About

About

Hailed as “heady, euphoric, singular, surprising” by Publisher’s Weekly, “beautiful, horrifying, passionate, and bold,” by Jeff VanderMeer in The Millions, “Rilke’s lost female shadow,” by Conjunctions, “universal and personal, comforting and jarring, ethereal and earthy,” by Electric Literature, and “foreboding” by The Guardian UK, Quintan Ana Wikswo has long been active in the collusion and collision of transdisciplinary art and direct human rights fieldwork.

Wikswo is recognized for innovative hybrid constellations of work that integrate her fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry and essay with her original photography, performance, audio, and video installation. Since 1988, her fieldwork and literary projects interrupt sites and trajectories of human rights infractions, gender violence, hate crime organizing, and global and local networks of white supremacy.

Wikswo is the author of the several books of text and photographs, including The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press), the novel A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be (Stalking Horse Press) and multiple anthologies and museum catalogues. Her work appears regularly in Guernica, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, LitHub, Warscapes, Kenyon Review, and others.

Her forty major projects and commissions are published, exhibited, performed, presented, collected, archived and tour regularly at institutions and centers throughout the world. Wikswo’s projects have received multiple solo museum exhibitions in New York City and Berlin, are in the permanent collections, and appear regularly in museums, galleries and performance spaces including Brooklyn Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art/LA MOCA, Berlin Jewish Museum, University of Southern California, New York University, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Museum of Modern Art (France), University of Missouri, Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), F.A.C.T. Foundation for Art and Technology UK, and many more.

In collaborative performance, Wikswo’s major video, text, and libretto commissions are funded by New Music USA and the National Endowment for the Arts, in longterm collaboration composers including Tom Flaherty, Veronika Krausas, Pamela Madsen, Andrea Clearfield, Anne LeBerge, Jen Kutler, Isaac Schankler, James Ilgenfritz, Arthur Kell, Bill Alves, and more. Her solo performance work for radio, video, live proscenium, and in-situ venues include Wave Farm, St. Marks, Dixon Place, Pete’s Candy Store, Bowery Poetry Club, and Joe’s Pub.

A Creative Capital grantee in Emerging Fields, her work has been honored by four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships including one at the Lynchburg African American Cemetery, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Endowed Fellowship, and multiple residencies at Yaddo. She has been an Endowed Visiting Professor and Visiting Artist in English, Human Rights, Creative Writing, Music/Composition, Performance, Gender Studies, African-American/Black Diaspora Studies, and Indigenous Studies at several universities including City College of New York, New York University, Colgate College, California College of the Arts, and California State University.

Her studio is located in New York, and her fieldwork and artistic practice is based in the lands where she was raised – in the US South, Eastern Europe, and Indigenous and US-occupied lands along the US-Mexico border. Her work is all based in autobiographical and empirical inhabitations of these sites, amidst communities to which she has extensive personal and ancestral direct experience. She continues ongoing forensic and prevention-based work surrounding race, gender, and queerness in these personally relevant human rights hotspots.

“Author and visual artist Wikswo juxtaposes dreamy, surreal prose with shadowed, ambiguous, occluded dreamscapes to haunting effect—heady, euphoric, and full with loss. Wikswo’s singular lines strike like the tone of a bell while her beautifully composed images echo the surprising twists of language. [Her work] defies genre or distillation and instead takes the reader/viewer on a journey where myth, mystery, and the impossible have never seemed more real.”
– Publisher’s Weekly

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s trenchant interdisciplinary investigation into the sites of massacres and other atrocities is a vivid reminder that art no longer serves religion, but is progressively supplanting it in terms of ritual and sanctity.”
– Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic

“It’s more than the way W.G. Sebald, Jesse Ball and Teju Cole have used photographs to punctuate and accentuate the narratives they write; there’s a sense of collage here, of the images being used to state things where words no longer suffice.”
– Chicago Tribune

“The tragedy of embodiment, of our inherent separation from one another, permeates bodies of work that strive to rewrite the rules of creation, that it might contain a space where we can love. It is no wonder, then, that Wikswo’s projects obliterate boundaries of form, structure, genre, and medium like a typhoon.” 
– The Rumpus

“One of Brooklyn’s most engaging artistic and literary voices.”
– Greenlight Books 

“Quintan Ana Wikswo  peels back history to image, lyric and the body so viscerally I felt my skin shiver.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch

“Wikswo’s stunning, solitary and cinematic letters to the self (think of the Quays and Béla Tarr speaking together in dreamtime) bear witness to a world beloved and betrayed, the spent and brutal collisions of irretrievable loss with what might have been possible.”
—Rikki Ducornet

“Beautiful. Brutal. Poetic. Quintan Ana Wikswo reinvents American Southern Gothic, weaving a spell that is both horrific and heartbreaking. Mandatory reading.”
—Lydia Lunch

“Gigantic, unsparing prose whose beauty is letter-perfect.”
– Dennis Cooper

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s work occupies territory the way only the bravest literary works do: the characters and places within shirk boundaries and create new ones, exist both inside and outside the world as we know it, and redefine love and existence in an unexpected and wildly queer way.”
– Lambda Literary

“Wikswo’s writing holds within it all the unsettling truths of American history […] a reminder of what has been ripped away, of what survives—and thrives—in places where atrocious crimes against humanity have been committed.”
– Necessary Fiction

“Wikswo’s emotional power, coupled with a fantastical, dreamlike quality underscored with darkness and a fixation on mortality, gives her work a cinematic nature evocative of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman. Blurring the edges of reality and challenging the body’s limits, Wikswo is interested in how the trauma of loss affects us on a primal level, denying us a language that can articulate our grief. These are the memories left when all else is stripped away, when we are left with nothing but our minds. Wikswo is skilled at amalgamating her emotions and memories with reflections on human tragedy on a larger scale: the universal themes offer familiarity, while the historical or geographical settings lend weight that transcends individual experience.”
– Bookslut 

“Quintan Ana Wikswo, in her unique and magnificent works, has ignited an extraordinary condensation of texts and images that culls together spirit, compassion, and dreams. Throughout her foray into extensions of the mind and the limits of the body she exudes an uncanny power of magic and wizardry.”
—Lynn Hershman Leeson

“Enthralled by Quintan Ana Wikswo’s new novel A LONG CURVING SCAR WHERE THE HEART SHOULD BE. Her prose is fierce and her photos visceral—this book is a gut-punch of strange beauty.”
– The Rumpus

Introductory Video

Watch Quintan’s talk about her artistic practice at her Creative Capital presentation.

Read Quintan’s autobiographical texts for SOUTHERN COMFORT in Gulf Coast Journal. 

Read Quintan’s memoir non-fiction essay FIELDWORK in Guernica magazine.

Watch Quintan’s film FIELDWORK

Watch Quintan’s solo performance DRONES

 





Biography

Hailed as “heady, euphoric, singular, surprising” by Publisher’s Weekly, “beautiful, horrifying, passionate, and bold,” by Jeff VanderMeer in The Millions, “Rilke’s lost female shadow,” by Conjunctions, and “universal and personal, comforting and jarring, ethereal and earthy,” by Electric Literature, QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO has long been active in the collusion and collision of transdisciplinary art and human rights. They are recognized for innovative hybrid works that integrate their fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry and essay with their original photography, performance, audio, and video installation. These projects interrupt sites and trajectories of human rights infractions, hate crime organizing, and global and local networks of the far right.

A human rights worker since 1988, Wikswo’s methodology is deeply grounded in collaborative and coalition-based organizing principles, long-term project fieldwork commitments, autobiography, forensic ecology, and intersectionality. Wikswo’s practice involves multi-year personal habitations of occluded sites with complex histories at the intersection of sexuality/gender, science/technology, othering/belonging, dis/ability, race and white supremacy, mythologies/shamanism, and military studies, with a special focus on human rights aftermath issues and crimes against humanity.

This work is guided by the multifacted  – and often secret or unspoken – legacies of human, ecological and anthropocene history that inform contemporary behaviors, beliefs, and systems of power and control. Her final projects create interruptive, disruptive sites for investigation and discourse around existential questions about humanity, our societies, and how we can navigate beyond the limited boundaries that we are taught contain us.

Her forty major projects and commissions are published, exhibited, performed, presented, collected, and archived at institutions and centers throughout the world.

Wikswo’s books include the acclaimed collection of photographs and stories The Hope Of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press), the hybrid poetics novel with photographs A Long Curving Scar Where The Heart Should Be (Stalking Horse Press), the artist book Schwarzer Tod and the Useless Eaters (Catalysis Projects), and the exhibition catalogue of her Sonderbauten project, Rituale gegen das Vergessen (Kehler Verlag/Berlin Jewish Museum). Their work appears in anthologies including They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press), Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance (UMass Amherst), One Blood: The Narrative Influence (University of Alaska), Procession for the Extracted: Site-Located Artmaking at California Gold Mines (California College of Art), QDA: Queer Disability Anthology (and multiple editions of the annual performance anthology Emergency Index (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Wikswo’s ongoing journal and magazine publications in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art include regular contributions to Tin House, Conjunctions, Guernica, The Rumpus, _nY_ Amsterdam, Warscapes, DIAGRAM, the Kenyon Review, and many more.

Wikswo’s visual art, text and video installations have received three solo museum exhibitions in New York City and Berlin, and appear regularly in museums, galleries and performance spaces including Brooklyn Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art/LA MOCA, Berlin Jewish Museum, University of Southern California, New York University, Museum of Jurassic Technology, Museum of Modern Art (France), University of Missouri, Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), F.A.C.T. Foundation for Art and Technology UK, and many more.

Wikswo’s solo and collaborative live performance works are actively presented onstage, in museum exhibitions, and site-specific installation featuring their hybrid text, libretto, film/video installation and projection, and original scores by prominent new music and jazz composers including Anne LeBerge, Pamela Madsen, Veronika Krausas, Jen Kutler, Isaac Schankler, James Ilgenfritz, Arthur Kell, Tom Flaherty, Bill Alves, and more. They perform regularly in New York City and elsewhere with Lydia Lunch, Nicholas Isherwood, and others at venues including (Le) Poisson Rouge, Dixon Place, Bowery Poetry Club, Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the City of Munich, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, and more.

Wikswo is currently an artist-strategist-advisor for the German Foreign Office, the German State Department, the Haus der Kulteren der Welt (Berlin), The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Colin Powell School for Global and Civic Leadership at City College New York, the Institute for Global Violence Against Women (CUNY), interdisciplinary arts at Cal State University Fullerton, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. They have worked extensively on the design and implementation of pre-Trump human rights initiatives for federal and tribal offices such as the United States Department of State, the United States Department of Justice, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and non-governmental organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International, the Conference of Material Claims Against Germany, The National Civil Rights Museum, and others.

A Creative Capital Grantee in Emerging Fields, Wikswo’s work has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Theo Westenberg Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, For Site Foundation, ARC-Durfee, Oberfaltzer Kunstlerhaus, Montalvo Arts Center, Djerassi, Puffin Foundation, Millay Colony. Wikswo has received multiple fellowships to Yaddo, including the Pollock Krasner Residency. They are a member of PEN USA and serves as guest artist, juror, visiting lecturer, and strategic advisor at multiple arts as well as geopolitical justice institutions.

Wikswo maintains a lively commissioning practice, as well as an international visiting professor and visiting artist practice at New York University, California State University at Fullerton, San Francisco State University, Colgate College, City University of New York (CUNY), State University of New York (SUNY), University of California, California College of the Arts, Old Dominion University, Yeshiva University, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and many more. Wikswo’s primary academic teaching focus is to guide students and student artists beyond the boundaries of discipline, and into galvanic encounters with new forms and tools for intensifying their own practice, developing a lifelong process of self-direction, and encountering the world with as much freedom of movement and expression as possible, and then a bit more.

She is completing Slaughter Parties, a transdisciplinary book about the experience of global and local first responders, fieldworkers, peacekeepers, mercenaries, journalists, and the peculiarities of those rambling rhizomes who reside at contended sites and conflict zones

A 7-minute presentation of her methodology and practice can be viewed online via Creative Capital:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXOlLpHnIJ8

“Author and visual artist Wikswo’s juxtaposes dreamy, surreal prose with shadowed, ambiguous, occluded dreamscapes to haunting effect—heady, euphoric, and full with loss. Wikswo’s singular lines strike like the tone of a bell while her beautifully composed images echo the surprising twists of language. [Her work] defies genre or distillation and instead takes the reader/viewer on a journey where myth, mystery, and the impossible have never seemed more real.” Publisher’s Weekly

“One of Brooklyn’s most engaging artistic and literary voices.”  – Greenlight Books 

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s trenchant interdisciplinary investigation into the sites of massacres and other atrocities is a vivid reminder that art no longer serves religion, but is progressively supplanting it in terms of ritual and sanctity.”
– Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic 

“[Quintan Ana Wikswo explores] humanity from the outside, not just crossing genres but exploding them. Quintan combines text and photography to give us characters who have left their bodies, and whose stories have become boundless. She writes with both a lightness and the weight of lives unlived, of remorse, and of loss.” – Pixelated

“A seduction and an insurrection: a paean to lovers, explorers, resisters, and those without borders.”
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

“It’s more than the way W.G. Sebald, Jesse Ball and Teju Cole have used photographs to punctuate and accentuate the narratives they write; there’s a sense of collage here, of the images being used to state things where words no longer suffice.” – Chicago Star Tribune

 

Artist Statement

At the heart of my work are questions surrounding the construction and depiction of reality and realities – truths and histories. I am curious about how tactics of storytelling and narrative are used to create and control mythos and historicity – as weapons of hegemonic power, but also as tools of resistance and liberation. I investigate how narratives are coded into the human body, mind, and psyche through a potent matrix of sexuality and erotics; trauma, violence and militarism; and altered states of consciousness.

For several decades, I worked for human-, civil-, and gender rights organizations in the United States, Europe, Central and South America, and various North American Tribal Nations. Within this work, I focused on projects with which I had first-hand personal, direct and/or ancestral experience – I therefore stood simultaneously as witness and as instigator, as activist and victim, insider and outsider, survivor and bystander, solution and problem, rescuer and betrayer.

My job was the construction of official narrative: reporting on, crafting, and compiling oral histories, survivor testimonies, victim testimonies, white papers, government reports, law enforcement reports, social services and psychiatric evaluations, news articles, stakeholder reports, diplomatic briefs, and ghostwriting speeches and strategic communications for officials and powerbrokers on various sides of the prevailing power structures.

Today, my interdisciplinary projects investigate how states and their institutions and communities define and police the official stories of normalcy and belonging. How is narrative used to enforce control over human activity, and what are the methods of enforcement? Where – and on whose bodies – are official histories encoded over time? What are the processes for disruption and interruption of these coded stories?

How do poetics and visual abstraction hack this code, and provide a renegade underground railway for insurrection and disobedience?

My bodies of work explore and inhabit unmarked, intentionally obscured, and hidden sites where trauma has literally “taken place” – sites whose experience of atrocity have been erased from public record, and where contemporary efforts continue to actively obscure or erase the aftermath narratives. I work at these sites over a period of 5-10 years, using with salvaged military film cameras and typewriters manufactured by Fascist and authoritarian governments.

I create multi-voiced portraits of place over time, and time across place…constructing new evidence that resists erasure and interrupts the prevailing narratives. I work in literature, photography, video/film, and performance to create a single project. Each project is comprised of a constellation of independent but interconnected poems, texts, stories, essays, video installations, large-scale photographs, books, solo and collaborative performance works, and site-specific rituals and rites.

In my photographs, videos, texts, and performances, I work to dislodge these timespace situations from their habitual representations and contexts. I work with the instruments to actively interrupt conventions and disrupt narrative and visual controls. They exhibit inappropriate, intrusive, and distracting aberrations in spelling, focus, spacing, exposure, margins, characters, and framing.

Because tangible, material evidence of atrocity is typically removed from these sites, the place itself is a volatile abstraction in a constant state of destruction, construction, and deconstruction. Because the cameras and typewriters themselves are unlikely survivors of violence, they have unique capacities, wounds and histories.

My challenge is to incite new encounters and engagements with sites and stories that have been silenced. I am not interested in presenting an official story or replacing an old history with a new history. Instead, I wish to create a conversation with these disrupted voices and places to invoke a constellation of human realities that prevents communities from indulging in the worship of a single unified message.

– Quintan Ana Wikswo

 

 

Press

For a full listing of current press, please visit: http://bumblemoth.com/category/press/

PRESS & PRAISE FOR THE HOPE OF FLOATING HAS CARRIED US THIS FAR:

“One of Brooklyn’s most engaging artistic and literary voices.” 
– Greenlight Books 

“These stunning, solitary and cinematic letters to the self (think of the Quays and Béla Tarr speaking together in dreamtime) bear witness to a world beloved and betrayed, the spent and brutal collisions of irretrievable loss with what might have been possible.”
—Rikki Ducornet on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 

“You will find within these pages a marvelous alchemy of image and text, all of it radiant, sensual, endlessly layered. The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far is at once a seduction and an insurrection: a paean to lovers, explorers, resisters, and those without borders.”
National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 

“Quintan Ana Wikswo, in her unique and magnificent The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, has ignited an extraordinary condensation of texts and images that culls together spirit, compassion, and dreams. Throughout her foray into extensions of the mind and the limits of the body she exudes an uncanny power of magic and wizardry.”
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Director of Women Art Revolution on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 

“In these stories, disasters in war and love trigger peculiar unexpected metamorphoses…Cataclysmic apocalypses such as hurricanes, political coups, and military invasions find equal footing with lovers’ quarrels, broken romances, and erotic negotiations. Instead of cause for destruction, these catastrophes become opportunities for transformation—especially from human to non-human.” 
– Maxine Chernoff in Literary Hub
read the interview here

“[The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far explores] humanity from the outside, not just crossing genres but exploding them. Quintan combines text and photography to give us characters who have left their bodies, and whose stories have become boundless. She writes with both a lightness and the weight of lives unlived, of remorse, and of loss.”0s&1s / Pixelated on The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far 
read the interview here

PRESS & PRAISE FOR MERCY KILLING AKTION

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s trenchant interdisciplinary investigation into the sites of massacres and other atrocities is a vivid reminder that art no longer serves religion, but is progressively supplanting it in terms of ritual and sanctity.”
– Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic on Mercy Killing Aktion

“The New York artist Quintan Ana Wikswo shows asylum photographs whose foreboding atmosphere is accentuated by technical simulations of the hypersensitive vision caused by post-traumatic stress disorder.”
– The Guardian UK
read the Critic’s Pick on Carrie Buried Beneath Catalpa Beans 

” Quintan Ana Wikswo…encourages visitors to rethink their understanding of mental health and wellbeing, by asking how far our personal wellbeing is related to the values of the society we live in and the impact of new technologies. By showcasing spaces formerly reserved for the mentally ill, Quintan Ana Wikswo provides insights into the historical context of mental illness and its surrounding power structures.”

– Faye Smith on Carrie Buried Beneath Catalpa Beans 
read the review in Purple Revolver

“This survey provides a well-designed forum for Wikswo’s images, which manage to take us somewhere we don’t want to go, and to do it not with a hammer to the head or to the senses, or with accepted and expected visual histories, but with a glimpse of blue sky or a blooming dandelion juxtaposed with a dance of barbed wire or a priapic guard’s tower. That’s pretty much the way it really was, after all.”
– Tom Christie, B.L.A.T.C. on Sonderbauten at the Berlin Jewish Museum
read the review on B.L.A.T.C.

“Alone amid cacti, barbed wire, and phone lines, she is looking for something. The figure raises her rake — which seems like half claw, half witch’s broom — above her head, then returns to it to the sand. The sun radiates in cactus spines, but she is dressed in what looks like a fur coat and a long, metallic sheath made from a Mylar emergency blanket. Where her head should be there is a red beaked mask from which hang wattles and clawed fingers. She is the Vulture Vulva Vigilante, a symbolic, threatening creature, invented by artis tQuintan Ana Wikswo, who seeks out female remains in the desert and commemorates them, taking a fierce stance against gender violence in the process.
– Ashley P. Taylor, Hyperallergic on Fieldwork
read the interview here: 
In The Desert, A Vulture Spirit Follows a Trail of Femicide 

PRESS ON “SONDERBAUTEN”

Berliner Morgenpost
Deutch Welle
Die Nacht Magazine
Theatre Geimende Berlin
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Judische Allgemeine

Affiliations

 

Artist in Residence – New York City
Colin Powell Center for Global and Civic Leadership
City College New York / CCNY

Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative
https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/colinpowellschool

Artist in Residence – Berlin and Mississippi
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Max Planck Institute, Berlin
Goethe Institute
Mississippi: An Anthropocene River / Field Station Natchez

www.hkw.de

FIELDSHIFT FURTHER (Co-Artistic Director)
…a transdisciplinary company creating new performance works at sites with human rights and ecological impact.
www.FieldshiftFurther.com

FLASHPOINT NYC (Core Artist)
…New York City’s jazz and literature live performance ensemble, premiering original works since 2012 at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Cornelia Street Cafe, Pete’s Candy Store, and many more iconic literary and live music venues.
www.FlashpointNYC.com

CATALYSIS PROJECTS / LA (Founding Director, Resident Artist)
…a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary arts organization that presents, publishes, and curates collaborative new works by leading California and international artists.
www.catalysisprojects.com

 

Advisory Committee

Partners

Creative Capital
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Max Plank Institute
Colin Powell School for Global and Civil Leadership at City College New York
Corporation of Yaddo
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
Pollock Krasner Foundation
Center for Cultural Innovation
People for the American Way
ARC/Durfee
Djerassi
Puffin Foundation
Ucross
Millay Colony
Villa Montalvo
Anderson Ranch Arts Center
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus
Can Serrat

FAQ

For more interviews, please visit PRESS and ARTIST TALKS.

It has become clear that there are exactly thirteen questions asked about my work.  I have a fantasy of responding to these questions by number, like a desultory Oracle at Delphi on a time-management regimen, or a librarian who simply fails to comprehend why no one respects the efficiency of the Dewey Decimal System.

Q1. Who writes the poems, stories, and texts that you use in your projects? What is your process? Isn’t it a little peculiar to move around between disciplines of literature so much? And why do you work in multiple languages?

I write all my own poems, stories, essays, and texts for all my projects. They are original to me, and I take full and sole responsibility for what is mis/communicated.

If I’m creating a site-specific work, I typically haul my salvaged government typewriters out to the site. These texts begin as an exploration of how I’m processing and experiencing everything around me – a transcription of my brain. But the process expands to include conversations I have with people – witnesses, bystanders, storytellers, rabble rousers, and that’s largely based on my background working with oral histories in a human rights context.

Sometimes the work is narrative and sometimes more about sound or language or mood, or structure, form, or presentation. These pieces find their ways towards poetry or prose, essay or libretto. I am not at all interested in the conventions that segregate one from the other.

I write in English, and then I very often collaborate with translators to create “mirror texts” in German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, Diné… I like to build worlds in which multiple languages create nested architectures and voices.

Q2. Who takes the photographs that you use in your projects? What kind of cameras do you use? Are you working in film or digital? How do you get those colors? Do you use photoshop to get all those layers? 

I create all my photographs myself, using salvaged military film cameras that I find in junk shops or are gifted to me by strangers during fieldwork. I work with cameras that are indigenous to the site at which I’m working.

I work in medium format 120mm and 35mm film. Everything in the photographs is achieved in-camera, through old-fashioned mechanical and optical and chemical means – the colors, the layers, everything. There’s no digital manipulation at all, either in photoshop or some other computer software.

The layers that are apparent in the films are all created in camera, through as many as forty or fifty exposures. It’s all about calculating how each camera and film stock will respond to the amount of light. (That obsession is a good way to learn how to watch how the world glows.)

I use mostly broken and malfunctioning antique cameras, many of which I have adapted to encourage particularly unconventional responses to light and the chemical emulsions of film. When using film, it’s actual photons interacting with chemicals on the film. Because of that, the resulting photograph is the record of a fairly volatile organic process. It’s affected by many fluctuating variables – the chemicals’ age, their condition, their quality, how much light is allowed to contact them and under what circumstances, as well as the vicissitudes of development, digital scanning, and printing.

Likewise, when working with an 80 or 100 year old camera filled with rust, dirt, cracks, and battlefield detritus, each camera will respond uniquely to the film, to light, to lenses…most of their calibrations aren’t standardized. It takes a tremendous amount of time to build up a working relationship with each camera sufficient to produce even one image.

Similarly, it’s a challenge to find an intrepid lab willing to develop the film, and switch all the settings on a scanner that is capable of digitizing the unusual sizes and conditions and processing of the film. By the time all these variables have been managed, I don’t even have time left for Photoshop. (Although I admire people who push that software past its limits and into new terrain.)

Q3. Who shoots the films that you use in your projects? What kind of cameras do you use? Are you working in film or digital?

I shoot all my films myself, unless I’m performing site-specific works – such as Out Here Death Is No Big Deal – and in that case I have a really fantastic team of cinematographers and shooters with whom I work closely – their names are listed in the individual projects.

I use digital cameras as well as film cameras – typically experimental or homemade instruments whose primary purpose has nothing to do with high resolution and stands in direct opposition to the economic barriers erected around access to state of the art video cameras.

(My earliest films – Waterland, Apimania, and Chemise Eyes Lies – use public access archival film footage which I adapted and oftentimes re-animated.)

I use about thirty different kinds of cameras to create my films…a mixture of digital and analogue film. A lot of the films are created using animated photographic stills, which is time consuming and often gives audiences headaches, but I quite enjoy making them. Others are very simple scans of the entire film negative, in a kind of meditative panorama that also often gives audiences headaches, but I also quite enjoy making.

In general, the films are intended to be shown as projections during live performance or within installations – in both instances, human figures of performers and viewers take on a life-sized scale within the ecology and architecture and invented worlds of the films. On small screens without live performers, it’s a somewhat different experience that I consider more a meditation than a traditional film or video art installation.

Q4. Who creates the performance works that you do?  What is the process of working with collaborators? 

I write my own performance scripts, and either I or someone else performs or presents them. While I began working with performance collaborators, since 2015 I’ve begun performing my own work more and more – drawing on a literary tradition and a visual arts performance tradition…I’m certainly not a dancer or an actor by training. For some pieces, I work with various collaborators who have that kind of training.

All of the performance works begin with my own concept or thread of narrative, some sort of preoccupation that forms the bones of the piece.  If I’m working with  collaborators – composers, choreographers, actors – we work closely together to create the musculature: the sonic and movement vocabularies. In general, we do not all tell the same story, but instead work together to explore different and sometimes oppositional aspects of a world that we’re creating together.

Collaboration is an intimate relationship that in general requires trust, risk-taking, and exodus from the comfort zone. All of my collaborations have pulled me into new explorations and pushed me to acquire unforeseen skills and perspectives. As an evolving artist, collaboration can be an alchemical method for ongoing creative and intellectual evolution.

Q5. You make a lot of work about the Holocaust, and Plantation Slavery, and Eugenics, and Genocide against Indigenous Nations, as well as decidedly gloomy and perhaps irrelevant things that happened in Europe a long time ago, like the Crusades, the Witch Hunts, and the Inquisition. Why? Why? Why can’t you put the past behind you? America is bright and shiny and new and you persist in opening up wounds that have healed. Some folx find that incredibly irritating. 

I am not interested in quick fixes or comfortable lies that obscure the hurt and injustice beneath – beyond that, time is an illusion. Patterns established at the origins of human civilization (rape culture, genocide, femicide, hate crimes, etc) continue to unfold today in actually quite predictable ways. As Hannah Arendt writes, human existential progress may very well be an illusion. The only path towards liberation from our own cruelty and suffering winds through a circuitous landscape that traverses the entire globe, and our entire human presence upon it.

The United States was a colony of France, Spain, and England. I’m interested in the lacunae that exist between our continent’s indigenous roots, and the recently acquired/imposed culture of the colonizers.  In the United States, it’s a tempting illusion to imagine a new idealistic society free of the draconian legacies and limitations of Europe, of the past, of history. It’s equally tempting to think the atrocities and catastrophes of this new country are new inventions. However, the United States – as a nation – began as a grand experiment by the empires of Europe.

My initial intellectual interests were primarily 20th century US civil rights work. Yet each thread that I pulled seemed to stretch back across the Atlantic to far more ancient methods of constructing societies. History is comprised of a series of patterns, almost all of which lead back an astonishingly great distance through time (if not through space).

There is very little that is new under the sun, and it’s a preoccupation of mine to link current events to those of a very distant history. It was difficult to work on the US-Mexico border in the midst of epidemic femicide and not wonder, while grasping at theory-straws, about the witch burnings. It remains difficult to see how the Catholic Church responds to the epidemic sexual abuse of children, and not wonder about patterns established during the Inquisition. It’s impossible to encounter a crematorium at a concentration camp, and not be aware that outsiders in Europe have been burned during all empire-building psychoses.

There have been many instances of genocide throughout human history, but none as comprehensively documented as the Holocaust. Because of this, it’s particularly illuminating to seek out those aspects of the Holocaust that nonetheless remain hidden or taboo, and ask questions that begin with why and how…

I have known many Holocaust survivors during my various jobs in human rights. I was at times a ghostwriter or editor for their memoirs and autobiographies, and also worked for many different organizations that provided them with limited reparations or social services. I took the oral histories of people who survived the sexual crimes and medical crimes under the Nazis – their experiences were largely silenced or expunged from public testimonies. I also met several past and present Nazis, as well as their descendants who, like many Jews,  wrestle with painful complexities of ancestry, legacy, otherness, and family secrecy. This constellation of voices and realities is central to my cosmos.

Some branches of my ancestors were refugees from many different suffering corners of Europe, and quickly began to pollinate within many different corners of North America. The tragedies of Europe were their intimate family tragedies, including the Witch Hunts and the Holocaust – centuries apart, but both quite unpleasant for families with epilepsy.

Q6. You make a lot of work about the South, and a lot of it is pretty sad and gothic. Why?

I grew from a sprout to a seedling, and then have spread my rhizomatic roots  throughout the Southern Half of the United States – half in the “Old South” and half in the “Old West” – rural Appalachia, the Shenandoah Valley, the South Carolina Sea Islands, New Orleans, and many nooks and crannies of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

My family comes from both places, and from other continents, both before and after recorded time. Some of my family came here by will, and some by force. Some stayed within the racial and sexual rules, and some wildly transgressed them – either by choice, or by force. It’s complicated. Some ancestors arrived as survivors of genocide. Others came and perpetuated genocide. Some were slaves, some enslavers. Sometimes the survivors went on to persecute others, and sometimes the persecutors changed sides and became healers. Some ancestors lived here and worked for liberation for all and I try to live up to their legacy, while other ancestors contributed to humanitarian catastrophes whose repercussions cause pain and injustice to this day, and every day.

I try to exist in conversation and communion with all my ancestors, for I am a result of their strange genetic constellation. While I am not responsible for the actions of my ancestors, I know that I exist within their fabric, and the strings that I choose to weave represent agency, and responsibility, amends and justice, reparations and revenge.

As for the Old South, I was a small child looking deep into some of the most raw wounds of this young nation. None of these wounds have healed, because no justice has been served – the perpetrators walk free and spread lies. The South is a place of euphemized horrors that have been largely sanitized and dismissed.

In my childhood, I found it to be deeply segregated, profoundly sadistic, and a far worse place than most folks felt comfortable openly acknowledging in “mixed company” – it was violent, bigoted, cruel, petty, frightened, arrogant, and ignorant. Everyone I loved was frequently and publicly and joyfully tormented by roving mobs, usually with guns. The violence and policing was vigilante, as well as state-sanctioned.

And of course it’s where I learned what civil rights are, and what kind of people fight for them.

And how to find a queer speakeasy.

It’s beautiful, soulful, wrending, passionate, transcendent, profoundly sensual. Senses that exist nowhere else exist in the moist dark places of the American south.

It remains the frontier of genocide and crimes against humanity of a scale that has yet to be officially recognized in the United States. The reverberations of these catastrophic injustices seem at times to become pop culture cliche, but at their core it’s simply vast human pain placed within the confines of narrative.

Gothic is just a catchphrase for bounded torment, wherever it might occur.

Q7. You make a lot of work about the desert, and Mexico, and the Southwest. Why?

Beginning in my early adolescence, I started a still-unfolding journey across nearly every inch of the US-Mexico border. I was a child in the eastern south, and an adolescent and adult in the western south of this continent – what is or used to be Indigenous lands – Comanche lands, Navajo/Diné, Apache, Hopi, Tewa….

While organizing against gender violence, I was kidnapped and raped and eventually escaped, and found refuge on the Nambé Pueblo and in Española, New Mexico. In the desert, I learned all the things one is supposed to learn While Wandering In The Desert, and then I learned a bit more. In the desert, between all the many languages, there was a word for everything, for anything. If you could not find it in your own language, you could find someone who would teach it to you in theirs. I found many that for the first time described who and what I felt I was.

Later, I worked in Texas and became deeply involved in the queer, combat veteran, and sex worker communities along the borderlands. These are three communities who taught me about violence, survival, healing, regeneration, self-definition, and the limits and limitlessness of agency over oneself, and the limits and limitlessness of institutional power over oneself. I am grateful beyond measure.

Intellectually, I’m attracted to a borderland whose friction has yet to resolve. Living in the Southwest, many people seemed convinced of their Americanism, and it’s the last seemingly shameless frontier of European colonialism. Europeans arrived with nearly universal contempt and disregard for the highly evolved and complex societies that they encountered and demolished. Today, the conditions imposed on many Indian Nations remain inhumane, including the Tohono O’Odham Nation where I worked, which encompasses some of the most complex communities and transcendently sacred land on the planet. Lands that white people experience as “new” instead contain the clearly perceptible presence of tens of thousands of years of vibrant human and nonhuman experience.

At night, the desert looks and feels like outer space: stars are lurid as diamonds. The gold in the desert mountains was brought there from distant asteroids. Scratch the surface of the desert, and a glimpse of the cosmos emerges.

Q8. Why is so much of your work about sexual and gender violence?

Despite the fact that the human female population is systematically subjected to socially-sanctioned male violence that transcends race, nationality, ethnicity, class, age, and every other variable, talking about it is considered deeply questionable. This is infuriating and absurd, like nearly everything, but more so.

Invariably, everyone wants to know if “it’s personal” for me. Should it matter? It’s a subject that’s been censored for several thousand years, and millions of women have died because of that imposed silence. So yes, it’s personal – as it is for every human that issued forth from a female uterus.

In terms of gender, it likewise remains astonishing that so much depends upon the correlation of genitalia to social roles. If I had my choice, I’d have been a falcon or a mantis. Some humans, gifted with imagination, have envisioned for themselves ways of being that reach beyond the confines of anatomy or cultural conditioning. I like to spend my time around those ways of being, and it’s reflected in my work.

Oftentimes, those humans are singled out for particularly atrocious persecution. And that’s reflected in my work, too.

Q9. Sometimes I can’t tell what is going on with sex in your work. 

The first time I sent stories to a magazine and they were accepted, the editors wrote back welcoming Mr. Wikswo to their pages. I realized that while I was writing first-person lesbian love stories, I was widely (or narrowly) understood to be a man named Quintan writing modernist tales in which a male narrator writes about his sexual conquests of women.

Later, editors and publishers rejected my work – and still do in 2017 – because of the bigoted adage that women cannot write about sex and violence because female readers don’t like it, and male readers (who like it) won’t buy books by women. That’s consumer capitalism – humanity at its most primitive.

And of course other gatekeepers persist in believing that intersectional work that surrounds the interstices of queerness, race, gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth cannot appeal to wide audiences. They are the dinosaurs who still walk the earth, and soon they will die and we will be rid of them. So if they thwart you too, keep moving and know that you are the future and they, sadly, are already extinct.

I think there’s always the assumption that the male sexual experience is universal and relevant, and everyone else’s should be content with the specialty shops. But that’s changing. Especially if we make it change. Because the sexual experience I create artwork around is universal and relevant as well. And so is yours. And yours. And yours.

There’s a lot of overt and subtle scrutiny about who we love, who we have sex with, and oftentimes that directly affects whether and how and where we get to publish or exhibit or talk about or share our work. Each time I’ve created a work that involves queer sexuality or eroticism and I sense a kind of audience surprise, I feel angry that this because nearly all of us were forcibly prevented from creating or sharing these works over the many centuries.

My desire is simply to create a piece in which I openly recognize and represent my own psyche. But sometimes that turns out to be transgressive. I think that happens to almost everyone, and it’s a worthy challenge to keep on expressing your own experience.

Q10. How do you find your sites? And how do you decide to create projects in particular places?

Have you ever been somewhere and felt like something is a little…strange? It’s hard to put your finger on it. It’s just a sense that something is a little…unusual. I bring a socially-coded camera and an old typewriter and sit down and refuse to leave for several hours or weeks or maybe several months or even far too many years, and I gradually begin to see tiny details – things that would almost seem invisible to the casual passer-by. It’s as though my eyes themselves begin to change.

Eventually, as people become aware that I’m just sitting there, they start to share little details about what happened in that otherwise inexplicably strange or unusual spot.

And sooner or later, the unusual and the strange seem like my very oldest friends and adversaries. It’s as though I didn’t find them – they found me.

Q11. You make a lot of work about shamanism and witches, curanderas, brujas, sibyls, spirits. Is there something you want to tell us?

I do not believe in the five senses – I believe in the 25x25x25 senses. Some of us have access to more than those five. I come from a constellation of cultures that do not exactly delineate between the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, and do not police established reality. In brief, I believe in physics and physics agrees that there are more than three dimensions, and more than five senses. So take it up with the scientists.

I’m deeply wedded to a state of being in the brain that, over the centuries, has resulted in both exaltation (as shamans, saints, and holy figures) and condemnation (as defectives, demons, and possessed witches). Some people call it epilepsy, others have different conceptual rubrics.

Our brain systems are dynamic and elastic, they transform over time and can grant access to transcendental states, altered states, visions, prophecies, and are very adept at navigating the cracks between the confined mundane world and the cosmos…if we keep them agile and brave.

Our global human mythos is built upon the adulation of figures who are godlike, spiritlike, demonlike, witchlike, and we are raised on their exemplar lives from birth (Jesus, the tooth fairy, Baba Yaga, Snow White, La Llorona). Yet at adulthood there is a threshold after which all but a few of us are goaded into becoming unnecessarily mundane humans. It’s perhaps the most occluded crime against humanity.

I’m also interested in how shamanism has been afflicted by control and policing by societies and states. Looking at the history of shamans is looking at the history of colonialism, and fascism, and a lot of deeply repressive social movements that began by clearing out those who could cross worlds and borders. The Witch Trials, the Inquisition and the Holocaust all targeted people with certain , and murdered them.

Q12. Your name is a little unusual. How should I pronounce it? 

Yes. It’s a vestige of the very complicated ancestral broth in which I cooked.

(It sounds something like Kwintin Ah-na Kan-toss Wicks-Woah)

Q13. What are you?

Dust in the wind.

 

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