A piece I made in 2005 was my first foray into this subject matter. Winter Garden: Hybrid Love Objects, pertains to the use of the glasshouses as a repository for objects, landscape and at times people brought back by “old world” travelers from their expeditions to the “new world.” (Actually, Noelle Mason was one of two performers in this piece!) These winter gardens helped construct some of the groundwork for eurocentric fantasies, for better and for worse, of people from other places. I thought what better than attempt to re-imagine the interior logic of such a fraught, powerful and beautiful human narrative building space.

At first I attempted to make explicit some of the problematic underlying logics of these spaces. I then began to project into our future.

No Place is the project with which I produce, in collaboration with others, an amalgamated future. Although it appears to be a futuristic escape, this project intends to be quotidian. All of the materials are domestic and the subject matter (family, death, reproduction) are at an everyday scale. It is my hope that this project is not an escape from reality but a conduit to an other reality already embedded in our own.

Saya

Thanks so much for asking. The insignia for the Empathics comes from a combination of elements: a neoclassical column, a Japanese inro, and a Sankofa.

As for popular associations of utopia, I will respond in my next post.

Best,
Saya