On Ricerche and Research
This conversation began as a public talk by Sharon Hayes at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on January 26, 2023, on the occasion of her artwork Ricerche: One being included in Ruth Erickson’s group exhibition To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood (October 6, 2022-Feburary 26, 2023). Hayes and Erickson expanded upon this talk over the spring of 2023 for this volume.
Ruth Erickson: One aspect of your work that I deeply admire is how pivotal moments of the past—political speeches or protests—become material for focusing on the present and future. Your series of films under the umbrella “Ricerche” was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings). What about this work in particular did you feel had creative life and lessons to teach us in the present?
Sharon Hayes: Pasolini’s film has had a grip on me since I first saw it while in graduate school. I was interested in it first in relation to two cinema verité works: Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronique d’un ete” and Chris Marker’s “Le joli Mai.” Cinema verité, of course, is often conflated with the English term, documentary cinema, but the French name steers more generatively toward what I was interested in about these three works: the production of a reality or a truth that the camera does not just capture but facilitates or makes possible.
And while my first encounter with Comizi d’Amore was that collective genre-based one, Pasolini’s film lingered more potently for me than the other two and has, over time, worked on me in a sense. The film was shot in 1963, and released theatrically in 1964. In Comizi d’Amore, the gay writer, poet, film director and communist Pasolini and a small film crew go across Italy in the summer of 1963, interviewing people about sex, sexuality, love, as well as about homosexuality, perversion or inversion.
For me, Pasolini’s interviews agitated at and toward the ways that sex and sexuality act out symptomatically in so-called value-based policies and ideologies. For me this has only become more clear as I’ve lived through the performances and backlashes of Trumpism and its manipulations and instrumentalizations of race, gender, sexual normativity, and sexuality. What are the things that shape collective understandings of who and how they can be or who and how their neighbors can be.
The thing that I find so fascinating about Pasolini’s film is that he interviews people in groups, a decision that ends up provoking interesting collisions between the individual and the collective, between the personal and the public, in a sense. And one of the things that this choice does is it produces a tension that for me was the most energetic force of the film, which was a tension between how one appears as a person, as an individual, as somebody who has an answer for a question, when in a group with others. The film disrupts the notion of an individuated subject as somebody who can speak truth and posits that person, instead, as a subject in sociality or a subject in family or a subject in religious community or professional setting. And that collective “we” is constantly pressuring the individuated “I”.
At a couple of points in his film, Pasolini uses the Italian word “ricerche,” which means research. I was moved by his methodology, to speak to collective subjects, as a proposition of and toward research.
I wanted to move with Pasolini’s film as a kind of ghost, a presence that is not visible, but is forceful!
Erickson: Tell us more about your series of films and their structures.
Hayes: I’ve made three semi-autonomous works. Ricerche: three was made in 2013. It’s an interview with 35 students at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s college, in western Massachusetts. I was interested in addressing what I think of as the contradictory condition that such sex-segregated institutions find themselves in–both ahead of and behind the times. By this I mean that the enrollment selectivities of all women’s colleges are not only unpopular or anachronistic but impossible to uphold, reliant as they are on a gender binary that is actively refused in both practice and policy. On the other hand, these same enrollment choices allow for a wildly expansive embodiment of gender that I found to be so much wider than at co-ed campuses wherein students conform to extremely narrow gender normativities.
Ricerche: two is the one that has actually been made most recently in 2020, and it is an expanded interview with 23 members of two women’s tackle football teams: the Arlington Impact and the Dallas Elite Mustangs, which are both based in Dallas Fort Worth. For all of the discussion of gender equity and sports, women’s tackle football still represents this threshold for various patriarchal powers involved in the economies and the lives of professional sports. These elite players run into really persistent obstacles, both small and large, to practicing the sport that they love and that they have trained for and are very good at.
Ricerche: one was shot in 2015, and it was edited and completed in 2019. It’s a two-channel piece with the screens installed back-to-back, and there are two groups of interviewees: five- to eight-year-old kids of LGBTQ+ families and 17 to 18 year old young adults. In Ricerche: one, I was interested in Pasolini’s question “Where do babies come from?” because it lingers in his film as origin point for his inquiry into sex. (The questions I ask in each of the Ricerche works are a combination of questions borrowed from Pasolini and questions that I spontaneously compose in the moment.) For Pasolini to put birth at the origin of the problem of sex points both to a particular political-religious formation but also to sweeping assumptions AND limits of heterosexuality. I was interested in asking his question to kids of LGBTQ+ families, maybe for the obvious reason, that I was interested in all that lingers outside of white, patriarchal, heterosexual reproduction which includes queer participation in reproductive technologies.
Erickson: I can see how these are linked through their shared structures of interviewing groups and inquiring about sex and sexuality within contexts where those identifications and terms are under pressure or in formation. Let’s focus on Ricerche: one to explore some of these questions in more depth and with a unique focus on working with children. What initially drew me to this work is how it troubles expectations about children and their roles. Children don’t tend to be the subjects of interviews, and your question “How are babies born?” rubs against assumptions about children’s knowledge or suitable subject matter. Let me first ask about consent, and how you involved the children and their families to take part in the work?
Hayes: I was in conversation with various LGBTQ+ families and family groups that I knew and could find online. At the beginning of each Ricerche, the process is dynamically informing what will eventually become the work. I pay attention to how, where, and with whom. In conversations with families, I learned about an annual week-long gathering in P-town (Provincetown, Massachusetts) called Family Week.
I tried to prepare or schedule the interviews in advance of arriving in P-town, but it just wasn’t possible, and so I arrived at a 6-day production schedule that was fast, furious, and spontaneous. To interview kids is also, of course, to be in conversation with their families and with their parents, because five- to eight-year-olds can’t offer consent or willingness on their own. This meant that I was immediately engaging the full family. It was important, in this piece, to be present as a queer parent myself and to be transparent about the challenge of making decisions for or on behalf of your child. I approached the ask to participate with care and seriousness, but I also think many of the parents were as curious as I was to hear how their child might respond to the question.
Erickson: I’m really interested in this idea of producing a reality rather than just documenting one. Could you expand that idea a bit more in relationship to this work and how it challenged you?
Hayes: The thing that became really clear and that is always interesting with these works is that each of them also presents a series of specific obstacles or challenges. The dominant one in Ricerche: one was the interview itself. My primary and my first focus was on five- to eight-year-olds. And I was interested in five- to eight-year-olds in part because they gathered up in my mind the largest balance between what they know and what they don’t know, than kids younger or older.
Five- to eight-year-olds don’t particularly communicate in interview form. It’s not a form that fits in their lives. I was interested in that as a breakdown of a sort. There’s a constant question that circulates in these works about whether the interview is capable of holding the conversation. In Ricerche: three, this is provoked by size or volume: how do you interview 35 people at once? It doesn’t make sense to do that and there’s a pushback that becomes energetically operative. With the video with kids, the push back arises through the mismatch between the interview and its conceit of talking through questions and answers and all the other things that kids would rather be doing, like playing with sand or telling me a joke or going to get an ice cream or whatever.
One of the things I really like about this challenge of interviewing people in groups is that the group immediately claims their space of comfort, power, relationships. Their relationship to each other and their way of being far exceeds my relationship to them and my way of being-in-interview. What they do, in the course of the interview, is steer us to their relationship to each other and to the world.
With the young kids, the one thing I had to do was to really hold back my desire to care for them. That was maybe the one place that my “parentness” came out. I could hear that when I was editing, in the sound and cadence of my voice and in what questions I asked and how I proceeded from one to the next. There were sections of the interview where I saw, retrospectively, that I wasn’t allowing them to take control and I was trying to caretake their confusion or discomfort.
Erickson: One of the striking things when you see Ricerche: one is how distinct the narrative qualities of the two channels feel due, in part, to the age of the participants. The screens are installed as an a-frame on the ground, and you can only see one side at a time. Over the work’s 28 minutes, the two channels of video play the entire time, but the sound of only one channel is audible at a time. As a viewer, you then might see the video of the five- to –eight-year-olds, but hear the voices of the teenager and young adults, or vice versa. Can you share a bit more about your decision to involve older kids in the project?
Hayes: So when I was running around doing this work, trying to track down five- to eight-year-olds and their families, I kept seeing these super cool young adults and I had an accident of running into a former student of mine who was part of a group called COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere). And through that student I ended up inviting 14 COLAGERS to participate in a group interview on the beach one day. In that group were a few young adults who had been on the edge of queer participations in reproductive technologies, whose families were some of the first queer families to do artificial insemination or surrogacy. Some in the group had been with COLAGE for a while and had been doing a lot of advocacy in and through that organization and elsewhere.
With them, I start with the same question: How are babies born? What became clear was that birth certainly isn’t a matter of biology, or technology alone, but centrally a matter of narrative and of narrativizing. The depth and complexity with which these young adults negotiate both the pressures and the burdens and the pleasures of accounting for their origin, again and again, was really something that blew open this question for me.
The interview with the young adults was something I didn’t expect, I didn’t plan for, and I didn’t seek out. And yet it was a real revelation for me as a queer parent and also as somebody who was interested in and invested in what does it mean to sit outside of white, patriarchal heterosexual normativities. I insist on that full construction because actually there are very few folks who actually sit inside normative narrative constructions of family, and exclusions are produced through positions of race, ethnicity, and culture as much as through sexuality and gender.
Erickson: Yes, so well said, you really become aware of this watching the piece. The young kids are not pre-political subjects, but their origin stories are not yet known to be as politicized, which feels different from the other side of the video with the older kids. Your performance in these works is incredible. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your own performance within this piece. You did a little bit just now with that idea of caretaking.
Hayes: In Comizi d’Amore Pasolini’s presence is really quite strong. He is a performer and a provocateur and I find that his self-consciousness as a figure/performer expands the ways in which the work moves, moves it away from documentary and toward the kind of permissiveness that performance allows both the filmmaker and the interviewees. Perhaps this was also conditioned by the “newness” of the technology that Pasolini deployed: lighter cameras and synchronized sound that allowed for the crew to travel to and into the public. Pasolini and his film crew encountered a public or multiple publics and the camera/s recorded those encounters.
In my case, there was no explicitly “new” encounter between the groups and the camera/s as even the 5-8 year olds have an at-the-ready-sense of what it means to be filmed. BUT nonetheless, I am interested in the interview-as-performance and interested in allowing the interviewees to be of and in the moment, to speak, to rant, to voice as they need to on that day, in that context.
In large part, my formal choices in these works trace and follow Pasolini’s. I used a single camera in Ricerche: one, two in R2 and four in R3. Each time, the cameras compose tight medium shots of each group. I don’t include any establishing shots that picture the full size of each gathering. My interest is in making a collective with the audience that comes to the installation.
The shots are frontal, with the camera/s shooting just across my right or left shoulder. This puts primary focus on the group but also on the energetic movement between speaking and listening as both speakers and listeners are equally present. This makes space, in a sense, for viewers to the exhibition to listen with, not only to, the group.
In each work, I record only the sound from the microphone that’s attached to my body without any extra recorded sound to convey the environment.
In a traditional or normative documentary setting, you might fill in the soundscape to give the fullness of the place. And for me, there were many choices I made along the way to just deflect documentary ever so slightly. Because I don’t think of this as a documentary. I am interested in performance, I am interested in the way that when we speak, when we try to answer a question, when we try to narrate, when we try to tell our origin story. I’m interested in the way that some of the terms that I’ve learned from performance, like the singularity of an event, it happens once, it may be repeatable, but it’s a different thing each day. And that for me offers a provisional or contingent liberation. Like, it’s not about me asking anybody to be truth telling. It’s about me trying to give people a possibility of being whoever they want to be, and to mark whatever they want to mark in that moment.
And maybe in a certain way the five- to eight-year-olds do that in a full body sense. Because who cares that there’s a camera and a person with a mic in front of them. There’s also sand and there’s their friend. So maybe there’s something of this access to, I think of performance at its best manifestations of allowing us temporary contingent access to possibilities of being. So for me to rely on performance rather than on documentary is to speak to something I said earlier, I’m interested in the camera and the microphone facilitating an encounter that need NOT be the truth to be real.
Erickson: Would you share with us your vision for Ricerche: four?
Hayes: I’m interested in talking to queer elders. Pasolini follows this trail of questions through his film of…”Was it better then? Was it better in the past or is it better now?” This led me to go towards queer elders. There’s a place of a real tension in queer community and in political community in general that has to do with generation. How do we live both consciously and unconsciously, or consciously and less consciously, with our generational citation where we become a person? I think of myself generationally, not necessarily in terms of the year I was born, but rather like that I moved to New York in 1991, in the middle of the AIDS crisis and that had an impact on me that I still feel now. I think that our generational positions are a really curious thing because we are sitting very distinctly and then yet cohabitating in a contemporary moment. I’m interested in asking queer elders questions about time and reflection, but also about the challenges of aging, particularly how that intersects with a whole host of intersectional identities that make it harder for some folks when they age than other folks. So right now I’m reaching out to elders through queer assisted living facilities and institutions and trying to find and gather people who are interested in participating.
Erickson: That sounds like a really rich space of exploration for your fourth Ricerche film. I cannot wait to see it. Thanks so much for this conversation.
Main image
Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: one, 2019 (installation view)
HD video with sound
Tanya Leighton Gallery
Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery
A photograph of a white exhibition room, at the center of which there is a flat TV screen showcasing an image of three children being interviewed. An arm belonging to a person off-camera is seen at the left side of the image, holding a microphone. The child most to the left, who is light-skinned and has long brown hair, speaks into the microphone. The child in the middle has darker skin and short black hair and is smiling. The child at the far right is light-skinned and has red hair to their shoulders. They are all wearing light-blue summer clothing of different types. In front of the screen, there is a wooden bench with a pair of headphones sitting on it.