{"id":1941,"date":"2018-05-14T23:27:53","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T23:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/?page_id=1941"},"modified":"2024-05-29T21:03:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T21:03:19","slug":"text-by-human-poney","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/text-by-human-poney","title":{"rendered":"Text by Human Poney (AQNB)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Maheke<\/a> enters the large auditorium of Santander\u2019s cultural institution Bot\u00edn Center<\/a> casually, feet shuffling lightly along the floor against the backdrop of a trance-like soundtrack. Dressed only in boxer briefs, a white tank top and socks, the London-based artist feels out the space, moving between bodies in the audience and the stage area. Presented on April 17 as part of the Body Ecologies<\/i> programme put together by Santander\u2019s independent art space fluent<\/a>, Maheke\u2019s performance \u2018A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)\u2019 (2018) follows one by Mary Hurrell<\/a> on January 30, closing with another by Louisa Martin<\/a> on May 26. The three-part series is the research project of curator Alejandro Alonso Diaz<\/a> whose \u201cconclusions appear in the form of experiences, gestures, intuitions and emotions, rather than via words and concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diaz notes the research opts toward embodied experience and sensorial thinking to track the \u201cchanging ways our bodies work, breathe, dream and interact.\u201d Looking at performance for its potential to \u201ctranscend the use of language,\u201d movement, gesture and ambience become vehicles to explore limit, potential, and transformation in relation to human identity and perception.<\/p>\n

Maheke\u2019s performance, which runs in conversation with current solo exhibition A fire circle for a public hearing<\/i><\/a> at London\u2019s Chisenhale<\/a>, mutates seamlessly between layers of fragmented choreography. From small facial expressions and performative tropes to Michael Jackson references and bodybuilding poses, gestures form and fall away like stray thoughts. In what feels like a prelude, the pace of movement remains a constant throughout but the atmosphere gradually intensifies. Large curtains slowly come down, the space darkens. A large projected video takes centre stage. Spinning footage of the artist dancing in their studio creates a dizzying, centrifugal effect. Through image, sound and body, the viewer enters an atmosphere of physiological experience that seeks to communicate without representation.<\/p>\n

The attempt to move past language is the attempt to move into new paradigms \u2014 how do we free ourselves from words, from the fabric that formed them? How do we purge ourselves from its inherent violence, or, as Diaz notes, \u201creshift into a new planetary choreography to rearticulate these logics, which range from our daily unconscious gestures to the migration of species\u201d? In a conversation that attempts to unpick some of these questions, Maheke expands on the multiple narratives that emerge and intersect within a body \u2014 where archive, memory, marginalised identities and the colonial body reappear like ghosts.<\/p>\n

**There are so many elements going on in your work, not just through the layering of sound, video and performance, but also the references. Can we start by talking about your process?<\/i><\/p>\n

Paul Maheke: <\/i>I often describe my practice as a magma, it\u2019s kind of solid at times and liquid at other times \u2014 it\u2019s always layers that are accumulating throughout time, and so I always have the feeling that I\u2019m moving forward bit by bit, somehow. One thing helps me to do another thing, so I like to think of the exhibitions and performances as moments of research, as well.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in tropes, representations and cliches, and how to re-digest them. For example, I\u2019m not interested in using cliches per say, but if I am to use them, they need to be filtered for them to become interesting. So it\u2019s very much about digestion and the rendition of that \u2013 how does movement transform in the space (that is my body) and how can two ppl meet in my body and what does that create.<\/p>\n

** Like you\u2019re channelling something?<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: Exactly, everything happening really quickly. But there is a lot of research of course in the sense that my work is very much influenced by a lot of things such as feminisms and writing and poetry\u2026<\/p>\n

**: Are there people in specific you keep coming back to?<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: I usually say Michael Jackson is the reason why I\u2019m dancing, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres is the reason I keep making art. So those two are very important for me, that\u2019s why in the Chisenhale show there are references to both of them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very absorbent. I\u2019m really interested in putting together things that are not necessarily obvious together. It\u2019s a lot of things colliding and I\u2019m interested in the tensions between them and even the conflicts or contradictions. For example, for this performance, there is this idea of jumping in and out of a person all the time, almost as if possessed by some spirits.<\/p>\n

**Yes! You look like you\u2019re under a spell when you\u2019re performing\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: Especially for that one because there\u2019s all those facial expressions, but it was interesting to see how various movements could come together in a single narrative, and this is often what I\u2019m doing with text or in my videos \u2013 trying to put together things that were not and making them as seamless as possible.<\/p>\n

Paul Meheke, \u2018A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)\u2019 (2018) Body Ecologies performance documentation. Courtesy the artist, Centro Bot\u00edn and fluent, Santander<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

**It seems like all these movements travel around the periphery of something, like it\u2019s about what\u2019s being left out and what\u2019s not there. Or this moment of the rehearsal or the before or after, rather than the performance itself.<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: Yeah totally \u2013 for example, with Michael Jackson, I\u2019ve been looking at videos of him rehearsing because I was interested in that kind of underperformed quality. I\u2019m always interested in what\u2019s left untold and unseen, and there\u2019s something quite poetic about the rehearsal \u2014 this kind of repetition of movement almost as if stuttering, of rendering them with an uncertainty, something that is not quite so clear. There\u2019s a lot of movements that are starting but not really finishing and then transitioning to something else.<\/p>\n

**Yeah, those \u2018not yet\u2019 moments make you feel like your watching something very intimate happen, or you\u2019re thinking about the space around you somehow. Or maybe a memory, what once was and is now just an afterthought\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: When I speak about the work, often I\u2019ve been using the word \u2018ghost\u2019 to describe it, even the references or the people that surround my practice, or have been influential for it to flourish \u2013 about channeling some others.<\/p>\n

**Yeah, I want to talk about these ghosts, but first, in relation to channeling, does your process feel somewhat outside of your control or that it\u2019s open other forces somehow \u2018making the decisions\u2019?<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: It\u2019s a mixture I think, for example the show at Chisenhale, I really have the feeling that the work preceded me, in the sense that I wasn\u2019t able to see the full dimension of the work and how important that was for me, up until the moment it was done and performed by other people, somehow. I had the same thing with my first video, when everything seems to click without me really being part of that process, so I guess there is almost a magical element. It sounds really romantic and cheesy.<\/p>\n

**Not to me. Especially the way you explore a non-linear sense of time \u2014 this seems like an essential thing to tap into.<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: Yeah, totally, linearity for me always speaks from a place of violence. I cannot think of anything else but violence when I\u2019m thinking of it. And of erasure, as well.<\/p>\n

**Could you talk about the relationship between nonlinear time and erasure and in your work, and how it relates to circularity which seems a strong component of your practice?<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: I\u2019m really interested in the idea of circularity and this non-aggressive way of occupying a territory. For example, the way nomadic people use a circle of patterns to not wear out the soil, or not wear out the resources where they are living. But there is also this thing of the way linearity speaks of the western mind and how things are meant to make sense and they never made sense for me (even though I\u2019m a western person). I think it has to do with queerness, as well, where my understanding of the world is very much a layering. Things are happening simultaneously and they can speak to each other, or not, and they may or may not encounter even, but it\u2019s way more messy than that and I\u2019m interested in that kind of confusion of power. The work is about that somehow. For example, the video, sound and dancing are following three parallel lines and they are encountering at times, and branching off, and that\u2019s where that in-between is and where the work resides.<\/p>\n

Paul Meheke, \u2018A familiar familial place of confusion (Channel)\u2019 (2018) Body Ecologies performance documentation. Courtesy the artist, Centro Bot\u00edn and fluent, Santander.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And in terms of time \u2014 again back to this project at Chisenhale \u2014 it was also one of those things, like what would be a queer, black understanding of time, for example. That\u2019s when I started to think back to Michael Jackson and also the vogue ballroom scene, where everything is happening at the same time on the sides, in the centre, in the middle, above, underneath. For me, it\u2019s almost a counter-example to the white cube and to this thing of having to isolate something in order to value it and to understand that it\u2019s valued. The vogue ballroom scene is the opposite; the fact that everything is happening simultaneously makes the thing interesting. I think, for me, that was as close to an understanding of space and time according to queerness and blackness.<\/p>\n

**You can really feel that complex layering in your work \u2014 but also moments of push and pull that work against each other \u2014 I guess I\u2019m referring to the way your work occupies both a space of freedom and movement, as well as stasis and limitation.<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: For this piece, I think there are clear references to that; to the impossibility of escaping masculinity because of the way my body looks. What was really hard for me in this work was not to fall into that trap of binaries \u2014 like masculine or feminine \u2014 but finding something that would be a bit more uncanny or unsettling.<\/p>\n

**Yeah, I was really feeling those socks; <\/i><\/p>\n

PM: If I were to remove the socks, then I would just be a typical contemporary dancer. There\u2019s something a bit comical about them, about the work, as well, in the movement that I\u2019m doing. I felt this vulnerability at the beginning because it\u2019s very rare that I show my body in my performances and so this was somehow very revealing for me. So the first moment when I\u2019m just walking around in full light was very, oof<\/i>, I felt very self conscious somehow.<\/p>\n

**As well as the way the \u2018beginning\u2019 of it started, very casually, warming up and the audience was staring in anticipation or confusion.<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: I like to work around those moments, the transition of what\u2019s considered a performance and what\u2019s not. The photographer only started to photograph me once the light was down, when, for me, the prelude is totally part of the performance \u2013 those kind of liminal spaces, or in between spaces, I\u2019m really interested in. The socks are not necessarily speaking to that but there is a little bit of how to bring the domestic into the space, which is an art venue, and how to bring in the mundane.<\/p>\n

**There is a nice relationship between your choreography and the other elements, which felt enormous in comparison \u2014 the space, the lighting and also the circulating video. Somewhere between the simple and the spectacle\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: I\u2019m often using very simple means. With the video I started to experiment with movement in the studio and I placed a camera on the fan that was just above me, and I started to dance. Very DIY, very simple. That\u2019s often what I\u2019m doing. I see it almost as a timer. It\u2019s an ever-present thing that is there in the space circulating, gravitating. As well, there were a lot of ideas around cosmology and this kind of broader understanding of the world, and of existence and humanity. Somehow very pretentious and ambitious, these kind of connections between the domestic and the cosmic, but yeah the spinning video there were big ideas to take on board.<\/p>\n

**All these elements existing within one fractal almost. I remember when I first encount ered your work, you spoke about a lot of these ideas (the cosmic, the formless) in relation to water and hydrofeminism.<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: Hydrofeminism is a text I bumped into, now almost two years ago, when I was trying to think about how to unlearn resistance as opposition. Resistance has always been present in my work as a position from which to speak from, but how to avoid exhausting yourself and on a personal level, thinking about desire. It was connected to a lot of things.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I realised that I was working with those moments of resistance but I was hitting a wall that was way too hard for me. So how to not exhaust yourself, or to burn yourself out and still feel resilient and resistant. When I started to think about water, a friend of mine, Sophie Mallet, gave me that text and it all made sense. The approach of hydrofeminist is both mythological but also very political and embedded in a lot of thinking around geographies and around identity at large. Often I\u2019m interested in how I can escape, how to think of identity outside of identity politics, and it\u2019s representational tropes. I think water helped me to do that and to abstract a little bit more.<\/p>\n

Water was also connected to this idea of formlessness, and formlessness now is kind of back in my work through the figure of the ghost.<\/p>\n

**Yes, let\u2019s talk about the ghost(s). Have there been any defining moments in your life with ghosts?<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with ghosts. Every Wednesday, I would go to the library and look at pictures of ghosts but then I became super scared. I couldn\u2019t hear anything about ghosts up until I was maybe 15 [years old]. When I was 26, I met this psychic woman and she told me, \u2018Paul, you have something.\u2019 She told me that I\u2019ve been past on something and that I should acknowledge it because it\u2019s there. Then shortly after that I had my first ghost experience, which was very acute, where I started to see people in my room.<\/p>\n

It intensified when I moved to London, and I think I was living in a haunted house. I mean full of ghosts \u2014 really. I would have those presences come at night and it was a little bit scary, not nice.<\/p>\n

During my residency this year at Altos de Chavon in Dominican Republic<\/a>, we were told loads of ghost stories. The site is built on former territories and sanctuaries of the Taino indigenous population, who were exterminated by colonization. I met with a medium there who told me I have an untrained psychic energy that I should use because it\u2019s as if I was in denial \u2014 as if I was denying the teeth in my mouth. But it\u2019s still something that frightens me.<\/p>\n

Also this is telling me that everything is still here, nothing disappeared, and it\u2019s embodied in us and it\u2019s in the wall of our architectures, its like everywhere; this erasure.<\/p>\n

**God, the ghost as a metaphor for erasure. But it\u2019s more than a metaphor\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

PM: It\u2019s everything. The ghost is everything and nothing. It may or may not appear; may appear to some people and not to others, occupies different dimensions, different beliefs, and is a figure of the past, the present and the future. There\u2019s a blurring in time, kind of like this thing of removing myself more and more from the representational and letting nonhuman forms of life speak to our subjectivity and our bodies, somehow. what it means to have an existence that doesn\u2019t exist in the visible realm, or in the realm of the visible. How this speaks to the absence and presence of black and brown narratives, marginalized narratives throughout western history.**<\/p>\n

A conversation with Paul Maheke on erasure, ghosts and channeling the space between<\/a> by Human Poney for AQNB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Maheke enters the large auditorium of Santander\u2019s cultural institution Bot\u00edn Center casually, feet shuffling lightly along the floor against the backdrop of a trance-like soundtrack. Dressed only in boxer briefs, a white tank top and socks, the London-based artist feels out the space, moving between bodies in the audience and the stage area. Presented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1941","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4E7Fe-vj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1941"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3519,"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1941\/revisions\/3519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulmaheke.com\/projets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}