DIGITAL RESIDENCY | RIEKO WHITFIELD

RIEKO WHITFIELD

Rieko Whitfield weaves immersive worlds with speculative mythologies, decentring narratives of Western capitalist individualism toward beyond human collectivism.

RELEASE #1

ON EMBODIMENT

For my first art release I am sharing a work-in-progress choreography, filmed in my family home in California on my mother’s iPhone. I’ve never had any formal dance training, which somehow always made me feel I am not “allowed” to dance. I have flat arches and a turned-in hip, and I don’t always feel rooted in my body.

Sharing this work-in-progress choreography with you, dear reader, is admittedly several steps outside of my comfort zone. I dance, especially on days I feel a little broken, because I allow myself space to feel whole again. Today is one of those days.

The choreography is from my upcoming opera Zakuro for a song called “Fruit”. Zakuro (“pomegranate” in Japanese) is a speculative mythology inspired by the Buddhist tale of a protectress-turned, child-eating demon who consumes pomegranate seeds as a replacement for flesh after a spiritual transformation. The opera expresses anticipatory grief from ancestor to progeny, and is a reckoning with our ravenous desires in a time of ecological collapse.

The entirety of Zakuro came to me in a rapid succession of visions while I was still in the middle of filming Regenesis (I’ll be sharing more on Regenesis in future art drops). It was around this time L.A.-based performance artist and choreographer Jas Lin reached out to me on Instagram. I fell in love with the way they moved, and I knew they would play a crucial role in this project.

I video called Jas during lockdown from my London home, and we discussed Zakuro, demon goddess energy, and the emancipatory power of movement. Months later Jas happened to be in the U.K. for work, and I jumped at the opportunity to finally meet in person.

I sent Jas some quick voice note recordings of the songs I wrote (one of which I used to choreograph to in this video), and we prepared a live dance and music performance of Zakuro in the days they were staying in London. The choreography I am sharing here is inspired by this collaboration.

As it turns out, we are all allowed to dance. We are allowed to feel rooted and whole in a world that divides and disempowers. To dance is to allow ourselves space for the joy, the rage, and the complexity of our embodied existence.

There’s a collective spiritual transformation coming for us too. Do you feel it? If life as we know it is collapsing around us, then oh my god, I hope you dance with me into its reincarnation.

ZAKURO PERFORMED BY RIEKO WHITFIELD AND JAS LIN

Extraterra at Harlesden High Street, London (2021)
Photo by Sai Li

RELEASE #2

ON PROTOTYPING

RIEKO WHITFIELD

On Prototyping

When I was eight I moved to a new house, and spent an inordinate amount of time in the garage. In that garage was a workbench and my treasure chest of craft materials – primarily polymer clays, recycled cardboard, and scrap fabrics I used to make small animals and homes for them to inhabit.

Around this time I was also struggling to adjust to my new school, and looked forward to coming home every day to play with my pet rats. I guess I never got the memo that if I wanted to make friends, maybe I shouldn’t spend all my free time working alone in the garage with a rat on each shoulder.

I loved making crafts, but I was also good at painting. I learned from an early age that making Serious Art meant submitting oil paintings to competitions with cash prizes. “Craft” became a dirty word, something childish and unprofessional, what weird rat girls did alone in the garage.

If I am now a Serious Artist, I can tell you that I’m more weird rat girl than oil painter. I’ve returned to crafting with pride. Crafting for me is a way of incorporating play into prototyping – a very important part of my process when world-building for larger projects. For example, I began to visualise Regenesis when I sculpted a set of tentacles out of polymer clay, which I then shot on my phone with a green screen backdrop on a mirrored bed-side table. These tentacles helped inform how I made the prosthetics for the tentacular narrator of the film, and the set design for how I later filmed the scenes with mirror film against a green screen backdrop.

Now that I am working on Zakuro, I also go back to crafting the prototype. I wool felted a giant white rat puppet and photographed it against a black backdrop with some pomegranates. I am not sure yet how or if the white rat will play a role in the filming of Zakuro, but for now I am thinking of ways to potentially incorporate this character into the project as the narrator.

The rat to me symbolises resilience, and as Zakuro is set in the coda of the anthropocene, I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of an eternal rat that outlives the human race. Rats are a widely misunderstood species from the perspective of humans. Seen as vermin, invaders, and pests, rats are rarely appreciated for their intelligence and rich social lives. Rats survive in the underbelly of our civilisations – the very civilisations that have acted as vermin, invaders, and pests to our environment since the dawn of modernity.

I remember once stopping by my MA tutor Pil Kollectiv’s home studio where he and his partner Galia raise their young son. Somehow the conversation shifted to the decision to have children, and they joked that their son would have to learn to hunt giant radioactive rats to survive the impending apocalypse.

We fear for the future of our progeny while at the same time, view them as the embodiment of hope. Like planting a tree when you know you may not live to taste its fruit, Zakuro expresses radical hope for the future in the face of anticipatory grief. What better narrator for this story than an immortal, giant white rat?

I’ll be sharing more stories on the world-building project of Zakuro in the coming months, so watch this space!

RIEKO WHITFIELD

On Prototyping

RELEASE #3

ON MUSIC

Thick in the process of recording my debut EP Regenesis, my music collaborator Jared Bennett gives me an “assignment”: make a playlist of your favourite songs, the ones that inspired you while composing the songs for the EP, and freewrite what emotions, images, and associations the music evokes in you.

So I list the artists I have on heavy rotation now, and the songs I binged on throughout the pandemic: Arca, Sophie, Eartheater, FKA Twigs, Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Ryuichi Sakamoto. I select the song solari off of his album async and think of the time in my life this album saved me. When async was released I was working a suited up job in Tokyo, living alone in an overpriced apartment. I had just experienced a death in the family, and was drowning in grief. Each night I’d come home exhausted, and lay on the floor with async on repeat.

Sakamoto, recently diagnosed with cancer, recorded async believing this album would be his last.

The album was influenced by Sakamoto’s visits to the site of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster. This album, in the wake of his personal diagnosis, feels like a reckoning with the fragility of our collective mortality. One night I had a dream. Sakamoto came to me and said, “make art that makes people feel the way my music makes you feel.”

A few months later I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, and left Japan on a one-way ticket. I was taking my life back.

So for Jared’s assignment, I revisit solari and write:

Sweeping, spiralling upward
Ethereal
Played on an old decaying organ
In an old decaying church
Opening to the sky

Years later, I find myself in yet another wave of grief.

This time I am grieving the abrupt loss of a pre-pandemic world, and with it the loss of a seven-year relationship. In my newfound solitude I reach for connection – opening myself up to rebirth, to healing, to radical hope.

Most importantly, I return to music. Before Regenesis, before I knew I would one day release an EP, I write my first song in years: Safe Spaces .

Most importantly, I return to music. Before Regenesis, before I knew I would one day release an EP, I write my first song in years: Safe Spaces.

What I’m sharing in this Release is an emotional outtake of this song, over which we layered the resonance of crystal glasses filled with water, and piano keys hitting like distant drops. The version of Safe Spaces that makes it to the final album will likely sound more polished, but this is me performing at my rawest.

The song is a proposition of vulnerability and connection. Safe Spaces is about taking the plunge into our truest selves, on a personal and collective level, when faced with the terrifying depths of our unknown waters.

Because always within darkness lies the possibility of rebirth.

I reach to you now, and with this song, I hope my music makes you feel.

The upcoming Regenesis EP will be the final instalment within the greater Regenesis project, which includes The Opera Tentacular and all objects created within the world-building process.

Special thank you to collaborators Jared Bennett and Ben Gardiner.

Lyrics to Safe Spaces:

Maybe I’ll keep you in my good graces
tonight, in my safe space tonight
Maybe I’ll heal you
Maybe I’ll feed you with hunger that
burns you inside, maybe I’ll free you
Maybe I’ll find you in all of the places
you hide, maybe I seek you

Believe me, believe me

 I’ve lived a million knowns, a million lies, a million lows, and a million highs
Maybe I’ll heal you
Maybe I’ll heal you
Maybe I’ll heal

RELEASE #4

ON DIASPORA

Rieko is the founding director and curator of Diasporas Now, an expanded performance platform for multidisciplinary artists from various non-Western backgrounds. The platform was co-founded by Rieko Whitfield, Lulu Wang, and Paola Estrella to champion emerging POC artists who use performance as radical acts of self-representation.

In March Diasporas Now organised the workshop Embodying Avatars, hosted by Decolonise Art History Cambridge and the Bread Theatre and Film Company at the Corpus Playroom at the University of Cambridge.

Diasporas Now’s workshop considered the diasporic condition as a departure from unity to multiplicity, embodied in the ethos of the platform.

Each Diasporas Now founding member shared their personal stories in their paths of becoming performance artists, followed by exercises in movement-based expression by Lulu Wang and Josh Woolford, and world-building and character-development by Rieko and Paola Estrella.

Both exercises focused on the idea of embodying hybrid identities that is a central component to POC lived experience, and creating personal, emotive, and more-than-human avatars. The workshop title was inspired by the text Glitch Feminism, and writer Legacy Russell’s call to “usurp the body. Become your avatar. Be the glitch.”

The video clip below is from an improvised moment with a few participants from the workshop, filmed and edited by Rieko and Josh Woolford.

Diasporas Now is a collective manifestation of personal and often political identities celebrating the multitude of minority perspectives under the hegemonic culture.

More information and performance schedules are available here

Diasporas Now was recently featured in ArtAsiaPacific

RELEASE #5

ON SONG WRITING

For Release #5 Rieko shares an outtake from band rehearsals with producer Ben Gardiner for the song Ashes to Ashes from the upcoming Regenesis EP.

Words by Rieko: This recording includes an unfinished beat which we will continue to build upon in upcoming production sessions. Ashes to Ashes is the swan song of the EP – a reminder that we are all always interconnected in a cycle of birth, death, and regeneration.

RELEASE #6

ON WORLD BUILDING

Earlier this month I spoke at the Royal College of Art on my worldbuilding practice, from my speculative mythologies to my live music shows and upcoming EP, and the growing community around my performance platform Diasporas Now.

In a panel discussion with my co-founders Paola Estrella and Lulu Wang, we also discussed the power of storytelling, collectivity, and cross-diasporic solidarity in creating social change, along with the need for new discourses surrounding decolonisation.

I spoke on how "it still feels extractive in the methodology of how [arts institutions in the U.K.] are approaching diversity and inclusion." Artists of the global majority are systematically incentivised to check off boxes of intersectional marginalisation, and present traumatic life experiences to feed into narratives by and for white audiences.

"That's why for this platform, it was really important for us to be a celebration of identity, not victimisation."

Diasporas Now embraces the "messiness" of prototyping new systems, and writing new narratives from the bottom up.

RELEASE #7

ON REINVENTION

Lately I’ve been in a state of reinvention. When I look into the mirror I don’t see my face but a fluid oscillation between who I have been and who I am becoming.

With the launch of my Regenesis EP underway, I feel the halfway point between the art world and the music world – a moment in chrysalis.

For this art release, I am sharing with you how I see myself now.

On the left is my daytime persona. This is Rieko as an artist-in-residence currently at the Tate Modern, where I organise weekly workshops responding to the Tate collections for a diverse range of students.

On the right is my nighttime persona. This is Rieko as a performer, baring my soul through my music at nightclubs and museum lates, weekend after weekend to unfamiliar faces.

I feel the liquid body before a butterfly, imaginal cells waiting to become.

RELEASE #8

ON PERFORMING

This release is an exclusive first look at documentation from Rieko’s recent event Enter Regenesis for the Jerwood Staging Series commission…

Photo by Tereza Cervenova

RELEASE #9

ON TIME

How quickly a year passes. I wanted to wrap up this residency by reflecting on the past year, and the passing of time itself.

2022 has tested me through the rigours of metamorphosis – through high highs and low lows, through the gravitas of a Saturn return.

Even in the uncertainty of this time, what I feel most is gratitude. Gratitude for all of the opportunities that have come my way, from my residency at the Tate to my performance commission at Jerwood Arts, and to every single person who attended at my live shows – at the Institute of Contemporary Art with Eastern Margins, at Fold with Futur.Shock, at Iklectik with Chinabot, at the Yard Theatre with GGI 끼, just to name a few. I feel gratitude toward my many collaborators, to my community, and to the momentum of Diasporas Now.

And as I leave this year behind, I am pulled toward the magnetism of change.

And as I leave this year behind, I am pulled toward the magnetism of change.

2023 will be a year of many firsts. I will be releasing my first EP, filming my first real music video, and expanding from performance art toward my personal regenesis as a musician.

Still my raison d’etre rings true, as I wrote for an exhibition publication for LUX this past spring: “…The stories I tell are inherently political. If we can get people at an intuitive level to feel beyond the illusion of infinite linear progress and hyper-individualistic selfhood that dominates our current reality, we can begin the necessary work of creating deep political change from a place of empathy.”

So how better to sign off on my residency with IMT than images of my weekly workshops at the Tate Modern – multisensory meditations on past, present, and imagined futures responding to Cecilia Vicuña’s Turbine Hall commission “Brain Forest Quipu.”

Under the canopy of Vicuña’s ghostly forest, I ask my students to reflect on the following prompts: “What are the key memories in your life that have shaped who you are today?” and “What is the future you would like to envision for yourself, for your communities, and for our planet?” We then fold our written intentions into tiny pods, and bind them together with interwoven threads.

My hope for the future for these children, for our communities, for our planet, is that radical political change will emerge from the soils of our collective wisdom, our mycelial matrix of ancestral memories. All I can wish for as an artist is to plant the seeds for writing new stories, new songs, and new realities, into existence.

So to whoever is reading this, and to whoever has been following my work so far: thank you, thank you, thank you – and may 2023 lift us with grace toward life beyond metamorphosis.