Maya Watanabe ~ STASIS

Maya's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lecture marathon at State of Concept in Athens, June 2018 was entitled 

STASIS

Summary

Maya introduces her presentation as the screening of a video work as well as a reading of a text about the video, intended to include the audience in the process. The video begins with the camera moving slowly over a structured surface, perhaps geological of nature, stopping its route on a white, moist area that could be salt or ice. The sounds turn from a doomy droning into a crisp crackling and as the camera continues to move in close-up over what looks like milky, overlapping scales under a layer of ice. As the camera slowly slides on, we finally reach the eye of an inert fish, and see a moist, half-frozen layer of water above it turn into ice. The soundtrack is composed of rather abstract, electronic sonic moments as well as what could be manipulated recordings of ice being manipulated, crushed, or cracked in different ways, with an occasional underwater quality. The camera continues to move close over the icy surface which seems to be in a continuous state of changing from frozen to liquid and back.

The title ‘Stasis’, Maya tells us while the video continues to play in a loop, refers to biostasis, a period of inactivity or equilibrium in a biological system. It especially applies to an organism which while remaining alive, undergoes the suspension of all metabolic processes. Maya tells us that in the video we see a crucian carp in a biostatic state, describes the increasingly cold living conditions of the carp and their adaptation to survive in winter when the water freezes, enabling them to survive for up to 5 months without oxygen and food. The carps freeze tolerance strategy is called cryopreservation, an environmental process as well as a state researched by scientists for various purposes. Maya continues to describe some of the research processes and conditions in the scientific laboratories and draws a line between the power of the “scientist as author” – deciding to stop the metabolic functions of the fish – to a film editor cutting and pasting an element of a filmstrip. She says that the stopping, holding, and repeating of an image can allow one to possess it, and states that “in the passage from the laboratory table to the film editing table the carp’s biostasis is placed next to the cinematic”. The term ‘stasis’ is also adapted by cinema studies to refer to a delay in a film’s narrative and a total stillness of the image. She says that cinematic “embalmed time” opens the possibility for a continuous now, a repetitive and suspended time.

Interested in “the space between life and non-life”, Maya wants to ask with her presentation: “What and where are the ethical and political limits of domination over life and death?”. Rather than pointing at the power that decides between life and death limits, she is looking at the fissures which allow for mutual permeation. These themes connect to wider concerns for Maya and some of her questions are “who is dead or alive, who counts as a subject, who is killable and what is grievable”.  This relates to her research into recognizing and grieving subjects in genocidal and ecocidal contexts. Finally, Maya mentions that the video was shot at the Amsterdam anatomical theater, accompanied by a scientist. She shares that she found that taking the responsibility of authority over another being’s life to bear contradictions and ethical conflicts that she found irreconcilable in the end of the process.

Maria Lind

Maria Lind thanks Maya for the intriguing video and enlightening description of the process. She found the film interesting to look at and to think with, one reason being the way in which it slowly unravels. Though it didn’t take her long to realize it was a fish she was looking at, it could have been something much larger as well. The fact that scales collapse and the micro and macro are not so easy to distinguish anymore, and what is observed in the minutest, bears significance for the biggest, seems to be relevant to other presenters as well. The filming made Maria Lind think of the Otolith Group’s film Medium Earth, similar in terms of “honing in on something”. She also thought of the politics of visibility, effected by e.g. microscopic photography. She ends by saying that Maya’s work is both clear and slightly mysterious and this combination makes her curious to see other works by her.

Sven Lüttiken

The microscopic and macroscopic, the ambiguity of scale was striking to Sven Lüttiken as well. He points out the interesting doubling and mirroring that is established between the suspended time of cryogenic biostasis and the cinematic embalmed time that is practiced with the freezing of what is depicted, as well as the cyclical motion of the loop which mirrors the circle of life and death of the creature that can go into this metabolic suppression. He says that as viewers we don’t really participate in this phenomenon as we witness it, it does not transform us, though ideally, we are affected by viewing an artwork or film and we don’t remain the same but are part of a process which affects us. He finds intriguing that in contrast to many others, Maya established a clear boundary between the work and the frame. This split might be seen as more conventional, but for him there is also a real potential in there, to show something as an invitation or challenge for the viewers who can then get more background info and some interpretation, which can turn into a productive conversation.

Rachel O’Reilly

Rachel O’Reilly begins by sharing that she has only just received the final version of Maya’s thesis in her inbox. Having seen the work once before, she noticed this time how affective the sound is, how the soundtrack connects to the movement in the film and “gets the viewers mind moving” on the depicted situation. She finds it aesthetically well composed. The work appears as one case study in Maya’s thesis, which thinks through Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontology’ and ‘geontopower’, a paradigm shift, which she thinks Maya wrapped her head around very well, stressing her “keen instinct for elaborate theoretical objects”.

Rachel O’Reilly describes how she observed Maya’s process of writing the thesis, working with materials already in her practice but not yet theorized previously, making the text as bibliography of the work. The collapse of the difference between art and science stood out to her, especially important because of the colonial history of science. She shares that Maya’s thesis begins in a genocide which is also an ecocide, thinks through seemingly distant materials and adds up in the work which stands on this epistemological ground. She likes that Maya is not interested in an emphasis on access to the lab, or a “performance of avantgarde posturing around new access to new technology”.

What is post-cinema? According to Rachel O’Reilly this will be an ongoing question of Maya’s practice, and while she sees an extreme sophistication around this in the work, there could be more theoretical work done around the question. Had there been more words, she would have also liked to see more attention to the psychoanalytic aspect of control in the thesis. The ethical aspect of the work is sensitively dealt with, but also “on the knife-edge”, reasonably unconventional without exaggerating the drama of the work. For the work Maya has done in beginning to theorize her practice in a short period of time, Rachel O’Reilly extends her strong congratulations.

About Maya Watanabe