The Language of the Body, of Affects & Hormones: An Interview With Agata Siniarska

tia-2023-fp-agata-siniarska-null-void-c-dajana-lothert-22.08.2023-20x30-24-s.jpg, default, ‘null&void’ by Agata Siniarska, photo: © Dajana Lothert | Tanz im August 2023

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‘As I worked on “null&void”, I kept asking myself: What would a land with a bomb crater in it say to me? Does that crater belong to the bomb? Does it make a kind of assemblage, or can I look at these things separately? […] War breeds bizarre hybrids’, says Agata Siniarska, choreographer and performer. Her work ‘null&void’ will be on display for the Santarcangelo Festival audience in July 2024.

Marcelina Obarska: Let me first start with the title. Initially, ‘null&void’ sounded quite poetic to me, but then I discovered that it’s also a legal term meaning ‘invalid’, ‘without legal force’.

Agata Siniarska: This work was originally going to be titled Ground Zero, but I was absolutely oblivious to the fact that this term was so strongly taken over by the context of the United States and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. As far as I was concerned, this concept was attached primarily to Hiroshima. In preparation for this performance, I headed to Japan. I went to Hiroshima and happened to be standing at the site of the explosion thinking, ‘this has to be the title’. Subsequently, people said that everyone would probably associate this work with the events of 9/11. So I looked for alternatives. Ground Zero is also the name of a Japanese noise jazz band founded in the 1990s by Otomo Yoshihide. I’m attracted to noise music, especially Japanoise, to its dynamics, and that’s why I was keen to combine the two. And since the title Ground Zero for my work was no longer on the table, and I’d listened passionately to this band’s albums, I opted for null&void, which is the title of one of their songs. Then I investigated what it means. This legal term matched the theme of my work remarkably well. I was curious to see if I could imagine how non-humans would narrate a war or any military intervention. These are the silent voices which go unheard and disregarded. When Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, what struck me was the fact that no mention was made of non-human organisms when talking about casualties. Indeed, over time the Ukrainian Ministry of the Environment came to address the topic of ecocide [aka eco-destruction or eco-ruin – a term to describe grave crimes against the environment; Ukraine is one of the countries that recognises ecocide as a crime, ed], which brought about the idea of holding Russia accountable for this destruction. I’ve never experienced any military intervention, yet if a crime affects any species, it affects me too. I was wondering whether I could give a voice in this work to those who aren’t given a voice in anthropogenic scenarios. The title null&void suited the task well, and my private didascalia (stage directions), the reference to the Japanese band, were left offstage.

‘null&void’ by Agata Siniarska, photo: © Dajana Lothert | Tanz im August 2023

MO: The association with the voices of non-humans as being ‘illegitimate’ indeed feels highly relevant in this instance.

AS: Earth has no rights in Europe. To my knowledge, the only country that officially adopted the law of the Earth is Bolivia. [The concept of ‘Pachamama’, meaning Mother Earth, is also in the constitution of Ecuador, ed.] Europe has extensive environmental discourses, yet there’s no legal recognition.

MO: The boundaries of imagination are moving. What I’m thinking of, for example, is the movement to declare the Odra River a person. Yet war continues to be a radical verification of what non-human entities mean to us.

AS: As I worked on null&void, I kept asking myself: What would a land with a bomb crater in it say to me? Does that crater belong to the bomb? Does it make a kind of assemblage, or can I look at these things separately: the land, the crater, the bomb? War breeds bizarre hybrids.

MO: You employ ecological discourses in your work, while the post-anthropocentric perspective often comes with a kind of difficulty: we always express ourselves from an inalienably human position. How do you deal with this?

AS: Luckily enough, by virtue of being a choreographer, I can access many languages, not just the verbal. I utilise the language of the body, the language of affects, the language of hormones… I always treat such work as a task that I know will fail. However, the very fact of being persistent with the task, of trying again and again, means a lot to me. The more I ‘sit’ close to the non-human, the more I know about what the human is. People often label me, saying ‘you’re into art and ecology, while human dramas are unfolding here’, but that’s not quite the case. I find it extremely fascinating to think about the inextricable link between different species. When you see a bird singing, what is this singing? A bird and a beak? A bird, beak and throat? A bird, a beak and the branch it’s sitting on? The wind that carries sound waves? Waves and leaves moving on a tree? This is choreographic thinking in a broader, off-stage dimension for me. We’ve learnt to think of human beings in detachment from their surroundings. This is the task of art: to render our imagination open to thinking that the ‘I’ is a ‘we’ by touching different tissues. The ‘I’ is openness, porosity. Thanks to my artistic practice, I’m learning not to place myself in isolation. Categories of subjectivity feature strongly in art at the moment. That’s why I feel that it’s difficult to come up with something to expand that subjectivity, especially through contact with non-humans. I feel that building with non-humans is still not really exciting for humans.

MO: On the other hand, there’s quite a lot of talk in art today about relationality, the dissolution of strong human subjectivity.

AS: Perhaps the visual arts have opened up to relationality. However, I believe that choreography remains uninterested in this topic. As far as I’m concerned, there’s quite a lot of stage activities around the principle of ‘I am, here and now, and I’m performing’. I’ve been observing an emphasis on ‘hyper-performance’. But where’s the performance that could help me, an artist, withdraw a little and perhaps give space to something else? Then I can bring the relationship as such, rather than its content, to the stage and foreground. How can relationality be shown on stage at all? How can imagination, whether your own or that of your audience, be opened to it? What also strikes me is that artistic practices affecting ecological discourses are often centred around the ‘I’ and the individual experience: ‘I’m hugging a tree right now’, ‘I’m experiencing the temperature of the water in the Odra River right now’ and so forth. But maybe I’m being unfair now.

MO: You deal with death in your work: in ‘null&void’ you raise the issue of the environment as a casualty of war, and in ‘Down to the Bone’ you ask about extinct species. How can choreography contribute to the taming of death and the grieving process?

AS: I narrow down the definition of choreography to four parameters: body, movement, space and time. No matter which project I embark on, I tend to think about how these parameters would perform and what tensions they’d generate. It’s a kind of vivid mapping of the vicissitudes of life surrounding us, intertwined with death. In performances in which I worked a lot with extinction studies [an interdisciplinary research field dealing with extinction, ed], I drew inspiration from a quote by Vinciane Despret, who once said that if one species dies in the world, then something dies inside of me. [Despret is a Belgian philosopher, one of the pioneers of animal studies, ed.] The first time I read this sentence, I found it a poignant, almost physical experience. We live in a globalised world on the one hand, enjoying a great deal of privilege, but on the other, our imagination isn’t global. We fail to understand the extent of our connection to everything else on a global scale. Choreography is about body, movement, space and time at different scales. Is it the stage space or the global space? Is this a piece of linear time or is it frozen time? Is this a human body or a non-human body? I’ve often wondered if choreography could help me train my imagination muscle sufficiently enough for the experience of a dying species to become my physical experience in the here and now. Because the death of a species means the death of a particle of my world. As part of the Museum of the Anthropocene project, I worked with taxidermized animals. Taxidermized animals aren’t included in the circle of life and death. They’re deprived of something – their bodies can’t decompose in the soil and come into another life. They’re trapped in the everlasting ‘now’. I asked myself whether I could surrender my body to these animals so that they could rest, if only for a moment, from this everlasting ‘now’ and go away. Can I do some time for them? Animals in museum dioramas can’t die.

MO: ‘Museum of the Anthropocene’ was not only your 2022 performance but also the title of a broader project that ‘null&void’ is a continuation of.

AS: Indeed, Down to the Bone, the Den/Nora performance activity and the concert BITE are also part of it. I hope to address the issue of industrial meat production next year.

MO: You run a sort of digital archive of the ‘Museum of the Anthropocene’ on Instagram. How important is archiving to your work, both as a tool and as a medium?

AS: It’s important to me that all the human and non-human beings I’ve co-thought and co-created with are present within this archive. The popularity of social media prompted the creation of the Instagram account ‘Museum of the Anthropocene’ [museum.anthropocene on Instagram, ed], originally run together with two other people but for some time only by me. However, what’s interesting to me is the other archive – the stuff that remains in the body after each work. Especially in those performances where I referred a lot to the non-human body and worked with my voice. I find it interesting to see how deeply this permeates me and how I then bring the material from one performance to other works. As I started working on null&void and entered the studio, the images and feelings from the work Muzeum Antropocenu. Diorama No 1 – Duchy i Potwory (Museum of the Anthropocene: Diorama No 1 – Ghosts and Monsters) came back to me quite strongly. Now that the Museum of the Anthropocene revival was out, it was amazing to see how inherent null&void was in me. These experiences are housed in tissues and, at the same time, begin to interlock in a strange fashion. It’s a kind of living archive – I’m changing through these works, and vice versa. The political context is also changing, so it’s all in continuous motion.

MO: These archives, how do you think they can be saved? Is it at all possible to achieve this kind of translation of bodily experience?

AS: I can’t think of a good answer to that. I’m wondering how to deal with such qualities as decay or fading. How could this process be archived? Would archives that classify and assign numbers prove successful in such cases? To me they appear to capture a moment, but it’s not about the moment but about the process. Perhaps a museum as a place of preservation, and archiving is a companion thing. Archive as accompaniment rather than collection in one place. However, this is still a matter of speculation for me. I imagine it’d be intriguing to see what would happen if I passed my work on to another body, what other language could be developed to enhance the passing on of material.

MO: You’ve described choreography as a relationship of body, movement, time and space. Let me ask you about space in terms of the presentation at Santarcangelo. It’s a distinctive festival because it features one purely theatrical space, with the rest of the stages, as you know, arranged anew every year. Please describe the process of spatial adaptation of ‘null&void’.

AS: I created null&void as part of last year’s Tanz im August festival in Berlin. Along with its curator, Ricardo Carmona, we did some thinking about different spaces. We fell in love with the building of the anatomical theatre in Berlin, but sadly enough the people managing it wanted to charge a huge amount for its rental. We decided to create the work in a black box in Hebbel am Ufer [Berlin’s performing arts centre, ed]. At first, I was absolutely against it because I find the black box such a worn-out space. Nevertheless, I thought, since we were going to opt for the black box, it made sense to utilise the whole theatrical apparatus to build a different kind of affect, something I’d been avoiding a little bit. When Tomek [Tomasz Kireńczuk, artistic director of the Santarcangelo Festival, ed] called me, he proposed displaying null&void outside – 10pm, starlit sky, moonlight and so on… Sadly, this didn’t come to fruition for organisational reasons. I ended up showing null&void in the theatre space, much to the delight of Annegret Schalke, who created amazing lights for this performance.

MO: This year’s edition of the Santarcangelo Festival is being held on the theme ‘While We Are Here’, and Tomasz Kireńczuk writes in the curatorial text, among other things, about the armed conflicts that are taking place. In our recent interview, he also spoke about the issue of privilege in terms of the festival’s programming and emphasised the importance of keeping an eye on what’s happening outside this beautiful Italian town. What’s your view on this? How do you regard the opportunity to showcase your work dealing with the atrocities of war in a setting like this?

AS: I’m a freelancer and, of course, being able to showcase my work has always been a great joy and privilege for me. But having experienced the severe cutbacks in the arts this year, I’m thinking about it a bit differently. The world is becoming militarised, and the sharp reduction in arts grants is primarily affecting freelancers, those without full-time jobs. Consequently, for me this situation isn’t idyllic; rather, it’s one of the few opportunities to showcase my work. I’m at a point now where– after more than ten years of being a choreographer and performer – I might have to do something else to make a living. I believe that, due to financial constraints, creating a festival isn’t an easy task for Tomek either. Most likely, if it weren’t for the AMI grant, I wouldn’t be part of the festival programme. I do appreciate the opportunity to arrive at such a fantastic festival, bring some exposure to my art practice as well as the opportunity for an exchange with other people. These opportunities are limited, and it appears that there will be even fewer. In Western Europe, art is the first to ‘get the boot’. But naturally, I appreciate the fact that I can still work in my profession, given that there are countries where this is absolutely no longer possible.

MO: The pandemic has already proven the problematic nature of the allocation of resources and of how they’re used.

AS: A great deal of money was allocated to support freelancers in Germany when the pandemic broke out. I was a beneficiary of the majority of possible programs. It was a huge privilege to work in such conditions. As far as Poland was concerned, I think 1,700zł of ministerial aid was offered for three consecutive months at the time. Now, whenever I come to Warsaw, I can see that the dance community is vibrant and filled with hope since there is a new government with a great minister of culture. On top of that, the Dance Pavilion is finally going to be built. I fear, nonetheless, that in a world where the extreme right is growing stronger and the world is becoming increasingly militarised, the arts will be put under greater threat with each passing year.

MO: Last but not least, I’d like to ask you about the beginning – namely, genealogy. You said in one of your interviews that you’d rather use the phrase ‘Małgorzata’s daughter’ instead of your surname. To what extent is this issue of matrilineality, of making history along maternal lines, relevant and present in your work?

AS: I had my first official premiere in 2013 at the Stary Browar (Old Brewery) in Poznań, and I truly wanted this to be a feminist choreography. And I succeeded, I guess. I received dismissive comments such as, ‘oh, it’s feminism, there’s nothing to talk about’ from many male dance critics. From that point on, feminism has been for me not a declaration but rather a tool for work or at work. What may serve as an interesting example is what happened at the Teatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw [crisis and dismissal of director Monika Strzępka, who was announcing a feminist revolution, ed]. I was surprised to hear this declaration by Strzępka and her Collective that the Teatr Dramatyczny was from then on a ‘feminist institution’. How on earth did they know what a feminist institution was? What did that even mean? Indeed, one can build an institution with feminist tools. But the act of calling something off-the-cuff a ‘feminist institution’ is, in my opinion, an impossibility. That’s a topic for another discussion, but I think that was the reason why the revolution in the Teatr Dramatyczny failed. Feminism is a tool, like pliers, a hammer and duct tape. The important question is how to apply these tools to a variety of fields that don’t strictly have to do with women and people who identify as women. To me, with some social sensitivity, these tools seem to be applicable basically anywhere. This makes them capable of changing the world, but it’s a very long and hard job. I was brought up by my mum, and I also have a sister. Three women who are very different. The way we’ve built – or rather how we’re still building – our relationships has strongly infected the way I think about relationships at work. This process is extremely tough but above all very fascinating. We’re together, and I’m very thankful to both my sister and my mother for what they’re still teaching me.

Translated from Polish by the Lidex Translation Office

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