Interview with Ibrahim Quraishi
by Allen Frame
Ibrahim Quraishi is a director, writer, conceptual artist and Artistic Director of Compagnie Faim de Siecle, a collaborative performance/installation initiative based in Paris and New York and founded in 1998. His pieces make use of interactive digital media, live performers, theatrically evocative space, deconstructed texts, and repetitive, choreographed actions to “explore various cultural and social conflicts while consciously examining the realities of migration, dispossession and the dynamics of cohabitation within the highly rigid socio-political spheres of imagined communities.”Allen Frame: Your current work-in-progress, 5 Streams, commissioned by Asia Society, will be developed and workedshoped in October at Mass MOCA in North Adams, MA. Is this an experimental theater piece?
Ibrahim Quraishi : No.
AF: Installation with figures?
IQ: That's not bad! That's what it is, actually. It's a large collaborative piece, in a workshop phase. The first part was in Japan last year, Mass MOCA will be the second and third parts, and the premiere will be at Asia Society in New York in January, 2006.
Still from Violin Islamic, 2002
AF: How many collaborators does it call for?
IQ: 12. There are people who do sound, movement, voice, installation, sound and space design, choreography.
AF: All multi-tasking?
TM: Everyone is multi-tasking, actually. And I work with a minimum number of performers chosen very carefully. The space designer (Xavier Hool) is also the set designer who's also the one who's building it. The person (Marc Perroud) who's doing the video is also the tech¸ person and is also mixing it. The persons who are doing the composing are also the sound designers.
AF: Can you describe the sound concept of this piece?
IQ: It's an experiment with interactive technology, having two levels of captor technology, one which changes the recorded sound that already exists as part of the design, the other that receives and then transforms the sound of the audience, whose own natural sounds like breathing become interactive material for themselves and for the composers, live mix and sound designers, who will be NORSCQ and Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky. This is actually low tech, high tech design that is used to make the audience a part of the piece. We may also have an audience interaction with texting on cell phones, where the audience takes a photo that becomes an element of the piece as it's texted to us and we play with it as a video.
Still from Violin Islamic, 2002
AF: In terms of high and low tech, do you mix trained and untrained people together in your company?
IQ: Of course. I believe in working with people who are not trained in their specific fields who would be considered amateur, who would be considered outside of the realm of what they've been asked to do. I think it's very exciting. What that does is create the element of risk. I think risk is imperative in any piece of work.
AF: How about the special sensitivity that's required when you work with people who you're bringing into an arena that they haven't worked in before, where questions of discipline and expectation are involved. How do you deal with that?
IQ: A lot of it is developing a long-term relationship with whoever the person is. There's no audition process, and there never will be. It's about finding people that are interesting and finding people that are dedicated to whatever they're doing, whatever that may be, regardless of their having formal training or not. And then putting them in situations that they're not used to. That's a really important element-creating situations that they've not worked with, artistically or otherwise, so it's taking people who're in certain boxes and taking them out of certain boxes and seeing how they shatter their box while creating another box. And I think only certain personalities and certain types of people are able to do it. I've worked with about 97 artists in the last five years, and out of that only two have dropped out, so I think it's a good record. And they range from many different places, and from sound, media, voice, science, biology. The fact that they're willing to go for a ride says something. I think it's a lot about humans interfacing with technology, with society, with nothing, with themselves. In a way the work is trying to create social spaces that allow for experimentation but also allow for de-experimentation that allows for a mess. Out of that mess, maybe something interesting comes out, performative or non-performative. It's deliberately creating chaos. Fluxus did that. There's nothing new about it. I think it's really interesting in these times, as it was in those times, to re-question, re-play, or re-search those live processes of that theory. In most instances, we are living in those experimentations, but we don't know what they are. We don't know how to deal with it. So the multiplicity of sound and environments and languages and daily reality the palette is quite large. How do you negotiate the palette? How do you play with it and have fun rather than getting frustrated and becoming a neocon?
Still from Violin Islamic, 2002
AF: I think of your work as being frenetic, multi-leveled, and simultaneous, with many types of activity at once, many media, many directions. It's interesting to think of it somehow as reflecting this time. When I think of Robert Wilson, for instance, in the 70's, I think of slowed-down time. What were the influences or pressures on you to evolve into your hyperactive multiplicities?
IQ: Robert Wilson is known for his antithesis to psychological content. In that sense, I'm with him. In our cultures, whatever the culture may be, there's such an emphasis on the psychological drama vis a vis human relations, social reality, social fabrics of communities, and how men and women, men and men, animal and animal, the state and the individual, deal with one another. When one looks at Wilson's Civil Wars, it's revolutionary, a kind of deliberate anti-minimalism that was totally minimal. You see satire in it, and humor, this mockery of the psychological drama. There's something profoundly non-performative about Civil Wars that made it performative. There's something about that non-activity that is not based on psychological reflection, not based on the emotive paradigms.
still from Nature/Paradise, 2004
AF: What are the key markers of artistic influence between his time and your time?
IQ: You've got Marina Abramovic on the one hand and Bruce Nauman on the other. These are old-timers, but they're not, actually. When you've got Bob Wilson, you've also got Pina Bausch, Peter Sellars, Robert LePage, Kazuo Ohno, Reza Abdoh, Sebastiao Salgado, Einsturzende Neubausten, Bill T. Jones, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Glass, Kraftwerk, Ariane Mnouchkine. In the early 90's you begin to get people like Philippe Decoufle who kind of revolutionized "circus" through technology but redefined "circus," to say it doesn't really exist anymore. In Germany you have many figures starting with Marthaller, Peter Stein, Peter Mussbach, and you have this absolutely crazy director named Achim Fryer whom I love. All of these influences colliding and all of them trying to deal with the times of their cultural reality, as Andy Warhol was. They were essentially trying to deal with pop culture as they saw it. Whether they succeeded or not is another matter. Pop culture defined by high culture is what they were playing with. Taking in a lot of that, as someone of my generation would, as I did, not from the point of view of a professional but as someone who just wanted to go on "trips", to go on "voyages" that did not necessitate a passivity, taking from their histories which are the same as our histories, 20 years later, the change has been not in relation to society but in the anti-relation to society. What is happening today is, the works that are being created are, at least in my case, trying to address society by not addressing it, but instead, addressing the role of technology to society. It's not about social commentary. It's not about historiography. It's not about looking at historical references from the idealization of the past. And I'm not necessarily saying someone like Abramovic or Nauman does that. They do do it, actually; they just do it in another way.
AF: Your social context is imbedded in the live process of the piece?
IQ: Only in the live process. There is no commentary. It's up to the individual to discover where her or his place is.
stills from Landscapes, 2003
AF: Where does the writer fit in?
IQ: Most of the time if I do collaborate with a writer, the relationship ends forever so I prefer to collaborate with dead writers.
AF: Because you're writing through the conception.
IQ: If I use the work of Primo Levi, for instance, I cannot and will not use it the way he intended. And I'm sure if he were alive, he wouldn't mind it but who knows?
AF: Arthur Miller was going to sue the Wooster Group over their adaptation of The Crucible.
IQ: Which is so ridiculous. I would say, get rid of the idea of being married to the text. Look at so many contemporary visual artists who got rid of the text while using the text. They've been at the forefront of citing how inconsequential textual polarities are, where you don't essentially need the wholeness of the text to get from one point to another. It's okay to dump it, it's okay to emasculate it, it's okay to burn it. It doesn't mean you're physically burning something, but it means you're trying to take it to another level. You may or may not succeed.
AF: What's your terminology for the idea and use of multiplicity-that simultaneous layering of flexible media, of people in flexible roles, of multi-cultural references?
IQ: There are two terminologies. One is what I would call a transactive reality, and the other, its impetus, is alienation. The terminology is not really very fancy in that all of us experience the process of realizing at a certain point in our lives that we are inconsequential, that we are alone, that we are really not the center of anything profound. When you come to that realization, you begin to negotiate your reality with this multiplicity of many realities and you see where you belong. In most cases you really don't belong anywhere. How do you negotiate the vastness of this intense desert that has so many layers, not a desert, whatever you want to call it, space, that you are inhabiting for a certain amount of time, and how do you come to terms with your inconsequential existence? And what do you do that allows you to feel you have a place for yourself?
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Allen Frame is a fine art photographer and writer based in New York. His photography monograph Detour was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001, and his work is being exhibited at Gitterman Gallery in New York through June 4, 2005.
© Ibrahim Quraishi - Allen Frame, 2005