought that one process might help the other. At least in my head. They are both (art) works. I am applying a methodology for durational, multi-stakeholder, rights-focused projects that has been developed over the course of freeDimensional, Lanchonete.org and in giving support to other projects, in the making of Luv ’til it Hurts. I think the same can be said for the making of Lanchonete.org drawing on lessons learned from freeDimensional, but I was not concurrently writing criticism in that instance. Ishmar is working with me on the book, and also features in the book. We started conjuring these relations during a poetry workshop he offered at São João Farm Residency in Rio State (Brasil), and now we meet weekly for a writing class. Below is Ishmar’s ‘opener’ from an excerpt of the book in which I describe its 20 characters. 

[* For the LUV site, this is part two of a set. Let’s call it the Elpenor Set. See part one, here.]

1. It never ceases to baffle and amaze me whenever an association between Elpenor – a decidedly minor character in Homer’s Odyssey – and an idea of methodology crops up in my presence. Akin to being caught midfall (pants down). It is a kinship that plunges me from a secure apex, a terrace (a spacing out) of experience into abstraction, the amplest of falls, towards the world. One thinks [during the fall]: what exactly is a methodology? What is it made of, what are its parameters? Solid and well-built as the Achaen ships, wouldn’t a methodology forcefully entail global applicability – or, better still, isn’t the efficaciousness of any given methodology ultimately tested in and by socially intricate contexts? Elpenor translated, carried over into a methodology. For me, it seems startingly easy to squash a methodology: one minor incoherence is enough, one dicey corner, one false move. It seems to me even easier to destruct a model. If, on the one hand, I am capable of recognizing Elpenor’s potential as a “conceptual character” such as the ones presented by Deleuze and Guattari in “What is Philosophy?”; if I am able to interpret him as a body of diligences and prescriptions – a sort of lens through which the world into which we are falling is simultaneously sought after, a world that grows more and more clear-cut as we approach the asphalt –, it is also my innermost guess that an identical link could be established between a certain postural inclination and the harmless Choreocampa elpenor caterpillar, one of the mimetic insects listed by Caillois in his Man, Play & Games. The caterpillar in question, if perceived to be threatened, operates in itself a physical mutation termed terrifying by the author; in taking upon itself the likeness of a serpent, it manages to fend off lizards and small birds. Through an act of camouflage, a momentary absence from “self”, the caterpillar postpones its death. The analogy doesn’t seem that far-fetched once we take into consideration that both beings have developed (evolved) strategies to go unnoticed – in the mythical world and in the natural world. Were it not the case, how else could we justify Elpenor’s survival through so many dangers – a character repeatedly referred to as inept at warfare and somewhat dumb? Both Elpenor and the caterpillar that echoes his name help compose a gallery of beings unfairly flattened into the singular episodes they are at the forefront of – in most cases, episodes taking place in other people’s lives – the predator’s, the hero’s – in a supposedly general circumstance that divorces the hero, the “true” virtuous hero, from all those who surround him; characters which seem to exist solely in relation to a stilled organizational nexus oft emblemed by a protagonist who is in some way exceptional. I think of counter- types such as Bartleby, the scrivener – the Incredible Shrinking Man – and finally Jepthe’s daughter, an anonymous character from the Hebrew Bible who seems to serve the single purpose of illustrating a most dubious idea of sacrifice. Characters about whom we know next to nothing; characters we know just enough about, however, so as to feel compelled to side with them, to defend their opacity.

   Read More

This article is a field [luv] note to Luciérnagas and friends in Bogotá. I was there for a project by Daniel Santiago Salguero and his HIV+ peers. Fireflies, this is the word in Spanish for fireflies. 

Speaking of fireflies, I met some luminary folk while in Bogotá Like Jackie … as far as I know she is the only woman in Luciérnagas, well, except your costuming friend (Daniel). I would love to publish a text or reflections on process by her for the 2020 Love Positive Women holiday (Feb 1-14).  We will be putting up 14 days of woman-authored content on those days early next year. Can you ask (or work with) Jackie to make a text? Let’s do in Spanish, but also we can translate on our side. If you will agree to interview her for the site, then you can also be a bit instructive w/ your questions. Just make it about the lab process. In that way you both support Love Positive Women. 

I do luv this term: starfucking …. star (*) fucking. While it is not used (as such) it is something that is present in the Sontag biography I read. Like people considered whether she liked to know famous people. I was once at a church party with Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams, and to explain it further would be inconsequential. Conditionally, I like to know famous people. I would say.  Edmund White’s hand on my leg, but that won’t work for showing pure happenstance. A chance encounter with Kele Okereke on the LES, but I think I was considering straight fucking on that occasion. But my ex showed up and blew the scene. However, when I consider the ‘starfucking’ as I’ve heard it bandied about, I’ve decided its not necessarily a sexual thang. Once at the Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration in Shelbyville (TN), I decided to pass by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s box seat and casually ask her for an autograph. She declined. Queen. It’s ok because I got out of it what I wanted. I wanted to be close to her. I don’t know why a 14 year old gay kid wants that, but I did. In fact she obliged what I really wanted with a lick of rudeness in her curt refusal. 

Laboratorio Luciérnagas

Relatoría 24 Agosto

sesión #6

disidencia sonora

artista invitado: Mauricio Rivera Henao

lugar: Adorno – Liberia

Relatoría:

Mauricio Rivera es artista sonoro, también trabaja con video e instalaciones. Tiene una pregunta constante por el territorio.

Disidencia = contra hegemónico

Obra: un diálogo con el lago Titicaca

Paisaje sonoro: retratar los paisajes en término sonoros. Volver plástica la materia sonora. Habla de tener conversaciones con insectos o minerales como gesto contra hegemónico ( disidente ).