This is the second episode of a series interview with my immigrant friends. Each of each contains different content but in the meantime similar in a way. The total run time of each video is around an hour. Feel free to treat it as a podcast or background music and discover the surprise moment in it.

There was a part Wayne talked about Utopia, to be precise, what is Utopia. He sort of thinks it through during the interview about the definition of it. He said: “Imagine something beyond reach, a critic of presence lack of whatever.” Utopia is something that can’t be materialized. When the paradox of the meaning appeared in his mind, it confused him for a bit then shortly he realized that is exactly what utopia means. The moment or that part perfectly presents the idea of utopia. Also, he talked about his idea about immigrants, which is complicated. That tells it all… I couldn’t quote what he said individually, it’s like extracting a single drip from a stream. But if look it as a whole thing it becomes a surface that can be clear sometimes, reflective things and some moist illusion. You can see the fish and the world under it but you won’t feel the chill until you jump in it.

This is a series interview with my immigrant friends. Each of each contains different content but in the meantime similar in a way. The total run time of each video is around an hour. Feel free to treat it as a podcast or background music and discover the surprise moment in it.

Daniela Stubbs-Levi is a Peruvian artist, poet, and musician based in New York City. She received her BA in Graphic Arts from Toulouse Lautrec in Lima Peru, and later a BFA in Visual Arts from the University Paris VIII in France. Stubbs-Leví was born in Berlin, raised in Lima, studied in Paris, and currently lives in New York. Her sense of displacement informs her work and leads her to embrace and delve into the relativism implied in the act of remembering: memory is not a fixed device but more likely an ever-changing frame with which we measure reality. She is interested in dissecting music as sound — a pivot balancing between language and meaning— and notations for their use in different contexts that explore the nature of time and its connection to emotion. She uses mediums such as video, photography, sound, drawing, and writing as individual voices that coexist giving each one space for dialogue.

https://danielastubbslevi.com/

During the interview, she mentioned something that’s haunted my mind. She mentioned Anne Carson’s lecture about stillness which talks about immigrants as a quote because we are the quote without context. Anne Carson references the Antigone by Sophocles, how Antigone was put in the dark cave(Tomb) and became a metic that changes her status to be an immigrant, someone in between. Antigone was pulled out of the status neither alive nor dead, she was foreign to both of them. Giorgio Agamben also said, “to cite is to pull it out of the customary meaning but refused to let it settle to the new meaning”.

I like how Daniela introduced what she did was finding or be something in between. I had a friend like that too, who’s no long in U.S. but that had me thought about the feeling of hesitation and how powerful it could be.

In my research I was looking into lies, something not real nor fake, because all the lie you told was already in the memory and they might become real during the time it was told. Talk with Daniela remind me of different aspect of my lies, but to put them back into the context of my creation will erase the unsubstituted status. In that sense, I am the King Creon and I let my project or my immigrant status dry as Antigone at the cave. I quote it all the time because I couldn’t think it through…

Many thanks.

The way I create videos is straightforward. I do the video, create the story, shooting, editing then done. I deal with the installation later if there’s any. But this time I am doing this differently, I tried to picture what the installation will be.

Back in January 2020, I was working on “Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager” at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. The space I was exhibited was very unique, a circular space with two floors. The first floor was just a black box space but the second floor has a big hole to the first floor in the middle of the space and the wall has an altar-ish look, not to mention the floor was all wooden floor.

I was thinking about the relation between the viewer and space, when the viewer walks in it, they traveled to see each altar and what’s inside. My original idea was to install objects that related to the video on the first floor and serving as a chronological exhibition. Thus when the audience walks they will become the time.

I kept this idea in mind and picked it up recently. My idea for this project was to shoot ten scenes, each scene represents a year, then it will be my past ten years. Those scenes will all be similar with two actors walking and chatting from right to left, talking about different things while they are walking. Each scene will sit around two minutes that make the total length to be 20 mins. The audience will walk with the actors from the first screen to the last scene, when the actor walks to the end of the left the screen will keep playing the scene without actors. This work will take a long space to exhibit, but it can alternatively be exhibited on one screen with ten scenes one after one, it just won’t be that cool…
I do not intend to show the notes of each scene, instead, I will just post my notes and researches that related to it. Perhaps at some point, I will have it display as a more clear story and post it as one post.

References book “Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film” by Giuliana Bruno, Publisher: Verso, 2018