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MAIA NUNES
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JONAH KING
​IN CONVERSATION

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DRAFF WAS CURIOUS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SOME OF THIS YEAR'S NEWEST DUBLIN FRINGE ARTISTS, SO WE HOOKED UP MAIA NUNES AND JONAH KING TO HAVE A CHAT. BOTH HAVE A BACKGROUND IN FINE ART, BUT ARE PRESENTING PERFORMANCE WORKS IN FRINGE. JONAH IS COLLABORATING WITH MAEVE STONE AND EOGHAN CARRICK ON BODIES OF WATER, WHILE MAIA PERFORMS IN THEIR OWN WORK INCANTATION. BOTH ARE INTERESTED IN HOW IDEOLOGIES AND HISTORIES AFFECT BODIES. THEIR CHAT ALSO TOUCHES ON THE IDEA THAT THE EMOTIONAL AND SENSORY REALM COULD ACT AS A REFUGE FOR KNOWLEDGE THAT DEFIES PATRIARCHAL VALUE SYSTEMS.

THEY MET IN JONAH'S REHEARSAL ROOM AT THE END OF THE WORKING DAY, ONE WEEK BEFORE THE FESTIVAL BEGINS.

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Maia: Okay. Cool, so shall we start?
Jonah: Yeah, let's start.
M: So you have a background in fine art right?
J: I went to NCAD, I did Fine Art Media.
M: Okay, cool. And then you went to the States?
J: And then I went to Columbia in 2014 to do my Masters. What did you do?
M: I did Textile Art and Artefact [TAA]. It was kind of a new course when I started it, and it had just made the transition. It was into design for a while, and then it made the transition into fine art.
J: Nice.
M: And the way they kind of sold it, was like, it's really process-lead. It's like sculpture but like through materials.
J: Wow, cool.
M: And then actually the course didn't have a lot of resources and stuff, there was a lot of…
J: Oh, do you have mixed feelings about it?
M: I sort of feel now, I mean, I think the course gave me a lot and it was super enriching in lots of ways and it helped me in my process and in how I think about things. I really enjoyed it because I like doing stuff with my hands, but I sort of think maybe I should have done sculpture.
J: Do you think it was maybe kind of responding to like, that feeling that NCAD-sculpture was very dematerial… dematerialised? I don't know what you call it.
M: Yeah, you would just be in your head swimming and I'm a super heady person in general. So, I think I made the decision that like, okay... If I have something tangible and TAA is known for having good briefs and deadlines and, like, I work really well in that way. So it was like, maybe that would be a better format for me to establish a structure for myself. And maybe it was.
J: Yeah.
M: But I didn't make any performance work in school.
J: Did you not?
M: And I wonder, like, if I had been in sculpture would I maybe have made performance work.
J: So, how, when did you graduate?
M: So maybe, 2016 or something, 2017, yeah.
J: Yeah, and you've been making sculptures since then?
M: No, I've been making performance work. I went to San Francisco for a couple of months and worked with Tania Bruguera.
J: Oh, I know her, yeah. She's great.
M: Yeah! So, I did some assisting work and I got a grant and I was helping with archiving this body of work around useful art. And then also took part in her first Escuela de Arte Útil, which is her school in a gallery space. I did that for a while and then came back and was like, okay what am I doing. I need a practice. What am I, what kind of artist am I?
J: Who am I? Yeah, totally.
M: Yeah, exactly. Existential crisis.
J: Such a shock.
M: Every second week.
J: Oh my god, yeah. I know, Jesus.
M: Yeah. So, what I was going to ask is, is most of your work in video, like lens-based?
J: It is mainly, yeah.
M: Okay, yeah. And would it have always been, or…?
J: Ehm, no, I had like a body of work while I was at NCAD that was more social practice.
M: Okay.
J: It was like a lot of group organising; lots of people coming together in social platforms. We ran programming in Dublin where kids from transition year programmes would come in and work with mavericks and radical people of previous generations. We had older people come in and talk about how they started the first pirate radio station and how they were campaigning for contraception before it was legal, etc.
M: Cool!
J: And it was the way to have a public debate. Then I ended up co-founding a project called Exchange Dublin. We received arts council funding in 2009. It was a crazy experimental political art project space that we had in Temple Bar. And we got a building and a bunch of money to have an art centre. We were kind of thinking about non-hierarchal community buildings.
M: Okay.
J: So we created an ad-hocracy political system, where we tried to programme the space without any managerial structure. It was a precursor to Occupy Wall Street so it had a lot of those kind of ideas in it, and we learned a lot of the same lessons I think, but maybe slightly earlier.
M: Yeah.
J: And, so that was a big body of work.
M: Okay, so you've always worked in quite a collaborative way?
J: Yeah.
M: Because that was going to be one of my questions.

Maia and Jonah in conversation

J: Yeah, my work has a lot of people in it. And I think it comes from that. Because I was really influenced by anti-globalisation movements, summit protests and lots of anarchists and I was sleeping in tents and fields and stuff. I really enjoyed that in my teens. And so, we took those ideas into those projects and I think they sort of stuck. After that I turned to film, video projects and writing. Because I wanted more of a speculative space.
M: Okay, do you feel, do you still kind of start with ideas through writing? Is that the beginning of your explorations?
​J: I think I start with an image or with a diffuse idea and then writing is a way to develop an instruction manual, to understand what the work wants to be, how I'm going to carry it out. 
M: Hmhm.

writing is a way to develop an instruction manual, to understand what the work wants to be.
> JOnah

J: How about you, you write as well, don't you?
M: I do write, I do write. In a kind of chaotic, in a very chaotic way. Where I write a lot for a period of time and then completely step back from it. But, I think, for me, it's the kind of thing where I'll be sitting on an idea for a while. Like, I'll be quietly thinking about it for months and months and months before I start taking any steps towards making it.
J: Yeah.
M: So like, now, I'm doing the Fringe show but I'd be sitting on an idea that I'm like okay that's gonna happen like next year. I'll like project, you know.
J: Totally, yeah.
M: And then my writing gets kind of complicated because I will have, like, scraps of what's already been started and scraps of what's coming, if that makes sense.
J: Hmhm, it's like a cascade.
M: Yeah. And I write poetry as well, which is kind of more life stuff and internal workings of that but often that kind of links in to the work. So then drawing a clean line out of that can be quite difficult sometimes.
J: Hm, what do you mean by that?
M: Like in terms of, then, extracting what the work is gonna be. It's like I tend to have a lot of floating ideas and my brain works pretty fast. I can go through periods of being super overwhelmed and not really knowing where I'm going or what I'm doing and then all of a sudden I'll be like, oh that little piece that I wrote like three weeks ago, that has that one line and that one line is super interesting.
J: Totally.
M: I'm one of those people, in college like when I wrote essays, I'd write 10,000 words to give you 2.
J: Yes.
M: I'm like more... and then subtracting.
J: And then bringing it back, yeah, absolutely. I feel like for every one work there's like a hundred that didn't come to life.
M: And then I'll forget about them.
J: Yes, they return. I did a project once where I wanted to make this huge structure and float it out on a lake. I was doing a residency on Lake Michigan. In the end, just because of time, the giant elaborate structure just became one triangle. It became part of a video. And then I was back home in Ireland and I was cleaning out at my mom's house and I found a drawing of the triangle floating on a lake from seven years previously. I thought the sculpture had been an accidental reduction, but somehow it had been there before like that.
M: Oh wow that's creepy. What I tend to do is I write and then at the same time, I'm a very oral person and an aural person. So write things but also speak them out loud and then start putting stuff to music or weeding it into a kind of soundscape and then the piece evolves out of that, and at the same time I'll be thinking about visuals, so the two come very hand in hand. Like the material process. Because I guess, I have that background in textiles, everything I put into a piece is really thought out, there's never a random object in my project. So the whole thing forms a kind of collage or like, performance assemblage.
J: So what I'm hearing you say, that you're very precise in the assembly, but do you feel like, there's all of this stuff that's happening and you pare it down? So does that happen in a kind of a speculative space, does that happen in your head, does that happen in your writing? Because as I'm making more works they're becoming… they're big projects often, I mean even things like Bodies of Water. Where there's a lot of people and I'm only a collaborator, but there's a lot of people and a lot of stuff, so most of the kind of messy play happens in different spaces. Where you can afford to waste paper or you can afford to, you know, but then by the time it comes to building the thing...
M: Making the piece.
J: Or whatever, like by necessity it has to be decided upon.
M: Yeah.
J: It becomes a descriptor, like an instruction manual.
M: Completely, and I'll be quite like, cut-throat. Because you have to be kind of cut-throat about the decisions you're making.
J: Yeah.
M: But I think I also established for myself quite a forgiving space in terms of just being like, it doesn't have to be perfect. Like what I'm putting together and the things that I choose at the end of the day they're the things that I'm choosing this time in this iteration of the work. You know?
J: Yeah.
M: So it's never finished. Like for the Fringe show, people keep asking me 'Are you ready?' and I'm like I'm as ready as I'm going to be. In the sense that I've made the decisions that I'm going to make this time, and if I do it again, it'll be entirely different just by its very nature. Because my brain will have moved forward or sideways or whichever way, I will have changed my mind. Something will have shifted through the doing of the thing. You learn and you always want to shift something, even if it's really subtle.
J: Oh, yeah!
M: Yeah.

it'll be entirely different just by its very nature. Because my brain will have moved forward or sideways or whichever way.​>MAIA

M: But I'm also someone who tends to move in sweeping movements. It's definitely like a weird balance making all these decisions which are super thought out, but at the same time like, having this trust in chaos and just being like, actually, if I follow my intuition and the organic process of the thing, it will naturally become what it needs to become.
J: Yes.
M: So even the last time I did a performance, I was actually super upset after the first show because I just felt like I didn't make the connection with the audience or the people in the room that I felt I wanted to make emotionally. For me that's the most important thing. If that doesn't come through I'm devastated but if that comes through and other things fall apart I'm kind of okay. Like the second performance I did of that piece, the sound wasn't really working, there was a few issues that went wrong. But I felt like, I communicated something to people and I held a space for them. And if I feel like that has happened, then I'm happy.

Maia Nunes performing in Ways to Love Me

J: Talk me through that, like, what, for example in that instance, like what was the work, what were you communicating and did it work?
M: Yeah, so I did this piece about, it was a piece that explored the legacy of emotional colonialism in contemporary intimate relationships and love power dynamics. My family is from Trinidad, from the Caribbean, so that would be my ancestry. Actually both sides of my family are from there, even though my mom is part Irish, part Madeiran, she grew up in Trinidad. And my father is Afro-Caribbean, black, Trini. So, ehm, yeah, I guess I was interested in how we learn to love and how we inherit all of these different ways of loving and looking at ourselves and each other and being intimate with ourselves and with each other. And then how colonisation has actually impacted that and it's interesting to explore that also in an Irish context because of course colonisation has happened here too. But, I was particularly interested in black and brown bodies and how we have been impacted by this legacy. Ehm, and so, I created this soundscape, it was 45 minutes of sound which included organic sound and also repetitive vocal harmony loops. When I say organic sounds I mean sounds like the sea and like chains in parts and also people crying. And then I had three musicians, who played bass and keys and percussion. And then, I wrote these eleven pieces of text which turned into songs which each dealt with a different aspect of this emotional legacy. So one of them was looking at like, exotification and one of them was looking at the saviour complex and one of them was looking at.. just different things. For me song is super important, because of the role that it has played in liberation movements.
J: Totally.
M: And in terms of a practice, a freedom practice, and a liberation practice. And also a kind of, a mode of preservation and survival.
J: Yeah.
M: And as a ritual.
J: Yeah.
M: And as something that has like such deep links in the Caribbean with politics, with Africa, with ancestral heritage and so for me music is kind of like the main medium that I'm working with and everything else that is layered on top of it always has some kind of ritualistic element, or this nod towards DIY rituals pulling on strings of heritage that, ehm, is in many ways lost to me. But I'm trying to… I did a workshop with with Emily Jacir and Michael Rakowitz in Firestation Studios and Michael said this really interesting thing about remembering like re-dash-membering. Like, this reassembling of a history that has been fragmented and dispersed and in many ways lost, so I'm really interested in this kind of process of pulling all these fragments from different places and different parts of myself together and assembling some kind of immersive sound and performance experience that embodies and communicates all of that.
J: That's beautiful, I love that. It makes me think of the word diaspora and this idea of like, for me that word, I see this image in my head where a thing is like…
M: Splintered?

A NOD TOWARDS DIY RITUALS PULLING ON STRINGS OF HERITAGE 
​> MAIA

J: Yeah, or like dropping ink into water and just watching it expand, a dispersal. And an idea that could be a body that by reconnection forms a new comparative shape to its original or something, do you know what I mean?
M: Yeah but I also think, that's another interesting thing that I got from that workshop, Emily was saying the word diaspora, the word diaspora kind of erases how we move, like it's this word that speaks about moving or people having moved, but the stories of how people have moved are kind of, are lost within that term, so that was kind of interesting. I never really thought about it before. But that's kind of interesting for me in terms of thinking about my work, because I tried to move from this space of ultimate specificity like this piece that is happening in Fringe is kind of like an incantation which draws together stories from sort of femme and women ancestry from different sides of my family and weaves into this long, sort of like, meditative chant, a very slow sort of chant.
J: Beautiful.
M: That happens over the space of 55 minutes, ehm, but that is so specific in terms of actually speaking about real people. And maybe slightly poet-isising them or like sort of wrapping them in an energy which is sort of prayer-like or ritualistic. So, it's not like, hard cold facts, it's slightly poetic. But, it is, they are real stories and the details are real and they are about people who existed and exist. Within me. And, I within them.
​J: I was about to ask you about that, like, you as the kind of sum total of those actions how does that sit within you and then you as the artist in the work you're creating. Yeah, like, where do you sit in that work apart from the obvious sort of embodied conclusion of it?
M: Yeah, I think one thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently is that I'm not a conclusion. I'm the beginning and the end, so everything I do reverberates backwards as well as forwards if you believe this notion of ancestry, that like particularly the African diaspora would kind of believe that everything that you do reverberates in both directions and that time is circular not linear.
J: Hmhm.

I'm not a conclusion. I'm the beginning and the end, so everything  I do reverberates backwards as well as forwards.
​> MAIA

M: And, so, I guess for me, my work is quite personal, but in that specific I hope to communicate something much larger. I think there is an element of searching for some kind of healing or kind of unravelling to happen, as well as a bringing together, at the same time remembering that there's also a kind of dismembering happening at the same time, if that makes any sense at all.
J: Yeah, it's like change.
M: And so there's kind of an element of my work that leads towards healing. And transformation. I suppose my hope is like, right now, that work is very much wrapped up in me and my identity, but as I move forward that that can be more expansive..
J: Yeah, that's what I'm hearing, the way you describe it, it's like you're taking on themes that are critical in so far you are interrogating but it's not critical in so far as it doesn't sound like a critique. It doesn't sound like you're tearing apart... there's a huge amount of injustice right, we're talking about diasporas, about an absolute atrocity. But, in the work, it sounds like you're approaching it as a kind of confrontation of a culmination of stories rather than necessarily like, an opposition or an aggression or an anger. Is that..?

M: Yeah, I don't think it's angry. I think I have been angry and I think I am angry. And there is pain there, for sure there's pain, for sure there's injustice and for sure there's heartache and all of those things... but I agree with you, I don't think it's an aggression, I don't think my work is an aggression. I think it's a basket, I think it holds everything and let's it be and then notices things and sort of pulls them out into the light. I would read a lot of critical theory and race theory and also queer theory and you know, my work would be very rooted in that thought process. But, when I actually make the work I try and step back from that. I'm more interested in oral histories in people and embodied wisdom, emotional knowledge and emotional integrity.
J: Yes, yes.
M: But the two are like, two sides of a coin. And it's kind of funny, I think, when people try and look at things critically without looking at things emotionally.
J: Yeah, totally I agree with you. I think it's patriarchal.
M: Blind or something. Yeah, it's completely patriarchal.
J: I think it's a way to disparage a type of knowing that was formerly subjected to 'women's knowledge'.
M: Yeah, and like black and brown people.
J: Yeah.
M: For sure. I think that that type of work is moving from a space that is like, your belly space, that core part of you. My mom always says, move from your belly, listen to your belly. That part of you, that's what my work is trying to tap into, it's like, ehm, yeah. That kind of ancestral wisdom, that embodied knowing, these stories that have been passed down and heard and bent and changed, to kind of suit each person.
J: Like the knowledge.
M: Yeah.
J: Yeah. And also that they could survive.
M: And it was a mode of survival.

THat ancestral wisdom, that embodied knowing, these stories have been passed down and heard and bent and changed.
​> maia

J: I think what is privileged under patriarchy is recorded knowledge, but I suppose enslaved people had to avoid incrimination, so tradition and dissent had to be coded into song, children's stories, dance, etc.
M: And in music, exactly. So you look at the, the kind of drumming that they did and they had talking drums and these were banned because they were a way for people to communicate that slave masters wouldn't have understood.
J: Totally.
M: Ehm, and also if you look at hair and how people used to braid maps into people's hair so that they could find their way out of slave plantations and find their way to freedom.
J: Oh that's so cool!
M: It's a very, sort of like visceral, embodied pain. I think that even though my work is quite vocal, there's a lot of words in my work depending on which piece or whatever, but I do use words quite a lot and I'm very aware that I'm using English which is a colonial language in itself. But I think that, ehm, yeah, I'm still trying to tap into behind the words, that there's something more there. That music actually communicates something much more than what is being said, in the vibration there's something very, sort of, else at play, something spiritual at play.
J:Yeah, I think you are restricted within language, like that's the paradigm, that's the thing that holds the ideology, then it's those spaces of intimacy, rhythm, vibration, dance, movement, all those kinds of sensorial knowledge that actually allows you access to the things that are outside of the limits of a coloniser language.
M: For sure, and so, what about you. Tell me about, because I was looking at your website and I saw that you had made a lot of work where it would seem to me there was quite a strong connection between like, people and landscape. I was looking at the Ira Dean piece, is it Ira Dean?
J: Oh, yeah!
M: This piece has to do with water, and then there was a piece that you did where people were golfing across the desert. And then there was also the piece where, there was another one with a really strong connection to landscape...
J: Was that Upper_Sea?
M: Upper_Sea, exactly. Yeah. What was the Upper_Sea one again?
J: The Upper_Sea is a video essay about the way digital technology is approached as a route to immortality. 
M: Yeah.
J: Yeah. My work is an intersection of a bunch of interests. I think I'm particularly interested in where ideology sits in relationship to the body and I'm interested where the body sits in relation to landscape, and within all those things where an ecology begins and ends. In Bodies of Water, the artist Ira Dean disappeared ten years ago at sea.
M: At sea.
J: At sea. A lot of her work is thinking about the materiality of the body, about the life cycle of materials.
M: Okay.
J: So in Upper_Sea, the starting point was Trans-Humanism. Trans-Humanism is this type of American pseudo-spiritual technology movement led by a former head engineer at Google. He says that within 50 years there will be a moment in technology where we can upload our consciousness into computers.
M: Jesus, yeah.​​
J: And then we can live inside, you know, an old Dell laptop or something for the rest of eternity.
M: I would never want that.
J: I would never want that. I heard a news article about this, and immediately I started to think: what would it be like to be a consciousness outside of a body?
M: Yeah.
J: I wondered is there even such a thing? Is there a time that consciousness experiences that is different or oppositional to the timeline of your biology?
M: Well, isn't that kind of what people think God is?
J: Yeah.
M: Like, consciousness outside of the body that like, watches us and moves through everything. This kind of energetic, feeling energy.
​

Upper_Sea by Jonah King 

J: Yeah, yeah. So in Upper_Sea I was approaching this contradiction. I was imagining uploading consciousness into computers and I was thinking: computers are the accumulation of the movement of materials, minerals. We mine all these precious minerals and then we create computers. So, essentially what you're talking about is migrating human consciousness into rocks.
M: Yeah.
J: And so, you'd never actually leave the material space. But there's this illusion of leaving, that seems really old, it seems like similar to Egyptian Pharaohs and, you know, being buried with all of their possessions and those who worked for them. So, I was just curious about that. And then with the Golf piece, Leisure Sports I was thinking about America… I emigrated to America a couple of years ago. I was thinking especially about their landscape and the history of colonisation and how they are now at the end of their empire. I think of the whole Trumpian alt-right movement to be more like a swan song of something dying than necessarily a power gaining momentum. Unfortunately, right now, it has a lot of power. White America still has a lot of power. Though the difference between the 2008 and 2016 election is that the white Christian voters became the minority.
​M: Okay.
J: So, you had an American WASP-dominator culture, its lineage of colonisation, the history of their relationship to that land. The pioneer’s caravans going west, etc. and weirdly how golf was tied into all of that. Golf was the colonial game. The first iteration of golf happened in Scotland and was then exported to Philadelphia, where they played golf in the early colonies. The golf course is the French Colonial Garden.
M: Okay.
J: As we face climate change, there's a reversed relationship to territory. California has hundreds and hundreds of golf courses, including many owned by Donald Trump, all artificially irrigated. I just imagined taking out the carpet from underneath these men who are there playing this ridiculous game. They seem so oblivious to what their bodies resemble and the history of how they got there. I wanted to position them in a geological timescale.

They seem so oblivious to what their bodies resemble and the history of how they got there.
​> Jonah

M: It's interesting that you say that you feel like it's a swan song, because I agree on some level, but I also very deeply feel that this has existed for centuries. So, for me it's hard to believe that it is a swan song and that it's not like a visible resurgence of something that will push the limits, will really push the limits of what it can do and the violence that it can inflict. I mean, not that it hasn't already pushed those limits right, but for me it feels like, nearly like a repetition. It feels like part of the cycle, like this rearing of heads in this awful violence and this sort of dying down and hiding and then resurfacing. Like, becoming more fugitive and then coming back and like, yeah into the light.
​J: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And step forward.
M: It's global and very terrifying. So, tell me about this Fringe show, Bodies of Water, how did you find out about Ira Dean, is she famous?
J: She disappeared in 2009 leaving a very small body of work behind. And it's really the exhibition is led...
M: So it's an exhibition?
J: Yeah it's an exhibition and there's a performance in which her former partner and mentee/assistant leads you through her work.
M: Okay.
​

Bodies of Water, image by Alex Gill

J: Kind of looking at the work and also thinking about...
M: Her as a person?
J: Her and their relationship and what could have happened to her.
M: That sounds super beautiful.
J: It's interesting.
M: Yeah.
J: Yeah, it's really interesting
M: Cool. And so it's, because when I looked online it said that it was a theatre piece and also an exhibition. So, can you talk me through how different this process has been for you, working towards a piece that is theatre? Because is this the first time that you have done kind of like a theatrical work?
J: Yeah, it's crazy. First of all, it's collaboratively devised. It has a lot of moving parts, so, it's constantly changing even right now to the end. It’s a different process to how I usually work.
M: Okay.
J: With this work, the decisions are being made kind of constantly, written and rewritten, which seems to be normal for a lot of theatre development and so that's new to me.
​M: Okay, cool.
J: Yeah, and I'm enjoying it. It's a hell of a trip, yeah. So what will you do for the Fringe?
M: So, I'm doing this piece Incantation which is a 55-minute piece. It's actually based around the structure of the Rosary, but it's not religious in its intention or in its, in any other capacity except that it's a chant, an incantation. And I was looking at Rosary beads because I was kind of thinking about rolling beads and that like sort of rolling movement and like, repetitive... Jonathan Burrows has this bit in his book, I can't remember the name of the book, but where he says, you know, words repeated eventually become prayer.
J: That's beautiful.
M: So, I was kind of thinking about that and thinking about a relation to both sides of my family who have been quite staunchly Catholic and Christian, with a little bit of spice added here and there. But, yes, both are sides quite Catholic and, of course that being a colonial religion.
J: Yeah.
M: But also like, this notion of worry beads which is so universal because they are used in so many different cultures and in so many different ways and I was just kind of thinking about all of this in relation to inter-generational trauma and that weaving into this piece where, I kind of work the structure of a Rosary. I work through five generations of women in my family, working through this kind of history of women, through this mode of storytelling, but one that is kind of sung and then also has this intention. So I kind of turn the part that is like the creed into a laying out, with intentions for the piece working through these generations of stories. It’s very durational, like this suspended time. And it's all about intense focus and concentration the whole way through, but also this like, disconnect of this repetitive motion allowing you to somehow dissociate from the work as well and kind of, view it with this distance, or like, allow you to go inwards really.
J: Like meditation?
M: Like meditation. But also working through these stories. I have this amazing harpist who's accompanying me who is helping me to keep momentum within the piece and add light and shade. And then I have this soundscape that sits behind the whole thing with bird song and also my voice recorded and looped, so it's a very quiet piece. I remember applying for Fringe and the brief being like 'WE WANT THE BOLDEST MOST EXCITING, MOST GROUNDBREAKING WORK', and I was like, oh, my work is actually kind of old, coming from this old space and also super quiet-ish, it's not a piece that's shouting at you from the rooftop.
J: I think that's an act of resistance right now, honestly.
M: Yeah.
J: You feel like quietness and subtlety is sort of a territory that needs to be held.

You feel like quietness and subtlety is sort of a territory that needs to be held.
​​> JONAH

M: Yeah, and I'm kind of resisting the temptation to, like, put too much into it. Does that make sense?
J: Yeah.​
M: I'm kind of resisting the temptation to be like, okay how many associations can I make within the piece. Materially, I'm working with a rope and strips of muslin, just unwashed, organic muslin. And I kind of chose that material because it has these sort of echoes of kitchens, and straining and that, eh, process of filtration.
J: Yeah.
M: So I kind of chose muslin because of that, and I chose it to be organic. I was kind of thinking about white flags of surrender and that type of thing, but also, before there were rosary beads, people did use knots. They would knot into lengths of string or lengths of rope or whatever.
J: Yeah.
​M: So I'm also kind of echoing that as a tie of beads to this long rope and then every time I get to a certain point I tie a blue one to restart. And I was kind of thinking about blue and Madonna and like, black Madonnas and like this type of thing. And I also have like this super ornately beaded ostrich egg that I beaded for two months, I just sat beading this egg. I don't know if you know this, but ostrich eggs were one of the first containers in the world, so they would have been used like drinking bottles.

Beaded Ostrich Egg by Maia Nunes

J: Like vessels.
M: Like vessels, like one of the first vessels.
J: Oh yeah, I didn't know that.
M: And also, they were used to make some of the first beads in the world. So like, beading the egg is kind of like…
J: Turning it on itself,
M: Turning it on itself. And also something that people do in Africa like, as a craft.
J: Yeah.
M: Like on these ornately beautiful beaded ostrich eggs, but there was something about this notion of  it also being a container. And then having read Ursula Le Guin's piece about stories. Do you know the piece I'm talking about? ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’…
J: No.
M: They talk about how like, the whole of our narrative storytelling tradition in the West is built on this notion of the protagonist and how that kind of harps back to this notion that the first object in the world was a weapon, but actually it was a container.
J: Yeah.
M: And if we thought about stories as containers, and I was talking about my work as a basket, if we look at it as this like holding space, there is kind of a different notion there.
J: Well, so the obvious of an egg being like ovulation?
M: Yeah, but I don't want to…
J: You don't?
M: For me, no, I'm not looking at like reproduction. That's not really where my space is at in terms of defining womanhood, for me it feels reductive to, and also violent towards people who are trans and that are non-binary and different gender experiences, to put it down to ovulation. I would be very, very wary of that.
J: Yeah, fair enough.
M: Within the piece. I know that those echoes are there, just by virtue of putting that object in the space, but I was kind of thinking of it more from this notion of like carrying this vessel, this caring space and mothering space. And really anyone can be a mother, it's not confined to…
J: To biology.
M: To biology, exactly. Or this traditional notion of what womanhood can be.
J: True.
M: Yeah. So, how are you feeling coming up to the piece, are you feeling prepared?
J: Grand, yeah. I mean…
M: It's next week.
J: Yeah, it's next week. I mean it's scary because there's a lot of work to do, but I actually have two other pieces floating around at the moment so I'm flying to Chicago after the opening.
M: Oh fabulous, wonderful.
J: To open another show.
M: Cool.
J: So yeah, do you want to finish? I think we're done.
M: Yeah, what do you think?
J: I think we've talked a lot.
M: I think we've talked a lot as well. I think they have a lot of information there, a lot of information. But yeah, absolutely.
​J: Good night.

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Maia's show Incantation runs at the Chocolate Factory from the 21 - 22nd September, with shows at midday and 2pm. Jonah's show, Bodies of Water, is created in collaboration with Maeve Stone and Eoghan Carrick. It runs from the 7 - 12th September, daily at 6.30pm, also at The Chocolate Factory. You can book tickets for both shows at fringefest.com.

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Published 03/09/19

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