Elizabeth Archer on ____________-LESS.

I have been a sucker for disaster stories since I was small. Going to Ukrainian school as a child, I was inundated with stories of destruction and suffering in Ukraine that stretch back to the 10th Century….let’s just say the Ukrainian people have not had the best of luck in the last millennium. Because of this möbius strip of unfortunate events (the Russians invade, the Poles invade, the Tartars invade, there’s a famine, the Russians invade, etc.), the Ukrainian people have developed a distinct dialogue with their past (through music, literature and folklore) in order to understand their current reality: History does repeat itself. The images of Chernobyl I was shown every April (the anniversary of the catastrophe) fascinated the twisted, macabre imagination of mine and I have never been able to get the images of extra limbs and human mutation out of my mind. However, with this project I wanted levity, some way to explore the aftermath of chaos without stuffing images of sick children and parched earth down the throats of the audience. I wanted to see what comes after the explosion, how people pick up their lives, how hope exists, if it does at all. How do people relate to each other when their world has shattered? As I went along, the work became less and less about Chernobyl and more about how people look out for each other after worlds crumble and society neglects them.

My work took shape in two parts. First, I began with the obvious study of the catastrophe of Chernobyl. I read interviews, collected pictures and listened to music. I knew I wanted to work with objects that were presented in a theatrical manner, harkening back to travelling medicine shows of yore, so I began to hunt for what these things may be. I was particularly fascinated with the continual reference to Geiger counters (that measure radiation) and wanted to use the clicking sound they make as a base of the performance. The second part began when I visited my dido (grandpa). His house is full of relics and photos, mostly of my baba (grandma) and our family in Ukraine. I am obsessed with these photos. Each time I visit, I can’t help sifting through them and taking fistfuls home with me. I love the magic of old photos- the smell, the texture, the captured image of celebration, youth and even death. I wanted some way to share these photos with the audience, to give them the experience of holding sepia toned history. As I began to get an idea of how to marry these two ideas, I came about the notion of creating a travelling show with a woman displaced by tragedy, whose entire life is separated into bags. From there, I just began a series of improvs, seeing what I would find in the body of Baba. Each time I interacted with the audience, I found that she had this real need to connect with other people and to take care of them and from that stemmed this idea of giving everyone a mother to watch over them.

I have been working with Jen Hofer as my virtual mentor. Ms. Hofer began her work as an escritorio publico because she loved writing letters while I began my work based on my love of old photos. While discussing her work with our class, Ms. Hofer spoke about putting on her ‘escritorio’ outfit (complete with glasses and a suit) in order to write these letters for people, thus adopting a persona and making it a unique performance art experience. I have worked with the idea of persona my own piece: the shawl, the glasses and the bags create ‘Baba’ who is able interact with the audience and tell stories in a way that ‘Elizabeth’ cannot. Hofer’s aesthetic of celebrating the romance of old things (for her, a typewriter; for me, old photos) is something that seems exceptionally powerful in a day and age when our experience and interaction with images and words are largely restricted to those on a computer screen. The ‘gift economy’1 that Hofer establishes in making books and giving them out to friends and audiences is something that sparked my interest and spoke to me- I love the idea of the audience coming away with a ‘souvenir’ from the performer. The magic of performance, to me, exists in the exchange between audience and performer in the telling and understanding of a story. Because these pictures mean so much to both me and to Baba, the giving away of these photos is a way to express what neither of us could ever find a way to say in seven minutes. After all, they’re worth a thousand words, right? Finally, Hofer’s use of translation and poetry within her work helped me to better understand how to incorporate these elements into my own work. Baba is actively translating everything in her head from Ukrainian to English in order to share her story with the audience, and though this was uncomfortable for me at the beginning, Hofer’s idea that ‘translation is to be not hyphenated but collided’2 allowed me to use both languages within my process. The poetry, then, is found when Baba’s words, mangled and incomplete, collide with her thoughts, which are very clear.