Wu Tsang’s Renewal of the Collective
Two new films by the artist and her cohorts, on view at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, speak to joint struggles and why collaboration is key
In the second volume of his Prison Notebooks (1926), Italian communist Antonio Gramsci suggests that critical consciousness stems from the understanding that one’s identity is shaped by historical processes ‘which [have] deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The notion of an infinitely mutable mosaic of identities that we carry with ourselves (class, gender and race) is at the heart of ‘Visionary Company’, the exhibition by filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang and her multidisciplinary collective Moved by Motion, currently at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
A second major guiding theme is the renewal of the collective. Collective action and creation but also community building are brought to the forefront via the content and collaborative mode in which Tsang and her associates work. The show comprises a series of multi-media installations from 2019 and 2020. Two films, The Show is Over and The More We Read All that Beauty, the More Unreadable We Are (both, 2020) are fruits of the first year of a three-year-long residence at Zurich’s Schauspielhaus Theatre.
In The Show is Over, a collaboration with Tosh Basco, dancers glide across a dark stage. Their silhouettes are shaped by identical, loose-fitting grey suits. The atmosphere changes from graceful to lugubrious as; in one scene, the dancers trudge through mud which obscures the limit between clothing and flesh. Elsewhere, a woman kneels to pick up red apples that have spilled across a pristine white floor. Others scurry into the scene, snatching up the apples before she can reach them. In the panic, she drops the fruits that she has already collected. The anxious tension of this scene is mediated by two voices, one softer and more effeminate, the other a baritone, reciting passages from Fred Moten’s poem ‘come on, get it!’ (2018).
