one looped year but the lake is a journal series at Danspace Project guest curated and edited by NYC-based writer and teacher, Asiya Wadud. In February 2021, Wadud invited 3 pairs of artists into a seven-months-long series of private exchanges through emails, letters, ephemera, and other forms of communication. Jesse Darling and devynn emory, Tarik Kiswanson and Asiya Wadud, and Angie Pittman and Anaïs Maviel were paired based on what Wadud regards as “threads and resonances in their work and the trace knowledge that they might like to know one another and would—perhaps—naturally run into each other during a non-pandemic year.” Wadud writes,“In the dual absence of chance encounters and touch, what other kinds of gatherings are possible? How else can we find our way to each other?”

 families of what by Angie Pittman and Anaïs Maviel is an exchange of text, handwritten notes, voice, video, and images. Please listen, watch, and read below.

 

families of what is a correspondence between Angie Pittman & Anaïs Maviel that circles questions of grief, noise, Black being, and the body. How does grief find its way into the thin film between the “upper room” and “a little necessary distance”? Grief rests (resists?) in the background, matte then honed, succumbing to sound, to movement, to other matter. Grief becomes the emblem in the object it embodies. At one point, Anaïs writes, “Attaching a family picture of mallets I am still grieving greiving gris vie ng for.” This correspondence meets us alongside grief, near the knowledge that it folds, breaks, resists. Meanwhile, though, there is the culminating plea from Angie, “good grief— let me be.”  Maybe this urge radiates with us, always.

Sincerely,

Asiya

 

Anaïs

1.

the ability to hold many truths at once

the ability to hold many truths at once 

in the upper room            in the upper room           in the upper room          in the upper

room 

in                    the upper room                     where Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez is us

ears are tuned to hear the quiet

It is waiting, it is listening, it is breath, it is prayer

that doesn’t want or need anything in return

All of these tones are important 

to create

in my kidneys

2.

Intimacy.. You know, it’s like daring. How could anyone mean to hurt you if they see you all naked and vulnerable? How could anyone reject you if they saw the fabric of your soul? I am healing, as I cultivate faith that I am safe as I let myself be seen. I rewrite the story, over and over, rebuilding sacredness in the act of sharing oneself and channeling the collective in public, so that I trust the power of truthfulness, again.

Silence, because the range of our perception expands in that direction.

Principles, measures, sightlines need sharpened senses in order to be perceived and embodied. I care about principles, ethics to reveal themselves to all of those listening, those receiving.

I am learning to listen, in public. I am learning to: listen in public.

Angie

Anaïs

Watercolor by Anaïs Maviel.

Anaïs

Ms. mallet is retired. The many layers of tape couldn’t make its wood core whole again. It’s stayed with me though, as a relique of an epic breakthrough that probably happened on stage later the same year. Breaking a mallet is an initiation. The grief that comes along is as if having lost a hand.

Angie

me wander-dancing to T Pain:

Anaïs

Thanks Angie for these.

Attaching a family picture of mallets I am still grieving greiving gris vie ng for.

I also mix up i and e in grief, (I mix up many letters) and recieving. Receive, recieve grief. Greiving receiving. Just looked it up, it is in the same family as conceive, deceive and perceive…

Two Mallets. Courtesy of Anaïs Maviel.

Angie

Handwritten notes by Angie Pittman.