Spring 2020 

  At this writing, we share the burdens of unknowns, and shifting conditions.  Our sensitivity looks towards mutual aid, safe practices, civic/humanitarian responsibility, collective mourning, and notions of protection that mark another moment (in my adult lifetime) where we seek a global cure, a vaccine, and access to wide-spread testing. Here again, we are faced with conditions for marginalized, of color, un-housed and/or incarcerated communities being unevenly affected.  As an employed TA and grad student in pursuit of a job in a market that offers bleak prospects, I move with all of us negotiating the spread of losses and re-imagined futures. In the pursuit of a master’s degree at mid-age, I cannot help but compare how this decision may have proved to be too much of a risk, though less urgent than directly affected individuals, yet rife with aging queer health and economic concerns, later in life kin care commitments, and accompanying non-normative familial ties. Yes, we are all in it together aligned by the understanding that our circumstances “contain multitudes” of concerns, blind-spots, and approaches -if merely temporary, always-in-response, and slightly out of time. Still adjusting to the reality of the “global”, as in the-entire-world-shutting-down, pandemic. 

  All of these pages except this short page originated pre-Covid-19 shelter-in-place, which for us, began on March 16, 2020.

  This Spring 2020 process, like my daily life and body, will be remembered as both too fast, and slow though a sense of hot, damp, and cold. I acknowledge my own hard-to-trace, thirty-year movement-based practice held within the opaque spaces of a time-before, and of one-to-one and durational projects - projects that recontextualize conditions of immediacy and deprivilege the measure of quantified group convening.  I re-think how the works create links and relations, despite the artworld’s networks, to unpack how the accumulation of one-to-one and durational performances coalesce spaces into co-transformed ones - where ideas are exchanged, and importantly, resisted or stealthily refused. If my practice cleaves spaces where embodiment offers the capacity to “become a container of record for another” (Tolentino, The New Museum, The Sky Remains The Same, 2006-present), I also make space to break (-open, -down, -out) and feel for what might come to light as other ways, or ancient, old and new ways returning as guide, warning, premonition, urging. 

A future holds with the past. 

  The archive, the body, the mind is held, shifted, forever changed by the Other - as a libidinal smoke for future fire.