Tusia Dabrowska

Tusia Dabrowska works at the intersection of performance and media. Recent work has been seen at, among others, Circle1 (Berlin, 2019), mhProject (NY, 2019), BRIC (Brooklyn, 2018), The Gibney Dance Theater (NY, 2017), Museum of Art and Design (NY, 2017), Frequency Fridays at the Fuse Factory (Columbus, OH, 2017), Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn, NY, 2017), The PrintScreen Festival (Tel Aviv, Israel, 2016), and The Great Wall of Oakland (Oakland, CA, 2016), TAFNY (NY, NY, 2015). Her writing/translation has appeared in the Nth Position (poetry), the Forward (translation), Aish (personal essay), Vida, and The Vassar Review (translation). Tusia’s translation of Piotr Pazinski’s prize-winning memoir, The Boarding House, was published in late 2018 by the Dalkey Archive Press. She is a recipient of the Puffin Foundation Grant (2014) and an Asylum Arts Grant recipient (2018). Tusia was an artist in residence at Signal Culture (2017), BRICWorkspace (2017-18), mhProject (2019), and Konvent (2019). She holds degrees from the New School, Trinity College Dublin, and NYU. Tusia shares her time between Warsaw and Brooklyn.

Statement
I construct encounters across disciplines to develop my own forms of transmedia storytelling. I conceive, engineer, and participate in devised provocations to create site-responsive, dream-like experiences that trouble the mind-body distinction, interrogate the (post)communism-capitalism polarity, and imagine inclusive technologies and futures. My work stems from the impulse to create inclusive environments that engage the participants no matter their skill level and make others see things from more than one perspective. Not tethered to one performance vocabulary, my projects exist at the intersection of video, live art, performance for video, audio manipulation, and sound text. Moving beyond the politics of self-recognition, I seek radical empathy. Radical empathy manifests itself through my embrace of failure: of economic and political systems, of technologies, and of the body in terms of its capacity, coordination, attractiveness, and talent. I often present failure in terms of aspiration placing expectations on individual bodies that cannot be met. In short, my work is exuberant and increasingly with an eye toward liberation.

Interview with Tusia Dabrowska

Questions by Andreanna Donahue

For many years you’ve split your time between Warsaw and New York. What are the most valuable aspects of living and working in these respective art communities? 
I suppose living in two different cultures/communities is the reason why I feel so comfortable working at the intersections of different modalities and why I see my performances, videos and audioworks on a continuum. It’s not that the choice of a tool doesn’t matter, rather for each story there is a right medium, and I’m used to being thrown into a context where I understand very little and need to quickly catch up if not on the language then on the cultural context. In addition, when you switch between languages a lot, you become very aware of the nuances between words that evade your grasp, so I think this is why in my work I often strive not only to create inclusive environments but also to show different perspectives.   

Can you tell us about your current studio(s)? 
Normally, I have access to rehearsal rooms through the university where I teach. The rest of my process is mostly digital, and I’m not in a financial position to be able to keep a separate workspace for computer-based work. Of course, it is very difficult to not have a designated room of my own, and I am sure my work suffers from it. But I think that is the reality for many artists in New York. 

You mention that your work is “based on prompts, experimenting with narrative form and spatial narration.” Can you walk us through your typical process (if that exists)? 
I have a background in creative writing, and in the past four years I’ve been experimenting with storytelling that is connected to a physical space and that offers an immersive experience. Basically, I’m drawn to fractured narratives, layered sound design, and stories that move through space. 

Once I decide on a topic, I spend about 6 months researching it. I then create a set of prompts that sequence how the story unfolds in time. For “The New Women’s Space Program” (“New Women”, for short), the writer, Sara Batkie, wrote out the structure for me, and it was like getting a road map. Of course, I still had to develop content and since the text is not intended for the page, I tell and retell the story until it feels right. So, it’s just a lot of pacing around and talking to myself, but I find that writing things down can be a constraint. Once it’s written down, it’s static, so while I need a tech script, I usually don’t write the text down until I need it for documentation purposes.

The next step is usually figuring out tech. Of course, this is the most expensive part of my process, so it often happens in two stages where I first imagine what I would like to do and then adapt the project to the situation. But not always. For example, for “My Imaginary Friends”, I wanted to do an augmented audio app, so it was great to connect with the creative technologist, Nathan Koch, on this project. Although “My Imaginary Friends” is audio-only, most of my work incorporates video, but since videos take me a really long time to finish, I often show works in progress. Now, as the artist in digital residence at mhProject, I’m working on a series of digital assemblages called The Money Making Machine. Because they are all small works, it helps me practice my pacing in post production.

I experiment a lot in front of live audience. A lot of tweaking takes places after I see how people interacted with the work and what they responded to.

How do performances such as “New Women” confront issues surrounding identity, labor, and technology?      
Although my work does not explicitly confront issues of inequality nor provide proscriptive answers, when it works, I hope it makes the viewers ask how the current systems of oppression operate and how we can reclaim our voice. 

For example, in The New Women, it turns out that women are physically better prepared to go on a solo mission to Mars. Before leaving Earth, the protagonist agrees to have an AI implanted in her head to help her dock the spacecraft and set up a colony, which, as the astronaut notes, is an opportunity for her to correct the record. It was a woman who created the world. 

But, of course, her mission does not go according to the plan and she loses all communication with Earth. At first, she believes in technological progress but as days pass, the astronaut lets her identity as an expert fade away, then her national identity becomes irrelevant to her. She is finding it harder and harder to make herself exercise and stay connected in her body. There is a futility to her efforts to stave off her physical deterioration, but it is here that she begins to reconfigure hope not as a motivator to expand, overtake, or colonize, but to accept. (Seems very apropos of our times, doesn’t it?)

The majority of your projects are produced with several collaborators. What have you learned through the process of working closely with other artists? 
I think we are conditioned to perceive production, including artistic production, in terms of competition. Collaboration undermines this model. It also offers a safe space to grow and (at least for time-based projects) helps you make the work deliberate on more levels. Most of my projects are collaborative, but I have to say that I’m still learning how to be a good collaborator, and especially how to be a good lead collaborator.

Collaborating with Maria Hupfield was a very important experience for me. We were artists in residence at BRICworkspace at the same time, so we spent a lot of time together back in the fall of 2017. Maria invited me to do a performance with her, and it was amazing to observe up close a woman artist who is incredibly bold and equally generous. She reconfigures structures that are based on socio-economic privileging, to create more space for other women. It’s very empowering. Importantly, Maria’s work is enchantingly clear and efficient (as in not wasteful). It was a transformational experience for me to work with her because it helped me understand how I can be more bold and more focused in my work at the same time.    

Since 2015 you’ve attended many artist residencies including Konvent, a former convent and textile colony in Cal Rosal, Spain. What did you focus on during your time there last summer?
Konvent is a magical place. It’s about an hour outside of Barcelona, and it’s an artist run space that includes a former monastery and a number of abandoned factory buildings. Because the building complex is so large, there are pretty much no limits to what artists can do there. I was there with Wiktor Podgorski, and we had entire factory floor that we could use to develop and rehearse our project. We worked on the first 20 minutes of The New Women, a devised iterative performance with a multimedia component. The project tells a story of three women astronauts—an American, a Soviet, and a postnational AI—to interrogate cross-generational trauma and the imposter’s syndrome, to imagine narratives of healing and femme cooperation in service of liberation.   

What non-visual works of art - from literature, music, or film - are important to you?
Last November, I saw Varda by Agnes Varda. This was her last film and she used it to look back at her practice. Ostensibly, the documentary is about inspiration, creation and sharing. There is a lot one can learn from an artist of Varda’s magnitude and this film offers a journey through the body of her work, but one thing that also came up for me is the director’s playful and sophisticated approach to time in the film. Varda has a way to bend time, to mix and match different timelines, to operate with nuance between the real, imaginary and timeless while making the viewer feel like a friend who is not just observing but participating in her story

What are you working on right now? What’s next for you?
Except “The New Women’s Space Program,” which I feel I have mentioned here quite a bit here, I’m also working on “My Imaginary Friends” and “The Money Making Machine”. The latter is a collection of six digital assemblages that reflect on work that requires sitting in front of a computer. They are small works that I’m developing as part of my residency at mhPROJECT, a tiny project space in the East Village. It’s a chance for me to wrap up 4 years of exploration focused on the relationship people have with work, especially the strangeness of sitting in a chair for hours typing stuff on your computer and calling it work.

“My Imaginary Friends” is an augmented reality audio app that I’m developing with creative technologist, Nathan Koch, and interdisciplinary artist, Wiktor Podogrski. It’s a commission from FestivAlt, a festival that promotes alternative Jewish art in Poland. As I am a Polish Jew, this project is very important to me. The app offers an audio experience where I try to imagine what Poland would be like now if it had a Jewish minority at pre-World War II levels. This brings up all sorts of questions—for example, would the phone bill be in both Polish and Yiddish, or what’s the connection between expansion of civil rights for one minority and the overall liberalization of a country. This project will be ready in early July. 

LINKS FROM THE INTERVIEW:

The New Women’s Space Program https://tusiadabrowska.com/tagged/newwomen

Sara Batkie http://sarabatkie.com/

Nathan Koch http://nathankoch.com/

My Imaginary Friends https://tusiadabrowska.com/tagged/lostdecades

mhProject https://mhprojectnyc.com/

The Money Making Machine https://tusiadabrowska.mailchimpsites.com/

Maria Hupfield https://mariahupfield.wordpress.com/

BRICworkspace https://www.bricartsmedia.org/ARTIST-OPPORTUNITIES/RESIDENCIES/BRICWORKSPACE-RESIDENCY

Konvent https://konventzero.com/Residencias

Wiktor Podgorski http://wiktorpodgorski.com/