Ten Huts

ten huts

ten huts

jill sigman

wesleyan university press ∙ middletown, connecticut

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2017 Jill Sigman

All rights reserved

Manufactured in Canada

Designed by Eric M. Brooks and Scott Cahoon

Typeset in Fresco Sans by Passumpsic Publishing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sigman, Jill. | Lepecki, André. | Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. | Springer, Elise, 1970– | Yaa Asantewaa, Eva. | McLendon, Matthew.

Title: Ten huts / Jill Sigman.

Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017006117 (print) | LCCN 2017012574 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819576903 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819576897 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Sigman, Jill. Hut project. | Site-specific installations (Art) | Site-specific theater. | Refuse as art material.

Classification: LCC N6537.S5395 (ebook) | LCC N6537. S5395 A76 2017 (print) | DDC 709.04/074—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006117

5 4 3 2 1

Photo credits: pages i and vi, Rafael Gamo; page iv, Daniel Perales; page viii, L2 Lab/Alejandra Ugarte; page xvii, Ellie Bloom

Front cover: (top: Elisabeth Færøy Lund; (bottom, l-r): Ellie Bloom, Matthew McLendon, Jill Sigman, L2 Lab/Alejandra Ugarte, Vanessa Albury. Back cover (l-r): Ellie Bloom, Daniel Perales, Eva Bakkeslett, L2 Lab/Alejandra Ugarte, Rachel Eisley

To my parents

ABRAHAM & MARCIA SIGMAN

contents

Foreword  ∙  ix

Preface  ∙  xiii

Paradise Declassified  ∙  1

THE HUTS

HUT #1

The Border, Brooklyn, New York  ∙  27

HUT #2

The Border, Brooklyn, New York  ∙  33

HUT #3

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York  ∙  41

HUT #4

The Border, Brooklyn, New York  ∙  49

HUT #5

The Border, Brooklyn, New York  ∙  61

HUT #6

The Norwegian Opera, Oslo, Norway  ∙  71

HUT #7

Arts@Renaissance, Brooklyn, New York  ∙  87

HUT #8

The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, Manhattan, New York  ∙  103

HUT #9

Godsbanen, Aarhus, Denmark  ∙  113

HUT #10

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida  ∙  127

A POSTSCRIPT

Kjerringøy Land Art Biennale 2015, Kjerringøy, Norway  ∙  149

THE ESSAYS

dwelling object hut thing  ∙  165

ANDRÉ LEPECKI

The Century of Compost: Some Thoughts about Waste, Huts, and Pippi Longstocking  ∙  173

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Being Moved, Moving Ourselves  ∙  179

ELISE SPRINGER

Planting Dance at the Crossroads  ∙  187

EVA YAA ASANTEWAA

The Queer Frontier of Jill Sigman’s Hut Project  ∙  191

MATTHEW MCLENDON

Acknowledgments  ∙  199

Selected Bibliography  ∙  201

About the Contributors  ∙  203

Index  ∙  205

foreword

I was looking for choreographers who could infiltrate. Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, which I directed from 1999 to 2016, had embarked on the Creative Campus Initiative, a program of curricular and co-curricular experiments that took the arts into non-arts areas of the university. We needed artists whose practice and spirit of inquiry would elevate the arts as a means of knowing and understanding the world, thereby expanding the number of students who consider the arts as central to their education and to their research methodology.

I met Jill Sigman for lunch and was immediately struck by the fact that, as a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton and as the Artistic Director of a company called jill sigman/thinkdance, Jill herself exists at the intersection of an artistic practice and multiple disciplines. She is quite simply not classifiable in terms of her art, nor where she lives in the academy. I found myself fascinated by her discovery that her academic research was not enough to fuel her inquisitive self and would not answer the questions that she was asking. She needed to return to her first research methodology: accessing the knowledge that is contained in the body in dialogue with space, time, and community.

In spring 2012, Jill co-taught a course at Wesleyan with anthropologist Gillian Goslinga that was titled Ritual, Health and Healing and was cross-listed in Anthropology, Science in Society, and Dance. The course asked questions including: Why are bodies and embodiment so critical to healing rituals? How do rituals heal and what do they heal? What can rituals contribute to the health of individuals and communities as a political project? Jill and Gillian made the decision to teach the course, in part, in dialogue with a real community: the community that gathered at St. Nicks Alliance in Brooklyn, helping to lay the groundwork for Jill’s Hut #7.

Throughout the journey of this class, Jill manifested the same generosity of spirit that you will find in this book. It is Jill’s generosity that led her to expand her teaching practice to include another scholar’s approach; her generosity that led her to open her commission from St. Nicks to include Wesleyan faculty and students; and her generosity that built the bridge between the community partners and members of the Wesleyan community that made it possible for two groups that would never have encountered each other to engage in an atmosphere of shared learning.

Jill Sigman’s work cannot be classified, and that’s a good thing. As you will see in this volume, she is at once a choreographer, performance artist, visual artist, writer, scavenger, gardener, philosopher, community organizer, healer, and so much more.

As you travel from hut to hut in this book, you will cross many thresholds, be invited into many different worlds, but the constant is Jill. You are there at her invitation and she is your guide. And if you allow yourself to become immersed in the worlds that she has created for you, you will come to understand what matters to her and thereby reflect on what matters to you.

Although you may not have experienced one of Jill’s huts in person, know that every photograph and word in this book was selected with the same level of care and intention that she put into collecting each object that made up each of the huts you see here.

To be an audience member for a work by Jill Sigman means to be an active participant. Whether it is following her to an abandoned lot or joining her for tea and conversation (a ritual that accompanied every hut iteration), Jill’s audiences are never merely observers: they engage. So, too, you will find invitations to engage at the end of each hut chapter in this book.

Collecting dead palm fronds at The Ringling.

SONJA SHEA

If you allow Jill to guide you, if you choose to take the hand of this artist whose hands so lovingly crafted each of these eleven huts, she will guide you to a place of contemplation and action. You may very well change your relationship to what you throw away, to what is disposable and dispensable, to how you think about when to engage and why you should, and how it feels when you do participate instead of standing outside the circle.

Jill Sigman’s huts catalyze new understandings of the world in which we live, where discarded objects find new meaning, where people of various walks of life meet each other, where plant life grows in unlikely places, and where the ordinary becomes sacred.

Pamela Tatge, Becket, Massachusetts

preface

It feels a bit odd to be creating a book about The Hut Project. The huts were impermanent, ephemeral. They were made with what was found, ready to hand, cast off by others. And they were about place and its spirit more than about a product. A book seems somehow more permanent. And yet it too has a mutable history—one that you will now become a part of. As a choreographer I am interested in that: fashioning an object that will find its way to people and connect us. I have come to see this book as facilitating movement on a whole new scale. A fitting continuation of the very process of building huts.

I was shocked to learn, however, about the environmental impacts of the paper industry and book and newspaper printing. According to the Green Press Initiative:

The paper industry is the fourth largest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

The U.S. book and newspaper industries combined require the harvest of 125 million trees each year and emit over 40 million metric tons of co2 annually, equivalent to the annual co2 emissions of 7.3 million cars.

The demand for paper is encouraging the practice of converting natural forests into single-species tree plantations that support only a fraction of the biodiversity.

If you would like to learn more, please visit: www.greenpressinitiative.org.

Hut #9, View from above.

L2 LAB/ALEJANDRA UGARTE

An ethical dilemma. How to share the work that I am doing without contributing to some of the very issues it raises? How to navigate the trade-offs? I worked with Wesleyan University Press to make as environmentally sound choices as possible in connection with this book. I discovered that the paper used is equivalent to 47 trees, so I planted 47 trees via the National Forest Foundation, and another 53 trees to help offset the carbon footprint of the printing process. But in the end, I wanted to connect with people I don’t know in different parts of the world in the modest hope that it could somehow plant some seeds. And a book is an ancient way to do that.

More people have already been involved in these huts than I can name or number. There were people who came to visit them, attended performances, or had tea; people who gave me things they were throwing away or let me take their garbage from the curb; people who volunteered in so many ways, who carried things, solved problems, or found uses for materials when the huts were dismantled; and people who took pieces of the huts home and reinvented them. There were also the people who initially discarded the thousands of objects that I built with, the people who once owned them lovingly or unthinkingly, the people who touched them or used them, the people who transported them or made them … I will never know these people. But I feel connected to them through this work and I am grateful to them.

There are many others, whose names I do know, whom I wish to thank—those who helped make The Hut Project and this book about it a reality. My tremendous gratitude goes to:

Each of the curators and hosts who, to my surprise, invited me to build a hut out of trash on their sites and supported my process with care and generosity: Chris Henderson, Hélène Lesterlin, Matthew McLendon, Lise Nordal, Ane Vigdis Øverås, Radhika Subramaniam, and Line Tjørnhøj.

The intrepid assistants and interns who held ladders, helped tie knots, shot video, or pushed carts of garbage with me, many of whom are artists in their own right: Jennifer Blankenship, Katie Buono, Tamara Cepeda, Michael Doo, Mads Eckert Hermansen, Ayriel Hunt, Meryl Lauer Lodge, Elisabeth Færøy Lund, Lene Brustad Melhus, Molly Schaffner, Larissa Sheldon, Oda Egjar Starheim, and Natalya Swanson.

With Matthew McLendon at Hut #10.

DANIEL PERALES

With Elisabeth Færøy Lund working on Hut #7 in uniforms found by Elisabeth.

ELISABETH FÆRØY LUND

The various community organizations that were involved in The Hut Project, especially: Arts in Bushwick, Concerned Citizens of Withers Street, Earth Matter NY, GEM, Greenpoint Renaissance Enterprise Corporation, The National Congress of Neighborhood Women, NOTAM, O.U.T.R.A.G.E., Red Shed Community Garden, Rosenhof Skole, and St. Nicks Alliance.

All of the photographers who have photographed the huts, in particular these primary documentarians: Vanessa Albury, Eric Breitbart, Isabella Bruno, Lindsay Comstock, Rachel Eisley, Rafael Gamo, Louise Kirkegaard, Elisabeth Færøy Lund, Kaia Means, Daniel Perales, Peter Shapiro, Oda Egjar Starheim, Alejandra Ugarte, Jarred Wilson.

The five writers whose essays appear in this book who have kindly reflected on The Hut Project and shared their intellectual curiosity, interpretive acumen, and unique perspectives here: Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, André Lepecki, Matthew McLendon, and Elise Springer.

The artists who have collaborated with me on the huts and my related performances and videos, lending their own artistic visions and beautiful work to this project: Gustavo Aguilar, Cristian Amigo, Eva Bakkeslett, Ilona Bito, Joro Boro, Eric Breitbart, Donna Costello, Miguel Frasconi, Glass Bead Collective, Holland Hobson, Irene Hsi, Anice Jeffries, JOAN, Lene Brustad Melhus, Marisol Montoya, Jesse Sachs, Alyce Santoro, Molly Schaffner, Peter Shapiro, Larissa Sheldon, Skye, Vigdis Storsveen, Mary Suk, Amund Sjølie Sveen, Line Tjørnhøj, Austin Vaughn, and Kristin Norderval who created the music that allowed for magic in so many huts and dances.

The jill sigman/thinkdance Board of Directors for their unquestioning support and enthusiasm: Stan Katz, Ben Mellman, Jean Steiner, and Jasmine Ueng-McHale.

The dancers who have performed in the dances that have grown out of The Hut Project, for their physical intelligence and spirit of inquiry: Hadar Ahuvia, Danica Arehart, Maria Bauman, Corinne Cappelletti, Donna Costello, Sally Hess, Irene Hsi, Anice Jeffries, Kate Kernochan, Paloma McGregor, Larissa Sheldon, Mary Suk, and Devika Wickremesinghe.

Kristin Norderval working at her mobile sound station at Hut #6.

ODA EGJAR STARHEIM

Pam Tatge and Erinn Roos-Brown, formerly of the Wesleyan University Center for the Arts, who supported this and other projects with their characteristic vision and grace, and gave me the opportunity to teach in ways that have furthered this artistic work.

Isabella Bruno, Christina Ferwerda and the BRUNO team that created the exhibition jill, why do you build huts?

Chelsea Adewunmi, Karl Cooney, Kristen Holfeuer, and Jean Steiner for their steadfast administrative assistance in preparing this