Antonia Wright Brings Rave and Protest to Upstate Art Weekend
Immersive exhibitions are all the rage and have historically served as a platform to present social issues in an experiential, multi-disciplinary format that prescribes participation of the viewer. Miami-based artist Antonia Wright has a practice similarly centered on placing the viewer at the very heart of the issues she seeks to communicate. Together with collaborators, she has created light and sound installations that respond to social justice issues like U.S. reproductive rights, Cuban politics, and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Premiering during Upstate Art Weekend at The Caboose Hudson, Wright’s newest installation is a continuation of the artist’s body of humanistic, immersive installations. The work consists of a light show with lasers dialed down to their thinnest beams at once to resemble laser pointers used by protestors, while also being reminiscent of those used in nightlife.
Designed in collaboration with Antonio ‘Sponge’ Gonzalez the work, And now you do what they told you, which was accompanied by a score written by experimental composer and rave DJ, Dasychira (Adrian Martens) brought visitors together in a confused, pleasurable, and distorted hive. But. as Cultbytes discussed with Wright, things are not always what they seem:
Centering laser pointers and calling attention to their use in recent protest movements and in nightlife, as sensorial stimuli, your latest light and sound installation And now you do what they told you, just opened at The Caboose Hudson. How do you consider texture—or the interplay of discrete elements—as you work with audio, visual, and sensory components in your work?
Culturally, we encounter lasers more often in dance clubs than in protests, so the challenge of this piece was to create an environment that embodied the feeling of a protest. I began to craft the work, starting with the audio. I knew the soundtrack had to capture the anxiety of a protest about to turn violent. Laser lights were choreographed to a 4-minute looped soundtrack of sampled and distorted found protest audio and then set to 128 beats per minute like in EDM music.
Lasers in a protest and lasers on the dance floor cause disassociation or a type of confusion. In the club, we see a confusion of pleasure. In a protest, lasers create optical confusion for technology (helicopters, drones, cameras) and raise awareness by increasing visibility. The similarity between both is embodiment. I aimed to synthesize the two experiences using laser lights and audio.
Various nightlife scenes have been stages for social change, freedom, and activism—a prime example is queer nightlife, but there are many others. In 2011, with its social practice fellowship The Fun Museum of Arts and Design viewed nightlife organizers out of this changemaker lens. Another example is how after Maidan Kyiv’s rave scene grew, many exhibitions and articles chart the relationship between war and rave culture in Ukraine post-2013. In 2022, clubs became sites for making Molotov cocktails. In what way is bringing protest and nightlife together important to you? Tell me more about your research and your personal drive to create this work.
Miami, where I live, has a complex history of responding to dictatorships, coupled with some of the largest dance clubs in the world. This combustible situation reveals itself in many forms, including dance. While protest is a reaction against the news, raves are an escape from it. Miami’s sizable political exile community’s experience can sometimes express itself through protest and sometimes reveals itself in transgressive ways, like 24-hour clubs. As you referenced in Ukraine, these conditions create the club-to-protest context to bloom.
For the last few years, I have researched different architectural and technological aspects of resistance movements as source material and inspiration to make art. I study images from the news and look for patterns of discernible materiality in the protests. In 2019, during the pro-democracy Hong Kong protests, I saw an image of laser pointers used as a tool by protesters. Lasers are ubiquitous and used in many aspects of our lives, but these lasers being used by protesters can be purchased on Amazon for 20 dollars and are normally used to play with a cat or shine in a presentation board room. I read an article in Vox that said protesters “staged a massive laser light show that would rival any rave.” This “mesmerizing light display” led me to discover the use of lasers in protests in other countries like Egypt in 2013 and Chile in 2019, and I found myself asking, ‘Is this what protests will look like in the future? If so, will protests have the party aesthetics of a concert or rave?’ My research led me to discover that the military originally developed lasers, and now these objects are being used against themselves as a form of subversion.
What is your relationship to Cuba and its diaspora? How is the involvement of your generation different from that of your parents, or previous generations? Can you describe your relationship to—or interest in— protest?
As a Cuban American, I grew up going to protests with my family. My mother’s side of the family is Cuban and was exiled to the United States in 1959 when Fidel Castro came to power. Because she was forced to flee an oppressive communist government, she always taught me that I was ‘very Cuban’ and that we lived in a democracy. I was raised by my mother in Miami, the epicenter of the exile community outside of the island. My mom, and most Cubans in Miami, would follow the politics between the United States and Cuba on a microscopic level. Whenever there was an event between the two countries, there would be protests in Miami, and my mother would take my sisters and me to join. She always believed that because we left Cuba, a country where it was illegal to protest, it was our right but also our duty to protest and vote. She participated in protests as a privilege enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which gives “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” because it was one she did not have in her birth country.
So, the need to protest lives in your body. You made the large-scale light installation Patria y Vida together with Ruben Millares titled after the reggaeton song that became a catalyst of change and citizen dissent and activism in 2021. After its release by Cuban rappers Yotuel Romero, Descemer Bueno, Maykel Osorbo, El Funky, and the group Gente de Zona it racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube. Attempting to curb the spread of the song, the Cuban government called it an “operation from Miami,” an area that has been a refuge to Cubans historically and today. The catchphrase which responds to Fidel Castro’s slogan ‘Patria o muerte ¡Venceremos!’ was shouted in protests in Miami and spray painted on walls in the city of Havana.
On July 11, 2001, Cubans protested for the first time in over 30 years. As a result, over 800 people were arrested just for protesting. Patria y Vida stands in solidarity with the perseverance of those who continue to protest injustice worldwide.
Protest is under threat and being dismantled daily. Images from the news are the source material for this artwork, yet corporate media manipulates the narrative around these images. The media obsessively discusses property damage or the fear of lasers, dismissing the root of protesters’ anger and the impetus for what brought them to the streets in the first place. I hope to restage events from the past into an embodied experience to disrupt the power dynamic embedded in corporate media’s lens. The gallery offers a space of contemplation to reshape how protests are presented to the public by mass media.
How did your work evolve as you moved from Miami to New York, and back again? You have an MFA in Poetry from The New School (2005) and have studied photography at the International Center of Photography (2008). Thinking back, why did you choose to study poetry and not visual art? What brought you there?
When I was younger, I always thought I would become a writer. When I was in graduate school for poetry, I went to poetry readings several times a week. I loved how the experience of hearing a poet read their work changed my understanding of a text. The ‘performativity’ of reading poetry eventually led me to discover performance art. I learned about Vito Acconci, who followed people on the street, and eventually, I started following people on the street. Making performance art felt like writing and hearing poetry. I went to ICP to develop the technical skills necessary to capture the performance work.
Are you still involved with poetry? How does this affect the way you think about your art or your engagement with, or being in, the art world? Do you think art school (read MFA programs, various disciplines) is formative?
Ironically, I returned to graduate school during the pandemic and now have a second MFA in Visual Arts. I had a full-circle moment at the opening last Saturday. Poetry readings and performance art are ephemeral, and when I was in the large space of The Caboose Hudson, I realized there was nothing actually there. Light and sound installations create the same live space of ideas like poetry and performance.
Your exhibition I Came to See the Damage that Was Done and the Treasures that Prevail at Spinello Projects in Miami in 2022 concerned the pregnant body in response to legislation walking back abortion access—in State of Labor you have recorded the sound of labor, sounds of women across all walks of life, including potentially those with unwanted pregnancies in addition to sounds from your own labor.
State of Labor is a generative sound art composition that uses data sonification to protest the changing laws around access to safe and legal abortions. Through computational algorithms, the piece sonifies the new increase in mileage a person will have to journey as their unwanted pregnancy progresses. The piece has over 100 sounds of pregnant women’s voices. (Going forward, when I use the term ‘women,’ I include trans and non-binary people as well.)
Of course. What characteristics do these sounds represent and what do they mean to you?
My partner recorded my birth, and I was surprised to hear how simultaneously vulnerable and powerful my voice became. After the overturning of Roe, I wanted to hear women’s voices directly. There is also a tremendous amount of pain in the audio because if you force a person into having an unwanted pregnancy, they will experience a tremendous amount of pain. The sounds are as personal as the decision itself.
Another reason I wanted to use women’s voices was to debunk how the media portrays labor. When you do an internet search for ‘sounds women make’ the most common sound that is referenced is a woman orgasming. The sexual objectification of her voice is the audio version of the male gaze, a sonic gaze.
Many birthing stories are handed down within intimate circles, by healthcare providers, or through topical channels—sharing parts of these experiences to a wider art public is vital. How did you gain access to the source material for the sonification piece? What were the reactions of pregnant participants and healthcare professionals?
Partnering with midwives, I have been collecting the sounds pregnant people make during active labor, starting with my own home birth experience in 2015. I asked my midwife if she would collaborate with me on this project to collect the sounds her patients make during active childbirth. She explains to her clients that she works with an artist and asks if they would like to participate. If they agree, the midwife records their audio at some point during their labor. There is no video, and it is anonymous. The participant and their baby then receive a thank-you gift. I’ll wake up in the morning, and there will be an email in my inbox titled ‘New Baby.’ I edit the audio and input it and the data into the algorithm.
Cool. Do you know Coralina Rodriguez Meyer? She is a Miami/New York-based artist with a social practice project that centers on educating and empowering pregnant people facing a healthcare system that is lacking in people of color.
Yes! I saw her during Upstate Art Weekend. Small, wonderful world. In speaking about reproductive justice, I used audio from the midwifery community specifically. As a counter option to the patriarchal hospital system, midwives are a matriarchal subculture that creates the space for a woman to have autonomy over her own reproductive experience. They are the paradigm for how females should be allowed to make decisions over their family planning. Midwives believe that birth can be a euphoric experience and a way of accessing a uniquely female power. The choice to use the homebirth movement as a paradigm and a laboring woman as synonymous with reproductive rights is confrontational and contradictory. Yet an extension of the freedom to decide whether or not to have a baby is how to have it.
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