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Cultural Fluency: Moving in and out. Atmosphere of displacement. Multiple walls, partitions, fragments. Implicit thresholds. Cement. From a factory to an office, from a warehouse to a gallery. From the Italian rotonda. Wood floors, concrete steps, a foyer with tiles or mirrors. A passage. A large area with a depression. The story a horizontal plane set into the plan. Marks from the former printing press. Layers of paint. Grey on white. Irregularities from the drift of materials. Variable light. A car. Traces of use and repair. Bodies wearing it out. Drift from one place to another. Perfume of somewhere else. Layers of codes and styles. There are no modern ruins, only demolitions and renovations. Bubbles, inflations, circulation. The gaps filled with concrete as the boards wear out, the concrete crumbling and cracking. The load bearing walls cut-up. The ground raised or lowered. Everything getting chewed up over time. Partial enclosures. The glass opening things up to the other side. The breeze moving the trees on the street. The flow of traffic, the movement on the sidewalk. The movement of sediment and rock. Everything eventually opening to the outside. Unfolding and refolding. Moving in and out.
A Glossary for Other Spaces Atmosphere The ‘atmospheric’ interior is described by Jean Baudrillard as a space that ‘permits’ a fluid movement between intimacy and distance, warmth and non-warmth, a space in which relations are mobile and functional. This corresponds to a neutralization of the subjective aspects of relating (e.g. desire): a situation in which taste (as a process of internalization) does not have a place, only information and organizational structures. This externalization of atmosphere corresponds to a state in which fixed divisions (private interior, absolute exterior) no longer hold. Attention Walter Benjamin wrote, in his “Work of Art...” essay, that distraction is the mode of reception characteristic of architecture. Helene Furjan has suggested that distraction, as Benjamin formulated it, “[...] is not so much a peripheralizing inattention as it is a mood [...] an active engagement with the matrix of information flowing towards the viewing subject.” This is getting close to the mode of attention that Simone Weil wrote about so beautifully in Waiting for God: “Attention consists of suspending our thought [...] Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” This is very different from the contemporary forms or processes of attention, caught up in the circuits of capital. Boundaries The attention to framing, to the structures that configure comprehension can appear or be interpreted as a labor of making and maintaining boundaries and categories, of refinement and purification, of interrogation and exposure. By a slight shift, however, this activity might also be thought of as a kind of testing out of boundaries, an attempt to make a break, or better, to simply drift outside into the vague, the peripheral, the in-between; as Robert Smithson wrote, “Look at any word long enough, and you will see it open into a series of faults, a terrain of fissures each containing its own void.” But perhaps it takes more than time to reconfigure the gaze of the modern subject. As curator Anselm Franke writes: “Boundaries are never given to us in the form of a priori categorical separations... Representations, aesthetic processes, and media images consolidate, reflect, and reach beyond these boundaries. They are the very expression of the liminality of all things, including the liminality of all subjectivities. All social practice is, in these terms, boundary-practice, although every boundary is organized and conceived differently. ”
Images Think of an image as something other than a visual document, something more than a distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation; perhaps as a sudden event in life, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard would suggest. Images do not only represent, they operate in multiple, differing modalities: offering concepts of spacing and organizing, defining zones of visibility, articulation and imagination, producing affects... They interact: folding, transposing, intermixing, destabilizing... Bernard Cache relates the practice of framing images to that of architecture: “Architecture, the art of the frame, would then not only concern these specific objects that are buildings, but would refer to any image involving any element of framing, which is to say painting as well as cinema and certainly many other things.” Interiors An interior is produced as much by inhabitation as design: it is inhabited as much as it is perceived. There is a story by the modernist architect Adolf Loos that goes something like this: A rich man commissions an architect to re-design his home, to ‘bring Art’ to his home at any cost. The architect takes control of the space, producing a highly organized interior in which the man has to re-learn how to live. When, on his birthday, he receives some gifts from his family, he turns to the architect to help him place them in the space. The architect responds with hostility, stating that the interior he has designed has already ‘completed’ his client, and that nothing else is necessary or should be accepted into the space. The man then realizes that his identity has been fixed into place, and that he will be unable to continue to develop in relation to the ongoing flux of the world. Other Spaces A gallery is like a container ship at sea. Or perhaps it is more like the container: opaque and interchangeable. The ship at sea is an enclosure that is nonetheless caught in the flow, moving along with the other strata. Michel Foucault wrote about ships as an instance of a heterotopia, an other space – a term for the ambiguity or tension in spaces where flows and temporalities pile up and multiply, where intimacy and displacement coincide. Then there are the ‘non-places’ of Marc Augé or Michel de Certeau – defined as non-relational, non-historical and not concerned with identity, or as a space that is absent from itself, respectively. The non-place is the product of a mode of attention (or distraction): the being-elsewhere typical of modern transportation, for example.
Representation It is hard to resist the mode of thinking that arranges concepts and the anonymous materials they territorialize – subject/object, interior/ exterior, mind/body, etc. – according to a dichotomy or hierarchy and a prioritization of product over process: freezing, confining, making static. But such arrangements should be approached with careful attention to the illusion of stability, the reality of drift, of contingency, of difference. To attend to the existence of things apart from representation is to aspire towards a process that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds. Territory In her text, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity,” Miwon Kwon describes the affects of electronic networks and the flux of global economies on bodies and territories: “Within the present context of an ever-expanding capitalist order, fueled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications, the intensifying conditions of spatial indifferentiation and departicularization exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life.” In the section of A Thousand Plateaus called ‘How do you make yourself a body without organs?” philosophers Deleuze and Guattari suggest a radical engagement with this reality of deterritorialization: “This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensity segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight.” Negotiating the flows is an artistic process. It is the production of ephemeral territorialities, like a bird’s song in the forest. © David Court, 2013
Engagements with Contemporary Brooklyn March 14 – April 27, 2013 · Featured Artists: David Court Aisha Cousins Malesha Jessie Hiroki Kobayashi Martin McCormack Mark Reigelman · culturalfluency.info “For the artist, obtaining cultural fluency is a dialectical process which, simply put, consists of attempting to affect the culture while he is simultaneously learning from (and seeking acceptance of ) the same culture which is affecting him.” – Joseph Kosuth, “The Artist as Anthropologist,” 1975 Cultural Fluency: Engagements with Contemporary Brooklyn brings together six artists whose active and purposeful engagements with the city embody its culture. The exhibition is part of a wider dialogue examining the creative exchange between urbanism and art practice. In the spirit of Cultural Fluency, this newspaper/exhibition catalogue includes conversations with the artists as well as with contributors from different fields. The exhibition, ranging from public artwork and photography to “guerrilla opera bombs”, highlights artwork that depicts Brooklyn while also altering our perceptions of and experiences in the borough. The artists featured all regularly operate at the intersections of art, place, and community, often with an innate political awareness. Working in response to the exhibition concept and the gallery space itself, David Court’s text-based work, A Description Without Place & A Glossary for Other Spaces, expands throughout the gallery walls, exhibition postcards, and this newspaper. In a playful yet strategic manner, Court draws attention to the multiple forces at work in the production of space, specifically addressing the materiality of BRIC Rotunda Gallery, the layout and experience of the exhibition, and its implication in larger frames of building and inhabitation. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Could Not Understand (aka The Obama Skirt Project) is a year-long performance artwork by Aisha Cousins during which she vowed to wear fabrics bearing President Obama’s image every day. The fabrics were collected shortly after Obama’s election in 2008 from Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, South Africa, and Tanzania, where there is a long tradition of depicting the faces of black political leaders on clothing. She wore the Obama fabrics until her friends and neighbors began to see them (and the mind-set they represented) as normal. Cousins documented her experiences by writing a series of performance art scores. The piece expanded into the creation of a group called The Story Skirt Project, whereby participants re-perform Cousins’ work by wearing Obama fabric and documenting their own stories. Vocal artist Malesha Jessie challenges the notion of ‘authenticity’ in opera performance being tied to a ‘legitimate’ venue and audience. Her guerrilla opera bombs in the barbershops, bodegas, stoops, and sidewalks in Bedford-Stuyvesant engage a surprised public who pause to listen and even spontaneously dance to her performances. The 8-minute video loop Guerrilla Opera is presented openly, allowing the film’s music to permeate the gallery space and alter the experience of viewing nearby artworks. Hiroki Kobayashi’s photographs of the endangered Slave Theater, once a hub for civil rights activities in New York, uncover a history that is at risk of being buried. Abandoned for years and at the center of a bitter dispute over ownership rights and competing visions for a neighborhood landmark, the theater’s future is uncertain. By re-presenting the politicized murals inside the iconic building in a new gallery context, Kobayashi re-introduces the soul of the theater and its history to an expanded demographic, possibly affecting its future. For over three years British artist Martin McCormack has been walking the length and breadth of New York City, gathering tattered subway maps, tourist maps, and maps found on take-out menus. An active interplay between commerce, leisure, location, and art practice, The Great New York City Mapping Project is a dynamic re-creation of the city, in graphic form. Mark Reigelman’s Stair Squares is a response to ongoing activities on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall while actively altering the space. The collection of public furniture accentuates and encourages the use of the public steps as a grand civic stoop. Presented on a custom-built stoop for the exhibition, visitors to are welcome to sit and linger, shifting their perspective and becoming part of the exhibition. The exhibition is conversational and participatory not only by engaging the public in the gallery space itself, but by expanding the dialogue through its communication materials. Newspaper contributors Laurie Cumbo, Matthew Deleget, Karen Demavivas, Keith Gill, Thomas Leeser, Syreeta McFadden, and Hanne Tierney discuss the relationships between politics, community, architecture, poetry, and performance with their art and with the city. On Thursday, April 4, 2013, Inside Cultural Fluency extends the dialogue further. The public program night features Q&As with the artists and the Bed-Stuy Story Skirters (a group of Brooklyn women who have been re-performing Aisha Cousins’ The Obama Skirt Project), as well as interactive performance art scores directed by Cousins. The public is invited to visit and participate in the online forum culturalfluency. info, whereby Cultural Fluency will continue to grow beyond the confines of a gallery exhibition. By regularly including new interviews and conversations across fields and globally, the blog will continue to examine the creative exchange between the city and art practice. At the risk of being utopian, it is my hope Cultural Fluency will help our understanding of the human condition in our city and in our society – essentially shaping our ‘place’. Erin Gleason, Exhibition Curator Erin Gleason is an artist, curator, and designer based in Brooklyn. She studied Fine Art, Imaging Science, and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and received her MFA in the Art/Space/Nature Program at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Gleason has exhibited and curated in the U.S. and internationally and has created works for a variety of public sites. She is the co-founder/director of the Crown Heights Film Festival, co-editor and designer of the publication FIELDWORK (ASN Mutual Press), and recipient of a Russell Trust Award for research in Greenland. eringleason.com
Thomas Leeser When designing cultural institutions and museums, what is your approach to the building’s relationship to its community and the city at-large?
Architecture is itself a form of cultural production and as such one of the first things to consider is its impact on the community, on the institution itself and its contribution to the city at large. Architecture plays a key role in the way we feel about our cities, neighborhoods and the environment we live in. It is therefore very important to realize that architecture is in many ways one of the most powerful voices an institution like a museum may have. This puts the architect into a position of extreme responsibility far beyond the mere functionality of a building. Since the recession, have you seen a shift in attitudes for design that reflect an arts organization’s relationship to the city, including issues such as politics, race, and gentrification?
All I know is that when we started with the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, it was a very different neighborhood. Many things changed over the years, and after we opened the museum in 2011, it had become apparent even to people who initially felt that the architecture wouldn’t matter that much in a neighborhood with very little foot traffic, that it was quite the contrary. Architecture mattered in a real big way. It sud-
denly helped shape a new identity for the neighborhood. People who you wouldn’t expect to pay attention to Astoria suddenly talked about it as if it was a new institution on the Upper East Side. It was really interesting how people who would never go to this part of the city suddenly knew about it. At the same time, it was really satisfying to see how people who had lived in the neighborhood for a long time suddenly developed a new sense of pride. This was really one of the greatest moments for me as an architect – to see how architecture actually affected peoples lives in such a positive way. It was a confirmation of what I believe is our biggest task as architects in our society. And I think a similar thing is happening with BRIC House. All of a sudden, BRIC House has a face that one can see, a locus that one can recognize and orient oneself on within parts of Brooklyn. All of a sudden you can feel and see the institution that was literally invisible before. Your design for BRIC House (which will for the first time bring the organization’s contemporary art, performing art, and community media programs under the same roof), incorporates a very large indoor stoop. Are there other architectural gestures that encourage interaction and exchange between artists and the public, or that ties the building’s activities to Brooklyn culture?
The large stoop is of course central to the design, the institution, but it’s also meant
to be symbolically central to the neighborhood. Brooklyn is a multi-cultural city unlike any other, and BRIC House is located precisely at Brooklyn’s cultural center. As such, it seemed appropriate to provide a non-formal place for social interaction precisely between the theater, the TV studio, the gallery and the street. And it is at the street level where we made a small but significant gesture by pushing the street front into the facade as to allow a visual and physical connection with passersby to the symbolic center of BRIC House. Architecture can have a profound affect on a community. How does engaging with that community and ‘place’ affect you, as an architect?
It is the very reason to be an architect. To affect the community and our environment, which means to change it. Change – in the sense to enable one to understand one’s environment and world around us in a new way – allows us to see things in a different light and to open one’s experience and the way we feel about things. This is what we can only hope to achieve when we design for our community, and this is what affects us as architects in return. Has your vision and design approach as an architect changed by working with many artists, performers, and arts organizations over the years?
I started as an artist, which I feel is a very uncomfortable description of one’s activities. Maybe this is why I decided to become an architect, and yes, working with artists is always influencing the way I think about things. This is what artists need to do, and this is what I want to be inspired by. Being based in DUMBO and in a building that includes artist studios, nonprofit organizations, and an incubator for media start-ups, is cross-arts collaboration or dialogue something you seek out? Or is it a natural part of your life and work?
It is of course both, but being in an arts community like DUMBO, a lot happens by osmosis. Just walking down the street and seeing many ideas leaking out of the many workshops, galleries or the theater across the street is daily inspiration for me. Thomas Leeser studied architecture at the University of Darmstadt, Germany and at The Cooper Union, NY under John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Raimund Abraham and Bernard Tschumi. He has taught at such institutions as Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard universities, and he is currently a professor at Pratt Institute. Leeser Architecture has won many international awards, including most recently the prestigious Red Dot Award for the design of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Current large scale projects are under construction in Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and New York.
Karen Demavivas Can you comment on the concept of “cultural fluency” as it relates to a nomadic life and how it’s shaped your diverse experiences as a culture worker?
To me, cultural fluency is not about consistency or expertise in any given locale or field such as art or literature, but more a reference to fluid continuity and interconnection among sites and disciplines. In my case, it meant audaciously shifting from one community, knowledge system, and ecosystem to another and then, at times, back again. Perhaps I can begin with Brooklyn. I was fresh out of college in the cornfields of the Midwest, had a taste of studying abroad in London, and was seeking a more cosmopolitan place to start my career. I got the internship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and that sealed the deal to move East. Cheap rent in those days meant moving to a railroad apartment in Williamsburg and slumming it with other creative transplants and early gentrifiers – for better or worse! My wide-eyed self held ambitions as an administrator and curator in the New York contemporary art world and, sure enough, I was exposed early on to some of the most prominent artists and professionals working in the field such as Jeanne-Claude and Christo, Nam June Paik, and Matthew Barney. But this linear ambition was somehow derailed by a moment of travel in Asia and 9/11. Late in 2001, an undeniable feeling arose that I wanted to do more for the world and that meant leaving Brooklyn for a while. So I went abroad to engage with themes of social change, community-building, and sustainability
Ms. Allyson wearing her Obama skirt. The Bed-Stuy Story Skirters is a group of women who have been reperforming Aisha Cousins’ project, which is based on a pop culture practice found in many African countries of wearing clothes that depict political leaders. © Andrew Beard
Aisha Cousins What is a performance art score, and why did you begin creating them?
I define a performance art score as a set of written instructions for a live art piece. I was introduced to performance art in college, but I don’t recall learning to see the instructions as a separate work of art until years later at the Museum of Modern Art. I happened to land a job there right when the museum was increasing its focus on performance art. As a result, I was exposed to a ton of live art as well as documentation and critical thought about it. Anyhow, I can’t recall exactly when I stopped saying “I’m a performance artist” and started saying “I write performance art scores,” but I’m pretty sure it was while I was working at MoMA. Before that, I had been making murals and mixed-media drawings. Murals were my public art form of choice. I loved them and thought I would make them for the rest of my life. Over time, however, I became frustrated with the way murals create a one-sided conversation where the same statement gets repeated for decades, as opposed to adjusting to the changing times. I started experimenting with other media and wound up creating a performance art piece I felt really good about, called Diva Dutch. I started morphing it, getting other people to perform it, etc. After a while, the performances began to feel like a one-way conversation too. I shifted directions and started writing
the instructions down, so other people could do them in a way that highlighted their unique talents, ideas of beauty, and personal histories. That’s why I like writing the scores down. I like that it allows them to become a way for each new person who performs them to express themselves. How important is community participation in your work? How have these dialogues influenced your work and upcoming projects?
You know, I was on such a mission to make works that created a two-way conversation, that now most of my work doesn’t function without participation. I need performers to bring the scores to life, and the works generally aren’t complete, unless an audience engages with them. They don’t necessarily require a group of people to come together and say “we are a community” though. They just bring people together by engaging them in a conversation about an experience or an interest that everyone has in common. The people who participate totally affects the end result and influence whatever new work evolves. When I write a score, it’s not finished until it’s performed a few times. I ask for feedback, and often use it to adjust both the format and the content of the scores. You must have a lot of funny and interesting stories about the Obama Skirt Project.
Tons of them, especially during the phase when I wore Obama fabrics for 365 days. When I was working at
MoMA, Michelle Obama came by to check out the artwork. Ironically, I probably would have met her if I’d not had on an Obama dress. One of her guards saw the Obama on my chest, and I could almost see “stalker alert” going off in his head. I wanted to explain it was an art project, but he had a gun and he wasn’t trying to hear it. Anyhow, she came all that way to see some art and missed the one piece that referred to her husband. I, on the other hand, did not get arrested by the Secret Service. And I’m happy about that, you know... Plus, when the guard got that “stalker alert” look in his eyes, it occurred to me she probably would have thought I was a stalker too. Not exactly the first impression I want to make, so again, I’m ok with that. All my co-workers were disappointed, but I thought it was a good experience because it pushed me to think about why I wanted to meet her. People are always pushing me to tell the Obamas about the project as if they have some magical power to make it grow. I don’t know if that’s true though. It’s not really about them. Well maybe about Michelle, but definitely not about Barack. People get engrossed in the Barack Obama aspect of it because he’s such a huge public figure right now, but the project is actually a documentary about black women. I just wanted to meet Michelle Obama because I’ve seen her make such awesome comments about the role of artists in society. I wanted to tell her about my work in general because I thought she might dig some of the other pieces like Diva Dutch or Brer Rabbit Day. I didn’t really picture her getting an Obama skirt though. As much as she might dig the concept, she doesn’t strike me as someone who would feel comfortable wearing her own husband’s face on askirt. Brooklyn-based Aisha Cousins is a writer of performance art scores. Her projects include public performance art scores focused on engaging black audiences from differing backgrounds. Her scores have been performed on the streets of historically black neighborhoods from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Brixton, as well as inside institutions such as the Museum Of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; The Kitchen, NY; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. aishacousins.com
Ghanian-American designer Carla Nickerson shares her story about this fabric she designed just after President Obama’s election in 2008: “I wanted commemorative fabrics like the ones I’ve seen featuring royalty and politicians in countries all over Africa. After calling everywhere, including West Africa, I wasn’t even hearing plans for a fabric, which I thought was absurd. I flew to Ghana (my paternal homeland) to finalize an online order that I rushed through Akosombo Textiles Ltd., and I got the fabric back here before the inauguration.
Obama fabric designed by Carla Nickerson
through cultural projects and experiences. The initial idea was to break out of gallery walls, then geographic boundaries, then rigid definitions about what it meant to be a culture worker in any given field. My interventions started in the abstract realm of art – in symbolic, poetic, and aesthetic forms and actions. Then they merged into more concrete forms of development work at the international, regional and local community levels. But I would always meander back to forms of creativity for inspiration and insight on where my vision would take me next. So I would get off the beaten track but somehow always found myself back in Brooklyn. It went something like this: Chiang Mai, then Paris, then Afghanistan, then Morocco, then Mongolia, then Chiang Mai again, then Brooklyn, then a global bubble called UN Headquarters, then South Africa, then Brooklyn again (plus the rest of the 4 boroughs in my role at NYFA), then São Paulo, and now – deep ocean breath – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But not to worry, the exciting momentum of the World Cup and Olympics in Rio will not stop me from returning for a dose of home in the near future. Each time I would come back to regroup and reposition myself and it would be a different relationship to the surrounding context and communities in Brooklyn. Yet I was grounded in a broader perspective of what it meant to be back in the comfort of home as part of a global community. I had cast a wider net while fishing: grass-roots activists on the Thai-Burma border, conservation experts in Paris, international development advisors and diplomats at the UN, and hands-on culture workers and organizations collaborating with communities of color and immigrants in New York.
When President Obama travelled to Ghana in July 2009, Akosombo reprinted the fabric using an identical color scheme and design. A long-time friend and fellow Ghanaian actress was miffed that they reprinted one identical to mine. She suggested we look into legal action, but I was flattered to see everyone in Ghana wearing my design while the first family was there!”
I would also stumble upon unexpected moments of continuity in experience among friends in Brooklyn. One of the artists in this show Hiroki Kobayashi and I had both spent time in northern Thailand and our first conversation at FiveMyles Gallery meditated on the different rhythm of life there. There was a prolonged pause as we just sat there in the moment of us knowing and feeling exactly what that meant in that specific time and place for us. Another friend in the show David Court and I had a cerebral discussion about how the concept of “relational aesthetics” penned by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud related to his work on spatial experiences and textual descriptions in a park in Canada. It just so happened that I had met with Bourriaud himself years before at the historic Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris to discuss how this same concept framed the site-specific art project I was researching in the rice fields outside of Chiang Mai. While grappling with this research on Southeast Asia, I was already working in a different field at UNESCO Headquarters focused on Central Asia. It was a role grounded in another area of my research on how nomadic tents during the era of Genghis Khan’s campaigns informed sedentary architecture in what is now Afghanistan. In both regions, I also had a driving interest in how the politics of cultural heritage related to community development: in Thailand with ethnic communities from the Northern region and Burma; and in Afghanistan with the ethnic Hazaras (of Mongolian descent) who were historically repressed by the dominant Pashtun tribes in the region. Yes, I know, it’s a head spin for me, too.
These dynamic moments of exchange inform a fluid cycle: as I move forward and engage with new faces and experiences, the more and more I am reminded of people, sites, and contexts from my past. What would be another name besides “culture worker” for your role in the field?
“Accidental ethnographer” comes to mind: a way of informally entering and exiting communities and places without ever fully saying goodbye. It is “accidental” in that I was never formally trained as an expert in these observations and engagements with culture and community. Rather, my “field work” developed organically, grounded in the reality of the day-to-day, chance (or fate), the recognition of windows of opportunity and reciprocity, and acting upon them. I would fluidly and respectfully learn, adapt, and contribute to specific relationships, projects and places. Then I would slip away without much ceremony, but still maintain a kind of continuity, an opening to return… I once lived for a time with a herder community in the steppes of Mongolia. I would help set up the ger (a permeable felt-covered trellis tent), ride horses, herd the sheep and goats on the hillside, milk cows, and welcome visitors. They would often come unannounced. We would serve them buttermilk tea with milk straight from the cow that morning, some dried mutton from animals slaughtered in winter, and steamed dumplings. There would be some talk of horse thieves, the changing weather, the state of grazing, the health of the herds – and perhaps some throat songs. Then the visitors would get up and head for the tent opening without so much as an adieu. They would simply