The Violence of Being Known

Artist Ernesto Pujol describes a socially engaged, public performance practice as

…the site specific embodiment of urgent social issues

…through considered human gesture, such as conscious walking

…ethically made and generously shared with a community

…as a form of diagnostic, collective, poetic portrait

…freely offered for aesthetic appreciation and meaningful reflection

…ultimately seeking a socially transformative, cultural experience

from Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths

This performance was an embodied response to Alexis Pauline Gumb’s chapter listen in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals where she inscribes the question…how do we mourn and survive the violence of being known?

“I would honor you with the roughness of my skin, the thickness of my boundaries, the warmth of my own fat. I would honor you with my quiet and my breathing, my listening further and further out and in. I would honor you with the slowness of my movement, contemplative and graceful. I would try to be like you even though they say it’s out of fashion. I will remember you. Not by the name (written in the possessive) of the one they say “discovered” you after generations of Indigenous relationship.” (17)

The Violence of Being Known is a wide reaching collaboration and visual monograph about the health of Whales. My immediate collaborators were writers Marina Keegan and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The piece was also influenced by Anna Halprin. Non-human collaborators include sand, ocean, seaweed, coral, and sky in Quintana Roo, Mexico. When I asked the locals if I could spend some time dancing on the beach, their response was “the ocean is for everyone.”

My work is always in conversation with other Artist’s work, never as a means to appropriate or exploit, but for the purpose of learning and witnessing perspectives different than my own. I do my best to humble myself in the face of complex questions, aware of what is conscious and unconscious within me. In this way I can’t lay claim to the work, as it is for growth and healing, which belongs to everyone.

"Yesterday I learned that the breathing of whales is as crucial to our own breathing and the carbon cycle of the planet as are the forests of the world. Researchers say, if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much as 110,000 hectares of forest, or a forest the size of Rocky Mountain National Park."

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned
"I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken."

Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness
"We have been conditioned to believe in a basic schism between our animal bodies and our human potential. The split between our animal intelligence and our human potential is well established and diligently maintained by our culture."

Susan Aposhyan, Natural Intelligence

The Violence of Being Known

"I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken."

"We have been conditioned to believe in a basic schism between our animal bodies and our human potential. The split between our animal intelligence and our human potential is well established and diligently maintained by our culture."