2020-2021

“Starting Relationships in Pandemic Times. This, in truth, is a conversation largely, though not exclusively, carried out via emails that began on 10 June 2020. As we considered how we could continue working on Sands Murray-Wassink’s ambitious durational project Gift Science Archive, the looming realities of restricted travel and gathering weighed heavy in our minds. Crucial to Murray-Wassink and his collaborators’ performance of archiving/auto-archived performance is dialogue—indeed, the messy relationality of intrapersonal exchange is an organising principle for ‘the archive’ of Gift Science Archive.Following ‘Process Event #1: VALUE. What is trash? What is trashy but valuable?’ on 6 March 2020 (just one week before the lockdown in The Netherlands began), we were keen to start thinking toward a second process event that would highlight another keyword in the project and in Murray-Wassink’s practice more broadly: relationships. But this second process event went on hold along with everything else, first for a month, then for two and, in the end, for 81 days. From this nearly three months of lockdown grew the idea for an epistolary exchange, which was initiated by an invitation to Bilbao-based curator Aimar Arriola with whom If I Can’t Dance had previously worked in the frame of the 2008–2010 Edition III — Masquerade. The invitation read:Given your work on projects like the AIDS anarchive, as well as your numerous other curatorial and writing initiatives around queer visibility politics, we couldn’t think of a better person to invite for a conversation on the performance(s) of archiving.The event we initially had in mind was an in-person conversation that would have been held in the Rijksakademie studio/archive depot here in Amsterdam where Sands and I have been developing the project together with two other collaborators (Radna Rumping who is working with Sands on a meta-archive that documents the archiving process, and Amalia Calderón who is performing the roles of archivist and researcher in the archive as she inventories and reflects upon the materials uncovered). Such an event no longer seems possible or desirable at this historical juncture, and yet a conversation between you and Sands on these topics feels just as resonant as ever. With that in mind, we want to invite you to a conversation that would take place in a different spatial and temporal frame. What we have in mind is a dialogue that unfolds over the summer (stretching roughly from the end of June through the September) via emails and/or written letters in which you and Sands can share elements of your practices and address orienting questions on the above-cited themes (as a “moderator” of sorts, I could provide a few prompts to begin). This exchange would begin in late June with a letter from Sands, which he is developing as part of a mail art project with Foundation Perdu, a poetry bookshop and theatre space that has long been at the center of Amsterdam’s experimental arts scene. Sands’ letter would be a first introduction to his practice, and, we hope, could prompt some first responses from you. I must emphasize that this format is an experiment in event programming, as well as in feeling our way through other forms of intimacy. We at If I Can’t Dance are very eager to begin thinking how intimacy unfolds in different spaces and along different timelines; in particular, in the era of the coronavirus when so much of our lives seem to be moving so quickly online, we are keen to think together with our artist commissions and others in the arts how digital space might be a tool to slow things down rather than speed them up. Arriola graciously accepted. Another month or so passed. In late June Murray-Wassink’s Perdu letter went out. About one week later the conversation began. With time, the exchange has taken on the sub-title “Feminist Legacies, Queer Intimacies” These four keywords—feminist, legacies, queer, intimacies—are guiding terms that hold different resonance for Aimar and Sands. If for Sands ‘queer’ is a stumbling block, for Aimar intimacies is more difficult: How does queer mean? What does it have to do with sexuality? With sexual orientation? What is intimate but not necessarily private? What is intimacy without sexual contact? What would collective intimacy feel like? Such questions do not necessarily surface in the letters directly. Like a lot of the feelings or life questions that drive our calls and responses to one another, they appear between the commas and in other pauses of the breath.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“Getting to know each other. The first six letters between Sands and Aimar move in a slow time, stretching across nearly the entire summer season. As with most relationships in their early stages, these initial exchanges are tentative, exploratory and even a bit naïve. Their language has in it a reaching gesture—a reaching toward something but what that something is, is not yet formed. Here one can sense them getting to know each other and feeling out their affective expectations, toward one another, perhaps, but maybe more so toward the form of the letter itself. In the last of these letters, Aimar shares with Sands an image of his working desk where Sands book Profeminist WHITE FLOWERS lies, freshly arrived via post from Amsterdam—in this gesture of touch, of book in hand (or hand on book as it were) what Sands will later call ‘the pulse of your contact’ seems to be made. It is this same image through which you entered Sands and Aimar’s room in ificantdance.studio and through which we hope you will return for further reading, in other intimate moments alone.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio

“Detached but Intimate/Personal. These next seven letters unfold in a flurry of activity during the final two weeks of the summer holiday. With the arrival of Aimar’s first letter to Sands via post, some ‘admissions’ are put on the table and with them a comb purchased in the old town of Bilbao. This small drug-store purchase becomes like a codex through which Aimar begins to speak about his ‘self-contained’ ways—in somewhat stark contrast to Sands’ continuous “spilling out’—and, in the process, to articulate his relationship to relationships, to the (auto)biographical and to the kinds of intimacies that flow through those connections to self and others. In the last of the letters, Sands receives Aimar’s comb, making an admission of his own that sometimes he worries he is ‘too much’ and closing the communique with the thought: ‘we do not know ourselves physically as we appear to others…the same might go for behavior…’” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“Aquarian late responses. A week passes and then come six exchanges in four days, the delay brought on by Aimar’s self-admitted ‘late replier’ tendencies. As an Aquarius myself, I identify with his difficulties opening up—the belated response a result of processing time as the Aquarian considers how much to open and in which ways to do so. I also find something of myself in Aimar’s admiration for Sands’ continuous ‘spilling out’ and the senses of belonging it inspires. Indeed, belonging (as both an affective and material condition) comes to the fore in these four days, from the gendered belonging coded by childhood toys, to the biopolitical belonging facilitated or violated by political conditions, to the (dare-I-say) queer belonging engendered by care-full attention to the capacities of those around us and the ‘bits and pieces’—a comb, an image, a name, a memory—through which those capacities make themselves known.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio

“I am more interested in content. As the season starts to change, Sands and Aimar’s exchange begins to take on more form. The possibilities and problematics of ‘queer form’, in particular, emerges as the content of their dialogue. Along the way, the form of their exchange becomes ever more unruly. Distinctions between what is ‘core’ and what is ‘supplement’ are nearly undone: trains of thought shift between email bodies and attachments, images being transferred across different platforms, or letters by post stamped with one date but entering conversation several exchanges later. The linear momentum of chrononormative time holds no sway here. An email time-stamped today can become the preface for an attachment dated two days ago; hyperlinks lead out; responses to a letter sent a week ago linger and mingle with new thoughts introduced an hour ago. These instances are clear reminders of the messiness of relationships—a messiness that emerges again and again in Gift Science Archive.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“El ano tuyo. After much activity at the start of the fall season, things quiet down through October. The exchange picks up again about one week into November, beginning with a series of photos of Aimar emerging from el ano tuyo [your anus], a narrow passageway marking the end of a cave in the Basque municipality of Tuyo [yours]. El ano tuyo, as you could imagine, opens onto a discussion of sexual pleasure zones and control, which implicitly leads us back to the topic of queer form—as Sands suggests in his response to Aimar’s rite-of-passage photos, his work about sex is all painting, all ‘one big gestural stroke’. Here Sands disappointment with the rejection of an invitation to Adrian Piper mixes together with a discussion of control as lifelong sculpting process and the formal (or, perhaps, informe or formless) possibilities of the orgasmic encounter—sexual, textual and otherwise. The chapter closes with a 20-page essay by art historian Kathy Wentrack written on the occasion of the 2001 exhibition Double Trouble: Carolee Schneemann and Sands Murray-Wassink. In it, Wentrack traces the shared aspects of Sands’ and Carolee’s art/life practices, particularly their shared commitment to using lived experience as the basis for creative production. Wentrack’s text is an important reference point in the the development of a narrative linking second wave feminism with third wave queer (male) feminisms. Following the essay, Sands shares one last image, perhaps to make Wentrack’s point more palpable, more present: If we began with el ano tuyo, we end with a gold-plated vulva.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“Missing Strands. The year is coming to a close, and in the weeks before winter holidays six more communiqués are exchanged. There is an attempt to wrap things up, even as there is full recognition of the impossibility of that—some strands will always stay missing, in the letters as in relationships. In a letter dated 9 December (though began in the week prior), the topic of queer form returns, this time with an extended quote from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in which she articulates her understanding of queer formalism. For Sedgwick (and, in turn, for Aimar), it involves a kind of fantastic imbuing wherein ‘… objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love.’ And then New Year begins. It is marked here by a letter within a letter, sent by Sands to Aimar on the first day of 2021. The nested letter dates back much further, to 2015 when Sands wrote to Carolee Schneemann following their difficult meeting in Salzburg during the opening of Schneemann’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum der Moderne. In this moment of carefully selected over-sharing, Sands performs one final gesture of ‘spilling out’—Sedgwick’s description of the excessive, of survival and of the need for sites of messiness (where things don’t quite line up) seems to come alive on the page. For all of that ‘abundance’, though, indeed some strands will always stay missing.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“To rhyme an ending with a new beginning. The winter holidays are over, and the communiqués close here, on 6 February 2021 about a week after Aimar’s 45th birthday. After months of backs and forth, of dreaming and planning, of delicately finding each other through words and images, Aimar opens up about health, about identification and about intimacy and its blockages. His admissions are somewhat unexpected, as is the affective impact of them. In his own final gesture of ‘spilling out’, Aimar offers a closing rhyme matched in its formal clarity of thought only by the rawness of psychic grappling evident in its content. Sedgwick comes to mind once again, this time her understanding of the beauty of not fully knowing people. In Aimar’s final letter (and the final of this eight-month epistolary exchange), it’s the sort of ‘too much’ that only an air sign can give, and, with it, Aimar at last comes to meet the ‘spilling out’ of Sands—not by mimicking Sands’ modes of expression, but, rather, by making visible his own intensities of feeling.Aquarius season.I think that says it all.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.

“Epilogue. The songs compiled in this final of the afterthoughts and postscripts are pulled together from across the months of Sands and Aimar’s exchange, merging their seemingly distended virtual time together with the regular weekly rhythm of Sands work with Gift Science Archive collaborator Amalia Calderón in archiving sessions at the Rijksakademie van beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam. Online and on-site the playlist (and the relationships it traces) developed from June through December 2020, combining sentimental pop beats, iconic New Romantic ballads, ‘deep house’ electronic tracks and more. There are some twists and turns — as there have been in this epistolary exchange—so take your time and listen when the mood is right. I’m only a few hours in, and I anticipate staying with Aimar and Sands long into the summer.” – MH studio note from ificantdance.studio.