Das Interview wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Barbara Wurm: So we are in Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Paris and Brussels. Thank you everyone for joining. The group coming together is already an event. But maybe we can go go back to that point where this project, the idea of making the film about Julius Eastman started. Who wants to go first?
Mawena Yehouessi: I can start, if you don’t mind. Rob, Anne, Paul, and Nizar are part of Faire-Part. It’s a collective they created when they met in Kinshasa a few years ago, and the four of them started doing films. But they would also invite other artists to their projects. They met Fallon, who is a sound artist and a performer, and started talking about Julius Eastman – and then this project came in.
Anne Reijniers: For four years, Collectif Faire-Part has been an artist’s residency in an art house in Antwerp called deSingel. We’ve been doing exhibitions there and other things. In deSingel they were going to do a live show with the music of Julius Eastman with four pianos, to do a tribute to his work. And they asked us to make a video contribution for this event, but it was still very open which form that would be. And then we, as Collectif Faire-Part, reached out to Fallon and Victoire to join us in making the videos for the live show. With Fallon, we already had worked on another project and we knew that Fallon had already been working for a long time with the work of Julius Eastman. So for us, it was very logical to connect with people who already knew Julius Eastman’s work very well. Victoire is a filmmaker who also works with film, music, and sounds. So that’s how we reached out to make the group bigger with more expertise. And then Fallon, in turn, reached out to Mawena because they had wished to collaborate already for a long time. That’s a bit how, let’s say, the group expanded.
MY: Fallon and I are part of another collective. It’s called Black(s) to the Future and works the same way as Faire-Part works in the sense that it’s a collective with a core, but it always becomes a choral project where we invite other people on specific topics. The idea of a collective is rather to de-multiply the voices and the expertise and the experiences rather than just staying super strict as a tiny group. I’ve always worked collectively. So that’s why I was super happy to join another group of people. Rob Jacobs: Beautiful.
Christiane Büchner: So now we know how you became interested in the music of Julius Eastman. Maybe you can tell us about how you worked with the music? How did you decide on certain pieces and how did you work collectively on this idea?
MY: I guess that Fallon might have been the person at the time who had done the most research and was the most dedicated to working with Julius’s work, but also influences. They were the most expert person, I would say, beyond the sound. But I don’t remember exactly. I mean, ‘Evil Nigger’, ‘Gay Guerilla’, they were clear monuments in Julius Eastman’s work. But then I don’t know exactly how the choice of those scores worked.
BW: How many more options were there that you got rid of? It must have been really difficult to choose. Victoire Karera Kampire: I think they were picked by the musicians themselves, right? I forgot that he was the one who initiated it.
AR: It was Petr Kotik, the composer and musician who worked with Eastman in the 70s. We only worked with the pieces that were selected by the musicians. They only played these four pieces, plus one piece for which they didn’t want visuals. It was an a cappella of two singers, also an Eastman composition.
We discussed certain thematic and visual themes that would connect all the pieces.
VKK: The part where we had to choose who would make the images for which score was very organic. I don’t remember us debating about it. I remember that I already had a connection with ‘Joy Boy’. I was very attached to it and there is a specific reason why. As much as it’s sound is complex and layered, ‘Joy Boy’ was the most accessible score. It felt the most like a pop song of them all. And this is probably why I had a connection to it. I did want to work with the banger, let’s say.
AR: We decided that each of us would make a chapter, that it would not be all of us making one film, but that we would have sub-groups. So it was Fallon and Mawena working on a piece, Victoire working on a piece, Rob working on a piece, and then Paul and me working on one piece. But we discussed certain thematic and visual themes that would connect all the pieces. And here, Fallon was again very important because they made what we call the bubbles. Rob, can you explain the bubbles?
MY: And maybe, Rob, you can also say that ‘Many, Many Women’ is not a Julius score. So yeah, maybe you can say both. Rob Jacobs: Yes. First, this is true. ‘Many, Many Women’ is a composition by Petr Kotik. But Julius Eastman did perform it with the S.E.M. Ensemble together with Kotik. This is something that we never questioned. Secondly, a word about the bubbles. You can see them as poetic guidelines that Fallon proposed. There were four core ideas. Things like ‘Living to the fullest’, something that comes back in the interviews with Eastman. How are we going to bring this into our editing? Another example is ‘Growth through repetition’, also something that speaks for these minimal piano compositions that Eastman made. There are four guidelines that we used that speak to the music or to Eastman’s views of the world and his spirituality and we tried to incorporate them all in our different ways into the editing. We also discussed more visual cues that we would try to work with so as to make a nice resonance between the different videos.
AR: One example of a visual cue is that we decided to make images that pop up out of the dark. That darkness would be the baseline, and that images would emerge.
MY: Maybe to give you a very pragmatic example of the way we worked is that we would do these online sessions where we would chat forever. We would talk about how we relate to the sound, what’s important for us within the music itself, what’s important for us as filmmakers, what is important for us in collective work, and how Julius was a really complex and paradoxical figure as well. And so we would also try to understand and make sense about: What was his relationship to Blackness? What were the nuances for him in between Blackness and darkness? What are the semantics that are different for us? Because we also come from different languages. But then we would also try to understand his relationship to queerness, what it meant in the 70s, what it means for us today. What is the political context he was living in? What is the political context we’re living in? And I think that those discussions were not necessarily specifically about filmmaking and choosing plans or whatever, because on that we had the initial immediate agreement that we trusted each other. So no one had to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this that way.’ But we were really nourishing a common language and intuition. So no matter what, we would always be linked by these conversations.
Most important for him is the process, what he’s trying to convey through his work, but not the artist in itself.
BW: JOY BOY is a subversive, experimental portrait, but it remains a portrait. And Julius Eastman seemed to be quite an outstanding individual artist who didn’t necessarily call for a collective approach. I found that intriguing. Did you talk about that too?
VKK: I feel like he was, and he worked very collectively as well. From what I know, he collaborated with wonderful artists such as Arthur Russell. And if you listen to what he says in the film, that at some point he can’t keep all of his scores and he’s giving them away, I feel like he’s not the type of artist who is so attached to his art or his ego. He’s not an ego maniac. He knows he’s bringing something to the table… Most important for him is the process, what he’s trying to convey through his work, but not the artist in itself. And there’s also something very precarious about this. He doesn’t know who to give the scores to. He doesn’t really have a structure around him. But I think it’s more about the making when it comes to him. So I feel like this collective thing doesn’t really clash with him.
MY: I 100% agree with Vic that Julius wasn’t a singular persona. He was singled out in so many ways. I think that something we talked a lot about is both what it is to be a Black man in this white context and also to be exceptional on so many levels. To be a Black queer man, to be a Black queer man with AIDS, to be a Black queer musician, to be a Black queer musician doing ‘classical music’. And we tried to be very careful not to single him out again, because it’s also a thing about how a European, super massive context also tries to make exceptions: Oh my God, you’re a Black man, but you’re able to do this music. Precisely, no. I think that the whole paradox around Julius is that he felt this so strongly. It was also a survival matter to embody this uniqueness, and he would embrace it completely, and lived his uniqueness to the fullest. But this uniqueness was always tied to this possible impossibility of still being part of a community, of still being part of a history, of the future call he had for the future generation of queer people. I think that this idea was something that we spoke a lot of in the making of the films.
RJ: And I also feel it’s in the film in a way, this whole tension between the collective and multiplicity, and the organic or the human, the nonhuman.
VKK: I think they all mingle as opposed to clash. It goes hand in hand. In ‘Many, Many Women’, also in ‘Evil Nigger’… There are bodies, dancing, multiple bodies, but at the same time, they are the same. I think this is also what struck us when we first saw the images of the other groups at deSingel for the first time. We were like, ‘Wait a minute, it almost feels like we’re making the same theme’, trying to work on this idea of singular multiplicity, and we didn’t see this coming. But as you said, Mawena, it all came out of our conversation. This is also how magical filmmaking can become when very nourishing conversations enter your subconscious, and they enter the film.
RJ: I very much agree with what you said. So beautiful. I think it’s both political and spiritual, this confusion between the singular and the many. Also in the different parts where Fallon edited in the sounds. It’s in between. As a ‘Gay Guerrilla’ looking up to the PLO, as a movement, him being a part of a movement, looking up to a bigger movement. It’s all about collectivity. Then at some point, he’s saying, ‘I live in the world.’ Any spirituality is also very much about the interconnectedness of all things, something that is most explicit in ‘Many, Many Women’ as there the text is also about the oneness of all things.
The idea was that we cannot pay tribute to Julius Eastman without having his voice talking about what he’s doing.
CB: We seem to be becoming part of the nourishing conversation you had in making this piece. There is one thing I wanted to ask about the interview. Was it also part of the original concert you were invited to or did you choose to connect it with the music?
MY: The sound interviews are Fallon’s. Julius Eastman wasn’t just a composer. He was also a musician himself. He was also a singer. He was also a performer. He was also a score writer. And he would also move in between disciplines and positions. He would be an artist, which also means a political person, which would also be just a human. I think it was always important to us, even when the invitation to the concert was made. And when we decided that we would rearrange it as a film, that the sound pieces made by Fallon, we call the interview ‘sound pieces’, would also be part of the film. The idea was that we cannot pay tribute to Julius Eastman without having his voice talking about what he’s doing. And this is what you were saying, Rob, this idea of spirituality is that of Julius against the idea of a heroic figure, of an inspired artist or whatever, he was also a philosopher. He was always doing those things in a very spontaneous way, but also reflecting and self-reflecting on them. I think we really wanted to show this to avoid any projection or a simple, ‘Oh, yeah, that dude was making music, period.’ No, that dude was making music out of an emergency. He was trying to live through music because he didn’t know how to live otherwise. And so Fallon went to look for a lot of different interviews with Julius Eastman and we would have those moments of Blackness or darkness with Julius’s voice also speaking for himself. It was also a way to create bridges in between the titles, the sounds themselves. We also wanted to add context for people who would just be bluntly discovering Julius’s work for the very first time. But the context would come from him and not just be something that would only be our interpretation of the work.
BW: Maybe to pick up on who took responsibility of which part. What drew you to those individual parts? For example, Anne maybe you can talk about ‘Gay Guerrilla’?
AR: By the way, I really enjoy listening to everybody talking about it. I also feel that it’s nice to get closer again to the work because I have to say that I don’t exactly remember the moment of the decision that Paul and me would work on ‘Gay Guerilla’, but I know there were different conversations. If I would put on his music just to listen to music, I would rather put on ‘Evil Nigger’. I enjoy how it moves in my body a lot. ‘Gay Guerrilla’ has a very narrative style, it’s more repetitive. Even without images, it already has a story for me. It feels like it has waves of growing and fading intensity. When Paul and I decided that we would work on it, we created a little script together, which was the idea of having a real gay guerrilla in Kinshasa, a group of queer dancers that would move towards the camera and fall and rise again in each other’s company. Again, sometimes there would be the individual and sometimes there would be the group. Paul did all the shooting and found the dancers in Kinshasa. I know that the dancers were very much inspired by Eastman’s music and that it was very new for them to dance to it. Then Tony, one of the dancers, the one you see alone first, he did the choreography. And then Paul sent a hard drive with the images, and I started editing. And in the editing I tried to work with the growing repetition, to repeat certain moves.
We really owe it to Julius, that he helped us to go within ourselves and try to really understand that these are other people that respect the world and the act of living in a very specific way.
BW: That’s really brilliant. It also rhymes a lot for me visually with the first part of ‘Evil Nigger’. And I would like to ask Mawena how you and Fallon worked on the visuals – it’s so impressive.
MY: Thanks. So I think there was also this idea that there’s trust as co-workers or co-artists, but there is also friendship within that, even beyond. I think also something we didn’t say is that I think we really became super, super close, all of us. And it’s something that goes way beyond respecting each other as artists. We really owe it to Julius, that he helped us to go within ourselves and really try to understand that these are other people that respect the world and the act of living in a very specific way. And I just love you guys, and I will say it again. I think that it’s really how artwork can bring you really to create connections. I’ve always been obsessed by darkness. I always just want to do everything with a Black background. It’s very literal, but I also really work on race, on how it is to position yourself as a Black artist. I think that ‘Evil Nigger' to me was not a question. I think I was like, ‘Can I do it? Can I do it? Can I do it?’ Because there’s such a big history, a big fear. The question of saying ‘Evil Nigger’. Or embracing the ‘Evil Nigger’ thing was also a big conversation we had. I love to use the word ‘nigger’, but also because I can say it, and not everyone can say it. But this was a real thing too, to what extent can you push the subversion and really embrace the oddness, the discomfort, but also the magnificence and the beauty of resistance there is behind this ‘Evil Nigger’ thing, this oppositional force. From there, we went away. We were also really into this idea of elevation. My practice is about collage. The idea that it would be a collage film was obvious because I don’t know how to do anything else. We really started improvising dances, but we never danced to Julius Eastman’s piece. We danced and we performed to music we were listening to at the time. Sometimes it becomes two bodies. Sometimes it’s just the same body that is scattered all around. We wanted to see the face, but not to be able to recognise or identify it. The idea was to de-multiply, to be haunted, not by yourself necessarily, but also by the projection that is put on you. This idea of double consciousness, but maybe it’s multiple consciousness, and the constant antagonism. We wanted to bring something in that would be really antagonistic, but never separate. You cannot separate those forces. You’re part of them, you’re complicit in them, you’re being made complicit in them, you’re a victim of them. But at the same time, you can still always highlight that there’s this force of destruction and reconstruction that is always coming back together.
BW: I find it interesting that there is a rhyme because it’s a four-part structure. And as in the history of drama, that is a non-dramatical structure. It is more about parallels or something that works on a more meta level than on a direct level. And here your part or Rob’s and Cem Weiss’s.
RJ: To speak about how the different pieces resonate with each other and how there is an outspoken connection between A, B, C, D? Interesting. I haven’t thought about it in this way. I can say that the way that the film flows through the different chapters makes a lot of sense to me. I cannot imagine it in any other shape. That we move through the physical active body, and that we then have zoom-ins and zooms-out on going to the microscopic and to the God or the divine that is also somehow part of the films for me. And I do see what you mean, that there is a rhyme going on between the different parts, and this is also why it works. I think for me, I know that everything is interconnected in this world. And sometimes there are moments when you can really feel this. Music can be a way to feel and experience this, a mantra can be a way, poetry can be a way. And it is all there in ‘Many, Many Women’. That is why I also gravitated a bit towards this piece. When I was listening to it, at the same time, I was falling over these beautiful cellular images that Cem was making. He is someone I met just browsing the Internet. And I felt there’s something in that microscopic imagery, that could just as well have been planetary landscapes. And the fact that this microscale resonates so much with the absolute macro brings me to a place where everything is just a pattern. Everything is repeating itself on different scales. Of course, we are also a scale of this, you as a person, but also you as part of a society, and you as a moment in time and a point in space. That is why I felt that it could work to bring this together. For me, this is like a visual route, one of many, towards this sensation of interconnectedness. With the ecstasy that is in this poem and in this song, it goes very well.
When you use the the word joy within the context of a Black life, there is a tension because the joy is only so powerful because there is so much pain that goes through these bodies.
BW: Yeah, exactly! Victoire, the ‘Joy Boy’ part also has a lot of similarities, not just what you described already, that objects or words appear from the dark, but also the more minimalist and conceptual way of getting closer to the political form of performance and a more media-centred representation of what Julius Eastman stood for. Maybe you can talk about it because I find it really fascinating listening to you describe what you’re doing.
VKK: Yeah. I had a very deep connection to the ‘Joy Boy’ score because there’s something very dynamic, but also something very soft. That really moved me. When I was listening to it, I felt as if I were in a forest surrounded by trees and a lot of animals and this very organic, full-of-life type of place. But at the same time, weirdly enough – but it’s not that weird if you know a bit about my work – I decided to work on death. I envisioned the story behind the score was the burial of a queer body, but in a joyful way, because that’s the title of the piece, it’s ‘Joy Boy’. But when you use the the word ‘joy’ within the context of a Black life, there is a tension because the joy is only so powerful, because there is so much pain that goes through these bodies. I’m talking not only about Black bodies, but also queer bodies. And I wanted to work on that contrast, to create a visual work that would be colourful in a way, but within darkness. There’s this fantasy that, if you had to be buried one day, it would be so nice to have a joyful moment as opposed to a very dark and sad moment. I think it was my way to pay tribute. And I think in every society, a way to pay tribute is also a burial moment. Technically speaking, I tried to do stop motion, and since I’m no animator, it was a very cheap way of doing it. But I had a lot of fun making it, and I had a lot of fun filming Alphonse, who performs in it and who’s one of my oldest friends, who also embodies queerness in many different forms in his life. As much as it was an homage to Julius, it was also one to my friend, who I’ve seen go through life carrying this marginal identity, but is so full of life and beautiful.
RJ: Beautiful. I feel like quickly sharing one thing I just thought of because it’s really helpful to hear how friendship is created within the different chapters. Of course, Cem and I, we didn’t know each other before, but we did spend a lot of time chatting. We had many long conversations about the piece, but also about the role of microscopy in his life. Cem is a gender queer person, who never really felt accepted in the place he lived. He changed countries to start life over. And it is discovering microscopy that, as he would say, saved him. Being close to microscopic life and observing patterns there and valuing this life form just as much as he valued his own and those of his surroundings. Seeing certain similarities and certain things that are different. It allowed him to let go of a lot of social pressures and embrace life and live life in a way that felt natural to him. And this also resonates with some of the message in Eastman’s music. It’s microscopy that allowed Cem Weiss to live his life to the fullest. So it’s something that, for me, also adds to the magic of the entire endeavour. Just a brief extra emotional note.
BW: That’s a wonderful post-script because Christiane and I already had, when Victoire was speaking, the feeling that now we come to a beautiful end, but this is a better one because we do not end with death, but with a new life, that this circle of our conversation could end. I’m really, really grateful. So sorry for Paul and Fallon not to be here, but they will be in Berlin. Thank you so much!
