Surviving, Sustaining, and Grieving in Place

MicroCosmos is an inquiry into our ability to affect meaningful change on a small scale through the inner dimensions of artistic practice. How are artists tapping into those inner dimensions to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live? When things feel out of control on a macro scale, how do our artistic gifts meet the needs of the world?

In response to these questions, MicroCosmos co-curators Javiera Benavente, Matthew Glassman, and Nick Slie created a framework of creative prompts and then convened artists who are knee deep in this inquiry to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. In this conversation, Liza Bielby and paris cyan cian come together to discuss their responses to the MicroCosmos framework in a conversation facilitated by Matthew Glassman. Liza Bielby is co-director of Detroit-based experimental performance ensemble the Hinterlands and co-organizer of arts and culture organization Play House Laboratories. Her meticulously crafted and genre-defying performances and events exploring untold histories and potential cultural escape-hatches have been seen in museums, theatres, galleries, and public spaces around the world including the Shanghai Biennial, Flynn Center, Kohler Arts Center, Teatro Libre, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and more. paris cyan cian is a New Orleans Black girl playing and composing with devotion and impermanence. As a movement architect, scholar, and curator working with and through various interdisciplinary forms of performance art, cyan’s creative work mobilizes embodied memory and ecological play into a worldmaking practice.

This encounter represents the culmination of a three-part process of individual work. The process began by convening pairs of artists who are knee deep in this inquiry. We invited each to reflect, study, and then encounter a fellow practitioner they’ve never met. Each participant in the MicroCosmos project undertook a three-part process of individual work. They were asked to meditate on five questions:

What questions and callings are you living?

What are the places, spaces, and relationships that are undergirding you and your work?

What seeds are you planting and tending?

What are the practices that would help you?

What are the experiments you yearn to conduct?

Then, participants engaged in shared study of excerpts from Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution by Lynn Margulis, “When You Meet the Monster, Anoint its Feet” by Bayo Akomolafe, and "Communication is Sacred” by Nora Bateson. Finally, participants created a short expressive response in any creative medium as a way of sharing what the prompts and shared study activated in them. Those creative responses appear interspersed throughout the following conversation.

Liza Bielby: I am a performance maker, and I work with Richard Newman and Jenna Kirk in a group called the Hinterlands that I helped build. The three of us work together all the time, and then there are two other people who train with us. We train usually three to four times a week in vocal and physical practices. We, with a couple more artists, manage a space in our neighborhood north of Hamtramck, called Play House. And my partner, Richard Newman, and I have managed that space for eleven years.

Right now we're touring a piece called Will You Miss Me? It has songs and family stories that are set around a funeral context. In it, we are working on traditional songs specific to our lineages—songs from specific peoples and places in the British Isles. These are songs that traveled to the United States into Appalachia, where my grandmother's from. They offer a way to kind of deal with whiteness and this cut-off from ancestry that I think is a real problem, not just personally, but culturally and globally, that keeps manifesting. When you have a bunch of people who cut themselves off from their lineage and cut other people off from their lineage, it's always going to result in violence, I think, until you find something else. So that's personal work that we do within the context of our theatre work.

We’re also working on a piece called Sunset about the digital, enchantment, the internet, and how we're engaging with these actually very magical powers—for which we don't have a mythology nor an understanding. So we’re looking at myth-telling, trying to understand what we're engaging when we're engaging with digital technology, how we can undo some of the patterns of dominance and white supremacy culture that manifests itself in these spaces. It's actually a fun project, but it's reshaping how I'm thinking.

paris cyan cian: I'm a performance artist, very interdisciplinary. I like making sounds. I like making films sometimes, not a lot of the time. I like being outside and being with the land and nature and water to understand myself and understand how I relate to the world. I draw a lot to also see and make sense of the shapes that come to me. And I do write a lot, sometimes the same thing over and over.

For the last three years, I've been researching and working on a project around oysters. I am thinking about the oyster body as an ancestor, as a conduit, and as a guide to understand what's going on in the Gulf South at the moment with regard to our waters. How can I communicate with the shoreline? How can I communicate with this swamp place that I call home? What are oysters as sea bodies and also bodies that hold other habitats? What can I learn from them in order to understand myself and to understand what is happening to our land?

I am in the works of developing a collective of my own, the Shore Collective, as a group of artists in different fields and mediums. At the moment, most of us are not in the same part of the world. In some form, we are all working with/around water or working with the waterways that are near us. We had a performance in June 2023, modjeskamodjeskamodjeska, and we recently published this archive portal, watabodies.me, a space negotiating different bodies of water, histories of maroonage between the Gulf South and Jamaica and how they intersect.

Currently, I am building a sound and wearable sculpture made out of oyster shells and biodegradable materials. The next desire is to build a public art installation for durational, site-specific performance. And yeah, I’ll go from there, who knows where.

How do we cultivate a collaborative relationship with distance and also a collaborative relationship to support that individual wherever they are in location and process? When do those practices intertwine?

Liza: Something you said about writing the same thing over and over again—there's something about repetition that really resonates with me because I think as a culture, the United States always wants to move on, move on, and move on. But there's something about staying in the place and the needle going over the same spot in the record or digging a bit deeper. I've been thinking about time, groundedness, and roots. I'm not from Detroit, but I was born in Flint and that's pretty close, and I didn't really grow up there. We moved around a bunch. Now I've lived in Detroit for fourteen years, which isn't very long to live somewhere, but it is starting to feel like somewhere that I know on some level. So I've been thinking about the floor and groundedness and what is holding me up so that then I can better hold up my students or even myself or the parts of the community I need to hold.

paris: I would say that where I'm challenged is I haven't quite taken the time to solidify what the Shore Collective is, to make it concrete—not for me, but for the world. How do we cultivate a collaborative relationship with distance and also a collaborative relationship to support that individual wherever they are in location and process? When do those practices intertwine? Can our next step be to take the time to give us a foundation?

The collaborative nature of what we're all doing is actually quite clear, and I feel like I'm entering the place to be ready to make that foundation. So that feels good. But honestly, this timing for the MicroCosmos is really lovely because I do need a moment of pause to just think about what is happening in my internal world. What is happening for everybody else in their internal world? How do I shape myself in that community and those conversations? I feel like I'm entering an assessment moment. As I begin to close out my twenties, I also feel like I just need an assessment of what I'm doing with my creative self and my sustainability of that. What is it that I want to give birth that would offer me some foundation for my practice?

Matthew Glassman: So, “what questions and callings am I living?”

paris: What is grief and the habitat of my body, and what is grief for Louisiana?

Liza: How can I be responsible to this moment? How am I building worlds that I want to be in, and how can I not get stuck in the relationship of banging my head against the wall or trying to bang against the wall that won't move? And what's holding me up? What's my lineage?

Right now, I'm focused too much on survival, and I want to get back to “anything is possible.”

Matthew: And if I can ask you each, what's your calling?

Liza: I don't know. I truly do not know what my calling is. I can only—

Matthew: What calls you?

Liza: The light in the studio, the wood floor.

paris: I am really starting to feel closer to this question. I know it has to do with world building, public space, and place-making with people. I know that's also deeply related to my strange relationship to New Orleans.

Matthew: What are the places and relationships that undergird you and your work? You can just list them.

paris: Appalachia. I lived in Virginia for a while. I went to college there, and mountains changed me. So, mountains, anywhere where oysters grow, our coastal spaces, Louisiana, the ocean, my ancestors.

Liza: Lake Superior where I grew up. My neighborhood in Detroit. My space that I work out of and the people I work there with. And Chengdu, China where I have lived over a long time. I have a list of teachers who I think about. Sometimes I orient my practice: before I go in the studio, I'll think of where they are geographically in relation to me. I move to the four directions and think about people here and gone and who I call into the studio with me each time. Good and bad.

Matthew: What are a couple of practices that would help you?

Liza: I think having someone make my schedule! Or a practice of not having to schedule in order to make days that are twenty-eight hours long or three hours long and to be more loose and luxurious with time.

And to have rituals before I open technology, before I close technology, so that I can find some of the things I've lost about how I used to spend more time in the world rather than in the other world.

paris: What does solidifying this collective look like? Do I even want to do that? I have questions around sustainability and academia and being in the Gulf South. Yes, I'm from here. This is where I live. This is where I do my work. And there's also something quite isolating about it geographically and resourcefully. And in terms of climate… home here means impermanence. So how do I situate myself when I'm traveling a lot for work and balance my schedule in terms of work and survival and also still being in my practice and building community?

Matthew: What is one experiment you yearn to conduct?

paris: To throw painting into my practice. And I want to dance on water. I want to dance on a boat in the middle of the Gulf, which is a huge experiment. And I want to survive. I want to survive, and I want people to be there. I want people to be there and experience that openness of water with me. What would an audience look like in the middle of the Mississippi?

Liza: I just feel very small in thinking right now. There are pieces I want to make, but they're all things I know about and the kind of experiment I want to do is something I can't even fathom where languages don't exist or the place before language or the place after language in a place of the body, but beyond the body that is of my culture, whatever that is, and beyond that. So, there's a thought that has to happen first before I can come up with this experiment. Right now, I'm focused too much on survival, and I want to get back to “anything is possible.”

Liza: I made a series of shout outs and toasts to people and things I love that are holding me up, to try to put myself in a place where I'm like, “Okay, this moment is from this person. This is something I love.” Because too often I'm in these spaces where it just feels hard and it feels like a murky moment.

I made a short bibliography of things that have happened or I heard or I read that are holding me up right now.

paris: To start, I made a grief playlist that I'm working through. I used to make playlists based off the seasons, and I'm just going through a big grief time in this moment. I just made a playlist that's called “Grief”: It's an hour and 30 minutes at the moment, and I usually just play one song because I need that song.

I think I'm just trying to figure out what sounds I need in this moment and what's too much, what's loud enough, not having a specific trajectory other than just sit there and listen, not having a desire to move and dance to it. It just is sonically living for me. And I've been writing these poems about what grief is in addition to this playlist.

Liza: That resonated with me, and I really enjoyed hearing the poems, especially “bamboo is so loud.” We've had a very grief-filled time in our lives recently. For the last three years, someone died every year on my block, and this year that didn't happen. I was afraid to say anything because it felt so… it was so surprising that it didn't happen. It was like, every October somebody on the block would die. It just felt like this stuckness and no outlet for grief and all of the things that it is. Like the cat jumping the fence, or it's like noise that is pervasive but light. I don't know. So there's a lot in what you said that resonated. Yeah, those are the things that there's repetition and this impulse to repeat or this willingness to repeat.

paris: Yeah, willingness. Yeah.

Liza: Which I think is also bravery on your part. That, to me, is very inspiring.