ANNOUNCER: This episode
of the Art Assignment
is supported by Prudential.
 Today, we're at the
Indianapolis Museum of Art,
which over the past year, has
exhibited three video works
by the Brooklyn based artists
Mariam Ghani and Erin Ellen
Kelly.
Mariam Ghani works
across disciplines,
and along with generating a
diverse body of work involving
installation, photography,
text, and video,
she is also an activist,
archivist, and lecturer.
For over 10 years, she's worked
with Erin Ellen Kelly, who
is a dancer, performer,
and choreographer,
and together,
they've made a series
of videos that examines
specific sites through a process
of research and collaboration.
Their areas of focus have
included New Mexico landscapes,
the rocky terrain and sea
of southwestern Norway,
and explorations of the
cities of Sharjah, United Arab
Emirates as well as St. Louis.
We're going to be talking
with Mariam and Erin
about the process they've
evolved for approaching
and learning about a
site and how they then
go about creating new
narratives through interacting
with a place in inventive ways.
 I'm Mariam Ghani.
 And I'm Erin Allen Kelly, and
this is your Art Assignment.
 Well, Erin and I had known
each other for several years
already, and we had
been talking together
about our individual work
and our individual practices
and sensing that there was an
overlap and a kind of interest
in collaborating, but we
never had the space or time
or resources to do so.
And then in 2006,
I had a residency
at the Akademie Schloss Solitude
in Stuttgart, in Germany.
I was able to invite Erin to
come and stay at the Schloss
for a month.
And we began to figure
out a way to work together
to make something, basically
using these two spaces.
One being the Schloss itself,
which is a rococo era,
the Schloss or pleasure
palace, which is--
the entire interior
is trompe-l'oeil.
And then the other
being the forest,
which was landscaped
at the same time
that the Schloss was built.
 And we would go
around and imagine,
ah, could you see
the rose garden here
and kind of imagine what it was
and look at how the grounds had
kind of grown over
and taken over,
like reclaimed themselves.
MARIAM GHANI: But
then when you really
look at it, when you
look at it in the way
that we were looking at
it, which is walking in it
every single day
for several hours,
you start to understand
that it actually
is still pretty artificial.
There's a lot of traces of
the construction left in it.
And so we were
looking for places
where those traces of
construction kind of
revealed themselves.
 And then I like
being in a place
and seeing the way in which
the body responds to it
and responds to the people in
which you're interacting with
and taking it from there.
And then maybe
seeing that, and then
also informing it with
a lot of other reading
and text-based research.
And every site has a history.
So if it's historically
significant,
like, also what does that mean?
And if you start kind of
exhuming those histories,
then it talks about who
and what has come before.
So the assignment that
we've come up with today
is to choose a location
that you find intriguing.
 And then you have to
research the historical uses
of the place.
You can do that with documents,
books, poetry, fiction,
however you're
interested in doing that.
And then talk to some
people to find out
what the contemporary
understanding of that place is.
 And then spend time
being in the space
and find your relationship
of the body to that location.
 And finally, make something
in any medium based on what
you've learned about that place.
 So Sarah, it's important to
note that their approach here
is based on a particular school
of landscape archeology called
the contextual school,
which has you investigate
the historical uses of a place,
contemporary understandings
of the place, and the way that
your physical body interacts
with that space.
Basically, it asks
you to contextualize.
 And I really like bringing
that level of research
and thoroughness
into art practice
because if you think about
the history of artists working
in the landscape, like, say,
in the 1970s with earth art
or land art, a lot of it is
really wonderful, but to me,
can lack a kind of questioning
or criticality about the space.
 Yeah, I mean, there's
a place, of course,
for a beautiful stack
of rocks in the woods,
but what happened in
those woods, you know?
 Exactly.
I think the work of
someone like Agnes Denes
shows a kind of engagement
with a site that's
closer to what Mariam and
Erin are asking us to do.
Like her piece in
New York in 1982,
where she planted and
harvested two acres of wheat
on the Battery Park landfill,
extremely valuable property
that, of course, has a
history to contend with.
 Yeah, but you can also think
about this assignment outside
of a fine art context--
as I often do--
in the context of literature and
writings about the relationship
between man and nature
in American history.
I was thinking especially
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
ANNOUNCER: In 1836,
Ralph Waldo Emerson
published his essay
"Nature," elaborating
his not insignificant
love of wilderness.
In the woods, he says, "standing
on the bare ground, my head
bathed by blithe air and
uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eyeball.
I am nothing.
I see all."
His seductive words
were foundational
for the transcendentalist
movement
but critique emerged soon after.
In its reverie, the
eyeball might miss, say,
the history of its environs,
of Emerson's own Concord,
Massachusetts, which was
home to Algonquin Native
Americans for over
10,000 years, was
the site of the initial conflict
of the American Revolutionary
War, and whose natural
landscape in 1836,
no doubt, bore signs of
intervention and life.
For this assignment,
we might imagine
that eyeball in
more modern times,
merging the presentness it
symbolizes with a landscape
archeologist's approach.
Doing so, we might
discover how we are
eyeballs but not just eyeballs.
Not mere observers but
fully embodied actors
within and upon the landscape.
 I would say the White Sands
location is a really good
example of that, in the sense
that it has many historical
uses from being a missile
test site and then it still--
tests are still occurring
at this location.
And in between test days,
people are sliding on sleds
down these sand dunes
and it has this kind
of very surreal,
like, moon landscape
in which families are
having family day.
And there's lots of
laughter, and because
of the nature of the space,
it's like sound echoing through.
 The framing choices for
White Sands is basically--
I think what ended up in the
film is just this very wide
shot because it's looking at
like the distance that Erin is
traveling to just cross
from one dune to another.
There's also this
particular choice
of costume, which is it's almost
blending into the landscape
but not quite.
There's just these
little details
on the costume that kind of
stand out from the landscape.
It's actually feathers,
which I was sewing on, hand
sewing on in the car as we
were driving to the location.
ERIN ELLEN KELLY: We were
there just right before dusk.
What we noticed was,
like this just vastness
of the rolling dunes,
and my body really
enjoyed the texture of the
sand and moving through it.
And we wanted to work
with the depth perception.
So how long it takes for you
to go from one area to another,
and this kind of
otherworldly quality.
And so the body can
slither in a way.
And I became very interested
in how does it float
on the surface of the sand?
For me, it's a
way of connecting,
connecting to the world we
live in in like a macro.
Connecting into maybe
community or social group,
a way of connecting to
yourself by placing yourself
in a location and exploring your
really personal relationship
to all this social and
environmental information.
So for me, it's just exercise in
your perception of connection.
 If you've been putting off
exploring that intriguing place
because you think, I can answer
those questions next week
or next month or next
year, you actually
may not be able to because
that place might disappear.
Half the places we
shot in in St. Louis
are actually gone now, and
that was just last year
that we shot that film.
The world is always changing.
Places are always shifting.
If there's something in the
world that interests you,
you need to go and
explore it right now.
 Thanks to Prudential for
sponsoring this episode.
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