Jennie Klein on Finale Flow Lunchtime Concert

Video Still from Yaryna Shumska’s performance

Flow Finale Lunchtime Concert Curated by Beau Coleman

Yaryna Shumska (Lviv, Ukraine) Memories of Shelter
Carali McCall (London, U.K.) Performing Rock: Going, Gone, Under the Weather
Vanessa Dion Fletcher (tkaronto, Toronto, Canada) I Want Pink Drip/Soaking
Jody Oberfelder (NYC, U.S.) Walking to Present (Brooklyn)

Text by Jennie Klein

The Flow Finale Lunchtime Concert began with an introduction by Beau Coleman, who, in addition to co-curating this final event, was one of the organizers of the Flow Symposium, along with Martine Viale, Dimple B Shah, and Carron Little, who co-produced the final event. Presenting from Edmonton, CA, Coleman began with a land acknowledgement that they stood on the unceded territory of the Council of Three Fires, The Ottawa, the Ojibwe, and the Potawatomi Nations. Coleman’s acknowledgement of the violence enacted by settler colonialism was particularly apt given the work that was subsequently presented on Sunday, June 19, a day that was recently made into a federal holiday in the United States to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved African Americans on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas. The performances addressed the fraught relationship between ethnicity, race, culture, identity, nationality, politics, and the ground on which one stood.

Memories of Shelter by Yaryna Shumska was live streamed from a suburb of Lviv, Ukraine, where she teaches in the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at the Lviv National Academy of Arts (LNAA). Lviv is a city renowned for its medieval architecture and cobblestoned city center and a designated UNESCO world heritage site. Largely untouched by the fighting going on elsewhere in the Ukraine, Lviv has become a sanctuary city where Ukrainian refugees from besieged cities are welcomed. Shumska’s performance made reference to a humanitarian crisis that was not readily apparent in the quiescent streets through which she traveled.

The piece begins with Shumska garbed entirely in white and wearing a white rucksack, standing on a familiar street. It is noon in Chicago time and 20.00 hours in Ukrainian time. Shumska stands on a quiet street that could be a middle-class suburb in any part of the world. This is not the Soviet Union era of cheap box housing, which also exists on the outskirts of the quaint medieval city center. Rather, it is the post-Perestroika and post-Soviet Union neighborhood of a nascent and burgeoning Capitalist economy, with what appears to be large, single family homes, generous sidewalks (used by Shumska as she walks through the neighborhood) and mature trees. “This is the street where I started walking, Shumska states as she carefully writes the geographical coordinates on the retaining wall. It is a street where she knew the path of the trolley bus very well. But… “something has changed.” The street “still exists for me, and I’m walking here again, and again and again.”

Something has changed. Shumska, continuing down the street towards her “center, the center of the place that connects all the shelters” that exist for her, passes some incongruous elements in the streets that include building materials and sandbags. At any moment, this beautiful street, lit up by a summer sun that stays risen well into the following day, might become a war zone that needs to be barricaded. At this moment on the evening of June 19, it is still a quiet suburb, in jarring contrast to the images of destruction and devastation that we have sadly come to associate with Ukraine.

Continuing down the street, Shumska moves to another set of unchanging coordinates, not stopping, but “going again, and again and again.”

The piece concludes as Shumska arrives at a park, that includes bars that can be used for climbing or pull ups. Shumska politely requests to a man that is stretching to share the space with a man who is stretching. Shumska jumps up on the pull-up bar and hangs there with the coordinates of shelter and safety written in blue and yellow chalk on her white dress. After some time, Shumska jumps down and presents her hands, covered with black pen drawings of geographical coordinates to the audience.

“The most valuable shelters are people. When we don’t have distance, when we don’t have walls, then we only have memories. Coordinates do not change. Memory coordinates do.”

Recited by Yaryna Shumska

Shumska is right. Coordinates, which are used to map and mark the movements of people through space are always the same. But that movement, as exemplified by Shumska’s decision to hang from the pull-up bar, is always peripatetic, relative, unanticipated, and unexpected. Warfare is based on coordinates, land gained, and land lost–all abstract constructions of movement that can be used to create narratives of bravery, power, and dominance. But underneath the maps and the diagrams are the chaotic and unregulated actions and memories of humans, bouncing up against one another, and always seeking, along with Shumska, some kind of shelter on land they could call their own.

Carali McCall’s Performing Rock: Going, Gone, Under the Weather was about duration, endurance, land–and drawing. McCall, who is currently based in the UK, wrote a thesis entitled “Running as Drawing” for her PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. More recently, she co-authored a book Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 for Bloomsbury Visual Arts Publication. McCall’s interest in performative drawing has its roots in her relationship with the land. The lecture that she gave for the symposium, written up for the blog by Jacq Garcia, was titled “i miss the land but does the land miss me?” In the accompanying abstract, McCall writes that

Made from earth’s dust–the stuff of stars and pre-solar (sic) grains such as graphite, it could be said that we are drawn and shaped by place; and so, if place draws us, constructs us, and makes us, and if i miss a place, does a place miss me?

The artwork is a response to this critical time–the ‘weight of things’ and the sense of longing…for home and a landscape–with big skies, far-reaching horizon lines and the smell of soil.

McCall did Performing Rock twice during this symposium: first at her lecture and again for the Lunchtime Live Flow Concert. Each performance was slightly different as McCall redrew the lines for the piece.  The performance, designed for the internet, began with a split screen. On one side was McCall’s studio, with an off-camera McCall holding a sketchbook. On the other, an image of a medium rock and its dimensions– 37 cm and 15.8 kg. McCall steps onto the screen, turns on a spotlight, and picks up the actual rock, which was borrowed from a nearby London park (England, U.K.). For the duration of the piece, she held this heavy and unwieldy object, while her fatigue from doing so becomes increasingly visible. As McCall held the rock in her studio, a statement appeared on the second screen: Swimming is a Life Skill. To be able to swim is to know that you won’t drown. Historically, swimming as a sport and as recreation has been reserved for people with financial means, people who are not brown or black, people who have access to safe water and swimming lessons. McCall’s work has been engaged with the way in which the landscape draws and shapes bodies, and the importance of not ruining our landscape for bodies that haven’t yet arrived. McCall is interested in all bodies, and that simple statement, appearing without explanation, made clear the degree to which many bodies were not being given the skills they needed for life. 

Video Still: Performing Rock: Going, Gone, Under the Weather

by Carali McCall (London, U.K.)

Gradually, the sound of waves replaces the sound of McCall’s breathing. Swimming is a life skill is replaced by a film, made by Lorenzo Laurent, of McCall preparing to swim in  what appears to be cold water in the Iceland, where the film was made. As the sound of the waves are supplemented by song, the version of McCall that exists in real time with the audience continues in her Sissyphean task of holding up the rock, her arms visibly shaking with the effort. McCall and the rock suddenly disappears. McCall preparing to swim lingers a few moments longer, but then fades away as well, to be replaced by a film of McCall swimming in the middle of the lake to the accompaniment of Bach’s Cello Suite #1 1 / 6, performed by Alexander Rudin. The images fades, and once the audience is left with the sound of the waves. The piece ends with the sound of McCall dropping the rock. 

An earlier iteration of  Performing Rock that took place at the 100 Years Gallery in 2021 before a live audience and documented on McCall’s website, includes a drone video of McCall drawing with a medium sized rock in the silo on the McCall Farm in Huron County, Canada. This performance took place before an audience who witnessed McCall struggling to hold the rock for the duration of the piece. When she dropped the rock, everyone could see that action. The later iteration performed for Flow in 2022 was less physically tangible and more ephemeral. The film of the laborious rock drawing made in a silo on the family farm was replaced by a seemingly effortless swim through frigid waters–an effortlessness that was belied by the sounds of effortful breathing as McCall sought to hold the rock even though no one was looking or was even given the ability to look. 

In their review of McCall’s lecture, Jacq Garcia returned to the idea of stillness.

“Is there drawing in stillness? The still drawing–a longing for home and longing for landscape. The drawing of stillness manifested through holding the landscape, feeling the weight of a rock through duration. These moments of stillness can serve as contemplation as well as a different manifestation of yearning for the land in which we have inhabited and how we can develop a relationship towards landscape.”
by Jacq Garcia

The stillness of which Garcia writes was evident in the ending of the piece. Several audience members, the moderator Beau Coleman amongst them, wondered if they were not seeing what they should see. As Garcia reminds us, seeing with the body is different than seeing with the eyes. McCall’s piece challenged the limitations of vision and visibility.

Vanessa Dion Fletcher’s performance had two titles. On the Flow website, the title is listed as I Want Pink Drip. Dion Fletcher apparently changed her title prior to June 19th to Soaking. Both titles are apt, given the content of Dion Fletcher’s performance, which appeared quite suddenly after the thud that resulted when McCall dropped the medium stone. On the left of a split screen, Dion Fletcher, garbed in a sheer, sleeveless white top with red stains and black patterns along with black shorts, stands up in what appears to be an off white-tiled bathtub, and affixes a container of liquid above the showerhead, after which she moves her legs, making splashing sounds that suggest that the bathtub is already filled with water. On the right is a vat of red dye that holds a batch of porcupine quills.

Dion Fletcher begins to bathe/dye herself, dipping a cloth that is similarly patterned as her top into an off screen container hold red dye, and wringing it out onto her body. She dumps a pan of dye on her head, periodically cleaning it off with the water in the tub. The porcupine quills are also being dyed, soaking up the red color. Dion Fletcher turns on the faucette, and pours more dye into the bathtub, periodically using the cloth to wash her body. Eventually the white top becomes completely stained with the reddish dye. The cloth that Dion Fletcher uses to bathe herself begins to disintegrate, leaving patches of dye on her legs and arms. By the end of the performance, Dion Fletcher is seated in the bathtub and covered with red dye. She has poured this dye time and again over her head. She concludes the performance by pulling her hair over her face and braiding it. The screen goes black.

Dion Fletcher’s performance raises many important issues, even if one knows nothing about the artist. The repeated attempt to cleanse oneself with red dye points to the inevitable failure of becoming clean, and obtaining purity, a fact that is reinforced by the increasingly red quills in the screen on the right, as well as Dion Fletcher’s stained blouse and disintegrating wash cloth. But there is more. Dion Fletcher is Lenape and Potawatomi neurodiverse artist. Much of her work addresses her indigenous identity. For example, the dye that was used in the performance was made from Hibiscus flowers, which produced a natural red/pink dye used by the Lenape. The original title of the performance - I Want Pink Drip refers to the Lenape words Nii Nagata Maxkuecziin Pangpeew, which literally translates as “I want pink drip.” A version of I Want Pink Drip was performed in a 70s style walk-in shower with pink and black tiles during the pandemic–according to Dion Fletcher, the change in routine that occurred after everything shut down encouraged her to experiment with dyes. The change of title for this performance, from I Want Pink Drip to Soaking, an action that Dion Fletcher literally undertook by soaking herself and soaking the porcupine needles, reflects the incommensurability between Dion Fletcher’s ancestral origins and her identity today. Dion Fletcher began making these dyeing/soaking pieces after closely observing the school mbuy/harvesting of the maple sap in the spring. Dion Fletcher grew up knowing nothing of the Lenape language and not much of the culture. With Soaking, it is as though she wants to soak herself in a culture that has not been easy to access. It was only as an adult that she attempted to learn the language so that she could communicate with her tribe, even though most of her tribe now speaks English or French as their first language. It is both sad and telling that Dion Fletcher had to enroll in an online language class to learn to speak what should have been her first language.

Video Still of Performance: I Want Pink Drip/Soaking

by Vanessa Dion Fletcher (tkaronto, Toronto, Canada)

Along these same lines, Dion Fletcher’s use of porcupine quills both reinforces and distances her from her heritage. As Dion Fletcher notes in a video interview, available on her website https://www.dionfletcher.com/, porcupine quills were used to decorate clothing by the Lenape and Potawatomi peoples, who obtained these quills from porcupines. Porcupines are no longer as ubiquitous as they were prior to western settler colonialism, and Dion Fletcher was forced to order a supply of quills on the internet. In traditional Lenape culture, porcupine quills, which readily accepted dye, decorated objects that were used on the body. As a product of a western education that includes an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Dion Fletcher used the quills that she obtained to make two dimensional designs. In order to bring these quills back to their original purpose of corporeal decoration, Dion Fletcher used a two dimensional quill work pattern that she had created to make the printed black and white top that she wore for the Juneteenth performance for the Flow • embody in site symposium. The shirts that Dion Fletcher wears have an abstract print of her 2-D quillwork, suggesting the work needed to bring together her native indigenous heritage with her current identity.  

The brilliance of Dion Fletcher’s performance lies in the way that she problematizes indigenous identities while making the case for the importance of acknowledging these identities. Settler colonialism in Canada and the United States has almost erased the histories of the peoples who lived in these lands before people of European descent decided that they could claim them. Dion Fletcher is forced to learn the language and visual representation of a culture that she should know. She doesn’t know this culture, and her efforts to learn the language and culture are impeded by her learning disability, which resulted, as she points out, in her separation from her peers in order to spend a lot of time with adults. Dion Fletcher’s work challenges western-centric forms of knowledge by asking her audience to meet her where she is working, rather than making work that a settler colonist society can easily understand.

The Finale Lunchtime Concert concluded with a film documenting Jody Oberfelder’s Walking to Present (Brooklyn). Walking to Present incorporated a number of interesting elements. First, it was essentially a performance for one, but done for 2-3 people that were taken on a guided walk by Oberfelder and her dance troupe that included Ching I Chang, Vanessa Knusse, Christopher Matthew, Daniel Morimoto, Maya Orchin, Andrew Sanger, and Mark Willis. The dancers, dressed in comfortable shoes, black pants, and deconstructed black vests, took a small group of people on a journey from The Center for Brooklyn History to Cadman Plaza Park, where they first encountered the Juneteenth Grove, and then the Brooklyn War Memorial, a 24’ high wall with two monumental figures representing Victory and Family (or War and Peace) flanking the following text: 

THIS MEMORIAL IS DEDICATED TO THE HEROIC MEAN AND WOMEN OF THE BOROUGH OF BROOKLYN WHO FOUGHT FOR LIBERTY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1941-1945 AND ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO SUFFERED AND DIED. MAY THEIR SACRIFICES INSPIRE FUTURE GENERATIONS AND LEAN TO UNIVERSAL PEACE. 

The dancers/guides met their group in front of the Center for Brooklyn History. The film opens with an overview of Brooklyn, followed by the beginning of the performance. Rather than follow all of the performances, filmmakers Nate Beininga, Nel Shelby and Loren Robertson chose to follow Oberfelder’s group. Oberfelder collected her small group of three women, and took them to a vantage point where they can see the Center for Brooklyn History, a beautiful terracotta building that is an architectural landmark. Oberfelder called the attention of her group to the motto on the facade: Historia est testis temporum/History is a a witness of time. Pointing out that the sculpted busts on the facade–Shakespeare, Gutenberg–were all men, Oberfelder asked her group to imagine themselves as monuments of the future. They then head towards Cadman Plaza park, after being encouraged to stay silent and observe what is all around them. Once at the park, they walk onto the grass, land that had once been owned by the Lenape and then colonized by the Dutch in the 17th century, and asked to emulate the sycamore trees in the park, rooting themselves into the ground and feel the wind on their skins.

Video Still of Public Performance: Walking to Present (Brooklyn)

by Jody Oberfelder (NYC, U.S.) at Juneteenth Grove

The group stepped back on the path and into the middle of the Juneteenth Grove, planted in 2020 as a memorial to George Floyd. “What is the difference between a monument and a memorial,” Oberfelder queried the group, and then went on to explain the symbolism of the colors of the flowers and the benches. Red was for the heart, black for soil, and green for the earth. The brightly painting benches and the constantly changing flowers echoed the colors of the African Flag. Oberfelder and her group of three circumambulated the grove, taking 120 steps a minute, becoming moving monuments.

Up until this point, the performance had been an intimate performance where the audience had the undivided attention and care of the performer. The performance had also been a walk of discovery that created a new map of histories, past and present, of monuments, humans, and plant life. At this point the performance shifted, as the dancers became a living memorial for the lucky audience members. The audience/participants were arranged on the grass in front of the Brooklyn War Memorial and instructed to stand an arm’s length apart from one another. Once arranged, the dancers performed to music around and in between the audience, treating the audience to a dance performance outside of the traditional theatrical venue. At one point, a child rode his bicycle through the event, seemingly unaware that anything was going on. Upon the conclusion of the first piece, the dancers collected their group and arranged them in front of War Memorial in order to view the second performance. Against the background of music composed by Missy Mazzoli, the dancers took dramatic poses as they recited the dedication that towered over them. Finally, the dancers split into two groups of 4 and took turns moving to the head of the line until they were all surrounding the feet of the two colossal sculptures that flanked the dedication. Even on film, the effect was quite stunning, with the “tiny” black clad dancers dwarfed by the wall and the figures. 

Video Still of Public Performance: Walking to Present (Brooklyn)

by Jody Oberfelder (NYC, U.S.)

At the end of the second performance, the dancers walked down the stairs of the memorial and collected the people in their group. Oberfelder took the remaining two people in her group back to the sycamores trees, where she asked them if they thought trees were monuments and exhorted them to plant their feet like a tree, think of the skin as bark, and blood as sap. “How can this moment,” Oberfelder asked, “be monumental?” The performance concluded with the gift of a compass–a compass that could help them find their way in the physical world, but could also symbolize finding their way in the ethical world. Given the events of these past few months, one can speculate that all people need a walk to the present that shows them the past, a walk that is carefully curated so that openness and curiosity are rewarded.