I was just wondering, Claudia, you
mentioned that Christine and you were
collaborating on how to handle the Trayvon Martin material.
And I was wondering where the collaboration came in?
Was it by talking about what you were
going to do tonight or some future work?
[LAUGHTER]
Yes it was--
[LAUGHS]
We started talking about it a long time ago,
but there were a lot of ideas that were
brewing in our conversations.
And then we just kind of accidentally
stumbled into this common territory
and decided to work with it.
And I hadn't seen her piece until today.
[LAUGHS]
But yeah, we were talking about it.
So there was a lot of exchange and a lot of trying to--
I felt like my role was to provide
a runway for Claudia's piece and to give it some kind of--
just to prepare the audience in some way for it.
I don't think that's true because she hadn't
seen the piece until today.
So the runway is not actually-- but I think that you were--
[LAUGHTER]
But I think Christine was interested in the pieces
that she pulled forward had to do with Trayvon
Martin in that the world of the kind of political repression
got addressed in all of the sound pieces
that she brought forward.
And so in that way, I think we were thinking about what it
meant to be in Trayvon's body.
And so I think even though we weren't
looking at each other's pieces and remembering them,
when I finally sent the text to Christine
and then she sent me her text and she
began to fold in these moments that I
had culled from these Black poets who I had spoken to,
and so that kind of became part of the text,
in part in the way of organic pulling together
the material that you did in the time that you've been here,
which is what I heard in your piece.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thanks, the pulling together, that's a beautiful thing.
In the Mapuche, people of the South of Chile,
the Indigenous people of the South of Chile,
the kind of song that a woman that sings from hurt is doing
is called pulling.
And because when you sing in that form and you do things
that nobody cares for, you see I come here in veneration,
in adoration, of this desert that is being destroyed.
I come here in veneration for the Yaqui culture,
for the ancient cultures of this place.
And it's-- boom--
going, going, going.
You know?
And so how can I respond to that other than by crying, crying,
in a tone that nobody cares for.
In a [? pulling ?] tone.
Now, the Mapuche think that when you
pull things that are worthless, that are nothing, from nothing,
to nothing, the ancestors come and all the forces come.
So this pulling together that you are doing,
it really freezes my blood, it freezes it,
because it changes it.
When you asked for us to close our eyes, I really did.
And I was feeling the rhythm of my blood change
by just the idea of going into an alleyway where
you are the dangerous one.
I remember a Latin American friend
who was coming to New York, and he
had been told New York is very dangerous.
Don't go into the subway.
So the poor man was terrified.
And finally, he decided to go into the subway.
He enters into a car, do you call the car,
what do you call it--
the car.
He sits, and people immediately leave.
Of course, he hadn't noticed that he was Black.
So it's who is scared of who?
So this pulling together is probably the one thing
that we can do.