Anohni - interview

Anohni is artist-in-residence for 2017 in Aarhus Capital of Culture. She just finished a 3-year musical project called HOPELESSNESS, which set political and environmental commentary to dance tracks. Anohni also presented a retrospective of her visual work at Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany last Autumn. She has produced collages made out of found materials and accumulated collections; she has created larger scale sculptural works and encaustic (hot wax) paintings.

Much of the work intuitively addresses contemporary crisises and supports a vision of restoration and transcendence. In Aarhus, Anohni will be advancing new music projects as well as continuing to add to the accumulative body of her visual work.

A constant theme that emerges through your creative work is that of the environment and a concern for the fragility of our ecosystem. What do you fear and what do you hope for the future of our planet?

My concern is that we will continue to diminish biodiversity. We are not fundamentally changing our trajectory as a species. If we want to have a world that we recognize in a few decades, scientists say that we must reduce our carbon footprint to zero in the next five years. We have almost reached 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. At the moment we are heading for 4 to 5 degrees of global warming in the short term. The Great Barrier Reef cannot withstand more than 1.5 degrees of warming without totally collapsing (even at 1.5 degrees we are guaranteed to lose at least 50% of the GBR.) One quarter of the reef died this year. At 2 degrees of warming the redwood forests along the West Coast of the US will die. Ecosystems around the world are the same. By disrupting the earth’s body in this way, we cannot expect her to continue to sustain life as we have ever known it.

Could we catalyze a wartime effort to salvage what remains of our biosphere and make sacrifices for the common good? Recently I was surprised to learn that some environmental groups are being advised to temper the facts about ecocollapse out of concern that the news will further alienate people from taking action. I disagree with this stance. How can people take appropriate action to protect their home if they don’t understand the true extent to which it is imperiled? The threat and well-founded fear of a Nazi Europe compelled all her citizens to take action. The repercussions of eco-collapse have consequences graver than any war we have ever known.

You have been working with the concept of Future Feminism; we hope to see these beautiful works here in Aarhus. Can you expand a little on your idea of 'Future Feminism'?

Future Feminism was a jointly realized art project created by a collective of my peers in NYC (Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine, Bianca Casady, Sierra Casady and myself). We developed by a process of consensus-building what we came to call '13 Tenets of Future Feminism'. We call ourselves 'Future Feminists' in part because we are all preoccupied with the future. We reframed a lot of very old ideas about feminism and femininity, interpreting them through the lense of our experiences and unprecedented realities today. Three of my personal favorite FF tenets are 'The subjugation of women and the earth is one and the same', 'Nurture the resurgence of biodiversity', and 'Relieve men of their roles as protectors and predators'.

You have been an inspiration to many people seeking a new way of being through your own gender transformation and the unique position you have adopted about identity. You have taken the name of Anohni. Can you describe the feeling of being Anohni?

My feeling of self has never changed. Taking a chosen name is a rite of passage that most transgendered people undergo at some point in their lives. I wanted to clearly indicate to people that it is appropriate and respectful to address me in the feminine.

We are thrilled that during our year as European Capital of Culture we will work in partnership to enable a range of your creative ideas to be shown and performed for a public and for you to have the space to create new works. We hope to create the atmosphere of inspiration for you during your time with us. What do you hope to do during the year?

I am honored to have been invited to be an artist in residence in Aarhus during this prestigious year for the city, and I hope to support and encourage a sense of color and engagement. I am excited to work on a body of music that stems from projects I was doing shortly before I became known as a musician, when I was still doing experimental theater and performance in NYC in the late 1990s. I am also planning several exhibitions. We are hoping to present the FF material. We will be doing a symphony concert at year’s end.

Lately your visual arts practice has been gaining attention, most recently with a large exhibition at the Bielefeld Kunsthalle in Germany. This has been a fairly private part of your creativity until the last few years, do you see your work moving to a more visual manifestation or is there a kind of fluidity of practice between music, visual art, film?

I have been exhibiting visual work for about 8 years. It is a different kind of process than performing, and it is fulfilling. The sense of dignity and space for contemplation that a visual practice affords me are things that live performance, for all its exuberance, can sometimes lack.

In Aarhus 2017 we have three core values: Diversity, Democracy and Sustainability. These are the values that we structure our year around and the values we wish to inspire people to rethink through. How do you get inspired by these values?

Touring Europe for the last 15 years, I have observed people across the continent struggling to open their hearts to the reality that their countries are no longer a series of insulated monocultures. The tectonic plates are now returning children and adults of the colonized worlds back to Europe. And during this time when people are more inflamed than ever about the prospect of racial diversity in Europe, the earth implores us to function as one family, rather than as warring nations. Nature’s future face (the delicate biosphere, the entire network of interdependent biodiversity, myriad ecosystems, forest systems, ocean systems and on), hangs in the balance.

Democracy can be confounding when a dissatisfied majority seem to betray their own best interests. Examples of this from my point of view include the catastrophic recent Brexit vote in the UK, the last 30 years of working class support for the Republican agenda in the US, and the rise of the National Front in France. I deeply hope that Scandinavian countries will continue to uphold their models of socialism as prototypes for the rest of the world. We can’t afford for anxiety to erode Denmark’s noble conviction that socialist values are core human values.

Sustainability is the only road forward. I struggle every day with the reality that my own footprint is deeply unsustainable. I am excavating that self-awareness as an artist. I want to evolve.