Tuesday 19 March 2013

SeaWomen by Mikhail Karikis | a conversation with David Toop and Cherry Smyth

This is a transcript of a conversation between the critic and poet Cherry Smyth, the audio culture theorist and composer David Toop and the artist Mikhail Karikis which took place in the context of the first exhibition of Karikis's work at the Wapping Project in London (May - July 2012)



David Toop: How did you come across the haenyeo community? It’s a remote place and quite an obscure phenomenon.

Mikhail Karikis: I have a Korean artist friend (Ahn SungHee) whom I’ve known for almost twenty years, and who, on various occasions, invited me to South Korea. We were driving along the coast of Jeju island when I first heard the extraordinary sound of the diving women… It was the sound that intrigued me. At first one cannot identify what it is, if it is produced by seals, by birds or humans.

My initial encounter with the haenyeo is reflected in the show: the visitor is immersed in sound before s/he moves to the second room of the installation displaying the video.

Cherry Smyth: But do they really see where the sound is coming from? There is an intriguing gap in this unusual animal/mechanical whistling sound. As a viewer I yearn to see them come up and go ‘wooo’; I want to see the shape of their mouths.

This relates to how we may detect pleasure in the female body. It’s much more invisible than in the male body. You have made a deliberate choice to not show the moment they produce that sound. Is it partly to do with gender? Is it a disguising? The work raises these questions because that moment floats and we need to assume when it happens. 

MK: I think of sound as a kind of migrant; the moment it’s produced it’s already somewhere else. Its exact location is unclear. As I talk, my voice is in my body but at the same time there is a journey – it’s in my chest, my mouth, my head, your bodies and in the space. Similarly, it is unclear where exactly the women’s sound is physically located. I would be inaccurate and voyeuristic to show where it is coming from. I would also be denying its ontology and journey.


CS: What the diving women of Jeju do is arduous and physical. They are underwater for up to two minutes and dip down to twenty meters. When they emerge from the water they are transformed. Their breath becomes a transcendent form of sound. I am relating the invisibility of that moment with the female orgasm. In pornography there is the ‘cum shot’ for men, but for women there has always been the question of ‘what is it and where is it?’ The discretion in SeaWomen is intriguing. It questions the authority of the director, artist, composer, and you decide to not go with an ethnographic gaze, and not tell us what to do. This is one of the very tensions in it: it isn’t didactic and those gaps recur in different ways in the piece.

The French novelist Margarite Duras talks about wanting to see a film which abandons the film, and to me there is some level of abandonment in this work. What does it take for you to abandon the conventions of voice-overs and subtitles, of tying meaning down? You don’t translate the rowing song for us and if we don’t read the notes, we probably don’t know what that high-pitched noise is. It remains quite alien and the meaning keeps hovering. Were you fighting against a need to explain?

DT: This is also emphasised by the presentation. You are looking through this door, so there is the feeling that you are really seeing through a door to another world. All the cultural and gender differences are emphasised by this configuration; it’s like saying ‘I’m an outsider to this’. What we are left with, is the non-specific information of sound. The discrepancy between the specifics of, say, an anthropological approach is completely countered by the fact that we are also immersed in the rather vague world of sound.

MK: The information sound provides is specific, but its specificity differs from that of visuals - it’s not explicit. If one really listens to what is happening in the sound installation, all the clues are there. For example we hear voices interacting; sometimes we hear a multitude of noisy voices, sometimes one voice speaks out, or two voices engage in conversation. From what we know from our own personal experience, we can assume that we are listening to some sort of debate, its structure and dynamics. This is what I am interested in: the sonic composition of a democratic debate. The particulars of the discussion are not relevant here, but obviously they are significant to them – they are talking about economics, unionisation and territory. We are able to hear the sonic composition of their democratic debate because we do not understand what exactly is being said.



CS: Duras asks if one can film the abandonment… You visited this place, you relied on an interpreter who you don’t bring into this space in the form of subtitles or elaborate explanations, so there is a very clear decision not to transmute that knowledge. At what point did you decide you didn’t want conventions such as subtitles, and to create the dislocation of sound and image?

MK: When I was already there. I was working with an interpreter, Dong-Hak. In the process, my passion to discover more about the haenyeo community passed onto him. He began talking to the women and the researchers we met to also discover things for himself. At the beginning he was translating all the time, but after a while the dynamics changed. He was often ‘buying me’ time; while he was engaging with them, I was able to observe their interactions, habits and environment, and through him they all became more accepting of me. This is when the subtitles were dispensed with, when I realised that in order to observe, interact and understand, one does not need absolutely every bit of linguistic information.

Also the kind of questions I was asking the women sometimes had no explanations. A reply to my question ‘Why are you making this sound?’ was ‘I’m coming out of the water, I am exhausted and breathe’; it is a fair response but does not explain the particularity of the kind of sound produced. The researcher Dr Cha Haek-Young suggested that it is not necessarily a physiological necessity to produce that specific whistling sound. But I wanted to find out how and why the haenyeo make this sound, the ways in which it is learnt and transmitted, as well as what it means culturally.

DT: There is a whole study of how music is associated with work and embedded in its rhythms – maybe the sound of the haenyeo is an extension of that. If you were doing a different sort of project, that would be an avenue to go down, but maybe not so interesting as this one, which actually admits that it is impossible to get a definite answer.

What is important is the texture of what is going on and the auditory structure which we hear far more clearly when we don’t know the verbal meanings, which after all may be irrelevant to us. This is also a far more visceral way of engaging with the work.

MK: I search for a humanist, visceral and embodied way to engage with my subject matters. That was the reason I had not a single haenyeo portrait photograph even after returning from my second journey. I needed to transform the process of depicting them into something more than taking a snapshot; something more embodied, which would consider the ethics of their representation without turning them into exotic or ethnographic curiosities. So I invented a little ritual in which I held my breath and painted their faces; this gave me the time-frame within which I painted each portrait, and a point where their work and my work converged. Holding my breath while painting linked my practice as a performer with my image-making practice, and created a way to relate to their work as divers holding their breaths.




CS: It also created a link to the language of breathing, which is central in your work.

MK: Yes, as well as to the liquidity of the paint, which relates to the haenyeo’s elemental connection with water, and the liquidity of my saliva when I perform.

CS: The women use the rowing song to help them work the boat, but when the engines came in they did not need to sing. Do they still pass the songs onto the next generation of women? Is that culture important to them although its function has changed?

MK: The song we hear in the installation was performed in their work camp. Given their old age, many haenyeo belong to a generation that rowed in the past. The rowing song is no longer functional in a direct sense of coordinating a rowing action, but I think it has a different kind of function – it’s an affirmation of community.

In terms of younger women engaging in this, well, there are none who would learn this organically as part of work. The new generation do not see being a haenyeo as a career option. In the past songs were a big part of this profession, not least because it is closely connected with shamanic practices, and song, not necessarily just work-song, is part of the haenyeo subculture.

CS: Let’s talk about the architecture of your installation space. The way you ask people to experience the sound is on the floor; this is also the way the haenyeo eat and have their debates. On the opening night of your show, visitors had a very physical response to the sound; they were rocking and swaying. The privileging of the visuals is held back and going through that doorway, as into another realm, people got silhouetted. This installation came out of the collective and relies on the collective.

People disappeared and reappeared as they walked toward and away from the video. The theme of the underworld is strong in your work: Orpheus is a major character in your previous album and your project Sounds from Beneath is about retired miners. In the video chamber, a woman went up to the image trying to touch it. It is evident that not being told everything meant there were questions about how we relate to the work. The element of transcendence came from the way you used the space. How much of that transcendence could you imagine?

MK: The idea that the doorway would be a passage to an underwater world was part of the installation from the beginning. But the fact that people came out as if emerging from the depths, creating profiles similar to the silhouettes of the haenyeo in their black rubber wetsuits was something the work revealed to me.

The twelve-speaker sound installation is mapped in space to function like a ‘sonic ship’: the sounds of the engine come from the back, the women’s diving from the sides and the flapping waves from the front. All the sounds of the interior scenes come from different speakers located in the centre of the gallery. Then, going through the doorway functions as a symbolic journey, which informed my video-editing process. I decided to turn all the underwater footage up-side-down; we leave the ‘sonic ship’ and enter a world where everything is topsy-turvy, with new rules of gravity. This creates a different tension in relation to the notion of struggle. Are we struggling to go down, where gravity pulls us naturally, or are we struggling to go up? Interestingly, the haenyeo struggle to go down. The reason they wear the led belt is to sink faster, which is made difficult by the porousness of their bones due to old age.

DT: That was one of the most powerful moments. There is a woman who is going up very quickly, almost as if you are chasing her. But in fact she is going down and you struggle to follow. She looks as if she is heading for the surface, which almost promises the moment that is never delivered: that she breaks the surface and the voicing of this extraordinary sound is revealed. But it isn’t.
In this installation, you shift the relationship between sound and image to move away from the privileging of the video. When we move into the video chamber, this rich and loud immersive sound environment fades out. When we remain in the sound area, we are distant from the image. The cliché of the screen with two speakers and the bench is broken. The strength here is that we are not allowed to play that game.

MK: I have been reflecting on the relationship between sound and image for some time. Very often I think of them as lovers; sometimes they are inseparable, occasionally they have an argument, or they operate independently. My perception of mainstream audio-visual culture is that it conditions us to think that sound and image go together, preferably prioritising the visual. Actually there is no basis for this assumption. When I was listening to my recorded material and was also watching the footage, I realised that what is sonically important does not always coincide with a visually significant, interesting or meaningful moment. So, why would I decide to keep a visually insignificant section just because of the sound that is mechanically attached to it? I worked on them separately.

A previous project – Sounds from Beneath – involved a group of former coal miners, whom I asked to recall the sounds they used to hear when they worked in the coal mines, such as subterranean explosions, wailing alarms and mechanical clangs. They vocalise these sounds on top of a disused coal mine. The way sound is used in that work challenges the video. In some cases, the explosive sounds bursting out of the mouths of the miners extinguish the image – the video goes blank. In SeaWomen, I am trying to negotiate a different relationship, where sound and image are more independent rather than locked in a fight.

CS: Let’s talk about your interest in industry, its loss and relation to identity. The coal miners’ work features older men, whereas here we have mostly older women, and I wonder if this is an anxiety about the future or the past, or if it’s connected with what is happening in your native Greece? You generate empathy with the people who are overlooked or marginal, people whose identity is under crisis. The miners come together to form a choir and these women are hanging onto this tradition which will probably not go onto another generation. Do you know what draws you to that focus?

MK: In recent European history we have been witnessing the dismantling of industry and manufacturing, the replacement of human labour by robots, and the growth of the service industries. Communities which formed in the context of work and engaged in the politics of work have changed radically. What happened to those communities, and how are new bonds and a sense of professional identity created through part-time and home-based occupation? Before SeaWomen and Sounds from Beneath, I developed an interdisciplinary opera called Xenon. That work is concerned with notions of professional identity and sound within the context of an office in which bureaucrats fight with standardisation, self-censorship and conformity. They try to understand under what circumstances of pressure they have forgotten or overlooked their basic human rights. When did they decide to let go of their dignity? They try to articulate something inexpressible. Someone stands up and recites the entire declaration of Human Rights by heart, while everything around her prevents her from doing so. The reality presented in that piece is bleak.

I felt that what I was looking for was a glimpse of hope. The haenyeo show us hope. Here they are, some in their eighties, challenging gender roles, managing their economics, and most activities, from going out to sea, fishing, packing up and weighing the sacks of food, and in some cases even selling them and running restaurants. There is something about this decentralised model of operation, which can serve as an example that is empowering and hopeful.

DT: And they also have a sense of…

MK: purpose.

DT: Yes, but I was thinking of tempo that is ideal to sustain the model of this way of life and work.

MK: Some call their work eco-feminist. Their rhythm respects the cycles of the tides, the winds and currents, and of reproduction of seafood. They don’t overfish, which goes against our current problem of industrialised fishing and the diminishing of resources. They have found a balance.

CS: I think you have found a kind of balance blurring the line between your art and work, art and custom, art and your everyday presentation. I see that in many pieces, including the way you perform in a very joyful engagement with content, material, colour and texture. Your performance of the self comes through. There is joy in the work and a level of dedication to something we are in danger of being inhibited by or cut off from. This underworld is a source of dream, a source of experiment and creativity. What you are trying to invent and sustain is exciting. We all do little bits, but you are a proliferator of living experimentation, which I admire tremendously.

MK: Is that a question? (laughs)

CM + DT: (laugh)


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