LITA ALBUQUERQUE

hEARTH confronts the viewer with a sound and sculptural installation that extends into performance. The encounter consists in a blue female figure at the center of a field of white sand, one ear to the ground, listening. The sculpture participates in a dialogue not only with the Sunnylands Center & Gardens collection of art, which includes the Alberto Giacometti Bust of Diego on Stele III, but also with its pristine architecture and beautiful grounds, which allow for another level of contemplation. The sculpture—a life-size, full-body cast of the artist’s dancer and choreographer daughter, Jasmine, in plaster covered with ultramarine blue pigment, installed in a circle of white—permits for the projection of a massive landscape and for hearing on a large scale. Albuquerque posits that we must reconsider the importance of listening. On two occasions during Desert X, singers and dancers animated the Great Lawn of Sunnylands with a performance created by Albuquerque in collaboration with Kristen Toedtman of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and with Jasmine.

neville wakefield: A lot of your work is about the swirling energies of the cosmos and how we constitute ourselves within that. The desert is an elemental and cosmic place, and you’ve been to many deserts. What draws you to the desert and, specifically, to the Coachella Valley desert?

lita albuquerque: I just came back from a trip to Tunisia in North Africa, which is where I grew up. I took my son there, and I took him to Djerba. I kept telling him—I said, “It’s a desert island,” and he said, “What do you mean, a desert island? Islands are islands. It’s not desert.” And I said, “No, no. It’s a desert island.” I hadn’t been back to Tunisia since 2011, so for about seven years, and there was such an impact of how much—I mean, I knew this— how much the landscape there influenced me, and how much it opens up some kind of a poetic space in me.

The desert in the Coachella Valley, especially the places that are inaccessible or less accessible, certainly has that feeling of the sublime, or that feeling of getting lost.

Traditionally the sublime has been constituted in terms of boundlessness—the absence of borders and the confusion of the self—which features strongly in your work.

Yes. Very much. It isn’t just the desert, it’s the relationship; it’s about internalizing space. It’s about experiencing, inside and outside. That’s a good way of putting it. It may not have boundaries, but on the other hand, it’s a space that holds you. It’s like, it’s not totally boundary-less; in fact, it takes you in. It envelops you. The self and nature become one, but you’re being held by that nature. It’s a “you’re not alone” kind of experience.

It’s interesting for your Desert X piece, then, which in a way was at the least deserted site.

I wanted to go out and, in fact, I had chosen the site, but then it turned out we couldn’t have that site. What intrigued me about the non-desert desert of Sunnylands was, it’s a site of political power. I strove to bring another kind of voice inside that place of power, which was also created as an oasis.

It has a peacemaking agenda.

Exactly. It’s where decisions were made, or well, discussed. [hEARTH] was putting my voice within that context. I took the distillation of my experience of being in those spaces when I was researching all the places I wanted to do works in, and what came out of that was that idea of silence. So I created this performance that was around the idea of silence.

How did silence manifest within the choreography?

There was a combination of choreography, movement, and singing, and we worked together. I wrote the libretto, but we worked with the composer and the choreographer to have moments of complete silence. There were moments during silence when there was a lot of movement, and vice versa. It shifted back and forth.

Between stillness and silence.

Exactly. At first I questioned whether to have any words whatsoever, but I decided to talk about silence and also about listening, because the figure was listening to the earth.

The figure was ultramarine blue, with her ear pressed to the ground. Was that an invitation for all of us to pay attention to the sounds that we don’t hear?

Very much, and in fact, the choreography of the piece, in a way, was kind of violent. There were the

three dancers, and two of them kept listening and then throwing themselves on the ground. They did that with the singers as well. They threw themselves on the ground as well, so that they could listen with their ears to the ground.

But it’s very much an invitation to listen, a listening within.

Was it about the act of listening, or was there something the piece was messaging to people that they should be listening for?

It was more about questioning what we should listen to.

She, the sculpture, was the one carrying the entire message in her being. And the singing was about, “Why have you come here? What are you listening to?” And meaning, therefore, “What should we listen to?”

It actually reminded me of a moment in Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine when he asks Marilyn Manson what he would tell the children of Columbine, and Manson says this incredible thing, “I wouldn’t tell them anything. I’d listen to what they had to say. And that’s what no one did.”

That’s good. Yes. Yes.

The attention that this listening asks of us, is it to the cosmic or to the political? It’s a political site, but it’s a cosmic act.

They’re intertwined, and so through listening to the cosmic, you get a different sense of the political. It was very much about, “I’ve got to, got to, got to, got to listen.”

I thought this was the most political piece I had done. The figure represented this not-ofEarth being, but also, she is listening to the earth, and listening to the earth is also listening to what’s happening on the earth, not just in the earth.