TUE/WED Performances

June 26th and 27th 8-10PM
SOMArts Cultural Center
934 Brannan St, San Francisco

Presenting: Rafa Esparza, Taisha Paggett, Sara Kraft, Mica Sigourney.

Rafa Esparza ”Casa De Adobe”

Curated by Doran George

In retrospect of a short lived, almost transient-like home living experience, an extreme opposite of my childhood upbringing: stable, fixed, secure, safe; I began to take an interest in investigating my relationship to “home”. I took up learning how to make adobe bricks from my father, who used to make them while growing up in a rural town in Durango, Mexico. In my lessons I learned how important this labor practice was for my father, not only as a means to provide for himself but literally as a means to set the foundation for his future family; the idea eventually materialized in the building of a house using those adobe bricks. I saw this gesture as a propagation of a tradition that sets roles for family members under a strict patriarchal system. Questions regarding my role, my part, my engagement in this space soon arose and hence the beginnings of my work with adobe bricks.

I have designed what is to be installed as part of this project: a skeletal structure of a cube using wooden beams, filled densely with hanging clumps of adobe bricks knotted onto ropes. Placed on the perimeter of the cube will be “masculine” objects as identified by me, paired with mirrors facing outward. Using the mirrored spaces as moments of meditation and reflection throughout the duration of the performance I will re-evaluate the various objects/ symbols, accessing them at different intervals while moving in and out of adobe’d structure.

Taisha Paggett “Fila Buster”

PREMIERE

Curated by Anna-Martine Whitehead

“Taisha’s contribution to the conversations this festival sparks around queer(ing) desires and economies is an overwhelmingly physical one; her movements are economical in the extreme. They directly confront her audience’s expectations of ‘performance,’ and their visual entitlement, manifest as a desire to passively witness. I look forward to the challenges Taisha’s piece Fila Buster will bring to the dialogue This Is What I Want is provoking.” – Anna-Martine Whitehead

Sara Kraft TRUTH ++

Curated by Rachael Dichter

This piece was originally created and performed in early 2007, partly as a meditation on the nature of Desire, and the rapture, ecstasy, beauty, doubt, fear, agony, violence, destruction, and utter madness it induces. It’s about the desperate and possibly unfulfillable search that lies at its root, beyond all the constantly shifting forms that our desire attaches itself to- objects, people, experiences, ideas, beliefs, states, past present future, possibility. It’s about the desire to Know- to control and make sense of the chaos of experience. It’s about the relative, subjective and illusory nature of mind, point of view, the mobius prism of mental emotional and physical states, and the perpetual chicken/egg feedback loop between them. It’s an incantation, an invocation, a kind of anti- manifesto, a relentless litany of sloganistic truisms in which the entire search for the truth is dismantled and purged.

We don’t have to ask ourselves how Desire is related to “Economy”- it IS Economy. This piece and the way it is constructed is itself a kind of meta-economy- a self sustaining and self destructing reactive feedback loop system- analogous to the global economy, the stock market, the collective psyche, the individual body-mind.

The 2nd person subject (“you”) being addressed in the verbal rant in this piece could be anyone or anything. Who or what is the “object” of your desire? Who or what has the power to “make you” feel/think/do all these things? A lover, a drug, money, the financial system, the government, god, the universe, life? The audience, me, yourself?

Mica Sigourney “All This Love”

PREMIERE

Curated by Tessa Wills and Rachael Dichter

“My piece is called
‘All This Love’
It’s about how much I want you to like me and how much I’ll never believe you anyway.”

-Mica Sigourney

“ Mica Sigourney’s work has me hooked. Whether or not this iteration succeeds, the piece matters because of the way his practice repeatedly ignites critical ideas dynamically. In my experience, his work (which I have performed in, as well as been audience for) utilizes charm and virtuosic ability to play social dynamics in the artist’s favour. This means he can facilitate games of challenge and intense competition in ways which feel soft.

Sigourney is the only artist who has participated in every year of the festival. His pieces have developed logically, getting closer to staging desire as a force in action. He is consciously manipulating, ridiculing and surrendering to his own narcissism while challenging the audience to engage personally in their desire for him. There is a way in which Sigourney challenges you to consume him through his work and in so doing to meet him in staging your identity; exposing yourself. That’s an exciting place to be.”

-Tessa Wills