Stay In Place
March 17, 2020 - May 31, 2020
duration: 76-days (consecutive)
location: my living room, Santa Clara County, CA
materials: Grey Housepaint, French Broom, Lavender, Bigleaf Periwinkle, Moss, 2 Rocks, Eucalyptus, Yellow Acrylic Paint, Empty Pasta Sauce Jar, Empty Red Pepper Container, Ponderosa Pine, California Poppy, Carob Tree Teaf, Swamp Mahogany Leaf, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, California Redwood Bark, Arroyo Lupine, Reeve's Spiraea, Bermuda Buttercup, Three-cornered Garlic, Doulas Iris, Eggleaf Spurge, Sour Fig, Broadleaf Forget-Me-Not, Aloe Leaf, Orange Peel, Violet Toothed Polypore, Oleander Leaf, Sequoia Bark, Everlasting Pea, Feverfew, Daffodil, Garlic Cloves, Trumpet Creeper, Rainbow Polypores, Hammer, 3 Paintbrushes, Various Pins and Nails, Dropcloth, Santa Clara County Public Health Orders
A wall is not a body. There are no folds of flesh to collapse into. No warm curves to cradle. No eyes offering solace. Rigid. Cold. Unrelenting. Also sturdy. Also still.
Stay in Place (S.I.P.) began after 14-days of quarantine and the subsequent “Shelter In Place” Order of the Santa Clara County Health Officer (CA) “to reduce the rate of transmission of Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (“COVID-19”).”
Part dance, part performance, part site-specific installation, the duration of each encounter with the wall in my living room corresponded to the length of the Shelter-in-Place ordinance, which was consistently extended. On day 15 the performance was 15-minutes. Day 16, 16 minutes. Day 17, 17 minutes, continuing this way until Day 76, 76 minutes.
In these times, the body pounds its fists, flutters its lips, tries holding on, holding up, and holding things together.
Holding is most visible in the score “Wingspan,” which introduced yellow paint into the composition and consisted of stretching (my arms, the work, the duration, the body) and holding (tightly, longingly, to grieve, to feel, to crumble, and to lift). It was performed on April 7 (day 22) and May 3 (day 48), dates when the public health orders were extended.
“Wingspan” was also performed on May 31 (day 76) to end the piece. On this date, my county Shelter-in-Place order was extended “indefinitely.” It was the first time the order did not include a projected end-date.
At the same time, across the United States, protests against police brutality and for Black lives called for moving out of shelter and into the streets.
“We are here. You are there. You are here.”
May 25, 2020, Day 70, duration 70 minutes with Wood Forget-Me-Not Flower
Day 70 took place on Memorial Day. A day that hails the US public to honor fallen (military) soldiers.
George Floyd was murdered by police on May 25th in Minneapolis, the literal “here” invoked in the score that Minneapolis-based artist Giselle Restrepo sent me on day 44: “We are here. You are there. You are here.”
I did not/could not know of Floyd’s death yet when I splayed the drop cloth and dress on the floor to paint the number (the day, the duration) “70,” staying close to the ground, tracing the light of the rising sun. But the systems of violence and injustice that perpetuate black death in America are not new.
I believe and acknowledge ghosts and ancestors that open up dynamic spatio-temporal realms where moving with the dead (“we here”/”you there”/”you here”) resists structures of racism and inequality embedded in white supremacist choreographies that regulate life, memory, mourning, rage, movement, access to health, and the political power of emotion.
As Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it.”
Left temple, Left Thumb (will)
April 2, 2020, Day 17 (17 minutes)
excerpt from minute 9
Left temple, Left Thumb (will)
April 11, 2020, Day 26 (26 minutes)
excerpt from minute 17
Left temple, Left Thumb (will)
May 7, 2020, Day 52, (52 minutes)
excerpt from minute 49
Each time the ordinance was extended, I would go back to the first score (#15) and begin again by painting the same body part, but with a new color of paint. For my body, the repetition marked an interval between the unknowable and the quotidian. Days became weeks, weeks became months, daily life and global politics were radically shifting in impactful ways — even as a body’s daily movements could be predictable, flat, and monotonous.
Throughout the performance I reflected on how a body moves, what a body moves for, what a body needs to move, what the body’s relationship is to touch (human and non-human), when a body can stay in place, what a body truly needs to sustain that demand, and what is required on personal, local, and global scales to shift priorities from fictions of economic recovery to something more vital, like life support.