The New Commons — by Prima Jalichandra- Sakuntabhai
The online program The New Commons interrogates the interrelationship between digital communications technologies and the experience of diaspora, the state of being away from home, relying on memory, imagination, and dreams to keep the image of that place alive. Digital space adds another layer to this work on memory, allowing for the simultaneous presence of past and present images of distant places. We no longer solely rely on individual memories but on collective memory, a memory commons.
This shared visual databank may refute and complicate the memories of each individual, shaped by their own and their family's experiences, ideals, and projections. It is this tension that I am interested in exploring. I invited pairs of artists, one living in the diaspora and one working in their culture of origin or artists who work collaboratively, to investigate this question in each episode of The New Commons. I wanted to see what may arise from these two perspectives, the outside and the inside, the past and the present. What kind of art and subjects are being talked about in different regions of the world? How do we relate ourselves or perceive our roles as citizens in diaspora and residents to a culture of origin?
This question is particularly pertinent in Shaghayegh Cyrous' works, which opened the series. Shaghayegh is an Iranian-American artist, living in exile from Iran for over ten years. Using video communication technologies and live streams, she maintains an active connection to Iran through personal and political engagements. Our initial idea was to have her create new work with one of her collaborators in Iran. However, due to the ongoing unrest and violent governmental backlashes, it appeared dangerous for an Iranian person to be working with someone based in the U.S. Faced with this genuine barrier to what we once perceived as the ubiquity (and perhaps democratic tool) of the internet, we decided instead to present her past works made in collaboration with her family and her ongoing activist work. In Walk in the Future of my Past (2021) and No Smell, No Touch (2018), she asked her mother to walk her through their garden and home on FaceTime. Her mother's gaze becomes the lens through which she experiences a garden she has never seen. In No Smell, No Touch (2018), she points out that everything looks the same, but she cannot smell or touch the objects. A dream-like state in which you can't be fully immersed, even though it feels close to your fingertips. While video calls collapse space and time – you can see the inside of my apartment, or I can show you the mountains –the illusion is only maintained inside the screen. The pixelation of the images creates another barrier of irreality: the memory captured is constantly at risk of deterioration.
While it may be less possible to participate in daily life in Iran, digital communication technologies present an avenue for continued political engagement. Shaghayegh went into exile for her activism and continued her activities abroad. Be Yad Ar (Remember) (2020) is a compilation of videos from the nationwide civil protests and six days of national internet shutdown by Iran's government from November 15 to 21, 2019. People on the ground uploaded videos before the shutdown to counter the government's denial of the exact number of death counts and refusal to confirm the bodies' identities. The protesters' families revealed 592 identities, of which at least 23 of the deaths were children between the ages of 12-17 killed by security forces. As the title suggests, memory becomes a crucial weapon in anti-government protests and the fight against censorship. The proliferation of videos from phone footage has changed the information landscape of those who control and access information. For Shaghayegh, activism from the outside means to be the voice for what is happening within. In the closing video, Golden Hour (2022), she brings dancing female figures onto a billboard in West Hollywood. The video is a dedication to the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which started in September 2022 after the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Iran's Kurdistan Province, by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Dancing is prohibited in Iran. Therefore, it appears as a great act of resistance and celebration. This video work also collapses the two places she occupies, Los Angeles and Tehran, showing that the fight for injustice in one place would lead to justice everywhere.
The second episode features a collaboration between Thai-Austrian artist Suchart Wannaset and a Thai artist in Austria, Maythisa Menchit. Born to a Thai mother and an Austrian father, Suchart lived in Vienna since he was six. Although he speaks Thai, he thinks in German, so he has to translate from German to Thai. Suchart invited Maythisa Menchit, with whom he had previously collaborated, to work together on the project. Maythisa was born in Thailand and grew up there. She came to Austria to study and is considering staying after school. Their dissymmetric experiences become the focal point of the collaboration.
Feeling at Home Away from Home is a two-part work: a video and a live performance. In the video, the two artists combined their image archive from their phones- overlapping views of Austrian snow-covered fields with rice paddies and alleyways in Bangkok, Mae's first experience with snow in the Alps, and scenes from past works. The soundscape is rhythmed by a sense of wonder as we go through these rapidly changing landscapes, punctuated with the artists' voices, the ringing of Line (a communications app popular in Asia), and other recorded voices. The two artists are never in the same space: either on the other end of a video call or as superimposed images on top of one another. And yet they have melded their memories together to represent the hybridity the two friends occupy. The last sequences appear more dream-like as the landscapes themselves become saturated. Mae's sleeping head is crowned by a lotus pond. Suchart wanders into a field overlaid with a tropical jungle, his body melding into the foliage. Dream spaces break down physical boundaries and render visible the psychological landscapes of being in between. The live performance reinforces this feeling of separation and yearning to connect. Suchart is in his bedroom. A projection of Mae appears in a ball of light and bounces around the room. The two dance together, Suchart casting shadows over Mae's projection, Mae appearing on Suchart's white T-shirt. The physical separation speaks less about the sentiment of missing someone or a place but what I would consider a double consciousness, in W.E.B. Du Bois's meaning of the term. Living between cultures, one is never whole, neither at home nor abroad. Suchart and Mae manifest for one another the missing half: the experience of growing up in Thailand and the experience of living in Austrian culture. This collaboration marks their six-year friendship, coming together in a shared visual language of their fluency.
Friendship became the mark of my curatorial practice and the inner drive behind The New Commons. To paraphrase Byung Chul-Han, friendship is a condition for the exercise of thought [1]. The decision to pair artists or work with artists who have a collaborative practice ultimately leads to cultivating relationships as a meaningful strategy to produce knowledge that is not purely intellectual or aesthetic but one that comes from intimacy, memory-building, and shared lived experiences. The two latter episodes of BROADCAST were occasions for me to introduce artists to one another and build relationships through working together. For the third episode, I was interested in centering the St. Paul-based Indian artist Prerna and her work on familial archives and governmental language. A recent immigrant to the US, Prerna's work reveals the impact of bureaucratic systems on immigrant identity. As someone without a last name- an error on the part of her father, Prerna had to navigate bureaucracy and its failure to categorize her at different stages of her life. Her aesthetic choices mirrored in her sculptural practice borrow from the aesthetics of bureaucracy and efficiency while dealing with intimate subjects such as losing one's mother tongue or memories of family gatherings in the old country. Her works testify to the process of immigration as she is going through it: what happens between the process of learning a new language and forgetting one's mother tongue?
To contrast with Prerna's experience, I invited my friend, Priyanka Ram, an artist and musician of Tamil descent based in Los Angeles, to be in conversation with her. Priyanka immigrated with her family as a child and grew up in San Antonio, Texas. Her background serves as a spiritual approach to abstract paintings and experimental music compositions. Their conversation centered around the use of the word pavam in Prerna's work. The Height of Pity(2021) is a CNC-routed column made of foam and saris that carved the word pavam in the artist's mother's handwriting. The ambiguity of the word can only be understood culturally. Its translation only purports to confuse the Westernized minds. Even among Tamil speakers themselves, the word is polyvalent. According to Prerna, pavam can mean pity and sin, but neither concept is distinct in Tamil culture. But Priyanka has never heard of it being used to mean sin. Both experience the language colloquially, similar to the experience of early childhood acquisition of language, which is more experiential than meaningful. Prerna gave the example of first learning how to write by copying the shape of the letters without knowing their meaning, thus experiencing letters as form and material rather than signifiers. This experience is translated into her sculptures, where text and image become similar. In The Height of Pity, the word is only legible at the top of the column. The illegibility is a challenge to the institutional aspect of language and how it provides a false sense of safety and certainty.
While written text tends to fix meaning, conversations are meaning in the making. Prerna's conversation with Priyanka extends the meaning and processes of her works in non-linear ways, creating avenues for their shared experiences to inform what the work can signify. This dual process is reflected in the work Today, we become (2019), in which Prerna obscured and redacted text from The Basic Guide for Naturalization by etching it into the wall and spackling it. As the spackle dries, part of the text disappears, its meaning constantly changing. Both the material choices in Prerna's works and the conversation with Priyanka challenge the authority of language by showing that meaning can be as fleeting as the nature of memory itself.
The fourth and final episode of The New Commons is a new collaboration between Francis Almendarez, an artist in Southern California, and Alejandra Bolaños, a Mexican sound artist in Veracruz.
I discovered Francis's work in The Invisible Archive, a creative research journal focused on performance art. Francis collaborated with his brother to blend video, sound, and performative lectures to address the overlapping memories and socio-economic realities of growing up in a working-class family from Central America and the Caribbean in Los Angeles. The rise in housing prices later forced them out of the city. After a long stint in Texas, he moved back to Southern California, to San Bernardino. Speaking to Francis about his interests and work process reminded me of Alejandra's work, which I saw during an open call for Prospect Art. Alejandra's recent project is centered on the oral history of pirate myths of the Caribbean.
Over four months, the two artists devised a system to maintain communication. The result is a live Google Doc document that functions as a rhapsodic archive of their exchange, learning about one another and sharing links to video, articles, images, and audio recordings. For the episode, they presented the piece as a live performative lecture: an interplay between Alejandra's voice reading in Spanish and Francis's low-timbre English takes the viewer through the multilingual and multicultural spaces that both artists occupy. The performance started with the song La Rebelion by Joe Arroyo, which Alejandra introduced as her favorite song. Francis also grew up with this song, played at intergenerational family gatherings in LA in the 90s and early 2000s. The song depicting the enslavement of Black people in the Caribbean forms a shared collective memory, across time and borders, of struggle and yearning for freedom and demonstrates a message of solidarity and resistance embedded in everyday life.
Both artists are educators and invested in alternative forms of knowledge. The performance alternates between diaristic and research tones: Alejandra sent Francis a recording of the songs of birds called chachalacas that she hears while she writes. Francis replied with a YouTube video capturing birdsongs in a Walmart parking lot in Houston, where he lived. The landscapes of memories and the physical landscapes from where they speak coalesce in the space of the text. When does the anecdotal become myth? Alejandra told Francis the story of meeting Margarita Zavala, the former First Lady, wife of Felipe Calderón, who was running for deputy. Alejandra started yelling at the woman, accusing her and her husband of starting the narco-traffic war, during which at least 200,000 people disappeared. She could not understand her own reaction. The sounds that came from her reminded her of the cries of the birds. She became the mythological creature, the Furies, a goddess of vengeance, half-woman, half-bird.
What we term alternative forms of knowledge is simply knowledge outside Western academia. For both artists, there is little to no differentiation between magic, familial histories, and folklore. A poignant moment of the performance is when Alejandra shares the recording of her grandmother's voice singing just before she passed away. In return, Francis showed a video of his grandmother and mother chucking corn for tamales. The sound of the singing voice and the sound of corn falling into a bucket are transgenerational modes of communication, an embodied inheritance captured via digital recording. The performance ends with an invitation to dance to the song, Fiesta by Banda Blanca. The rhythm of the drums resonates in our bodies, whether or not the music is familiar to our ears. The dancing ends where we begin with Shaghayeh Cyrous's video of dancing Iranian women on a West Hollywood billboard. These daily gestures are embodied acts of resistance against a dominant monoculture that seeks to codify and categorize us.
The four episodes of The New Commons revealed how, rather than complicating the imagination of the homeland, digital communication technologies form a space of in-between in which diasporic and sedentary views shape new ways of belonging. For Shaghayeh Cyrous, the screen is both a communication route and a barrier she cannot cross; lived reality is flattened into a series of moving images without touch or smell. Prerna's transformation of her family archive, filtered through the language of bureaucracy, accepts the reality that memories can only be maintained at a distance. Once transformed, they are let go. Instead, she finds new forms of kinship with fellow diaspora artists with whom she can share her heritage and the uncanny experience of immigration and losing one's mother tongue. The kinship exemplified in Suchart Wannaset and Maythisa Menchit's collaboration and Francis Almendarez and Alejandra Bolaños's oppose physical distance with emotional proximity and how the medium of video (including video calls) allows for a juxtaposition of these layered spatio-temporalities. While Suchart and Mae chose to blend their visual memories over a new score they created, Francis and Alejandra used the more traditional form of correspondence to materialize the space of their exchanges. The ties to a physical homeland become more abstract. The relationship between people- relatives, old friends, and new collaborators, corresponds more closely to the dynamic experience of living between cultures. We are part of a new global citizenry, shaped not by transnational neoliberal demands but responsible for continually pushing physical and mental borders for a freer world.
Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, June, 2024.
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References:
[1] Byung Chul-Han, The Agony of Eros
EDITOR’S NOTE: All episodes of The New Commons are published on our BROADCAST page and can be found here.
All Images (screen shots of live BROADCAST episodes) Courtesy of the Author.
1. Ep 1 Shagheyeh 3
Shagheyeh Cyrous, Walk in the Future of My Past, 2021. Video, 06:00.
2. Ep 1 Shagheyeh 4
Shagheyeh Cyrous, Golden Hour, 2022. Video, 02:30. Displayed on the Netflix Billboard at Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles, California.
3. Ep 2 Suchart and Mae 2
Suchart Wannaset and Maythisa Menchit, Feeling at Home Away from Home, 2023. Live virtual performance and video.
4. Ep 2 Suchart and Mae 5
Suchart Wannaset and Maythisa Menchit, Feeling at Home Away from Home, 2023. Live virtual performance and video.
5. Ep 3 Prerna and Priyanka 1
Prerna, Today, we become, 2019. Still, from the presentation by the author.
6. Ep 3 Prerna and Priyanka 3
Prerna, The height of pity, 2021. Still, from the presentation by the author.
7. Ep 3 Prerna and Priyanka 5
Prerna and Priyanka Ram in conversation.
8. Ep 4 Francis and Alejandra 2
Francis Almendarez and Alejandra Bolaños, still from virtual performative lecture, 2024.
9. Ep 4 Francis and Alejandra 5
Francis Almendarez and Alejandra Bolaños, still from virtual performative lecture, 2024.