A Conversation with Amanda Williams about Embodied Sensations

AR: And could you describe what the installation in the atrium will be?

The installation draws on the urgency of the moment in which we all find ourselves, which has forced everyone to make really major life changes to our daily routines, rituals, and experiences. In the museum, this has meant removing the furniture throughout the public spaces that could potentially present surfaces for the Coronavirus, and moving those chairs and tables and benches to the basement. So I’ve worked to move the furniture into the atrium space, into the center of the museum, and am asking participants who are already navigating so many foreign movements to also navigate the furniture, which now has a completely different meaning in relation to the viewers in the audience.

Ana Janevski: So the furniture almost becomes a little bit like a maze or an obstacle course, with stacks and a somewhat precarious arrangement?

Yes, the furniture went from being something that has been thought of as a way to welcome or provide comfort to visitors—a moment to pause, a moment to rest, a moment to wait for or to chat with a friend—to becoming objects that are hazardous or (as we could see even in something like the invasion of the Capitol) even becoming weapons or barriers. So it’s an opportunity to highlight how quickly things that seem mundane and that have been designed for a certain purpose can take on an entirely new identity based on factors that are happening around them.

AR: Can you talk about how this project has taken shape over the past year in relation to the transformation of public space during COVID-19 and the pandemic?

There was an initial kind of shock when the world had to shut down...it was a disembodied sensation. When, all of a sudden, you had to wait to enter a grocery store. When you couldn’t hug a loved one. All these things have to do with space and the way that we occupy all sorts of spaces. And also the way we took for granted our ability to interact or choose not to interact in public spaces. That was all removed from us. And so I think a lot of the anxiety and frustration that we see across the country has to do not only with people declaring this to be a violation of their rights, but also with the realization that public space isn’t free in the first place.

And so when your movements become regulated in spaces that you think you have control over, that’s where you see the tension. Everything from the sidewalk, to how far you can negotiate your front porch or lawn to receive your mail or to talk to a neighbor, has made people become hyper-aware of space. We’re forever emblazoned with six feet as some kind of marker of acceptable distance. And so it’s going to be really interesting to see what it now means for entire societies to be in tune with their bodies in relation to these metrics of space. It was always there, but it was something that many people didn’t really concern themselves with before now.

AJ: Can you talk about how you and your collaborator, the Chicago-based choreographer Anna Martine Whitehead, conceived the movements in the atrium?

In thinking about how Embodied Sensations would play itself out as a performative work in the atrium, the first aha moment was the realization that the constraints that were practical and necessary for the museum could also be really powerful analogies and metaphors for how people were experiencing their daily lives. I began thinking about what happens when entire built environment spaces begin to have terms, whether you know it or not or whether you have to adhere to those terms or not. And so how do you translate that into that space? I’m not a performance artist, but I do think about bodies and space all the time. So Embodied Sensations seemed like a natural extension of these questions, and it felt like it had to be a performative work in order to express the kinds of things that I was thinking about.

So I called on Anna Martine Whitehead here in Chicago, who has an amazing practice and has looked in her own work at the relationship of territories and bodies. And I thought that she could be fantastic as a guide and collaborator in helping me make these translations. Intuitively, I had a lot of understanding about what I was imagining and how I was thinking about the body. But in terms of performance, I really leaned on her heavily to think about how to create a kind of bridge between participants with no background in performance, and the performance community that thinks about this all the time. Are there ways that we can marry those two groups together and imagine how we could bring these experiences to life?

It feels like people may be in tune with the prospect of having to have their body do something they’re not used to having it do, or being told to do something and having to follow instructions. It’s something everybody has suddenly had to contend with this year. I think it’s important too that we acknowledge the absurdity of the moment in working on this, and then really bring it back to the art and the making of art as a way to find our collective way through this.

Michelle Kuo: With the online survey, you’ve posed very provocative and thoughtful questions that force people to reflect on what it even means to interact through a questionnaire in the first place. How much choice do we really have when we navigate space physically, but also virtually and online? What is ingrained habit, what’s involuntary and what is deliberate, what is intentional, how much agency do we have? I wonder if you could talk about the questions themselves and these larger issues of power and movement and control.

I think the questions became another opportunity to have people understand that our range of choices is not as broad as we think it is, and when we’re presented with information in a way that is comfortable or that we can see a little bit of ourselves in, we end up giving away more than we should or is necessary.

For example, there’s a question like, “What have you resisted most?” and the answers offered are “change,” “rest,” “arrest,” or “I don’t resist, it’s dangerous.” Each one of these options allows a point of view that might or might not be your own experience. And so if you see yourself in it, that’s fine, but more than likely you’re going to find a response that is familiar but is not your own, and it’s going to offer a moment to pause, to think about what it means to resist arrest in this past year, for example. What does it mean if you fear any kind of power and you don’t resist at all?

So it’s powerful to formulate these questions and these prompts to diverge from things that might be familiar. You know, words that have become part of our social lexicon, like retreat, mean something different now. Care means something different now. Personal space means something different now. So each of the questions can make you think profoundly about something that has been happening but maybe you’ve not given space to it, or you haven’t paused to grapple with what it means.

There was actually a question, and we changed the answer, about what is priceless. And I think the initial answer that we offered was, “One more hour with my dad.” That was my answer, but we expanded it so that it might capture the experience of a lot of people who have experienced loss, but experienced it in ways that maybe they don’t want to talk about. So we can give space for people to grieve about all kinds of things and try not to create hierarchies or minimize experiences and the range of experiences people have had.

So how do we use language to do this? The questions we use seem very straightforward but are able to get at very touchy subjects in a way that people wouldn’t necessarily open themselves up to, if you just went up to them and said, “What has been the most profound thing that has happened to you during the pandemic?”

I think the questions—as much as the movements themselves—are going to reverberate with people’s bodies. There’ll be shoulders tightening or there’ll be wincing or there’ll be a double take or there’ll be a laugh or there’ll be tears.