Socially Distant Residency Project

May 25 - 31

Fan Wu is a performer, writer, and community organizer. His main practice concerns the gathering of collectives; he is the founder of The Toronto Experimental Translation Collective, and has hosted critical reading/creative writing workshops at Art Metropole, Trinity Square Video, and Mercer Union. You can read his work online at MICE Magazine, Aisle 4, and Shrapnel Magazine.

Seven COVID-19 Monologues [PDF]

Residency Reflection

This conversation between Parker Kay and Fan Wu took place on July 19, 2020

PR: How many hours did you spend at Pumice Raft during your residency?

FW: I spent about five hours there everyday, over nine days, but two of those days I didn’t go because of the storm. So, 7 x 5... 35 hours.

PR: What time of day did you most often find yourself there?

FW: I would try to arrive after lunch, usually between 2PM and 6PM but sometimes I would be there from 5PM-10PM. And then I also hung out with people in the space.

PR: How did you perceive the space before you started the residency compared to after? How did your intentions change through the experience of being there?

FW: The major difference was how much I ended up liking to lay my head down on that strange camping mat and think instead of write. I went into the residency thinking I would motor out a 5-hour writing session everyday but it seemed to me important that I was thinking and processing, which is something I hadn’t had the chance to do in my non-residency life.

PR: Did the thinking state end up dominating the writing state?

FW: I would say it was 60% thinking, and 20% of that includes movement, which I didn’t expect either in that space. I wasn’t expecting to do anything dance-y or gesture oriented. So lets say: 40% thinking, 20% movement, and then 40% the writing that I had intended to enter the space with.

PR: Did the time you spent in the space with others influence what you ended up producing or how you were thinking? Or was it more a byproduct of having access to a space?

FW: Yeah, it was a blessing to have access to a space that felt then like a COVID insulated space because it was guaranteed that no one else would come in and I could control the variables there. I think it was good because it broke up a lot of the solitude of those nine days. The solitude was very intentional where I was trying to extract these COVID monologues from my interior voice. I was trying to figure out what strands of thoughts were loudest during COVID. It gave me a sort of perspective on those thoughts when other people’s physical voices entered the space.

PR: Do you think there is a correlation between the personalities of those that you brought into the space and the voices of the resulting monologues?

FW: Yes. With one friend that I brought in, I wrote this voice called The Orifice Artificer [laughs] and I wrote this before even thinking of him or having him in the space but he is someone who exemplifies an orifice artificer type. Not to reduce people to types but I have a lot of orifice artificer type experiences with him. This is a voice in the monologues that pursues their appetites down spirals into tunnels of temporary binges and addictions and he is sort of a beautiful twink from Montreal. It is very safe with him to go down these tunnels of appetite.

PR: When I was reading the monologues, I definitely got the feeling like you were articulating different parts of your own interior monologue—neurosis, anger, insecurities, all sorts of different emotions. The whole idea with the residency project was to provide a spatial shift in hopes of prompting a psychological shift amidst quarantine. Did your time in the space afford you the opportunity to step outside yourself in some way?

FW: Spatially the residency was very important because at the time I was living in a tiny room in the Annex that only fit my desk and my bed. So what I used the space for was to spread out the monologues through the length and width of the space and give each voice its own square footage so I could spatially visualize how they lay in relation to each other. This is something I could not have done in the claustrophobic atmosphere of that apartment.

PR: It’s interesting to think about the spatial influence of writing. Is that a function of process or do you think being in that room had a measurable effect on the content of your writing?

FW: Definitely, yeah or even the smaller room of the Google Doc screen, which is where most of my writing takes place. It was a chance for me to think about what is constrained in my writing by sticking to that form because it is just a word processor that you are assumed to use. But to have this other, more old fashioned technology of just paper and space, allowed me to enter a more theatrical process rather than writing lyric poems from one perspective. It allowed me to be a bit more schizoid.

PR: I think that comes across [laughs]

FW: [laughs] Thank you.

PR: You were the final of four people to take residence in the space and exactly halfway through your time was when George Floyd was murdered. As a result, the duration of your residency bridged these two radically different moments in our society. How did this affect the evolution of your work?

FW: Around day five or six the George Flloyd protests erupted in Minneapolis and then around the world. It was almost as though those other theatrical voices that were from COVID were blocked off, or suspended, in a way. The most dominant voice then became “Fan, what do you understand about race? Now is your chance to interrogate your own position on what race is and be swept up in the momentum of people asking these questions and real political work being done.” It did feel like world history was two steps ahead of me, that the art practice lags so that you have some time to process world history and then you produce something that is reflective about that period. But 2020 has been such a rapid churn with such sharp divergences between what people focus on between one moment and the next that it felt like if I was trying with this piece to respond to the urgencies of ‘the now’ I had to change my project or at least create a new opening in the project.

PR: This schizoid component, which was there from the beginning, seems attuned to the fast changing experience of the world that you just described and was in a sense prepared for the shift in your project that you described. The setting that you established at the outset of the project was open to the shifts that ended up unfolding in your work.

FW: The schizoid base and structure that been built.

PR: Exactly.

FW: I can’t remember whose theory this was but there is an analysis of the 19th to early 20th century as being a neurotic age. The neurotic age of Victorian morality, uptightness, repression, no one saying what they mean, and tip-toeing around issues and the 20th century leads into the 21st century as a schizophrenic age. You know, the age of technology that moves too quickly for us to cognize, an age of virtualities, and split personalities on social media and so I think my project was picking up what was already in the air. The structure of schizophrenia that we all live in and try to exist within.

PR: What does having the ability to speak in multiple voices give you as a writer? What can you only do when you assume different identities that otherwise aren’t accessible to you?

FW: For some reason that question shatters my mind. [laughs] Let's come back to that question.

PR: When I read the monologue on race that you wrote, you discuss the idea of talking around a thing. Could you elaborate on your thinking around talking around something like, in this case, race as opposed to talking about a thing?

FW: Part of that, and I don’t know if this is the most important part, is the preamble is leading the reader or audience member to make their own conclusions about how the preamble, or setup, translates into race and not doing that bridging work for them. I also think there is a way that talking around an issue mirrors the way race fractures reality. There is a way in which the topic of race somehow invites a type of evasion of really getting to that question. This is because of many many reasons, some of it is pain, some of it is trauma, but some of it is also the knowledge that it is unbearable that we are still in a world where race is still causing such strife. The stupidity of race being this issue is what makes it have this fracturing effect on reality. How could it be the 21st century and we’re still not out of this elemental prejudice?

PR: It is almost like there is an inability to really engage with it.

FW: Exactly, because you are struck with disbelief. You are stammering towards the question of race but then your tongue gets tied.

PR: Okay, last question. The welcome letter I wrote for all the residents in some ways personified the space and its unique properties. It was meant to be a primer for a more sensitive awareness of the characteristics of the space so that you could take note of the effects or affects that the space had on your experience. I’m curious if that had any effect on you and your time in the space?

FW: Totally, because I think that it dovetailed with my own interest in the material world and in doing this zen phenomenology of what is around you and getting into the mindset of presence. So when I read your preamble it very much linked up with that mindset that I had been trying to practice anyway. Thinking about something like the vents in the room, something I never would have thought about, or the strange hole in the ceiling, or the shape of the closet: all of these things would have eventually made their way into a monologue if I had even more time in the space or if my focus hadn’t shifted in day five or six. There is also that powerful park nearby, with marsh-tall grass, that I walked through when I was high on ketamine with aforementioned Montreal twink. [laughs] The whole network between the interior space of that room and the strange exterior space of that park, the Junction, and those big box stores (Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, etc) right next to each other, and me choosing a different route to get to that space, it had a modern mythological quality to it.