SARAH VANHEE
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SUZANNE WALSH
IN CONVERSATION
IN THE FINAL EPISODE IN OUR THREE-PART PODCAST SERIES, AUDIO/VISUAL ARTIST, WRITER AND MUSICIAN SUZANNE WALSH (DUBLIN) SPEAKS TO ARTIST, PERFORMER AND WRITER SARAH VANHEE (BRUSSELS) ABOUT WILD BIRDS, TRASH, REWILDING LANGUAGE AND OUR CONNECTION TO NATURE.

THIS CONVERSATION WAS ORIGINALLY BROADCAST AS A PODCAST IN ASSOCIATION WITH DUBLIN DIGITAL RADIO (ddr.) ON 22 OCTOBER 2019. YOU CAN READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW. 
​Richard: So welcome to a podcast by DRAFF. We’re here interviewing… or no, we’re organising a chat between two very fine artists, Suzanne Walsh and Sarah Vanhee. Suzanne is from Ireland and makes kinda cross-disciplinary work that involves a lot of language, text, performed… I would say it’s got a lot of experimental music influences or would fit into that kind of genre. I’m also joined with Sarah Vanhee who I think… well, comes from a dance background but would not consider her work dance per se, in fact, it also defies, and perhaps this is why it’s going to be a fantastic and interesting conversation, her work also defies categorisation. Her work is performance-based very often, involves an audience. I saw a very interesting piece where she gathered all her rubbish, every bit of rubbish for an entire year, and the piece involved Sarah over the course of about two hours and 15 minutes, taking all this rubbish from an entire year, laying it out, presenting it beautifully on the stage, nicely lit, covering an entire stage and then once it was all laid out, you repacked it, and over that time, you also spoke some text that had been generated by, either through taking notes, or through more automatic processes such as data gathering or email gathering that happens now for all of us.

Suzanne: Actually, I can already jump in and say I do a bit of data gathering too, so that’s kind of interesting link…

Richard: Ok.

Suz: Sometimes I make scripts from things like comments on videos on Facebook, things like that, and then it's kind of like I feel like I’m elevating that from something that’s throwaway into something higher, not that it is higher, but I’m presenting it in a way that might be taken as higher because it’s in a gallery context, so I mean I think that might be an interesting link.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s not something I’m specifically working on, it’s just for this work Oblivion, I worked with everything that normally goes into oblivion, and it has a lot to do with valuing, what do you value and what not, what is worth something and what not and all these spam communication, data, that are being produced are not considered as valuable, it’s kind of considered as, yeah, as waste, basically, but that was only one aspect.

Suzanne: Sure, I don’t always work that way either but I often do like to… or merge sometimes, I’ve done a work before for a show in 2016, part of a show called Different Republic, it was a commission for the 1916 uprising, revolution, it was a commemorative event. But I merged the texts of two Irish poets, one who was a revolutionary who was executed, I merged too their poetry with comments from activist groups today on Facebook, to make new poetry out of these two also different kinds of language, one which is quite romantic, nature poetry then this very, again, online jargon text, but still to try make something new out of those so… I quite like to do that, sometimes bring things together or rework them in some way.

Sarah: And what are you working on right now?
Sarah Vanhee, Oblivion. Image: Phil Deprez
Suzanne: Right now I’m working actually on, I’m trying to work towards a book, but at the moment it’s more in smaller sections. I’m involved in wildlife rescue, and I live in this institution which I just gave you the publication of, Fire Station Artist Studios, and while I’ve been there, it’s a very city centre urban environment, and at times I’ve struggled with that, I’m from the countryside even though I live in Dublin for a while now, I’m always trying to connect to nature in some way. So I got involved in this wildlife rescue group and I often have these birds in my apartment that are brought to me and then they’re brought to a vet after, or a shelter, but I sometimes have to take care of these very injured birds, or I’ve hand-reared small birds, so it’s kind of this ridiculous thing that I’m in this very city centre place with these birds coming through and also I do the helpline sometimes where I’m talking to people who are in these wildlife emergencies, so I’m writing around this topic. Also as a sort of strategy, I suppose on a more personal level, I’ve just had a lot of death in my family in the last couple of years, so it sort of also became this kind of compulsive activity, somehow helping me… I don’t know.

Sarah: And how far is it important to you that you do this as part of an artistic practice?

Suzanne: I think it will spill out, at the moment I’m doing an extract for a literary journal, and I think every time I try to do one thing, it always spills back out. So already I’m doing other performances around birds, I also just recently did one about starlings, murmurations, so I think it will end up, again, being performances and recordings as well probably.

Sarah: And do you… when is the moment, or where is the place where the audience encounters that?

Suzanne: This work? Well they’ll encounter it through publication hopefully. I love books and I love the idea of people bringing something home and that you could be reading it in your bed, you know, I think that’s what I love about books, and maybe records, that they can follow people home. But I think also, I will like I said, do performances in a gallery situation. I’m not really sure… I’ve been taking these little videos as well of some of the birds that live with me, in a very casual way because I’m not really a video maker, but maybe I’ll do something with them, and then maybe something will spill back. Because the activity of it is something very meaningful to me anyway in terms of the actual work of… you know, maybe something will go back in connection with the wildlife group themselves I’m not sure yet. I’m very serious about this activity and these people I meet through it are amazing, people give up so much of their time and energy to go rescue a tiny bird, you know, it’s this amazing… I’ve a lot of admiration for the people I work with so maybe there’s something there.

Sarah: Do you think people feel connected to these birds or what are the different motivations to do so?

Suzanne: Yeah they do, and one of the really good things is, I mean the people who work in my group are volunteers coming from different backgrounds, but the public who… when the public find a bird or an animal like I often feel they have a very strong encounter and it can be very meaningful for them. Because a lot of the time it’s very abstract to talk about environmental issues, it’s always this big, again, data, and I think having this very small encounter can be quite powerful. I often find, I mean, when I’m on the helpline, people who call in, I mean I’m really having to develop these skills I never had to talk to people… they can be very distressed or excited, you know and we have to make a plan, they’ve found something, they can be quite scared, but sometimes they can be really excited as well. So I don’t know, I think there’s something about the small encounter that can help connect you. I don’t know, you have some interest in environmental, I presume, concerns with that work you just mentioned?

a lot of the time it's very abstract to talk about environmental issues.
​> Suzanne

Sarah: Yeah I’m just curious how to, like where… I mean I am interested in… it’s hard these days to not be interested in environmentalism and in the question of how to relate, or how to relate back to nature. And in general I would say that actually I feel like I do what I want in life and as a citizen, as an engaged citizen, and I call that art because it’s the place where it’s possible to do that in the most radical way somehow. And I do, I mean there were two things I was thinking of, just in relation to the birds. We had… I just had a premier last weekend in Vienna where I was working on screaming, we had a group of people who didn’t scream much before, so not, I mostly work with non-professional people, so people who had a reason to scream, in one of the only fields left, open fields left, in that area of the city. And there was one woman, every time she screamed there was a crow responding, and when we moved place, when we moved to another rehearsal area, there was other crows responding, so there’s really something… and I went to her and said ‘you are connecting with the crows’ and she said ‘I know’. Also I’m very interested in first nations and witches, like that the connection with nature is there… and then the other thing was that I made this piece Oblivion on waste, which is mainly I would say a piece on interconnectedness, on how things are connected, and you can in fact not throw away, because what you throw away then will always burden someone else, in history or in the future or somewhere else in the world, but I feel for myself, my grandparents were farmers and the other grandparents were workers, but nature for me has become something abstract. So my son who is here today, maybe you hear him playing with marbles in the background, I sometimes feel strange about the fact that we grow up in a city and there can be weeks passing without him touching earth, touching like the ground, the soil, so without being like esoteric about it, I think indeed it’s hard to think environmentalism and climate activism without having this direct connection to natural elements, whether it’s birds or soil or…

Suzanne: I think that’s, for me, even though I do work sometimes with more, I would say exotic, more interesting to people, birds, I find the birds that I often deal with are the ones of the city, that people think are ‘ugh, seagulls or pigeons’, you know, they give out about them. But I kind of like that, I like that they’re these urban birds and they’re again maybe throwaway to people, they think ‘get rid of them, they’re dirty’, and they’re the ones I most connect with, these big seagulls, I have them in my shower sometimes. People think I’m completely crazy, but I form very strong relationships with them sometimes. But funny, you’re talking, a couple of things there, one was… I also have a vocal piece where I sing like birds, like crows, and seagulls, I’m going to Rotterdam next month to perform it at this post-opera event, and I always get asked to perform this work over and over. And it’s… I’ve had some really strange coincidences with it. For example, when I was on the helpline of my wildlife group, a woman brought me a seagull and she recognised me from a performance of the bird piece, at this Lacan conference two years ago, it was really strange, she was like, ‘do you sometimes sing like birds?’ she must have thought I was nuts, like ‘she sings like birds, and now she collects birds.’  
Suzanne Walsh in performance. Image: Louis Haugh.
And then another ​time, going to the witchcraft thing, I performed this piece, a version of it, in IMMA, that's the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in the gardens for this, they have this big event in the gardens every year, and I also did a sort of invocation as part of it and next thing this storm came and all these birds and rain… and people were like ‘what did you do?’ and I was like ‘I don’t know, I sort of might have called something up, I’m not sure’. So I like these kind of things that sometimes happen around your work, these little strange coincidences. I don’t know…

S: The work I do is kind of starting somewhere, but I never know where it really ends. I never have a work in mind that I want to execute according to a certain plan I have. It’s more that I set the parameters and I set the frame inside which things can happen. Inside which… yeah, yeah, I think invocation is also important to me, encounter, but I have, like I’m really far from imagining a choreographed dance piece and then executing it to perfection. So yeah it’s more like I feel like I set up spaces in which things can happen, but it’s not random, like this sounds very open. We work on very specific things, like we work on a specific fiction, or we work on exactly screaming, or I explore this theme, but it’s that I have no form in mind, that’s why also my work has very different formats so I can’t say from the beginning… I choose kind of the format that fits best with the work, and sometimes it’s even formats that were not existing before. For instance, you end up visiting someone’s living room, or I end up intruding into conference spaces.

Suz: Yeah, that was very interesting, I was reading about that.

S: Yeah that’s called Lecture for Everyone, this work. So then I think like, I want to have an impact in some way, so what’s the best way to reach that impact and what’s the best formula to follow somehow, rather than from an aesthetic kind of point of view, what do I want to achieve. Impact is important.

i do what i want in life as an engaged citizen and i call that art.
​> sarah
Suzanne: Sure… I’m trying to think if that links to my work. I think I definitely like to create a sense of uncertainty in a lot of my work and a kind of confusion. I often use a form, you think I’m going to do something one way and it comes out a different way, for example, a lecture. I have a performative lecture which is based on transcripts from David Attenborough documentaries. So I’ve transcribed lots of these documentaries, took pieces from each one, took all the animal names out, then replaced that with ‘they’, and I deliver it back as a lecture in a kind of Attenborough-esque style slightly, but you’ll never know what animal I’m talking about because it becomes any animal and... but I like to particularly deliver that in a lecture situation. One time I performed it at a seminar that I was the first person to go, so people just assumed it was going to be a regular lecture and then eventually it becomes this kind of more poetic space and, for me, a rewilding of language. And people always when they hear that piece, they’re either imagining some new animal or it’s an elusive animal so I like to kind of play with that, the sort of trust, and I’m using the hand gestures of the lecturer and that sort of authority you get, so the form is doing one thing and the language is doing the opposite.

​Sarah: So I always make these works that then kind of almost constantly transform themselves so I don’t know what it will give and it has something extremely transformative… I don’t know where it’s going to go I just create the conditions and then we see where it goes and it’s extremely intense, it really feels very ‘lifeful’ if one says that in English, ‘lifeful’, full of life…

Suzanne: Yeah full of life… vitality maybe.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s very vital, it’s very intense. And then, so I made this artist novel that sort of wrote itself through meetings with other people, but then later on I was asked to write a short novel and I thought, ok now I will try to take language seriously because before I never took language seriously, I think I took it seriously but never in the sense that I would write like a linear story with a beginning, middle, end, even though that’s what I like so much, like I’m always reading two, three different novels at the same time, it’s very important to me to have these parallel universes going on. So then I thought ok I will take the structure of the novel seriously, and then I wrote that short novel, and I was also asked by a commercial publishing house to make it into a novel, but then I’m somehow not ready for it, I feel like it’s too much me as one author deciding all that so there’s something different with the perspective of the writer or the reader there… like as a writer… as a reader I enjoy these gifts, like these whole universes that I receive, but as a writer, or I would say as an artist I can’t do it because I feel like I cannot be so self-confident, it makes me too much feel like god. So I'm this kind of… I try to stay away as much as possible from the idea of the individual artist or the author… even if I have to establish that at some point because otherwise I won’t get the funding, so I have to be this name and assume that title and be this person on that programme, but on the other hand I feel much more like channeling things, making things possible, facilitating… so there’s something there with how old or how mature does one have to get before one can say, yeah, this is me, this is what I’m doing, this is what I’m writing.

it becomes this more poetic space, a rewilding of language.
​> suzanne

Sarah Vanhee in Oblivion. Image: Emile Ouroumov
Suzanne: Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I think also ‘cause I often compose things out of multiple forms that… and I go back and forth as well a little bit, but even I was enjoying this idea of the thing I’m writing now being partly composed out of these conversations on this helpline for example, and we have to change some details on them but, I think even though I quite like to get into a deep writing place, it’s always about this bleed over of things that are happening outside of me and interruptions and yeah, material that comes to me from the outside. So I think I always have that too and I think when I perform I love the idea that I am performing something that seems like it’s me but it’s not, again it’s a sort of channeling in a way, like recently I performed a work about birds, again about birds, based on a murmu-, you know murmuration, where all the starlings make this big group form? And there was a video that had all these comments on it, a BBC video, and the conversations going on in this comments section are really intriguing because people got really into sort of conspiracies and ideas on group mind control and politics. So I like to deliver a script like that but as if it’s all me, even though it’s… so yeah again sort of playing with the idea that I’m the author, I’m the person you should believe, I like to play on that idea of the performer that you trust, that authority, and yet it’s a sort of a trick, that it’s actually coming from somewhere else so I don’t know, maybe it’s more performatively I like to do that, but I think it's always in... I always like to… say in my essays, which are always quite more experimental I suppose, I always like to include conversations I’ve had on Skype or something  someone’s told me, but also being… overt…
[interruption to recording]

Sarah: Emm… so what just happened is that my son, my four-year old son interrupted our conversation because he had to go to the bathroom and he wanted me to go with him, and that’s life and that’s reality…

Suzanne: Yes, yes.

Sarah: So you cannot just decide one thing and follow that path and that’s it and life will always interfere and I think in my work… [sound at door] there is life again… and I think in my work I want that to be palpable, as well, or at least a possibility, so that if I choose to be one thing, one persona, that it’s always a porous given.
​
Suzanne: I think, yeah, I think similar, I think maybe I don’t work as expansively as you on a physical level, but also, for example, I’ve had some health issues, throughout my life actually, so in some ways, yeah sometimes I have to manoeuvre with that and that’s why sometimes I work smaller. I always remember when I was in college and I was struggling with the health thing and I always just wanted to be really well to be able to do everything and then my tutor said to me, ‘No, you should just make work from where you are’, and I always thought that was a really valuable thing and again going back to the work I’m doing at the moment, the writing, it’s just this last couple of years I've been really shook by events, including the death of my father, and his illness and my mother’s illness and a lot of other sort of other little deaths that have happened around and it’s just been, I just had to be with this, I can’t ignore that because they’re so big and I’ve just had to include that into what I’m doing. In a way that’s why I think the bird… I was reading about birds in mythology and how they are often seen to be this thing called a psychopomp, which is about guiding the dead to the other world and I sort of like this idea but also then I’m also being a psychopomp because sometimes I’m having to bring birds to be put to sleep who are badly injured for example, so it’s like I’m continuing this work of death in a way that’s reflecting my life so I’m similar I think maybe it’s better just to go with the conditions you are in and that’s kind of more powerful and I think in a way for me that’s what life should be anyway, not just for an artist, there are ways of being in the world that are really rich and there’s all these different potentialities of being, because I think, I don’t know about in Belgium but in Ireland I feel you know we’re just getting this whole capitalism, neoliberalism, and this kind of construct of what you’re supposed to be in your life, you’re meant to have this, this and this to feel like you’ve achieved something and I think this really leads to a lot of problems, antisocial problems, mental health problems, so I think it’s trying to open this back up again, that you can have this rich life, yeah, different potentialities.

capitalism is actually everything that hates life.
​> sarah

Sarah: Yeah, I have to think of this line, but I don’t remember any more , it’s a German feminist who wrote it, how capitalism and therefore patriarchy, because capitalism stems directly from patriarchy, is actually everything that hates life and I feel that more and more indeed, this kind of violent, moving forward idea of progression, possession, you only care about yourself, not about anyone else, materiality, no roots, no ground, how that is everything that violates life, that makes life actually impossible, that makes us disconnected from everything and everyone else. And for sure I can only refuse it because I see how much harm it does to people, eventually people collapse.

Suzanne: Yes, yes, absolutely, it kills people for sure. And that’s why also I think I’ve always in my work been connected to particularly wild animals because I feel they, along with artists and other people on the edges of things, there’s a precarity because we don’t have this monetary value, and think about even domestic farm animals, they’re called ‘live-stock’ - there’s always this thing about monetary value, and just how wildlife is seen as pests, or weeds, this kind of idea that the minute they don’t have a certain value they want to get rid of… so I’m kind of interested in that and how people like artists or other people that occupy this ambiguity in terms of how you’re living and I feel sometimes even, because I come from quite a traditional country background, which does appreciate certain art forms, but I mean maybe everyone gets this, where you say ‘I’m an artist’ and people go ‘oh, there’s no money in that’, people love to say that, they love to take you down straight away, by saying ‘oh, yeah, you don’t make any money’.

Sarah: Well the problem I think is when artists also start to have to make that their main occupation and I think therefore that art is not necessarily better than any other discipline in society today because we are prone to the same laws of the market and competition. In a way it’s the same like with NGOS, because in the beginning when I started to do Lecture for Everyone, I thought I want to go to banks and insurance companies and yeah consultancy firms, but then I realised that very often in NGO life, it’s just so harsh, there is never enough money, people are constantly under pressure that they’re even, the level of self-care, the possibility to care for oneself, is even lower, actually often…

Suzanne: Yeah, yeah… people burn out probably.

Sarah: So people start to, yeah, burn out, but also really very toxic work mentality because everyone is under constant pressure and that’s really something dangerous for what we would call the left side of society, when we don’t recognise that self-care is before anything, and care for each other therefore, but it’s really hard because if you, indeed, for instance, if you don’t have a place to leave, it’s so straining it becomes more important than anything else, so we really have to… I feel we have to pick our battles very well and to choose very well where we give our concentration and focus to, exactly a sense of collectivity…

Suzanne: … and community…
Suzanne Walsh in performance. Image: Rebecca Kennedy
​Sarah: … sharing, community, but then also not be naïve and know that if you have to worry every day about bread on the table or a roof above your head, then maybe it’s good for a while to take a step back and do something else to just fulfill your primary needs.

Suzanne: Yeah, I think it’s almost cyclical, try to look after your own self and then try to keep connection with other, say, people you work with. I think spaces like this that we’re sitting in now, like Jigsaw, is like, we were just talking earlier about how these spaces have been sadly disappearing in Dublin and I really like how they’re a little gritty and they’re, you know downstairs I used to go to my tai chi class there and then there’d be gigs there, and they’re kind of rough and ready so they’re a space for experimentation but also community. And I think those kind of places are really important too, there’s not always this  competitive, professionalised practices, that it’s also this kind of pot lucks, and all this kind of really nice things.

Sarah: Absolutely. But these are the places to fight for also, like this is the moment to say ‘no, we don’t let go of that’, it can be a physical place, or it can be values or specific organisations.

Suzanne: Definitely.
Find out more about the work of Sarah here and of Suzanne here. 

​Posted: 23/10/19