Anna Colin

You started the conversation with the foundation about two years ago for the show?

Wu Tsang

Yeah, two years ago.

Anna Colin

Two years ago. The exhibition took multiple forms and started with a theme that was going to be quite different at the time, and it’s become The show is over,. One of the common strands of themes of what you practice but also of the exhibition is deep collaboration. Perhaps we could just use that as a theme to start talking about the show and perhaps how you worked with Moved by the Motion, which is a group you created a few years ago?

Wu Tsang

One of my very first thoughts when I was invited to do a show here was about responding to the unique character of the building and the space. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to do something that could work with the porousness of the building. Since I work primarily in film and video installation, sound and light can be challenging in a space like this. At the same time, I also thought it offered some unique possibilities. For example, the fact that the sound really travels between all the floors gave me this initial idea about two films that shared a soundtrack. Of course, the project evolved a lot over the last two years but in the end I’m very happy that initial idea that inspired the exhibition was able to be realized.

The main film that was created is called The Show is over,, which was in collaboration with the Schauspielhaus Zurich, which is the theater where I’m currently in residence with a group of a collective that I co-founded called Moved by the Motion. I have some core collaborators that are living in Zurich. We’re all living in Zurich together. They are very present throughout this exhibition because we’re showing some earlier works and also two new films. The newest film was sort of realized for this space. My collaborators are Tosh Basco, Josh Johnson, Asma Maroof and Patrick Belaga who’s not living in Zurich. The five of us composed the core group of Moved by the Motion. We also work often with the poet Fred Moten. 

We have a sort of expanded group of guests and collaborators that encompass a lot of people. There’s actually a lot of those people as well included in this exhibition, a lot of musicians, singers, writers, poets, dancers, performers, actors. I’d say most notably, for example, ‘The Show is Over,’ that was produced at the Schauspielhaus Zurich features a lot of the performers that are part of the ensemble there, the actor ensemble.

I think one of the things that ties all of the works together are these long-term collaborations that are very much rooted in the social life of how we spend time together and also how we study together. We work a lot with Fred Moten, who’s a poet. We like to read together. That’s usually kind of how everything begins is starting with text and starting with research and history and different kinds of approaches to language.

Anna Colin

You’ve just discussed Fred Moten being a central figure in the collective and someone you collaborate with a lot. His poem ‘Come on, get it!’ is kind of an inspiration or starting point for many of the works in the exhibition. We could say that perhaps— well, I’m not saying that because Fernando Zalamea, who is writing for the book said it— but it’s The Show is Over, is a kind of visual imagination of the poem in some ways. It would be interesting to hear about— you’ve said that you read a lot with the group— how the poem was extracted and inserted in your film. I also understand that Fred Moten’s works… his poem is in the film but your work and the group of Moved by the Motion feeds back into his work. I’m interested in this exchange.

Wu Tsang

Yeah, the poem ‘Come on, get it!’ that Fred wrote is an ongoing poem. He started it years ago and there’s all these different iterations of it. The most recent two sections of it are published in a book called All That Beauty which he recently published around the time that we were starting to work together a lot on performance projects together. 

Yeah, the stained-glass work and also The Show is Over, and also the new film, The more we read all that beauty, the more unreadable we are are all blended into this process, I guess. 

The way we work is mostly in dialogue with each other creatively, casually, emails, texts, phone calls more so virtually than in person because of this current pandemic. I think that the root of it is this communication that we all have with each other.

The Show is Over, comes from this collective reading that we do of ‘Come on, get it!’ that involves a lot of research into all the references. There’s infinite references in the poem and also music, the way music filters through the language of the poem. One of our collaborators, Asma Maroof is an electronic musician and DJ. We did a series of performances over the past year that were called compositions. Those compositions were sort of a development of the reading of this poem. We did one that was rooted in the first part of the poem. Then we did a second one that was really rooted in the music that was referenced in the poem that was more of like a remix or something. Then we did a third one which was actually a kind of filmic interpretation using live performance. 

There’s a running theme around images and the relationship of images to language, and also images to storytelling, and also images to representation. The conversations that we’re often having have to do with the impossibility of capturing images of our sociality or even that desire to see ourselves or to make ourselves unseen. There’s a lot of themes in the poem which then carry into the film and also into the sculptural work that’s about seeing through things and looking. That’s something I think that was starting before even this project with ‘Come on, get it!’ but also continuing into the next things we do.

Anna Colin

We’re standing in front or we’re sitting, rather, in front of this work Safe Space which was created out of a particular period where you were organizing a club night in a bar in L.A. This was all about, I guess, the difficulty. It was a challenge to capture something that was going to fade at some point...

Wu Tsang

I often work between documentary and narrative filmmaking. That’s something that I… I came from documentary. My first big project that I did was a feature documentary called Wildness. Wildness was produced in a time where I was living in Los Angeles and I was doing a nightclub. It was very much about the social context in which we were working, creating and having social life together. This neon sign… actually, The Fist is Still Up is reminiscent from that time period. It actually is directly referencing something that was taking place in the film, which I think often happens with my sculptural work. It’s not like sets from the film necessarily but they’re objects that have resonance with the film.  

I think one of the things that’s really evolved over the last decade is, I guess, my fluency in the different cinematic languages, like the language of documentary and how you tell a story or how you represent something. Also, the language of narrative filmmaking which would be something more like fiction where there’s a script and actors. I have developed my own fluency with these languages to produce sort of a hybrid language. For me, my favorite thing is actually when the performance feels real. Or when it feels like we’re in a fictional space but then it turns into a live moment. These kind of slippages between reality and fantasy are always very exciting to me.

For example, with the film The Show is Over,, I think it has a very hybrid feeling to it where it’s definitely not a documentary but it’s also not quite a story. There are characters and there are performers, but it’s sliding in and out of something feeling like you’re being told a story in a traditional way but then also slipping into something like an event that’s being captured, like a performance.

One of the things that’s really become important to me is thinking about camera language composition and framing, and specifically camera choreography as a way to approach filmmaking in a different way. There’s a sort of power dynamic that’s usually implied between the camera and the performers where the camera is capturing the performers. The performers are sort of there to be in service to the image. When we’re working, we’re often looking for ways to subvert even that process, even that approach to making something.

For example, we have these very strange camera movements that happen in the film which seem unmotivated. That’s what you would call it in conventional filmmaking terms is that it’s not motivated by the scene or the character or the story. It’s just moving and it’s roving. It’s mysterious and it points to something behind it, like a mechanism or a being or some sort of spirit. The performers are really dancing with it or moving with it or cheekily acknowledging it or ignoring it. Giving the performers that invitation to respond in whichever way they want for me is a very exciting way to work. It’s something that I’ve been doing before this and I hope to continue after.

Anna Colin

I wonder if you could talk about your relationship to music. That’s a big field. You’ve run a club night, you’ve made vinyls for artworks... You address the subject of music historically and in a contemporary manner very directly in your films. I don’t know if there’s something you’d like to share about music.

Wu Tsang

I’m definitely not musically able but I am very musically informed. I’m a fan, I guess, of so many of my friends who make music. For me, it’s always exciting… The thing about film is that it offers a way to experience music in a contained way that can be shaped by imagery and also can be shared and disseminated in different ways than live music can be. 

I’ve always worked very closely with musicians, in particular with Asma Maroof and Patrick Belaga who do the score for The Show is Over,. It’s very much a conversation, I think, that is rooted in thinking about different ways of communicating and telling stories outside of language. For example, I also work this way with dancers and I also work this way with performers where I think I’m really excited about developing ways of telling the story through performance, through sound, through movement, that are… We get on the same page through the text but then are really open to interpretation through their different disciplines and how they express themselves. 

I think as a filmmaker, as a film director and also as an editor, I bring my voice through that process of directing and editing. I think, for example, editing to me can be very musical. When I edit I’m often mostly existing in the realm of sound more than of image. I kind of sometimes don’t even look at the image when I’m editing. I’m just listening and looking past the image and developing a sense of rhythm. 

I feel like the scores for the films, for example, are very collaborative in the sense that I really go to Asma with ideas, she gives me material to work with, I edit with it, I go back to her, we rescore. It’s like really we pass it back and forth and it comes into being together.

Anna Colin

Do you pass it back and forth to the others, for example to the performers? It’s not just between you and Asma, is it? It’s a chain process.

Wu Tsang

Yeah, we pass everything back and forth. I think, again, the text always is the starting point. Then there’s all these iterations that we go through and trying things. Actually, in the beginning of making something I really love this beginning phase where it’s really just exploratory and playful and often we do really stupid things. I think that space of doing without thinking is a really productive space. When we’re developing the works, at the very end when I’m looking at the finished film, I love to look back at the early stuff that we were doing because I see how it’s all connected. It’s just the process is about connecting all the in-betweens and also clueing the audience in to what our process is.

I think these languages could be quite specific or these references could be quite specific. People often say, “I don’t understand the poem. It’s so dense” or “It’s so poetic.” I just say, “There’s nothing that you’re supposed to understand. It’s actually just about allowing all of it to wash over you and hit you visually, sonically and make what you can of it.” Each time it means something different. For me even when I read the poem, it always means something different to me.

Anna Colin

You can say the same of the film. In a way, you’ve never wanted to fix any kind of meaning or interpretation onto the film. It is very open the way you talk about it or write about it. I guess you never see the same thing as you watch it. It’s hard to describe how to… Yeah, people will be tempted to categorize it.

Wu Tsang

Yeah. Actually, the film upstairs, The more we read all that beauty, the more unreadable we are, for me that is kind of like a notebook that’s shifting through all this material that, for various reasons, is not in The Show is Over, or that is referenced beyond it or before it or after it but it’s also connected. I actually didn’t make that film until I arrived in Paris and was at Lafayette Anticipations working in the space. I felt like it actually really needed to just be made right here, right now. 

In a way, I wonder— and I don’t know if this is true but I like to think that it’s true— that this film could always change. I think it’s like a shuffling of the deck of what’s important. It’s meant to have a kind of a feeling of note taking or annotation or just like, “These are the things I’m thinking about right now in relation to this project.” I wonder if that could mean that it always changes. I don’t know.

Anna Colin

James Baldwin is quite present in this film.

Wu Tsang

Yeah, he is. Yeah.

Anna Colin

He was present in the preparation to The Show is Over, as well and he’s present in Fred Moten’s writing. Do you want to say perhaps something about the specific extracts you chose to include in that film?

Wu Tsang

Yeah. I don’t often work with archival material. I think there are so many people that do that so well that for me, I’ve just never felt compelled in that way that I need to become… I think sometimes archival material can be sort of daunting in that thing of the selection or the edits. How do you choose what to include and what to omit? How do you recontextualize these references that so many people probably already have associations for?

In this case I think Baldwin became increasingly important as this project went on because he’s sort of the setup for All That Beauty, the book that Fred published with ‘Come on, get it!’ in it where he writes a short opening essay, a prefatory note where he talks about Baldwin and his ways of looking and seeing. Baldwin’s eyes basically are a running theme that actually have been, even earlier actually in the Sudden Rise pieces that are in this show.

It has to do with this idea of an intimate distance that Baldwin has where he can be so close to something and also see outside of it, or see through things and also invite us to see outside ourselves through him. He just plays with all these ways of looking in terms of how we understand Baldwin.

I have a lot of material that I was going through, but the thing that enabled me to choose these particular selections have to do with his eyes. 

I feel like you see so much about what he’s trying to communicate and how his eyes are in these documents depending on who he’s talking to, what he’s trying to say. It just says so much to me about the sort of weight that he carries as a thinker and the way he thinks and sees. 

I chose two particular moments where he’s having… One is where literally he’s talking about “What do you see when you look at me?” and the other one where he’s explaining to someone who clearly has not that understanding. It’s a bit frustrating but it’s also like he has so much patience. Then the other one he’s, I think, a bit more open and he’s remembering something about his childhood. He’s always talking about, I think, related things around how can we exist together? This relates so much to how we see each other. There’s these very different ways that his body or his body language or affect convey not only his investment in these beliefs but also in how he communicates them to people.

We were shooting The Show is Over, in March and we finished the shoot actually just one or two days before the lockdown happened in Switzerland and also I think worldwide. It was within that window of one to two weeks where everything was shut down. It was a very strange process to make this film, to edit it because I was in quarantine and going through those initial waves of trying to understand what was happening. I had all this footage of this moment that was captured just before “when things were normal” and then now we’re in this sort of surreal moment.

What I actually believe is that things were never normal and that they never should be normal. Whatever that fantasy of what that was and what we want it to now become, I don’t actually subscribe to any of that thinking. For example, in the film we were actually working a lot with this one Baldwin text called “A Report from Occupied Territory” which is an essay about the Harlem Six that was written in 1966. It’s about an incident of police brutality and policing incarceration, and the utter incompetence and the racism of the criminal justice system in the United States, but I think this also could be applied to a lot of different contexts where the law is not there to protect everyone. It’s there to serve a certain contingent of a society and criminalize the other contingents. 

This is an essay that was written 50 years ago but literally the language of it and what it’s talking about, it could be about the present moment. This was all just there in the project and in the working on it, and then there was the murder of George Floyd and this sort of moment where all of a sudden, the world was finally in a much bigger significant way paying attention to the Black Lives Matter movement which has been around as well and has been doing this work. 

I’m never interested in prescience or timeliness because I think these things have a continuity with generations. That recursiveness of time for me is always in the project. It’s like we’re looking back and we’re looking forward and we’re just seeing the layers of how these things recycle and repeat, and also really focusing on the things that we do as modes of resistance. There’s not one way to resist but there’s all these ways. A lot of that for me has to do with this being together. That often is able to be created in the making of the performances in the films.