Serafine1369
For our last feature of the year, our three editors-in-chief, Lynn Seraina Battaglia, Nicola Waterman, and Caroline Bernadette Blockus, teamed up and interviewed the amazing Serafine1369 about her current show from darkness into darkness at Tate Britain in London.
ART NOW: SERAFINE1369 from darkness into darkness is an immersive multimedia installation with sound, light, and video work. It is a new form of performance art exhibition, curated in a post-covid world, where the artist performs restrained meditative movements on screen. This is their first installation work not requiring their live presence. Online video teaser.
CB: Congratulations on the show and thank you so much for taking the time and answering our questions. As we understand, this is the first time putting together a performance in which you are not physically present. How was that experience for you, and – given that the show has been on for a while – what are your takeaways so far?
Serafine1369: It’s the first official installation I’ve made but there was another work ‘I Have Become A Prayer’ that I made last year that happens without me; it runs more like a performance though, 33 minutes and 33 seconds, just once rather than in cycles. Having a work that just exists in a room, regardless of me, for months, is a new experience, like a strange unchanging extension of myself is just there at the Tate Britain. At first that people could just walk into that room whenever they wanted, felt like people could just walk into my brain…
As someone who’s lived from gig to gig for years, it’s been kind of amazing to not have to manually power a show each time for people to be able to access it; to detach the fact of the thing from my labouring physical body also feels like it changes the tone of the work, maybe allowing it to be more…calm? because the sensory realities of the flesh are not there, being confronting, as they might in a live performance - no smell of sweat, no heavy breathing, no crackling of the electricity of physical corporeal proximity…it’s like the tensions exist elsewhere, and the room is a place for reflecting on them, for processing, rather than playing them out. It’s felt like an exercise in letting go - the show is just there, with all its flaws, and I can’t do anything to change it, it is what it is. With a live work, it’s growing and transforming every time its performed, and everytime it’s performed I am different. With ‘from darkness into darkness’ I’m like, wow, okay, what is it for the thing to have its own life?
CB: The show is titled from darkness into darkness and appears to play with both the absence and presence of light. What significance does this hold for
a. The choreography itself?
b. The spacial experience?
c. The relationship with the accompanying sound?
Serafine1369: I love the darkness, the daily magical shift from day into night, and I also work a lot with my dreams - the things I see in darkness - and maybe dancing can be a similar process of feeling things out without any specific intention and reflecting/interpreting afterwards. The play between light and darkness creates rhythm, exposing and seemingly cloaking it is another way of writing - or composing or describing - space. The absence and presence of light creates the architectures of ‘day’ and ‘night’ and the changing seasons in some parts of the world.
The visual arts (and in this I include performing arts) are described as though it’s all about seeing - seeing that body dancing, seeing the sculpture from all angles, catching the intricate details...In darkness, other senses than sight take focus, and ‘focus’ can’t be so singular, in darkness, things grow.
In a very basic way, I am always interested in what happens when we are together in darkness. The binary culture equates sight with knowing, understands light as necessary for understanding, demands a situation of exposure and scrutiny in order to access clarity, light is associated with purity and darkness with obscurity. The obsession with light is also involved with the privileging of that which is ‘white’. The absence of light can invite a different relation to self, the dark is often equated with the internal, the subconscious, opaque, mysterious, hidden, challenging, scary, the underworld, for sure we can see this mapping onto how we are racialised (or not).
LSB: Movement across spaces, relations and dimensions are a big part of your practice. In from darkness into darkness your audience occupies a different space than you are in your (video) performance. They experience dimensions and relations different than you were while performing in this different space. Yet somehow there is a new space created in which your audience exists WITH your performance and their perception of that space is formed by it. When preparing for this exhibition what was your approach in considering space and relations? Did you consider it differently to preparing an in person performance, and if so, how?
Serafine1369: I thought a lot about what it is that draws me to working with live performance and how this installation could act on, and speak to, the bodies of visitors, guide people to move or not move, how the work could feel alive and relational in itself. I wanted for the room to be a kind of sanctuary - a relief space somehow - but one that you need to meet in order to access. By this I mean, it could be easy to walk into the space and feel like nothing is really there and leave. To experience the work asks for a kind of surrender to the darkness, time for the eyes to adjust, time to understand how to navigate and feel out a route in the darkness, the more time you give the more details reveal themselves. I am curious about situations of disorientation as ways to access different parts of ourselves, states of openness.
When I am making work I follow what I am drawn to, what calls me, and I don’t block myself with asking why, I feel around in the dark and accept what comes. Then when we get to the presentation, we put everything out in the space and I feel what it proposes - find the sense it makes to me or what it is saying, then move things around until they resonate in a way that feels good. These ‘things’ could be actual objects or the order of movements or sequence of events. I can have as many visions and draw as many sketches as I want but once we are in the room, feeling the angles and dimensions and things in relation in real time, this is always something different. I spend time in the space, ask other people how they are feeling and what they are experiencing inside it. I think the thing that’s different is that I actually get to encounter the work myself, as an audience might, whereas in a performance, I am always inside the work and so the work isn’t visible to me in that same sense.
NW: Effective interpretation takes many forms, but a key element in creating it is identifying your audience(s). Who is SERAFINE1369’s audience? And what do you want them to know about your work beyond the experience of it?
Serafine1369: I don't know if this is a statement that resonates so much with how I work - perhaps this is more the work of the presenter/presenting institution(?), maybe I think more about offering multiple points of entry within the work so that there are different ways for people to connect with it. I know that in the corporatised world we live in now, where everyone has to be an entrepreneur of some kind, that identifying one’s target audience is the thing and for sure if I am applying for funding I’ll say stuff but truth is, I want anyone who is interested to come and I want people who don’t think they’re interested to come too, and be open enough to see if they find something in the work that is for them. I don’t want to decide who should engage with the work, or make presumptions about ‘the kind of person’ or the demographic of people that may be into my work. Making for me is so much about expressing myself as movement as spectrum as multiple as beyond the perceived limitations of my body my identity markers the presumptions and projections of others etc etc so I don’t want to doing the thing I am trying to leave behind to my audiences.
CB: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital performances – with mixed reviews. What is your take on the challenges and chances of digital performances and what is your vision/hope/prediction for the future of performance art?
Serafine1369: My research is into bodies, corporealities, the things we sense and our sensory capacities, our capacities for feeling, our permeability and the impacts of environments on bodies and bodies on environment, which we can also call relation. I love cinema and video, I love readings, but I am not so interested in screens as interfaces for making performance, I think performance is about playing with or testing the tensions between things, about creating atmospheres, I’m interested in objects and beings in constellation in non-representational spaces, I’m interested in relation and the choices we (people) make and in our witnessing one another making those choices. I have maybe watched one online performance, and the only one I made was a digital game.
I don’t have any visions right now, I don’t ‘see’ anything in terms of future and rather hope, I would say that I have faith in the urgencies of making art and the inventiveness that this forces, and the potential this has for shifting perception, which can also be shifting approach, which can become transforming a situation.
SERAFINE1369, aka Jamila Johnson-Small, is a London-based artist, dancer, writer and choreographer. SERAFINE1369 previously worked under the name Last Yearz Interesting Negro (2016-2020). They are currently preparing for a new work for Sadler’s Wells which is taking place next March.
Instagram: @serafine1369
Art Now is a series of free exhibitions showcasing emerging talent and highlighting new developments in British art.
From darkness into darkness is on display at Tate Britain (Millbank, London SW1P 4RG)
24 September 2021 – 3 January 2022
Open daily 10.00 – 18.00
Free admission, it is recommended that timed tickets are booked before visiting.
