Access/Exit was a series of embodied interventions that occurred at, on, and around “public” sculptures. A collaboration with Berlin based visual artist Tanja Knaus, the series confronts the ways women artists access and exit public spaces, art and/as history, memory, authorship, and the frictive curvatures of monumentality.

“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”

Deleuze & Guattari, *A Thousand Plateaus*, 1980

The series began in Berlin with a 90-minute event on the sculpture 13.4.1981 by Olaf Metzel. Commonly referred to as “Randale-denkmal” (riot-memorial), Metzel created this sculpture in 1987 using metal crowd-control barricades. Its title references a violent riot that took place on April 13, 1981. As part of Berlin’s “Sculpture Boulevard,” 13.4.1981 incited new public protests and became a regular meeting site for alternative thinkers and political activists. It was removed from the Sculpture Boulevard by the mayor, who called the sculpture a “pile of junk.” Fourteen years later, the sculpture was privately acquired and re-erected outside of Universal Music Headquarters on Berlin’s MediaSpree.

In the first duet of the series, Access Exit I, Tanja and I insert our bodies into this fraught history. Without permission or announcement, the work explores thresholds of public and private, state and citizen, sculpture and performer, monument and organism. Each subsequent performance in the series grew rhizomatically from the socio-political, historical, and material points of access and exit generated during the first event.

After Access Exit I, the collaboration continued across continents. The duet became solo performances that remained coupled though not co-performed. We edited the live documentation and exchanged 9-minute videos through virtual interfaces. Each new performance continued the conversation. Distance and proximity were collapsed and expanded on screen. The physical and nonphysical web of the work became additional points of access and exit that impacted the collaboration and each live event.

Access Exit research films were commissioned for inclusion in The Equinoccio Festival in Chile, Germany, and France. The video footage from each live performance-research event was captured using low-resolution surveillance cameras.