Curating Anxiety

Chiarina Chen

The project started as a tribute to my dearest friends who passed away. And the vulnerable, anxious, and exhausted ones. We are in this TOGETHER.

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My artist friend Vargas-Suarez once told me a movie he watched from childhood, Crocodile Dundee. In the film, the woman brought up something about the shrink, and the man asked.

"What's a shrink?"
"It's a stranger you tell your problems to," she said.
He went surprised,
"Around here you tell Mickey (the bartender) your problems,
then, Mickey tells everyone your problems
then no more problems!"

I laughed. It made a point — why not talk about it? Who can we speak? It is not my intention to debate psychoanalysis nor psychotherapy here. Instead, I wonder how we can talk about it, and is it ok not to be ok? 
 

In a landscape of hyperlinked visibility, a time when mass-media, cognitive capitalism have split boundaries between virtual and reality, public and private, we are in a liquid era where fragility, temporariness, vulnerability, and inclination to constant change are the signifiers. Meanwhile, our culture tends to worship impressions of positivity, perfection, and success, and to de-value the anxiety, vulnerability, and imperfection. They are associated with 'weakness' or 'negativity' trapped in the Cartesian bilateralism of identity structure.

Labeling the word "anxiety" and "vulnerability" are convenient while coping becomes a harsh process. Statistics concerning burn-out, depression, and anxiety disorder are exceptionally high among the youth, with soaring suicide rates. Take a look around the people around you, including yourself. We often strive for constant optimism and try to eliminate things that reflect us negatively. As individualized autonomies, we overwork, feeling physically and emotionally drained, and exhausted to cope with the fast-moving and cynically competitive world. "we are tired of something," as Deleuze once put it, "but exhausted by nothing." The truth is that such mental swings were no longer a "roots" oriented puzzle but related to a larger social-relational crisis that we are all in it.

Collecting anxiety took an alternative approach, not through the pathological lens that demands a cure, but foregrounds the creative potential and importance of connectedness. We do not discard the pain and exhaustion, but to see them as thresholds of transformation — to endure and to activate the capacities of becoming nomadic subjectivities. As Édouard Glissant raised, "becoming-nomadic marks the transformation of the pain of loss into an active production of multiple forms of belongings. Here what once is lost in the fixed pattern has proceeded in a multiple rhizomatic manner that transcends the bilateralism of identity structure."

Started by sending out "signal" cards, we invite people so send sound recordings whenever they felt frustrated, anxious, or depressed based on their definitions of anxiety. Meanwhile, we invite artists from multi-disciplinary backgrounds to create artworks based on collected sound data. So far, we've collected sound narratives over seven languages across five continents and developed a digital open space that allows personal voices and collective stories to interlink.

The project traced continuing processes of opening, speaking, listening, receiving, and producing. An interesting fact to most artists is that due to the variety of languages and forms of content, the unknown became a prominent part of the art-making process; therefore, listening by itself outweighs any interpretations. As Barry Blesser mentioned, every soundscape is an eventscape. By listening, we are entering an assemblage of one's story, emotion, socio/geo location, perhaps also memory, history, and secrets. Here, what mattered was to listen with curiosity and wonder about the other, to imagine while acknowledging that it is impossible to fully grasp the other person. It is to approach with opacity — what fundamentally connects us.

Throughout the year, artists have transformed the collected sound of 'anxiety' into a series of commissioned works, leading to exhibitions and site-specific performances. Each show explored one theme, zooming in specific perspectives. In New York's first season, the collected digital community has traveled from downtown Manhattan to Manhattan Bridge, Soho, and landed in the Church of Epiphany in the Upper East Side. Sound artist Emilie Weibel, Ari Finkel, and Nikhil Shah live-performed music based on collected sound-texts. Artist Wayne Liu created four installations on decay, city nostalgia, and mobility. Photographer Barry Rosenthal sheds light on the blurred boundary between waste and beauty with a set of photography-installations. Lizzy De Vita responded to the tension of relationships, loss, identity, and negotiations through a two-hour spatial sculpture piece in collaboration with Chris De Vita and Mark Bleakly. Vargas-Suarez and composer Stephen Barber co-made From Subsonic to Supersonic, realized in the form of immersive sound installation. It invited the audience on a sonic loop that explored the vulnerability of human beings, the cycle of nature, and the universe.

We especially looked for venues with prime spatial acoustics to fully emancipate the sonic events, and each event became a shared socio/emotional experience. People got to collectively witness the transformation of collected anxiety in various creative forms while being able to contribute their concern in a judge-free, welcoming mode. At the scene, many participants came to experience the works that transformed from their' anxiety.' They also got a chance to listen to and wonder about others in the project. As one participant recalled as she heard her own sound "traveling in soundscapes, "I was bored waiting in the subway while sending this voice message... and I am surprised to hear myself this way when standing I am right here. I have never seen myself like this. It is a really intriguing experience." Another exhibition, To Fly, opened the weekend POTUS got elected in 2016, turning the whole scene into an unexpected yet timely catharsis gathering.

Taking off the dichotomic negative/positive division, collecting anxiety is still contested territory, perhaps at best defined by each person's situated meanings. As the world keeps spinning in its own dramatic, divided forms, Collecting anxiety is ongoing. We give this space to you, with a big welcome sign.