Hechos mierda. Artists, Institutions, and Cats from the End of Time

dinosaurs Víctor Albarracín Llanos, Qais Assali, Maggie Jensen, Irmak Karasu, Niloufar, Kara Springer, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Ana Tuazon Víctor Albarracín Llanos Hechos Mierda ..................................................... 7 Sindhu Thirumalaisamy ghost-film ............................................................ 25 Irmak Karasu lists of .................................................................. 57 Maggie Jensen a few signs for noise .............................................. 64 Qais Assali “I Only Read About Myself on Bathroom Walls” ........ 83 leo, Irmak Karasu, Kara Springer “and” ................................................................... 99 Niloufar Accidents ............................................................. 129 Kara Springer Do I have to build you a fucking pyramid? ............. 149 Ana Tuazon the year of emergency ........................................... 161 Qais Assali, Amanda Assaley Selling the Medinah Temple, Chicago ..................... 185 Hannah Feldman A letter from the land of the lost ........................... 195 Hechos Mierda * Artists, Institutions and Cats from the End of Time Víctor Albarracín Llanos I have lived with Montón for thirteen years. I first saw him on a Facebook post and, although I hadn’t really been thinking about expanding my family, I fell hopelessly in love with him and felt the need to bring him into my life and into my home. From the start, our relationship has been corny and passionate. The purpose of this text is not to unpack the nuances of that romance, with its myriad emotions and adventures, but I feel it is important to bring him up now, at the beginning, because now, as always, his wordless teachings have set the ground for many of the things I write. At this very moment Montón is napping to my left, lying on a small rectangle of cushy fabric that I arranged by the laptop, on the table where I write whenever I feel like it and whenever, without feeling like it, I sit down to write compelled by an unavoidable deadline. Whether I am doing it out of pleasure or out of obligation, Montón keeps me company whenever I sit down to work, and whenever I * Translated from Spanish by Tupac Cruz 7 do anything else in our domestic environment: when I wash the dishes, he jumps on the fridge and watches over me; when I repot a plant, he oversees the process and eventually amuses himself by digging into the bag of fertilizer or playing with some stray root; when I water the ferns, he waits attentively until the water filtered by the earth drips down to the plate under the coconut-fiber bowl where they are planted, because one day he decided that this is his favorite water—except for the water on the glass that you may happen to be drinking from at any particular moment, of course. When I make the bed he stays there, perfectly still over the uncovered sheets, in spite of my pleas. More often than not he will hold his position until I spread the blanket right over him, as if to show me that there are no flat surfaces, that there is always an unexpected relief to life, that every bed can also harbor a little mountain, a hill, a mound, a heap—after all, that is exactly what his name means in Spanish, where un montón de algo is “a pile of something”. As soon as it has been revealed that the bed is an elevation he gets up and stretches out, saunters across the mattress and under the blanket, teaching me that everything has wrinkles and folds, that no amount of effort could smooth out the traces that we leave behind as we carry on with existence. I started my remote residency at the Core Program in September of 2020. In spite of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic all around me, I struggled to complete the documents required to apply for a J1 visa, without which I would not be able to travel to Houston as a fellow. I paid for a medical insurance, I scheduled an appointment at the US embassy, I crossed my fingers for international flights to resume, and I came to terms with the thought of packing up my house, quitting my job and travelling to Texas at the end of August, trusting that life would return to “normality” at some point before the trip. A former Core resident helped me find a small 8 apartment close to the program’s recently opened studios for residents and, in principle, everything was set for the start of a new life. Months went by and the travel restrictions remained, “normality” did not come back and the embassy cancelled, three or four times, the scheduled visa appointments. September came and the program started with quite a few residents still away from Houston. We met on a Zoom screen, we discussed our practices and interests, we had long-distance studio visits, and it became normal for an arts residency to play out as a series of group video chats, and for our interactions to be structured by Google Docs formats. We gradually began to follow each other on Instagram, we created a WhatsApp group, now and then we liked each other’s posts and sometimes we got a glimpse of each other’s lives through the stories we posted on our social media. I guess life has become that for many people. Millions of individuals all over the world have dealt one way or another with the hardships of distance and confinement. Millions have fallen ill and many have lived through the death of a loved one. My own lockup began on March 7, 2020, so by September I was already used to this life in the small. Come November, feeling certain that I would not be travelling to Houston, I decided that this world-wide shift in scale might as well play in my favor. On November 15, while on a short run to the supermarket, I walked past a building and saw a sign posted on the balcony of an upper-story apartment: FOR RENT, it said, and there was a phone number written underneath. Out of curiosity, I immediately dialed the number and the woman who answered said that she could meet me there and show me the place. It was a large space: 1,700 square feet, three bedrooms and three bathrooms, a balcony, and all-around windows with a gorgeous view. The building dates back to the 1960s and its facade shows clear signs of neglect; 9 quite a few slabs of concrete are conspicuously missing. Adding to the somewhat decadent vibe of the construction, the ventilation and plumbing systems are not exactly functional. The apartment, originally intended for some upper-middle-class family, has also fallen into decay: several windows have been sealed off, there are bugs living inside the doors, the water pressure could be better, the intercom doesn’t work, and the ceiling, recently installed, is made out of cheap, hideous plastic. Still, after adding the pros and the cons I realized that the cost of the rent (about 400 dollars a month) was considerably lower than what I would have to pay for an apartment in perfect condition. Without hesitating I said yes, and a week later I had packed up my things and moved to this new place that is now my home, after spending the past five years squeezed into the 650 square feet studio apartment that I shared with Chispa, my aging chorkie—I think that is the designation for chihuahua-yorkie mix breeds in Los Angeles, her birthplace—, Rata—a cat who is just as cross-eyed as I am, although incomparably more beautiful—and Montón. A few days after the move I noticed that Montón had lost weight and that he had stopped eating. An ultrasound of his abdomen revealed clusters of cysts that had been silently forming over the years and now covered his kidneys in their entirety. His renal system was close to collapse and the veterinarian said that he could not understand how he was still alive. He advised euthanasia to prevent unnecessary suffering, and at first I agreed, although I asked for a couple of days to say goodbye. Back home, I saw him playing around, jumping, and demanding affection, as he has done for the thirteen years that we have been living together. In spite of his illness, his gestures conveyed a strong will to live, an attitude towards pain and well-being that was completely different from what has been normalized by the history of 10 medicine and consequently enforced by capitalism upon bodies and their interrelationships. Lorena, Montón’s human mother, travelled half across the country to come and see him, and to be there when the time came to say goodbye, precipitated by the shot of pentobarbital that the vet had offered to administer. We soon gave up on the option of putting him to death, even though his death might have spared me some money, time, and sorrow. Being a long-distance resident of a prestigious program for artists and curators allowed me to remain day and night right by this feeble and jolly cat, ailing and loving, black in plain view but blooming with shifting reddish hues whenever the surrounding light strikes his fur at certain angles. I have asked myself what would have happened if, instead of staying home, I had travelled to Houston in September, leaving Montón, as planned, with his substitute family in Bogotá. That question, asked over and over again, is not so much about what may have happened to Montón, who would have been dutifully cherished and cared for by his second family, but about what I may have gone through if I had been unable to watch my cat die, to share his last days, to learn from the end of a life that always struck me as somehow miraculous. I couldn’t imagine what might become of me without feeling this intense affection that has only grown with time, like a wild garden sprouting on fertile soil. And so I came to ask myself, over and over again: what is it that they do, artists-in-residence, when their cats die thousands of miles away? What do they do when their relatives and friends get sick, when their plants dry up, when their books go to rot in moldy boxes stored away in some facility that no one checks up on from time to time? When they have to produce instead of crying, when they have to cross the world to bury someone instead of caring for them, when they can no longer read their diary or ten-year-old notes 11 out of a notebook that somebody else has already thrown out, or a notebook that was left forgotten in some studio at the Banff arts complex, or recycled in an eco art program somewhere close to Hiroshima, or buried under the rubble after an explosion in Beirut? What is it to be an artist-in-residence? What is an arts residency? What does it mean to reside? Can we say that to reside is to live, and if so, what kind of a life is it that arts residencies promote? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I do have further questions that stem from these first few. If I had travelled, this would have been my first real residency, and if I had travelled during this pandemic I would certainly have endured months of fear and trembling, feeling removed and exposed after trading the serenity of my vital environment for the loneliness of a place ravaged by disease—to say nothing of worsening weather conditions and an unprecedented political crisis in the United States. It would have been undoubtedly an interesting time, but just as undoubtedly I would have experienced precarization, anxiety and uncertainty. I know that all residencies are different, just as all residents are; they each give rise to their own dynamics through their particular ways of interacting with the location, with the neighboring communities and with those who share the physical and mental space of the residency. I know that different opportunities, aspirations and limitations arise within these surroundings designed for artists. I know that the institutions that offer programs like these are far from homogeneous in scale, institutional framework, funding mechanisms and operational logics. Lastly, I know that all residencies have a dark side; it may be a sponsor looking to clean up their image, a committee whose interests and intentions are far removed from a straightforward love for the arts and for artists, or a set of arbitrary norms that prevent residents from turning these sites for the interruption of everyday life into 12 a space for the free development of ideas, intuitions and affects. I acknowledge, of course, the role that these experiences may play in the consolidation of practices, reputations, possibilities for inclusion and the professional ascent of countless cultural agents, but these countless exceptional creators are only the surface layer of a substrate formed by the ruins of those who did not give enough, who lost their compass, who needed more time than they were awarded, who failed to kindle the right relationships, who failed to condescend and who, in so many words, simply failed. An arts residency is always a temporary affair: a few of them run for one or three months, fewer yet reach up to a semester, and only exceptionally, as in the Core, are residents offered financial and logistical support, and a space to work in for a whole year, with the option of extending the residency for a second one. Even so, a resident’s stay in the space that has agreed to take them in is always framed by the question: “Where will I go when this is over?”. Established artists will seldom go on a residency. They may feel tempted to participate in an event or special program developed by an institution located in a center of power, or feel the draw of a residency by invitation (a well-known artist will never fill out an application form) in an exotic location with a significant potential to turn into a vacation. Nonetheless, you will rarely come across the name of a famous artist in the context of a residency. Artists who succeed tend to stay at home, because life at home, in the studio, with family, friends and collaborators in a quotidian surrounding turns out to be simpler, more productive and much less uncertain. Much unlike them, artists-in-residency, some of whom are true virtuosos in the art of jumping into the void, go from one place to another: three months here, two months there, a project in Croatia in June, a three-month gap 13 between November and January, when everything is closed and there is nowhere to go. Advances, pauses and stepbacks are determined by concerns over a difficult visa extension, an insufficient monthly stipend, and by the constant ringing of the question: “What am I doing here?”. It is a life painted with brushstrokes of hungover journeys, missed flights and airport interrogations: “Why are you, an Iranian citizen, coming from Portugal, and not from Iran? Why have you travelled to Puerto Rico, Turkey and Uganda in the last six months? How have you been able to make your way around without money during all this time, and what exactly are you doing here, in Tbilisi, right now?”. The life of artists-in-residence is always precarious, even when it is embellished with a sprinkling of cosmopolitanism, even if they are invited to have dinner with international curators, even if they eventually flirt or spend the night in a hotel jacuzzi with a collector, even if they bought a Miu Miu dress, even if their contacts list might seem to be worth millions, even if they think that everything is fabulous, sophisticated and intense. Even if they keep repeating to themselves that they are about to achieve something big, something important, life in residency will always have its moments of sighing at night, in a darkened room, when the glowing lights have died out and the doubts creep at you from behind. The next morning there will be an interview for a small local media outlet, and the resident will deploy the social charm that they have picked up by rote, and will know what lies to tell, under the cover of a forced smile, when they are asked what they plan to contribute to the local context and how they expect to interact with the local communities during the time of their stay (ninety days), and so on. During the last five years, for professional reasons, I have met more than a hundred artists from pretty much everywhere in the world. Although my position was not that of residency 14 coordinator, but that of artistic director of an arts space in Colombia, I spent many hours in conversation with these artists with all of their projects, worries, and urges. Few of them were coming from their places of origin, and few would head back home when their stay was over. Many told me that returning to their countries was no longer viable after two or three years of going around the world. During that stretch of time they had lost the position and the role that they played in their communities, they had missed out on the processes and mutations of their local ecosystems, and few people there had a sense of what they had been up to during their absence. Then again, although you can’t make much money out of residencies, they are more entertaining than an adjunct professorship in a visual arts program that pays very little, offers no medical insurance or paid vacation, or a pension fund, and will burden you instead with the immense responsibility of instructing and evaluating ever-growing groups of young students. Galleries also avoid them, at least at first, because an artist is expected to have a properly arranged studio where they can receive buyers and art professionals who may be looking to write an article or to curate a biennial, and being an artist-in-residence will hardly allow you to sustain the costs and rhythms of running your own studio. All in all, I have lived a stable life. I have not travelled much, opting to stay closely involved in different aspects of the life of artists’s communities in Colombia. During the last two decades I only left the country for two years to attend a masters program in the United States. Other than that, I have only been out on brief work trips: a week here, two weeks there, and then come back. I have little to no international visibility, and my network of contacts is pretty weak. Sure, I have many email addresses that could turn out to be useful someday when I am working on something, 15 but they would only be useful if I had tended to these possible connections for a long time through projects and collaborations. Had I been more skillful, I may have been able to go on a couple of important residencies when I was thirty, and now, at forty six, I would be back in Colombia, working my way to a teaching job and a peaceful retirement. But I wasn’t, and today I live the same precarious life as the many others who did leave and who were unable to make the dream come true. So I am not glorifying the life of the artist who does not go on residencies, because sustained work at one’s place of origin can also wear you down, it can be boring and, if you go at it with some degree of criticality, it will only get you enemies. To be almost fifty and a remote resident of a prestigious program is, from every point of view, an anomaly. Just because it is such an anomaly, this experience has turned out to be productive for me, allowing me to breathe and pause, to take the time to return to a few personal projects—in no way relevant to the narratives of current art—that I had been putting off for a long time. More than anything else, it has allowed me to grasp the arbitrary conditions under which I had been living until now, and to consider, in the smallest of scales and the most intimate of registers, the possibilities that arise when you find yourself living through a few good days with no commitments, appointments, applications, and without having to switch on the verbal machinery that makes art professionals today so special, so intelligent. Had I spent these one or two years in Houston as a resident of the Core Program, the anxieties, limitations and uncertainties to which I had been used to would have probably stuck with me all along. But, on the contrary, being a remote resident has turned out to be an opportunity for me to take in some air, some time and some life, even for the—generous though limited—term that has been granted to me by this 16 institution, which has found a way to respond, perhaps in spite of itself and its mission statement, to the contingency of a world that has been driven to a halt by the impact of a virus. Somewhere in Houston there is a building that I do not know, where a spacious and well-lit studio awaits me. Many institutional spaces around the world are now filled with studios awaiting the arrival of artists who perhaps will no longer travel. Some of these institutions survive today, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, crossing their fingers for the world to return to the “normality” before March, 2020, hoping that artists will again apply to their programs, that their funding will not to be pulled out, that the old infrastructures will not to prove obsolete. In so many words, they are eager to get back to promoting the circulation of capital in the form of artistic exchanges, and to privilege, once again, a metaphysics of presence where the artist, always cool and at ease, always bright, always so very peculiar, lights up a place like one of those great jars made of the finest porcelain, loaded with orchids and chrysanthemums, that light up the lobbies of luxury hotels. Other institutions have disappeared, or grown smaller; they have said goodbye to most of their staff and turned into providers of online content where the risk of contagion—and any other possibility of sincere human exchange— have been isolated and driven to their minimum. Why should we be looking forward to the return of a structurally flawed normality, instead of embracing the anomaly of contemporary life? Why should we continue to value institutions in terms of their scale, their buildings and their ability to hold on to a prestige that has so little to do with the wavering conditions of a present that is now getting to feel, more than ever before, like a final curtain fall? I prefer to think about the chain of relations that found and sustain the life of artists and cultural 17 workers in general. I think about the sequence: action—practice—institution—life, and I wonder if, in their ways of working, contemporary institutions understand that their action can only be real, efficacious and consistent if it upholds the possibilities, the nuances and the anomalies of all the forms of life that make up the ecosystem of art and culture, in their ongoing interaction with this living and ailing sphere that is the world. I think, then, about how forms of affect and care, and possible modalities of autonomy, are nowadays crucial if we are to redefine the meaning of some institutions that, in the absence of change, seem to me to be nothing but the enormous ruins of a nearby future. Only about two months ago the Core’s residents were able to negotiate with the program’s administrators the existence of this book, as a replacement for the annual exhibition and yearbook that typically account for our work. The group has handled all the stages of the creative process and self-organized according to the project’s needs, the specific skill-sets of its members, and an understanding of what would lead to better results. In a very short time, and after a lot of effort, we arrived at this hybrid object, reflexive and critical, where we jointly engage with the possibilities and the constant questions that come with the anomalous condition of our own lives and of life today. This book, which aims for a mode of existence that is different from that of the traditional yearbook, works less by way of collecting itself that through dissemination: its authors interweave threads of meaning from different parts of the world, they have done something to reactivate the small economy of designers and printers in Colombia—a country where the living conditions of cultural workers are dramatic—, they make the best of the resources offered by the institution for the production of this object, they make room for uncomfortable questions and 18 they search for a bit of light, of closeness and of truth, across the physical distance, finding ways to generate dialogical and affective spaces through it. About a month ago, when I was starting to give shape to this text as I went about my daily routine of caring for the animals and plants who live with me, two friends came to visit, for different reasons, both of them seeking affection, clarity and shelter: the first to arrive was Nataly—a young artist from Palmira, Colombia, who moved to Newark a year ago and has been making a living working as a waitress in a Brooklyn pizzeria while she struggles to find a place for her interests and the development of her practice. She was brimming with nostalgia for the city, her friends, and the warmth and breeze of the tropics. A few days later we welcomed Luisa—a Colombian artist who has spent years shuttling from one residency to another, from one project to another, from one grant to another, always trying to sustain two or three commissions in different countries, four funding applications and a biennial in crisis in the middle of a pandemic, all at the same time. She was exhausted and going through a severe mental block brought on by this surfeit of obligations, by her tendency to allow ideas and thoughts about her work to flow uninterrupted, and by uncertainty about what will come next. They didn’t know each other, but now they are friends: two people with very different lives who come into proximity and share different symptoms of the same disease. In these days of biosafety, hygiene and distance, it is necessary to create spaces that disentangle us from pandemic narratives, it is important to open niches, holes and caves for the contagion of affects, where we can have honest conversations about our hardships and the small miracles that allow us to keep on living. Ever since I left lugar a dudas, the arts center in Cali where I worked for five years, I had been thinking about the possibility 19 of creating a small space, which I envisioned as a place where the lives of artists could do some blooming, a place for complaining and solace, for action in the small, a place for a small community to come about surrounded by isolation. My intention was not to “generate” a community, to “consolidate” or “establish” one; my search was simpler: that such a community might come about and then come apart, always at the smallest of scales, always transitory, always changing, always anomalous. Asides from that idea, the only thing that was clear to me about this space that I wanted to create was its name: Hechos Mierda. In Colombia, when you say that something or someone is hecho mierda you mean that they are messed up, diminished, damaged, beat up, despondent. The meaning of the expression, which literally means “made into shit,” more or less aligns with the English “gone to shit,” but I also understand it as denoting the stage at which matter has been digested, when ideas have decomposed, when the integrity of the world, its communities and individuals, and of what they all do, when all of that has been digested and, in its fecal state, is prepped for the beginning of the cycle that will bring them back into the earth, for composting and, as a result, for fertility. This, in my reading, is a state that harbors an opportunity to replace productivity with fecundity. That is where we are now, hechos mierda, and it is good that we are: we are beyond repair and there is nothing wrong with that, as Giorgio Agamben once said, somewhere. I spent months wondering what Hechos Mierda might be like, where it should be located and who might finance it, and how to write an application that could make the project attractive to a sponsoring institution devoted to the arts and social practice. Gradually, I became discouraged: the project, if there was even a project to speak of, was too personal, it had no quantitative 20 impact, no population niche, no clear public reach. It was a whim with no accomplice, an entelechy destined for a stillbirth, as many of my thoughts are. But then, as I went about my days at home next to Luisa, Nataly, Montón, Chispa, Rata, thirty six plants that it would take me too long to name, and about two hundred books, I realized that Hechos Mierda already existed: it wasn’t an arts space, or an institution, or a support fund for artists whose merit and excellence have been proven. Hechos Mierda is a home where we laugh, cry, cook, argue about life and about what we are doing with our own lives. It is an emotional space where we discuss failed projects, absurd ideas, lost lovers, and traumas that don’t really fit into the narratives of psychoanalysis or decolonial practices; a space where we hold ourselves open to listening and lay our wounds out for probing, where tears are licked for healing. Soon enough Luisa and Nataly will leave. Montón will also leave, to become earth and find some other way to grow. Their lives will all carry on, hopefully lighter. This book will come out, clever or inarticulate, well or misdesigned, coherent or confusing. We will get through the Core, from a distance or in Houston, working in those studios that today remain mostly empty. The Core Program will continue, and someday it will disappear to become something different. Just what it might become depends on its capacity to incorporate and honor anomaly, to nourish any form of life that, near or far, seeks to germinate. We are gone to shit and the shit that we now are is the fertilizer for the time to come. The bones of extinct dinosaurs became the oil that shapes the desolation of our present. The use that we have made of that matter, of the black oil that moves the world, is the cause of our own and unavoidable extinction. And yet, while we are still alive, we should ask ourselves if it is worth it to go into extinction by 21 devastating everything that surrounds us, just for the sake of progress, economy, ostentation and growth. Maybe, instead of that, we should look for a path into extinction that might afford us some relief and yield some resources to share, some space and time to contemplate the beauty that shines forth from the life and death of a cat, the kindness and unbounded intelligence of two friends, and the power of thirty six plants that grow and give you oxygen if you give them a little bit of water and a bit of shit that, after settling down, has turned into fertilizer. 22 23 © 2021 Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “Hechos Mierda” © 2021 Víctor Albarracín Llanos “ghost-film” © 2021 Sindhu Thirumalaisamy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. “lists of” © 2021 Irmak Karasu ISBN 978-958-53352-1-9 “a few signs for noise” © 2021 Maggie Jensen Cover image: video still by Kara Springer ““I Only Read About Myself on Bathroom Walls”” © 2021 Qais Assali Book design: Taller Agosto. talleragosto.com ““and”” © 2021 leo, Irmak Karasu, Kara Springer Print consultant: Calipso Press. calipsopress.com “Accidents” © 2021 Niloufar Emamifar “Do I have to build you a fucking pyramid?” © 2021 Kara Springer “the year of emergency” © 2021 Ana Tuazon “Selling the Medinah Temple, Chicago” © 2021 Qais Assali, Amanda Assaley “A letter from the land of the lost, in advance of the Sleestak, but after the Altrusions found their feelings and and and…and the institutions came crashing down, when it was all still… and you and I were... waiting….” © 2021 Hannah Feldman Printed in Colombia by Editorial Nomos