“Shelter in Place” : Resonance and Affective Weight

a talk by

szu-han ho

[To begin the session, Szu-Han Ho first led the Global Condition group in an exercise taking place throughout the PAF building, a large and acoustically resonant space. For this exercise, each person walks slowly throughout the space while humming or singing a tone that feels resonant, either in the body or in the room, wherever a person may find themselves. The exercise lasts for 20 minutes and ends with participants returning to the presentation room to discuss their observations. The exercise is related to Szu-Han’s interest in the physical effects of sound on the body, as explored in her installation and performance piece “Shelter in Place,” as well as in previous performance works.]

I'm going to talk about a project called "Shelter in Place," which took place last fall (2016) and was a culmination of a lot of things that I've been working on through different bodies of work but have had a hard time bringing together. This was probably my first attempt at bringing several elements together—sound, installation, performance, and personal histories. I started making performance work about six years ago, although I had grown up playing music. I went through an experience of physical violence and that, I think, prompted me to think deeply about the body and to use performance in my work. “Shelter in Place” circulates around a story of my grandmother, who I'm very close to, and my relationship to violence and crisis through personal and family histories.

Prior to this piece, I had been creating installations with sand and water and the visual—I hesitate to limit it to the visual as it's not just visual—it's more of a physical experience of visually seeing weight as a correlation to a form of affect. I found myself looking at these images [of flood barriers made of sandbags], over and over: I was interested in these flood barriers as a kind of communal response to crisis, crisis that could be ecological or climate-driven or war driven. This [image] is an example from an online archive of a bomb shelter in WWII. I had been making work with the materials of sand and water and visually understanding what it looks like to feel the weight of something that is absent—to feel loss, trauma, and the lack of something that has such a physical presence and weight.

          This is an image of my grandmother and me in Hong Kong. I was born in Taiwan and my family immigrated to the US when I was 2. Before coming to the US, I stayed with my grandmother while my mother left to come to the United States. My grandmother really had a formative impact on me, and she's a maker, always making things with her hands. I'm very inspired by her and the stories that I grew up with: my grandparents’ generation in Taiwan lived under the Japanese occupation. From 1895 to 1945, Taiwan was a colony of Japan, and their education was in Japanese. My grandparents thought of themselves as Japanese subjects, they spoke Japanese in school, and Taiwanese at home (where their grandparents spoke to them in Taiwanese). Language in Taiwan is politically very complicated, as it is in many formerly colonized countries. During WWII, Allied planes (US airplanes) bombed the city of Tainan and surrounding areas, the region where both sides of my family are from, because it was a Japanese colony. These bombings were similar to the Dresden bombings—bombings of civilian areas—supposedly because the locations were of military value, although they were more about morale and psychological warfare. Both sides of my family experienced the bombings, and my paternal grandmother was 14 at the time. This is a picture of her family after the war; her father was a doctor, and the family lived and worked in the same space in this clinic in Tainan. The clinic was rebuilt after the war and is still there, and still functions as a clinic.

          The space of the clinic has always figured prominently in my memory because when my grandmother cared for me while my mother was in the US, we lived there together. It's a clinic that is well-known in Tainan, an institution for the city. The fabric of the city surrounding the clinic is heavily impacted by the Japanese colonial period, and you can see that the Japanese were mimicking European colonialism: militarily, bureaucratically, and throughout the education system. They built architecture styled after European buildings but slightly modified for the scale of this city. This [image] is an example of a Japanese-era department store that was recently renovated and relaunched. There is currently a lot of cachet around the Japanese colonial buildings that survived and a trend in restoring them. Along this area, you can see the buildings that mimic European style buildings nearby the home and clinic.

          This is also a market nearby the clinic. This area of Tainan is like an old city center. The Dutch were in Taiwan, the Spanish were in Taiwan, and the French made a brief but unsuccessful attempt to colonize the island. A lot of trade took place, including exchange of fabric, lumber, and spices. The history of Taiwan can be understood through the successive waves of peoples inhabiting the island. There are sixteen recognized tribes of indigenous people, and many more unrecognized by the central government. A major ethnic group consists of people who came from mainland China beginning from settlement which started 400 years ago, and then there are the more recent waves of immigrants. After the Japanese lost the war, Japanese settlers were repatriated back to Japan, and the status of the island became very ambiguous under Allied control. After the civil war in mainland China ended, the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, fled to Taiwan and occupied the island from 1949 onwards. My grandmother remembers that moment vividly, describing the soldiers she saw in the streets as “looking ragged” as she wondered who the newcomers were. The Nationalist Party (KMT) instituted martial law—Taiwan had the longest period of martial law in the world. The KMT controlled every branch of government, appropriated land, banned the speaking of the Taiwanese dialect in schools, disappeared and jailed political dissidents, and created massive political repression that many were afraid to speak of for a very long time. Democratic elections only began to take place in 2000.

                 To return to my grandmother’s story and how it has inspired my work, this part of old Tainan where she lived had been a trading hub since the Dutch and early Chinese settlers, so my grandmother and her mother had been buying fabrics from this area for many decades. This particular market is located very near her old home and is one she has taken me to many times. When I was thinking about this work, I knew I wanted to do something with materials from this market. I returned to the story about the bombing that took place in Tainan on March 1st, 1945: when the US planes bombed Tainan, my grandmother’s house was destroyed, everything in it was destroyed: all of the family belongings and the clinic where my great-grandfather practiced medicine. The family survived in the bomb shelter within the house—that is, everyone survived except my grandmother’s older sister, who’s name was Hahn Shu-Yin（韓淑英). She was 17 at the time, she had been volunteering for the Red Cross and was out of the home. My grandmother had been very close to her and she has carried that loss with her for the rest of her life.

          This is a picture of an aerial view of the bombing of the city. This is an image of my grandmother’s sister (who is sitting down). Her story is part of the intergenerational trauma and the physical trauma that I have personally experienced.

“Shelter in Place” takes the form of this pile of sandbags that I sewed and filled with sand. Its height is about my eye level and takes up the space of roughly a 7’x7’ area. I conceived it as a monument, as well as a shelter—and also a ruin. Here you can see a detailed view: I used brocade fabrics from the Tainan market, different versions of brocade fabrics that I bought in the US, rice bags, and mosquito netting. When my grandmother's family fled after the house was destroyed, they went to the countryside and relied on the generosity of a friend who had a general store. They slept on burlap rice bags. If you are Taiwanese, you would recognize this particular fabric as mosquito netting. Malaria was rampant at the time, and my grandmother contracted it. Fortunately, she survived—many were not so lucky.

The performance consists of five singers (including myself) and three tuba players. Each performer wears a piece that hangs around the neck and is filled with sand. These drag along behind us as we walk throughout the space of the gallery. The performance is meant to evoke a sense of my grandmother’s story and is created to immerse the audience within the sound, so that you can physically feel it. The performers move around the space for the duration of the piece, 30 minutes. It is a long, meditative work punctuated by moments of song and snare drum.

It begins with a period of the tubas playing a drone. This heavy, low sound builds acoustically and contains many harmonics, or tones that you can hear above the base note. The singers enter in vocally and begin to walk around the audience. The tubas and vocals interact, passing pitches back and forth. At one moment in the piece, the singers perform a melody. The lyrics of the song (written by Marisa Demarco) are as follows:

if you strike me

i will ring and ring

if you strike me

i will ring and ring

my skin is taut

and i contain nothing

vacated

there is space for resonance

and longing

fill me up

and i become nothing

but leave me

and i sing

I'll show you some videos and end here. Thank you.

SZU-HAN HO, REBECCA SCHREIBER, and PHANUEL ANTWI Q&A