Art for Intimacy, Affection, and Community

Artist, designer, and musician Oliver Blank hopes that participatory art can help prevent human suffering. Blank’s installations illuminate themes of intimacy, affection, and community. One of his projects, The Lady and the Stone, appeared at The Battery as part of a larger event; many others are designed specifically for other places.

As loneliness has become a public health crisis, linked to such problems as high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes, Blank’s work brings us closer to ourselves and our surroundings. Whether it’s a telephone, a stone, or a desk, he uses everyday objects to prompt self-reflection, tapping into questions about the human condition.

We recently talked with Blank about his artistic vision, his latest project, and how living in the Bay Area inspires him creatively.

In 2017, you presented an installation at The Battery, The Lady and the Stone. What was that experience like for you?

The Lady and the Stone was an immersive, interactive art performance that I created and curated with another artist, Asha Jimenez, in 2017.

Asha and I met while working on a design project, Translation Cards, an app that enables humanitarian field workers to communicate with refugees. For The Lady and the Stone, we wanted to create an intimate, experience-based piece, with a central thread that applies to everyone. Asha and I landed on the notion that we all carry a problem, a worry, or emotional burdens.

Through an interactive performance during the Obfuscia Hotel immersive event at The Battery, The Lady and the Stone gave participants a chance to release

their own burdens through an intimate and emotional ritual. The performance blurred the lines between fiction and reality.

During the performance, visitors were greeted by a stranger who told them they’d received a phone call from a forgotten friend. Visitors were directed to a phone box, where the caller told a brief story about how we all carry emotional burdens and that these burdens can be made as tangible as stones. During the call, participants were also told that a mysterious Lady on a rooftop could release their burdens.

After the call, visitors were led on a journey through the building. At one point, they received a blank stone from another stranger and were instructed to mark it with their hardship. At the end of the performance, they met the mysterious Lady on the rooftop, and she released their burden through a silent one-on-one tea ceremony with the stone.

Using the space at The Battery was an enormous opportunity — there’s so much storytelling you can do when you move people through spaces and places.

Your projects tap into deep introspective questions, which I imagine are influenced by your own thought process. As an artist, how do you come up with your ideas?

Much of my work begins as an emotion — a snapshot of a particular moment — and then it grows from there. Several of my projects include phones because I find picking up a phone, dialing a number, and waiting for a response very interesting, putting people in a space of expectation, hope, and vulnerability where you can dig as deep as you want.

Tell us about your latest project, “The One Who Got Away.”

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I was living in New Orleans. One day, I walked by a wall and saw the question, “What would you say to the one who got away?” written in cursive. I jotted down the words but didn’t think about them again for several years.

In 2014, Sarah Urist Green — who is an American art museum curator, wife of John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, and host of The Art Assignment on PBS — invited me to create a project for the show. The Art Assignment features interactive art projects from artists around the United States.

Brainstorming for the project, I recalled the phrase and had an idea: people would call a phone number and leave an anonymous message, answering the question, “What would you say to the one who got away?”

We expected a few hundred messages but received calls from thousands of people from around the world. I turned the project into a four-episode podcast that launched in May 2018. Hearing each caller share the complicated feelings that arise in the face of unresolved grief and loss is very emotional. For callers and listeners, I hope it’s cathartic and healing.

Much of your work, like The Lady and the Stone, focuses on participatory art, which we have a lot of in the Bay Area. How does living here influence your work?

When I live somewhere, I rarely make artwork in or for the city where I reside. Candy Chang — a wonderful New York–based artist and colleague who makes participatory/public artwork for emotional health — calls this “the grass is always greener” effect. For some reason, we often find cities where we don’t live to be more interesting places to make artwork.

But being back in the Bay Area, I am making roots and exploring new opportunities. My latest project, The One Who Got Away, straddles this space between participatory artwork and podcast, which seems like a very Silicon Valley thing to pursue.

You’ve also started a design studio, Outside, to help marginalized people and remote communities. What inspired you to begin this project?

My creative partner Asha and I both come from refugee families and identify with the notion of being an outsider. We wanted to use design to empower and uplift marginalized communities, which inspired us to co-found Outside. Our first project was Translation Cards, an app enabling field workers to communicate with refugees using tap-and-play audio translations. Most recently, I’ve worked on educational hardware for children in remote regions of the Himalayas, and a community-building platform for refugees settling in Europe.

Can you say more about how your projects help foster intimacy?

I think becoming familiar with our environment moves us closer to our surroundings. For example, my project Music for Forgotten Places deals with the idea that there are places in our neighborhoods, villages, and towns that we pass by every day and ignore, and seeks to turn our attention back to these spaces.

For that project, I selected certain forgotten objects within forgotten places and composed music to accompany each one. After finding these overlooked places, city residents discovered a small wooden sign engraved with a phone number. They called the number and listened to music that I composed for that particular place.

I believe that noticing these forgotten places can foster affection for the environment, which can help restore a sense of closeness with the community.

By Juli Fraga

Photos courtesy of Oliver Blank