By nènè myriam konaté and Lucas LaRochelle in collaboration with Andrew Gray
PHI — a Montréal-based organization consisting of three separate but complementary entities, the PHI Centre, the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art and the PHI Studio — is guest editing the 37th issue of Immerse. We continue the series, Emergence, with this third article written by nènè myriam konaté and Lucas LaRochelle, curators of the PHI_portal. Through these articles, we will explore how our approach has been shaped by new modes of art consumption, both online and offline, how we responded, what we’ve learned, and what has fundamentally changed during the global pandemic.
Earlier this year, a conspicuous, inflatable gold box took up residence at the PHI Centre, located in the Old Port of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, the first site of French settlement on the unceded lands and waters of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. This structure, dubbed the portal, comes from Shared_Studios, an organization based in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, on the unceded lands of the Lenni Lenape. Their portals form a transnational public art initiative connecting communities from 50 cities — from Ede Wageningen to Erbil to Bamako. Using immersive live-stream technology, the portals set an intimate stage for the public to connect with someone present on the other side of the life-sized screen.
The PHI Centre invited us as curators to root the PHI_portal in the specificities of our city through co-creating programming with local artists, cultural practitioners, and technologists. Thus far, this co-creative process has taken the shape of activations that harmonize artistic exchange and emergent media, and their significance within our lived realities. The experience of entering the PHI_portal is akin to walking one’s full body through the internet. Embedded in a network of varying geopolitical realities, the portals facilitate the emergence of a third space — a hybrid zone where specific contexts can converge.
In dialogue with our sibling sites, we co-create the programming of the PHI_portal with and for our communities, inviting guests into an intimate space of possibility — through conversations, performances, listening sessions, readings and shared meals. Within this transnational curatorial network, distance is a force to move with, rather than against. The linguistic, geopolitical, and cultural specificities of each portal entangle us in a web of borders as we attempt to negotiate differences. In this flow, we are seeking to be seen in the homes/skins we inhabit, and to believe they might coexist with the ones we’ve been pulled towards and away from. If the portal is a mouth, the curators are the tongue(s), the language(s), the organ(s) that animate the connective tissue of our network, facilitating the emergence of ephemeral communions. As we find ourselves in a global health crisis and seek to articulate languages of healing and care, we are reminded that translation is not always necessary, that we can sit with the discomfort of misunderstanding and resist the urge to interpret that which is not ours to articulate.
Access Denied
In March of 2020, after having only begun our relationship with the portal network, COVID-19 interrupted our access to the physical space of the PHI_portal. In the weeks that followed the shut down, we continued to communicate with curators via Zoom. Our initial connections, which had been marked by a sense of institutional urgency to produce programming, shifted towards the slow and necessary work of developing meaningful relationships.
Situated outside of the copy-paste interiors of the portals, Zoom calls between curators ruptured a space of ubiquitous access and imagined neutrality by folding us deeper into the emotional and material realities that inform each voice. COVID-19 appeared as a glitch in the mechanisms of Empire — the new political order of globalization as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — which codes the architecture of our geopolitical context as an infinity of entries and uninterrupted movement. This glitch created a temporary wormhole that allowed us to imagine other modes of being in relation with one another, of shifting institutional priorities away from production and towards care.
As we emerged from isolation in July and were able to reanimate the physical space of the PHI_portal, we were far more attuned to the sense of community we’d created with the curatorial network. The gold box became captivating because of its possibility to act as a public archive of the ephemeral intimacies generated by those who move through it. From this heightened sensitivity, it became clear that the people are the portal.
Transformative Intimacies
We must build infrastructures for empathy without the scaffolding of similarity, leaning into our divergent experiences as precisely that which connect us. This perspective, grounded in our experience of curating during crisis, drives our continued engagement with the possibilities of the PHI_portal in the face of sustained uncertainty.
We are writing this article as Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal enters a second lockdown, and the PHI_portal shifts from a public-facing art initiative to an intimate space for cross-border encounters between artists and collectives. In this renewed experience of confinement, we can create without the pressures of the public gaze, returning our focus to the relationship-building that initially compelled us to join the portal network. Our emphasis is on being felt, more so than being seen.
The portals might best be described as a place of longing — longing for a sense of intimacy with someone we might never meet again. We sew connections not because we expect a return on investment from the relationships built in a singular conversation, but because we long to care for someone other than ourselves simply because they are present. Central to this sense of longing is a flickering hope that these intimacies, born in the immediacy of the encounter, can transform us. In a dialogue on the social and political valences of Hope and Hopelessness, queer-of-colour performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz reminds us that “often experimental intimacies falter. But those failures and efforts to fail have a certain value despite their ends.”
Failure, as many of us have come to learn, is an ordinary occurrence as we attempt to (re)build our personal and professional lives through videoconference technologies. Zoom meetings expire, Google Hangouts drop, internet access cuts or fails to reach all corners of our homes. The moment in which the digital connection fails is precisely the moment in which we are resituated in our fundamental difference — that we are not in fact in the same room and that our contexts shape and define us. This confrontation with distance and difference bleeds into the ecstasies of the moment of re-connection; an animation that pulls us to re-sew our attachments to one another.
These glitches in what might be naively considered a “neutral space” are thus the foundations to build meaningful relationships that ground us with the power of being-together-in-difference. The moments in which we falter serve as evidence of our continuous attempts to grow in relation to each other. These are traces of the worlds we’ve reached for and might someday manifest.
Our experience of working on and thinking through the possibilities of the Portal, has been informed through dialogues with: Sergio Guerra Abril, Augustine Achu, Olamide Bankole, Marie-France Barbier, Yağmur İpek Cıngıllıoğlu, Olivier Dushimimana, Neema Githere, Émilie Heckmann, Rito Joseph, Lewis Lee, Parissah Lin, Rami Mohammad, Eloi Mugabe, Jean-Paul Nsanzi (Jay), Samuel Ordoñez, Andrea Peña, Sabrina Purdy, Tomas Ramírez, Ron van der Sterren, Mariam Sylla, Tsige Tafesse, Vincent Toi, Talhata Zourkaneini Toure, and Parul Wadhwa.
Lucas LaRochelle, is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher whose work is concerned with queer/trans geographies, critical internet studies, and community-based archiving. They are the founder of Queering the Map, a community generated counter-mapping project that digitally archives LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. nènè myriam konate’s transdisciplinary practice is concerned with care, somatic knowledge(s) and storytelling. They are the founder of The Clap Back, a dialogue-based space that facilitates the emergence of transdisciplinary experiences by exploring relationships between pop culture and lived realities.
Founded and directed by Phoebe Greenberg and based in Montréal, Canada, PHI is a multidisciplinary organization positioned at the intersection of art, film, music, design and technology. Offering a panoramic perspective of radical ideas focused on collective experience, social impact, and audience interactivity, PHI is committed to future generations of art consumption.
PHI consists of the PHI Centre, PHI Studio, artist-in-residence programs and PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. Through eclectic programming and a strong emphasis on content creation, PHI fosters unexpected encounters between artists and audiences.
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