WHERE THE ROOTS LIVE: ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE

ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE CREATES NEW MYTHOLOGIES. IN CONVERSATION WITH FAYE DRISCOLL, THE ARTISTS EXPLORE RISK, INTIMACY, AND THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF TRANSFORMATION.

By Magnus Edensvard

It was no coincidence that I found a copy of Julia Kristeva’s The Severed Head: Capital Visions on Isabelle Albuquerque’s large drawing table, amongst fragments of her own work and a multitude of sketches, during one of many visits to her studio—a stylishly repurposed fire station in the hills of Sierra Madre Canyon, in East Los Angeles. Kristeva’s compendium, published in tandem with the 1998 exhibition, draws particular attention to Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, which depicts the beautiful murderess and her equally dignified servant going about their bloody business. As in many of Gentileschi’s paintings, Isabelle’s work centers women—often modeled or cast from her own body—while drawing from a broad library of historical mythologies, biblical stories, and contemporary heroines. These protagonists—victims, warriors, witches—are depicted in varied guises, shifting forms and materials.

Isabelle’s multimedia body of sculptural work also appears to move through an anamnestic choreography that resonates with Kristeva’s prose. As she wrote in regards to Gentileschi’s paintings, “She uses these figures as she produces a witty analysis of Western culture’s persistent privileging of disembodied masculine rationality; the head, ironically phallic, ironically and yet necessarily severed; the maternal body continually arousing a jubilant anxiety expressed through violence.”

Isabelle descends from four generations of female artists. Alongside her mother, Lita Albuquerque, she has experienced both the intermittent blessings and the inevitable savageries of time. One such crucible came in 2018, when the Woolsey Fire destroyed their home and much of their shared family archives and artworks. Yet as Isabelle remarked, the fires may burn down all that exists above ground—but below, where the roots live, life waits in the seeds.

It was in this spirit of psychic gardening that The Meadow was conceived—a collaboration between Isabelle and Jon Ray. Together, they created a poetic “sketchbook” exclusively for Beyond Noise, featuring Isabelle’s drawings, personal photography, sculpture images, 3D renders, and VR scenes from various stages of her process.

We invited Faye Driscoll—an internationally-recognized American dancer, choreographer, and director—to engage in conversation with her. They speak candidly on life, memory, storytelling, embodiment, and the tensions of attraction and rejection that come with being an artist.

ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE: We met at a party on a heat pad. What do you call it?

FAYE DRISCOLL: A bio pad. All these crystals were heated, and they made you sort of stoned. [Laughs]

IA: We went on a hike together the day before the fires, and there was this beautiful view of the whole city. Three weeks later, I saw your work Weathering. I liked that it changes depending on who it’s performed by and where. We often think a dance is danced, then it’s over. That’s not how this feels. It felt almost like a barometer [of] the time.

FD: Well, the events are the same, but how they unfold does change each night. When you say barometer, I think that’s right. The thing shifts, and then we know we’re at this phase.

IA: You spend a couple of hours with these 10 bodies, and you get to know them really intimately.

FD: You see them from all sides—clothed and then slowly unclothed.

IA: I was in a bit of a trauma state because the fires had just happened when I saw it. Whenever there’s an intense thing [happening], I like to look through our history, where other humans have felt this before, so I don’t feel alone. That night, it was as if the performers took the flames into their bodies. Orgy for Ten People In One Body, started from a fire, and The Meadow is also starting from a fire. You see all these houses [here], where the tree isn’t burnt but the house is.

It’s because of the roots—the trees and the plants that survive are directly related to how far down the roots are. That’s their life. I keep trying to imagine the hills with new life. There’s so much birth in fire. Especially in California—there are trees that can’t even birth new trees without fire. It used to be really erotic to me.

FD: I was investigating moments our bodies blur and extend outside of themselves. It’s usually an erotic or violent moment, where you go inside the mouth, through the clothes, or inside the genitals. I started to develop Weathering with an intimacy coordinator and a fight choreographer, but it became more about a state of indeterminacy in the body—finding ourselves in these positions, and there being an emergent sense of what the meaning is. How do you sense the impact? Is that pleasure or pain you are feeling when hit? We’re looking at the impact of bigger, invisible things. History. The climate crisis. Hyperobjects. Would it be possible for us to slow down enough to feel these unseen impacts?

IA: Julia Kristeva says that art is the action of making the invisible visible. The invisible includes the spiritual world, and as you work with the body, you realize the boundaries are false. It’s such a thin veil. The more you work with the body, the more it becomes clear how they’re connected—that invisible thing between each body.

FD: As a choreographer, I’m dependent on actual human bodies, and inspired by the alchemistic transmission that occurs. How what I thought I was doing enters this wild feedback loop of transmission and becomes its own thing. How is that for you with material?

IA: I always thought of it as breeding my body with the material. In the wood piece, it would be like breeding my life with the life of the tree. Or with these different transmutations, it starts with my body, or a position—which is such a big thing, it’s a whole structure of power—something seemingly simple, that’s very complex, and then moves that to wax, to bronze, [and so on], to capture a performance there. Although it’s ten bodies, It’s a very lonely orgy with one person.

FD: Does the material communicate with you?

IA: Yeah, I was trying to understand each material like I understand my own body. I understand bronze the way I understand my hand. It’s a language. After the fire, there were three bronze busts that survived. I remember my mom pulling them out of the ashes. It goes back to the Bronze Age and becomes this conversation with people who have used that material. You aren’t talking to yourself, you’re talking to millions of bronze pieces throughout time. Same with wood—when you look at the technologies of religion, using wood makes you basically feel Jesus’s pain. All of a sudden, you’re having a religious conversation. You’re talking to people through time, through materials.

FD: And that alchemy is also in how materials are made.

IA: The foundry I work with is multi-generational—it’s a father, son, and wife. Knowledge is passed down through generations. When I’m working with wax, it’s a byproduct of a very intelligent culture. It’s a whole system of bees that are making this incredible materiall—thousands of years of honey. This is super high tech shit. I’m not surprised that we’re thinking about similar things. A tree has its whole life drawn on its skin, as do we. You can see when there’s a drought, you can see when they had cancer, you can see when they fell in love with another tree. It’s like a drawing on their body. A tattoo.

FD: I understand that you are communicating with every other human hand who’s been interacting with this material in collaboration through time. But is the material itself communicating?

IA: It’s like a call and response. I did performance before I did sculpture. I remember getting interested in sculpture when I realized a performance is a short event in time. Even though Weathering is a performance, it’s a longer event because it moves so slowly.

FD: It’s moving at geologic time, and it asks you, by being with it, to also start to do that. At a certain point, the rate changes rapidly, and by that time, you have regulated yourself to the bodies of the performers. You’re in a somatic practice with it in that way.

IA: It’s quite rigorous and almost brutal, yet you feel held. You’re thinking about getting us to experience that ecstasy.

FD: I hate audience participation, and [with Thank You For Coming], I was trying to figure out how to do it in a way that was interesting. It was asking the question: How does the body go from a passive state into participation?

IA: I think about [consent and not-consent] a lot. When I was making The Orgy, there was the idea of both simultaneously. The relationship between the material, the form, the space around it, the time, becomes a metaphor. It’s consent and not-consent. It’s love and bondage.

FD: You were talking about how you’d do these practices with your own body to find the gesture—the gesture that felt at once yours, but also everyone’s. How did that go for you?

IA: I was working as an AI data collector. This was in the old days when you had to train the AI yourself. I started looking at nudes with computer vision, which emphasizes pattern recognition: how we represented the nude—which is often the female nude—through time. Looking at the dark spaces, the light spaces, the way the forms are, then trying to make new forms in collaboration with a new kind of intelligence. That was really inspiring to me, how uncorporeal our experience was becoming.

I read this interesting text from Jaron Lanier. Many people think the end of humanity is when AI comes and wipes us all out with violence, but he was arguing that the end of humanity is when we fall in love with AI, which we are very close to—some people already are. I was thinking about that a lot, so I started taking my clothes off in my studio. [Laughs] I was very shy and trying to connect to my body. I was on the computer all day running a company, and there was a little space where I could hide without anyone seeing me. I think that’s why I started going towards reclining nudes, because I had to crawl so no one would see. I started trying to make the same form with a different agency. It was important that it wasn’t a sculpture of someone looking at a woman, it was a sculpture of a woman looking out from inside herself. It got really erotic. I had all these toys and props and different things.

I think about it less now, and I feel like I’m behind because AI moves so quickly. I’m really not up to date. If anything, I went in the opposite direction, I started using clay and what I called “drawing with my body,” which I guess is dancing. I wasn’t trying to make sculptures at all. It reminds me of the forces you were talking about. It came through a force.

FD: How’s the erotic garden? Does that feel like it extends from your own body?

IA: Yeah, I first started making the flowers from scans of my body and I thought of them as biophilic flowers. I started thinking of them to be able to invite someone into the studio and work with other bodies, but I haven’t yet. Maybe I’m afraid. Maybe I just don’t know how, and I’d have to learn. That was one of the reasons for The Meadow—to bring other people in.

FD: If you let yourself experiment with it, you’d find your way. The thing that makes us nervous about working with other people is that we think we have to have it figured out. Most people will just be delighted to be in an experiment with you.

IA: It actually doesn’t have to be just for art. [It can be] for friendship, for relationships, for life. Wouldn’t things be so different if we said, Let’s try things. It lets you breathe.

I’ve been practicing not knowing in my personal life, and it’s very painful. It’s not a space we really cultivate. To not know how you feel about something, to not know how you feel about a person, to not know what you want, to not know what you like, or what’s going to happen tomorrow. Not exactly knowing where you are—it’s painful.

FD: It’s about being able to be with the unknown [as] an artist, someone who is trying to think in new ways. I’m always in that practice and I have some familiarity, but it’s also always changing. It’s uncomfortable, it’s like rejection. It still hurts even though I’m probably gonna get a lot of it in this life. That’s what it means to take risks.

IA: It’s interesting that so much of art making is just repetition, repeating discomfort. The repetition itself holds room. You can mess up because you can do it again. There’s room for error when you do something again and again, which may be why I think of the drawing phase or making the sculptures as a rehearsal. There is so much room for error, for finding, in rehearsal.

FD: It’s about being able to be with the unknown [as] an artist, someone who is trying to think in new ways. I’m always in that practice and I have some familiarity, but it’s also always changing. It’s uncomfortable, it’s like rejection. It still hurts even though I’m probably gonna get a lot of it in this life. That’s what it means to take risks.

IA: It’s interesting that so much of art making is just repetition, repeating discomfort. The repetition itself holds room. You can mess up because you can do it again. There’s room for error when you do something again and again, which may be why I think of the drawing phase or making the sculptures as a rehearsal. There is so much room for error, for finding, in rehearsal.