The Pile of Her: Agnes Borinsky talks with Sam Max about Coop
At the time I was obsessed with the chickens who can beat humans at tic tac toe in casinos.
At the time I was obsessed with the chickens who can beat humans at tic tac toe in casinos.
This body unfurls in slow motion, leaving ample space for labels, classifications, and archetypes to land upon her and vanish.
My dad called in a fright. He said, “My God, there’s a gun in one of these boxes!” And I said, “Yeah, I bought a gun once.” He said “Well, I want to throw it away.” I said, “That’s fine, you can throw it away.” So they buried it.
what I’m doing is, by cutting things the way that I’m cutting them, and by putting them in the proximity that I’m putting them in, I’m trying to make more audible the patterns that you wouldn’t see if you were just reading reams and reams of these cases.
The work is the group; the group is the work. It is an antidote to work that devalues the human. The individual is decentralized, but not devalued.
Drag has challenged me to re-examine and expand my gender identity, which I now see as a continuum between my “everyday self” and “performance self”.
There is no preaching to the choir when it comes to considering reparations, because there is no choir. It’s a lonely act.
I went in with this insane piece, this musical phantasmagoria island site-specific thing — and came out with my most, sort of, small quiet piece I’ve ever made that really relies upon, for the most part, humans behaving based on characteristics that we can perceive.
It’s the concept of being brave and having a safe space that is safe enough that you can feel brave — because it takes bravery to have those conversations that you know will be difficult, with people that might have a viewpoint that is different than yours, but in order to find common ground and to communicate with each other, those conversations must be had.
I think we do talk without words at this point and use shorthand in rehearsals, and to an outside eye it might look like an old couple having dinner in silence, yet a whole conversation is going on.
And as we talk, all of our conversations seem to circle back to time; the passage of time, generations over time, geologic time that the mind can hardly fathom. “It’s hard to ignore when you think about things like climate. Suddenly you feel really small – in time.”
Maybe the political statement is that it’s not political. We can exist together, we can live together, without it being some message or some signpost in the sand, some marker of who you are.