Beyond the Grave: Writing Ghosts // performances evoking the personal and the sociological, the historical and ever-present hauntings
5/12, 5/13, 5/19 & 5/20 at 5pm at Evergreen Cemetery
Performances by Ghost Ensemble, LuLing Osofsky, Tasting Menu, & Isola Tong
A Ghost—geist, spirit—is a trace that is left over from a history. It lives through the collapse of vision and hallucination, of memory and invention, of the collective history of a site and of the subjective experiences and trauma of an individual. Through performances evoking the personal and the sociological, the historical and ever-present hauntings, the four artist-ensembles engaged with Writing Ghosts explore what happens when a no-longer-present entity is written, fixed. These artists encompass musical practices dependent on writing, language, and phonography, written accounts of trauma, and a meditation on the physicality and ghostliness of Chinese script.
Ghost Ensemble engages in the Deep Listening practice of composer Pauline Oliveros, in which participants are instructed to listen both inside and outside themselves, to sounds real and imagined. This practice dissolves the boundary between objective (exterior) and subjective (interior) listening. Ghost Ensemble leads attendees in one of Oliveros’s many Deep Listening exercises in order to attune to the surrounding space and develop awareness of one’s interior soundings.
Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is its primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has performed over 100 works and commissioned 34 new compositions by a diverse range of highly original composers who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often draws from contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, environmental sound art, and territories in between.
LuLing Osofsky writes of a former relationship with an individual later killed in a police shootout. She asks: In the name of the ghost, is there a kind of ethics? Weaving this narrative together with written police reports, flashbacks, and a meditation on her mixed Chinese-Jewish heritage, Osofsky considers the Chinese ghost in the frame of memory—something to be tended to, not dispersed, not exorcised.
LuLing Osofsky writes at the intersection of landscape, historical violence and collective memory. She is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and her work has been presented and performed at SFMoMA, the Getty, Carnegie Hall, and alpine birch forests around the world.
Tasting Menu develops and deploys a ghostly history of the surroundings and sounds of Evergreen Cemetery. Through the manufacture of speculative historical phonography, field recording, and live territorial improvisations, the trio evokes a collapsed and simultaneous history of the surrounding area.
Tasting Menu is a Los Angeles & Oakland-based collaboration between Tim Feeney, Cassia Streb, and Cody Putman, exploring instrumental and found sound, movement, tape recorders, door frames, window panes, rainstorms, pine cones, concrete floors, and children’s cartoons. Their recordings can be heard on Full Spectrum and mappa. They have performed for REDCAT, the wulf., Human Resources, Coaxial, the underwolf summer festival, and Music for Your Inbox.
Isola Tong enacts the performativity of Chinese script, and the haunting of Chinese ghosts as it relates to the early histories of Evergreen Cemetery. In a discussion of Chinese script, the philosopher Jacques Derrida writes: “Nonphonetic writing breaks the noun apart. It describes relations and not appellations.” Tong transforms her body—trans-femme, bi-cultural Filipino-Chinese—into an instrument of this writing, bringing these ghostly spirits into relation with the living.
Isola Tong is an artist, architect and activist whose artistic practice is committed to decolonizing transness through vernacular mysticism, indigenous knowledge and gender diversity in the global south. Her bi-cultural Filipino-Chinese upbringing and the tension between her transness and hetero-patriarchal structures influenced her layered and rhizomatic process. She graduated cum laude at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila with a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture. She also studied and worked in Osaka, Japan, for several years whose avant-garde movements influenced her practice. She has shown and performed in Korea, Slovenia, Serbia and the United Kingdom. She taught architectural design, theory, and history at the De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde School of Design and the Arts in Manila.
Cost: $25