What’s an origin story? It gets written as it goes, as it grows. You don’t know it was an origin until later, and then you have to be in process with remembering, writing—perhaps on paper, in the computer, notes in the head—and then forgetting; piecing together and rewriting again and again. This is not to say origin stories are false, for those that are concerned with Truth, but origin stories are a process of dialoguing with oneself and one’s own memory.
And I’m not saying that for the first time to myself. I mean, we discovered this again recently in thinking about Foreign Bodies as a project. We remembered a very key set of facts that seemed to have been left out of every “pitch” we’d made about the project in an attempt to participate in this thing called music career. I had begun to wonder what “they” thought about it, what “they” understood of the work we’d done, so I re-read the things I’d written and wondered what they read.
(Who are they? I dunno. People we wanted to pay attention to the work. Potential collaborators. The world. The echo chamber.)
Why? For the validation? The money? The fame? Hah. As artists, we make a thing that we think is important or smart. But is it just out of habit that we think people ought to come witness it? Listen to it? Read it? Come to our shows?
What we remembered is the key fact that there was not an origin moment in which we began. I mean, we had already embarked—and embarked several times before—on our interest in migration, in movement, in micro-movement (attraction towards each other or repulsion away from).
Work was our way of travel, and travel required us to work. And we were already “working on it.” That is to say, we were already working—working on a thing which we did not know what it was, but it was something else which led us to start thinking about it. I mean, this entire work was built out of work. Working because we had to, to be working artists, we had to travel, we had to bring our music, our performances, we had to come into communion with the bodies gathered there and that is what we chiefly did.
We did not say: let’s make a project, and now let’s begin, and this is the beginning, and then apply for funding, get the funding, book the tickets, and then go. No. That’s not what happened. We did not pick up the “newspaper” one day, see a wave of migration into Europe in 2015, and say, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s go check it out.” No.
Recently someone asked us why we decided to embark upon this long project, as though we had some vision of beginning a ten-year project. No. We had no vision of that. I had no vision that I would get little to no funding for Foreign Bodies when I did try. I had no vision that raising a child would take basically 50% of all my time, mentally and physically, and that the other 50% of the time would be spent just trying to survive. No masterplan that this work would have to somehow survive through the cracks and be borne through the doing itself, and come out of the doing of those two things—working and surviving. I only understood in the doing that this is what it necessitated.
No, we did not embark. We were already out there in the world living and working as artists, and the issues that were arising were flooding around us, clear as day and emergent—migration, travel, structural violences, direct violence, discomfort with the sweat and breath of the physical body, the silo-ing of the “sexual”, struggles between bodies, imbalances of power, yearning for visibility, to be heard, to be understood.
We had already embarked, were embarking, were doing. Were traveling, were asking, were being in relation through concert-making, which is essentially the occurrence of people (which people?) gathered together (where?) in a time (when exactly, during what?). And we were traveling, in motion with and against and despite and without other bodies who could and could not travel. It is not that we booked tickets to go to places where others were traveling, but that we were travelers encountering other travelers—and just as importantly, other stayers as well. Those who could not travel and felt stuck.
And as part of that, or to go back further toward the origin—and this is a big thing—I am a reluctant artist who was once determined to only work on the topic of migration as an advocate in a small nonprofit for refugee rights and never be an artist. Some call this reluctant yet hopeful artist an artivist, but I am so reluctant that I am not even sure if any artist can be an activist.
Being an artist has, in many ways, been an anthropological endeavor for me to answer precisely that question: can an artist be an activist? Can a queer body do a thing by simply existing as a queer body? I have been anthropologizing myself. It came to my attention as a student back in the late nineties, in large part thanks to a radical education by professors like Ronald Takaki, Norma Alarcón, June Jordan, Laura Pérez, Michael Nagler, and Jerry Sanders, that anthropology, or ethnography, was and is a fundamentally colonialist and white supremacist activity, inherently hierarchical, built on the white gaze, on the gaze of the colonizer.
Therefore, it seemed the only way to be in the world without causing myself moral injury (now, incidentally, part of the DSM), and without masking entirely, was to be a body performing body, a body that would be studied by myself as studier. To study myself as a migrant (if I could even count myself one), as a worker, as a queer body on stage, as a sex worker (if I could even count myself as one). What would this be, and could it be enough to simply be? What would it be to be an artist? Could an artist enact change? I had my serious doubts, and I still do. I carry those doubts with me. What would it be to study oneself in various contexts, and to think through the body of the self, and how it would change and feel and be read and be understood in relation to others?
These questions were already on my mind prior to even beginning to work with HYENAZ, and were encountered and questioned as I performed gig after gig, literally thousands of times.
Every concert is held in a context — contextual mapping in process
It was through the process of touring heavily and in duet with Adrienne in HYENAZ that we began to rabbit-hole into relationality and group participation, growing toward a crescendo as we made the immersive techno ritual Critical Magic. One of the things that we noticed while touring with HYENAZ during Critical Magic was that we were asking our audiences to bring their contexts, asking them to speak from a place of urgency about what their deepest fears were and what their intention was for the future.
In many instances, we sat alone or with sections of our audiences ahead of a show and asked them to help us contextually map this venue (already a politically contested space), and to map it within their communities (also a politically contested site). This activity relied on the idea that every concert, which was an instance of making music, was held by a political context. It was not enough to simply arrive in a city that is “a city” and has a guidebook, with “things to do”, but to acknowledge that a city is in the middle of a process in which people are engaged in relations, processes, and struggles, and each person who shows up at the concert has a context, a vision, an idea. And that is why no two concerts are alike. And when sound is made within a context, the sound is affected by the context.
We thought of this contextual map as a series of concentric circles that were “holding” this moment of sound-making and so our map would look like a kind of time-space spiral. And as we contextually mapped our locations of performance in Critical Magic, we were also sometimes inspired to take field recordings, sometimes in the hours before a show, in walks around the community, in the places that we stayed (our poly-home-ful locations, our temporary homes) and realized that all these sounds that were also “held” in context. And in a sense a sound was a home and a home was creating a sound and we were held, temporarily, in temporary sites of homes.
But it takes years — lifetimes — to understand a home or to home a home. Some never feel at home. So we attempted to hold this both being at home and not at all at home and asked others to help us understand this home as what it was for them–and for us.
When we looked at our maps, the maps of the homes, the sites, the sounds, that were held, what came was deep and fruitful writing that could be used later when a sound become a song and the song asked us: “what is this song about?”
Interlocuters and Local Community
When we were touring Critical Magic, we also invited interlocutors to dance with us and to sit with us and speak of what was happening for them, for the city, for the community. Interlocutors were people that we met online ahead of arrival who were members of the community to which we would travel. Aside from just meeting a bunch of wonderful people, they served to link us to the community, to resist the alienation of being a traveler and to soften the distance that we felt inherent in the audacity of arrival.
Indeed, we were travelers who carried the audacity to show up with the privilege of travel, to present their show, to share their music, and believe others should listen, and then to leave. What a privilege. The contextual mapping score that we performed ahead of a show helped us to understand and ask a very basic question: Where are we, in this particular moment in time, in relation, in community?
It was also through the critical magic show itself — a chaos magic ritual performed in the context of a concert–that we learned about where we were. The idea of the ritual was to circumscribe the ritual of gathering that is always already underway when we gather to dance in a club, when we gather to hear or perform a concert. By harnessing this energy we set out to ask if others could join us in setting intentions and releasing them into the universe. Thus we learned through the real vocalizations of others what was most important to them. I will never forget the people I met in Banja Luca who shouted “never again war”. They were exactly my age. They had lived through a reality I couldn’t imagine and it was omnipresent.
This experience helped us think a lot about what is “present” or “alive” to us as topics of urgency, and we tried to understand why this “presence” is so often about physical proximity, or other forms of felt proximity. Would it not be possible to care across distance? And how?
We also learned from people by sitting with them after our shows in the DIY spaces that we were performing. We heard that people were feeling very alienated from their own communities, as though they were the anomaly. We often heard people say, “no one hear comes to this kind of show!” And this inspired us to think about this dynamic of the anomaly — the she he or they who feels as though he or she or they lies on the perimeter of their very own community. And that most of us always lie on the edge of some group, a group that we feel part of but that we also feel so close to being completely outside of.
To travel without being stopped is privilege
It did not take much to notice that as artists with US and Australian passports we had the privilege to travel without being stopped at borders. Although we had both experienced the discomfort of what it was like to be in decades long relationship with the German Ausländerbehorde (the equivalent of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Services) in order to achieve our freelance visas, we nonetheless faced little to no challenges in crossing any border.
By contrast, as we traveled almost exclusively on trains and buses, we saw migrants who were desperate to leave where they were, who were transiting through the cities we were performing in (Belgrade or Budapest, to name a few). Sometimes they were sleeping on the ground of train stations we passed through, harassed by security guards who wouldn’t let them sleep at night. We witnessed migrants being pulled off trains and buses that we were simply allowed to travel on — Black and Brown bodies being profiled and IDs checked. It would not be enough to say that this privilege made us deeply uncomfortable and critical of the privilege to travel. It did. But it also did not stop us from traveling. And this sense of entitlement to persist also brought discomfort–an alienation to ourselves and our own behavior. A foreignness to what it was that we were doing and why. And we felt that just “being an artist” contains discomfort inside of it, which is something that we knew from the beginning.
We knew and we did it anyway. And we had to wonder: what is art doing?
I suppose what motivated me and perhaps both of us primarily was the fact that there was always at least one person who came up to us after a concert, looked us in the eye, and thanked us, authentically, for being there, for something we had said, for something perhaps that had resonated. Without that one person, I would like to think I would have stopped.
We could not deny the fact that at least a few people seemed extremely happy we had come to share our art. We spoke to many people who were so grateful that we had come so far — people who had never been to Berlin, who might not be allowed to come to Berlin, people who couldn’t afford to travel to Berlin and had no reason to. People whom had never seen such overt performances of queerness onstage and had felt so so alone in their aesthetics and in their desires.
Consistency of Form Content and Method
What we also understood was that, as artists who are traveling to present a show, we do so not in a vacuum, apart from the tools that we use to create the show. It is not enough to say, “This play is about war, and we want everyone to be dressed in brown. Now let’s go out to H&M and find a bunch of things in the color brown.” No. It is not enough to say this performance is about climate change, let’s fly to perform there. No. We understood that we did not want to be tourists, we did not want to travel quickly. We did not want to wear materials that were borne out of exploitation. That we wanted to resist cultures of extraction in every way we possible could.
We understood was that every performance needed to have a consistent politics, one with as few inconsistencies as possible, with as much through-line as possible. If the things we were wearing on our bodies did not account for their own origins, we couldn’t simply wear them incoherently. If our merchandise would not be printed on recycled T-shirts we wouldn’t produce them. If we would have to carry with us pounds of plastic—CDs or tapes that would be thrown away—then the way that our music was released would have to shift. And yet still it seemed like an impossible task to ever be entirely consistent as the very means that we carried to be artists at all and they way in which Art is carried out is often embedded in so many structures of power.
Foreign Bodies emerged not as a project that we “decided to do” but rather as a research that we were doing by being present in this contradiction and discomfort, as a result of touring and performing the role of touring artist. After doing and doing and doing we started to understand many things — not least that we were alienating to each other, that we were alien to our audiences, foreign to our own full values, that we were foreign to the community who was also foreign to itself and this could not change overnight.
Who is Not there
We learned that bodies who showed up were alien to each other, to their communities. And that bodies who were not there, bodies who were not present at the concert were not present for many reasons. And all around us bodies were being managed, were being controlled, were showing up none the less, some washed up on shores eager to enter and to cross. And we were hoping to find that there were or could be spaces of resistance in what we were doing as artists — but what were they?
As we became increasingly attuned to various migrant flows that were happening around us, and had been happening and would continue to happen, we wanted to intentionally go to communities that were most affected (the border at Sid, Croatia, or the camp at Dunkirk, France, detention centers in Trapani, Sicily) and to do so we should not perform at all but rather volunteer there, which we did.
We paid for these trips by working more or performing along the way. And when we worked — a concert in Palermo, for example — where did we get booked? At gentrified places of whiteness where electronic music was played. And it wasn’t enough to simply say, “yes, this is what it is,” while there are young Gambians down the street in detention or in youth centers who were trafficked and kidnapped, taken through Libya and put on dangerous boats to get there. It was not enough to just play a concert over here and forget about it. That is the context in which we perform — a context in which there are spaces that are not the jails and detention centers, that are not the places where black artists perform, but that are gentrified spaces that can pay us to come. It wasn’t enough to play a concert and just be OK with that. But what would we DO with this information?
All we could do, or can do, is to point out what we were seeing and attempt to speak about it, and perhaps to sing about it, to write the songs that we did in eventually do for the mammoth project Foreign Bodies, to write essays and to think about how and where to perform that could further resist the structures of where art happens. And finally to let those words and songs motivate us to show up in the streets and demand change. So in the end, I am still not sure that the artist enacts change as the artist, but by performing the role of artist, the artist is changed and is motivated to engage more deeply with activism.
HYENAZ are presenting some of the tracks from Foreign Bodies and some of our memories from the project on 6th of August at 19.00 CET at Refuge Radio
