For my assignment, I decided to expand my water ritual score from Assignment #4 into a participatory art project, Mixing Waters. The project involves mailing bottles of water from the San Lorenzo River to people in other places, who would then do the mixing waters score. You can read about the project here: http://www.cynthialinglee.com/mixing-waters/. A good number of friends from different places in the US have agreed to do the score.
Partway through mailing out the bottles of water, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. Harvey has been called the worst storm to ever hit the United States. Houston is my hometown, where I still have family; it is the fourth largest and most diverse city in the US (yes, even more than LA). It is also a center of petrochemical production and has a laissez faire approach to zoning, all of which will complicate the recovery efforts from the extreme flooding that has occurred.
I decided to take my remaining bottles of San Lorenzo water and do a durational ritual action connecting the 1955 flooding of Santa Cruz's last Chinatown to the current and ongoing devastation in Texas and Louisiana. The ritual draws on baibai, Han Taiwanese practices of ancestral worship, as well as being somewhat inspired by my existing performance art piece, Lost Chinatowns. I decided to do a ritual for every day that it kept raining (and as of Sept 1, it's still raining). Harvey made landfall on August 25, and I didn't start till the 28th, so the first three days are missing.
Password for all videos: "harvey"
Note: the documentation is imperfect (and given its ritual nature, it didn't make sense to re-film anything), and for some reason the Aug 31 video is flipped 90 degrees. I'll fix that when I have some spare time.
Day 4: August 28, 2017
Day 5: August 29, 2017
Day 6: August 30, 2017
Mixing Waters San Lorenzo - Harvey 3 from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
Day 7: August 31, 2017
Day 8: September 1, 2017
Mixing Waters San Lorenzo - Harvey 5 from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
QUESTIONS:
(1) How does the ritual make you feel? What effect does its durational, repeating nature have on you? How do the variations from day to day register for you?
(2) Does this piece convey anything related to solidarity or coalition building to you? Might any of its techniques be useful to us in the larger Borders Resurfacing project, as we think about how to connect our local issues/contexts?
(3) As imperfect as the documentation is, do you feel that it is strong enough as a stand-alone project to share publicly?
(4) Any other feedback or questions?
ReplyDelete1. Knowing the context, It makes me feel slightly sad, melancholy, slightly touched at the sweet gesture, and a wee bit bored. I enjoy seeing it from different angles, times of day and with different flowers and set ups. They don’t read as anything to me other than just variations on the theme, though I could interpret it as shifts in the region or the area that may have been affected as the storm moves.
2. I feel a sense of solidarity in the time taken to honor, but not in the recognition of the severity of the devastation. The ritual is relatively peaceful feeling while the actual situation feels quite overwhelming. I am curious about the relatives you have living there, if you’ve heard from them and if so, what they might have to say. For the Post Natyam project, surely water rituals can be used to stay connected to different current events and to document our relationship and response to them in a different way, especially if all 4 of us were to do something every day.
3. I especially like the photos documents after the ritual, the wetness tends to tell the story of what happened for most of them (minus fire). I think perhaps the videos could be edited together into one 2-3 min thing, instead of 5 plus days of watching 2-3 min of fairly similar footage. I think most people wouldn’t watch many of them. Unless it was something like “facebook live” where other people are encouraged to participate somehow from their own locations during those few minutes every night? If you did edit it together, I am curious about a layering of something like of Meena’s edits that they just posted (only because it’s on my mind), or of news information somehow in audio or visual. I felt like an audio element could be added.
4. On a small screen the water bottle that you use to pour water from looks a wee bit like an alcohol bottle, thus at first, my mind went to arsen instead of floods, especially since it is just wetting the area, not really flooding it. I particularly engaged with Day 5, because there was an interesting shadow of the incense in the beginning, and the photo which was doused was one of the more touching moments. Day 8 with the fire, also stood out.