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RIVEN RATANAVANH




Untitled Performance-Installation Reflections

December 8, 2022

I’m only now sitting down to write about the performance installation I created two and half weeks ago. In some ways I’m a slow processer. In other ways, it feels like this was an experimental process that happened to me more than something I conducted.

I began with the desire to create an installation and performance. I was thinking very vaguely about sound and touch, sound as touch, and I had just come out of a week of experimenting with transducers.

I began with a feeling, a vision. I sketched it.


There was no high concept, no rationale. I felt that this was an invalid way to begin --having my whole life been trained in writing papers and then making the work. Miaoye was the first person I showed the sketch to. I expressed my feeling that this was invalid, and they said that working this way can also be valid. I had already booked room in the media commons booked for four days and I wanted to make use of it.


Some thoughts:
  • I was happy with the viscerality of breathing into the dirt. This felt closest to my primary vision of the piece. 


  • I spent the first hour of the second day building shapes in the dirt. Leia said it felt like I was channelling something from the earth into the audience.

  • But, the score I set for myself of building things and watching them crumble felt tragic. That was not a tragedy I wanted to express or explore.

  • I spent the second hour of the second day just sitting, standing, breathing into the contact mic. That felt good -- I felt that I could look into the audience and connect with them, even though I couldn’t see them. I could see shapes of people lying on the ground or sitting back, settled. Knowing that there was no score except to breathe, no rush, no narrative, no arc, and yet that people chose to stay... that felt good. It also felt parallel to a version of holding a room. It felt more like cradling a room, like being a lake. Visitors shared that there were a lot of feelings they couldn’t express, a lot of thoughts and none at all. That reflected my state.



  • Bringing visitors up to the dirt to have them touch the dirt felt like it lacked intention, save for the occasional dirt exchanged where I scooped dirt up and put it in someone’s hands, and putting my hand under theirs, they poured it into mine, and so forth...


Lot of these ideas are good, but they don’t all belong together in one space. Some of them deserve more space, and more fleshiness.

This was truly an experiment.

I’m glad I did this. It’s revealing to see what my instincts produced. I'm happy with the outcome, and I think it spoke – it spoke to transformation, death, time, channeling energies from and into the earth.

I’m happy to work with my body. But installing and performing feel both feel energy expensive, and I either must plan carefully or lean into the work as exhaustion; or both.

Where to?
  • I’m personally just tired of working at this scale and need a break to make smaller things. I’m still itching to work with my hands but also to draw and to write.
  • I need to dive back into research. People have been asking me why earth, and I don’t know why. I personally feel like my readings started with sound art and Black poetics, to a budding investigation of transpoetics and transfuturism. I wonder what links or new directions will be found in a deeper investigation here.
  • I’m constantly itching to talk to people, and I feel that a series of interviews would also be good. In the past couple of months I’ve been taking to people in the art field, or working with sound, but I think that it’s time to talk to people who are closer to my interest in speaking more specifically to transness and diaspora.


In a new development tonight, I also have a lead for a potential venue. It’s time to think and work more intentionally.