Episode 72 Pippi Zornoza
Show Notes
A very special episode! Today we are chatting with Pippi Zornoza, co-founder of the Dirt Palace, a feminist artist-run collective/residency program/space that has been a pivotal part of the artistic community in Providence for over 20 years, and this interview is part two of a three part series focused on the Dirt Palace and its two co-founders: Xander Marro and Pippi Zornoza.
Pippi’s art and music defy boundaries of media, genre, and context, embodying an intensity and a meticulous approach to detail, often exploring the intricate, macabre, and the obsessive. Pippi’s work spans textiles, embroidery, lace-making, knitting, sculpture, electronics, and performance — be it within an exhibition context, on stage, or, or in a dark and cavernous warehouse. Pippi’s musical projects are almost too numerous to name: Throne of Blood, Sawzall, Vulture, Bonedust, RETRIX, and currently HARPY.
This series was made in collaboration with Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA), and was recorded in December 2022 in Pippi’s studio. In a first for the pod, you can *watch* the interview, including clips of Pippi’s work here. In our chat we delve into Pippi’s origins as an artist, her early years in Providence, and how her creative practice has evolved to its current interdisciplinary state that refreshingly blurs the boundaries between contemporary art, performance, and music
Stay tuned for the final episode in the series where we sit down with both artists to discuss their decades long collaboration.
Links from the conversation with Pippi
> Pippi’s Bandcamp: https://bonedustprov.bandcamp.com/
> HARPY: https://harpyprovidence.bandcamp.com/album/a-sacrifice
> A SACRIFICE (music video): https://youtu.be/kpo_PRLyuYI?si=8ZkNzf8Rni3QVXP4
> https://www.dirtpalace.org
> https://www.dirtpalace.org/wchbnb
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Transcript
Cass: From Small Data Industries, this is art and obsolescence. I'm your host Cass Fino-Radin, and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. And I know what you're thinking. But Cass, it's not the first Tuesday of the month, what are you doing in my podcast feed? And also, where have you been? Well, dear listeners, I have to apologize as I. Definitely become a little lax about release schedules, but it's for very good reason. Not only are there just some really, really exciting projects in Small Data's lab right now that I had to prioritize. But also you may recall me sharing a while back that I was going to spend some time thinking about creative, new ideas for the shows future. And I can't share too much right now because it's still very early days, but I am talking to a potential partner organization to serve as a home for the show. And there's some really cool creative ideas for expanding the show creatively and making it bigger and better, but most importantly, making it sustainable. So more soon on this front, I hope. Now in the meantime, we are continuing with our special series in collaboration with VOCA presenting my interviews with artists and co-founders of the dirt palace, a feminist artist run space and residency program in Providence, Rhode Island that has served as an incubator for hundreds of artists. Last episode, we chatted with Xander Marro and today we are visiting with Pippi Zornoza. Now, if you didn't catch the last episode, I recommend jumping back and listening to the intro for that one. As I shared a whole kind of like really deeply personal context for this project of interviewing Xander and Pippi and how I came to know them years ago. Also, if you didn't catch the last episode, just a heads up that this episode will sound quite different from what you are used to. Uh, you know, it was recorded on different mics and on location, but most importantly, this was edited for video first. So if you are so inclined, you can head on over to Vocus website. I'll put the link in the show notes and you can watch this interview on video, which is a first for us. And if you truly cannot wait to hear the final conversation with both Xander and Pippi, all three interviews are up on VOCA's website to watch as video. And in fact, I highly recommend checking out the video for this interview in particular. For when Pippi shows us her axe. And no, I'm not talking about a guitar. I'm talking about a literal axe and no, I am not going to give you any more context than that. I was so excited for this conversation with Pippi, just like Xander, her work is incredibly interdisciplinary and it really defies any hard boundaries, not only of media, but also of contexts as you'll hear Pippi's art work often involves performance and sound, not just as works of art in that sort of gallery context, but also as a musician. I'm sure Pippi will cringe if she hears me say this, but Pippi is sort of a legend of Providence's underground music scene. Back when I first got to know her, she was playing in a band called Bonedust, and I remember just how viscerally powerful and intense she was as a drummer. She's been in countless other bands, including Throne of Blood Sawzall, Vvltvre, RECTRIX, and currently a band called HARPY with her collaborator Gyna Bootleg. And there's probably about 50 other bands or collaborations that she's been involved in that I don't know about. And I thought rather than trying to describe Pippi's music to you or assign genres to it, why don't we just listen to it? So we're going to start this episode with a little listening party. We're going to listen to a track called A Sacrifice from HARPY's album of the same title. And from there we'll lead right into the interview. Now, if you enjoy the music, definitely check out the show notes. There's a link to HARPY's Bandcamp, where you can pick up the album. As well as a link to Pippi's Bandcamp. which is full of various other projects from past years. So without further delay, let's dive in and listen to A Sacrifice by HARPY.
Cass Fino-Radin:
So we're here at the Dirt Palace with Pippi Zornoza, co-founder of the Dirt Palace and Pippi, thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation with VoCA.
Pippi Zornoza:
Thanks for having me. Of course.
Cass Fino-Radin:
So I said the same thing to Xander. One of the reasons I love doing these artist interviews is it's an opportunity to sit down with an artist who I know and I feel like I know well. But I know that there are definitely holes and gaps in your story that I just don't know even myself already. So I'm curious, for you part of that is your origin story. So I'm curious, where did you grow up and just what kind of creativity were you being exposed to and where did things really begin for you?
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, I'm not sure my origin story is super interesting. I mean, my folks, my mother grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and my father is from Madrid in Spain. And my mom actually was... She studied French and was teaching English in France and then was teaching English to children on a military base in Spain. And then I think realized she didn't want to teach children anymore and started teaching adults, and that's how she met my father. So it feels like a very unusual meeting. I don't know, it's weird to talk about them first, but I think of them as both people who grew up in the '50s and '60s who were part of these very large extended families, but were the only people who left where they were from to go somewhere else. My mom left Ohio and my dad left Spain to come to the States.
And when I was growing up, my father's not a citizen. There wasn't a lot of emphasis on art. It really wasn't part of my upbringing. I don't think either of my parents have a lot of knowledge about art. I mean they definitely, especially now, appreciate it but I think I was just a child who could draw very realistically. And so I was encouraged as if I was an artist from a very young age because of that skill. Which is actually really sad to me because I just feel like there's so many ways of making art, and so many kids get left behind in that concept of what art making is. But I think I was just really fortunate in having that very particular skill, and so was encouraged that I was artistic. But I think that I really didn't have much exposure to any contemporary art, and that really happened later when I ended up going to art school. So I really feel like I came to RISD as someone who really didn't have the background or understanding of contemporary art the way maybe other people that I went to school with. So my mind was blown.
Cass Fino-Radin:
I had a very similar experience when I got to art school. So hearing that, that those four years must have been just very eye-opening for you in terms of just exposure to new things and art and music. So I'm curious, what were you making during those years and how did your creativity evolve as you eventually left art school?
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, I think I just wanted to try everything, but then at some point, maybe when I was... I went into the sculpture department originally, and then at some point I was just really young and just art felt so insignificant to me at the time in this way. I don't know if it was just a self-consciousness, but I just felt like thinking about making art became almost like... I don't know, I actually dropped out of school for some time. I just felt like I couldn't connect to fine art in a way. Just something got in the way. And I ended up working in a pizza place for the year, delivering pizza at Checkers. I don't know if you remember Checkers, this very important mythological pizza place in Providence.
But yeah, delivered pizzas there for some time, which was a really weird, interesting experience because all my roommates were still in school, so I would come home at two in the morning and they would all be asleep already taking classes. And so I was kind of very isolated at that time. But there was one night where I had this idea of a quilt that I wanted to make, and I think that's what made me go back to school was this idea of an actual object that I wanted to make. And I wasn't even thinking of it really totally as an art object. But from there, because I had wanted to make this, I ended up going into the printmaking department so I could learn how to screen print, screen print the fabric, learn how to quilt, and start making that quilt that I really wanted to make.
And from there, while I was in school, I actually made a lot of utilitarian objects, mostly textile based. So I was doing a lot of embroidery and quilting and making blankets and quilts. And then from printmaking really started segueing into making posters. But I needed, at that time and where I was at in my thought process, I needed utility to almost learn the craft and get past... Needed the function of an object to even be able to access art making because yeah, it was just something I was really going through and struggling with at the time.
But I do think that something that has stayed with me through that time period is that I do think a lot about context and where my art is and what the context is of it. And I generally do prefer for the work to exist in everyday spaces over gallery spaces, whether that's on the street, as in public art, or thinking about a space that people go to all the time that's not necessarily a gallery museum, which is something that I'm like now, actually now coming back to another part of what I've been really considering is I've started making these works now that feel quite haunted, and I'm sort of like, what is the right context for these? And that's something that's I've been thinking about a lot.
Cass Fino-Radin:
It seems almost happenstance or luck that you happened to be at RISD because you, it sounds like, had a bit of this existential crisis with art and what is its functional, what role does it serve in people's lives? And you just happened to be at a school with an incredible amount of craft. So it sounds like that, for you, removed the pretense of what role does this serve? Oh, it's a functional thing.
Pippi Zornoza:
Totally, and the other thing was I was just like, I have my whole life to be an artist. I'm in school. It wasn't that I wasn't wanting to think about ideas or the concepts at all. Of course I was, but I just felt like if I'm paying all this money, I should be getting a tangible skill here. And I felt like that's what I felt like from printmaking was. I was like, this is something that I couldn't learn anywhere else that I will carry with me. And plus, Providence just has such an amazing culture of screen printing that I was also really blown away by what I was seeing around and seeing on the streets. So yeah, it felt like quite a natural fit, even though I was coming at it originally from a textile point of view.
Cass Fino-Radin:
So speaking about what you were seeing around and seeing on the streets, and I'm imagining some of these were show posters for concerts at semi-legal or completely underground venues and warehouses. I know that sometimes there can be a bit of a barrier between the east side where the colleges are and other parts of the City where artists, who just live here, live and work, and musicians live and work. So I guess for you, what were the first things that were pulling you away from the little enclave of school?
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah. Well, I think part of it was also I worked off campus. I had a job. I was intersecting with people who weren't part of RISD, but also there was underground venues that were still tied to the institution. I mean, there were kids who were going to RISD who were running these underground venues, but they were so far off campus that there was no way for you to... If you wanted to go, you had to get out of that neighborhood. And just from being in these spaces, I just feel like I ended up making a lot of friends who weren't students. So I think that was part of it, it's just my social sphere was outside of just being students.
Cass Fino-Radin:
At what point does music enter the picture for you? Because of course, not just sound and performance art, that includes sound, but also music, playing in bands and playing shows and releasing records and going on tour. This has been a huge part of your life as an artist. So where did that really begin for you? Did you start playing in bands when you were in school?
Pippi Zornoza:
Right at the end, I was dating someone who was a local legend kind of person, set themself on fire during a performance. And I was just really, I think I was just always attracted to extreme music and extreme forms of expression in that way. And he just really actually encouraged me. He was a bass player and encouraged me to play the bass, and I always thought... I was 21, but I thought I was too old. I thought I was too old to learn an instrument. And so from that, I was in my first band and it was four women. There was one person who had been a drummer since she was a child, so one really good musician. And then the rest of us were all just figuring out as we went along. And that was a really great experience. And I think just feeling like we could do anything.
But even at that time, I was so... What attracted me to music performance was just the physicality of how people perform. And there's just so many just amazing drummers that were around at that time, specifically Adam Autry and Brian Chippendale, and just seeing these people who hit the drums so incredibly hard. And I mean they're both incredibly technically proficient, but I feel like I wanted to feel that power almost of hitting something and then that making the sound. And so I ended up getting this real ragtag drum set and teaching myself how to play the drums. Things just really started going from there.
Cass Fino-Radin:
I'm curious, around that time, what kind of music were you listening to? What were you absorbing? Not in terms of formal genres, but just maybe what were you listening to and how is this manifesting out into the music you were making? I know that metal has been a huge part of what you do.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, I would say even at that time, I wasn't even so involved in what was going on in metal in Providence. Slayer's, obviously a huge influence on me, although no one would ever know that from my music. But just, yeah, favorite metal band of all time. Isn't it everyone's? No, people have other ideas about metal, sorry. But yeah, at that time, I was really more into things like Big Black, more like things that were Post-Punk, I guess. But as I started developing, I think I just wanted more extreme sounds. So those sounds weren't quite doing it for me anymore, even though those are beloved favorites.
But also just what was going on locally was hugely formative, just going to see other experimental musicians play. I mean, I remember seeing Zeek Sheck play at Fort Thunder, and it totally blew my mind, and I think actually really changed how I thought about music performance just because of the theatricality to what she was bringing to her music performances. So it was just a lot percolating at that time.
And I would say that I'm just such an avid music collector and just voracious in that. So what I've collected or been influenced by since then has really, outside of that genre, I mean Diamanda Galás is a huge influence. Just metal as a genre, just the images, the culture is a huge influence on me. Something that was deeply influential to me was that Providence local bands were eccentric. They didn't necessarily fit into a genre, and we're just such a small city that there wasn't enough of any type of music for there to be these genre groups, I would say. And so you got a lot of mixed bills, and that was a really great thing to come of age around because I just had so many influences.
Cass Fino-Radin:
Yeah. So you mentioned that during your time at RISD you were screen printing and you were seeing these posters. And I would imagine at a certain point you started to make your own, of course. I'm curious if you could speak more to your relationship to screen printing and poster making for, again, this utilitarian purpose and becoming part of that dialogue.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah. I mean, that was the way you found out about things at that time. It's hard to remember. It's even easy for me to forget at this point. The internet did exist, but not in the way that we use it now. I mean, obviously the nerds changed so much over the last 20 years, but just you would wake up in the morning and you'd go about your day and your job or whatever. And I mean I would just keep my eyes peeled for what was posted up around town. And Providence just has amazing screen printers, and I think there is a little bit of competitiveness about it in a way where the amount of work that someone put into a poster could almost show how much they were invested in it. And it made you be like okay, this show is going to be sick, because if this person made this four foot poster that they screen printed on an electric box, they're obviously really invested in it.
And you started to know different people's styles and who was printing what, but that was just, there was a magic to that of waking up in the morning. I mean, this is something I feel like I know Xander said, is just this rush of waking up and wondering what happened in the night and seeing these messages. And a lot of the posters, they weren't necessarily legible. So there was a certain point where at some point you might need to be in the know or ask around. But it was a very different culture around events and underground events that you had to see things on the streets just to know about them.
Cass Fino-Radin:
As a screen printer yourself. Were there ever moments where you're looking at a poster and you're like, wait, how did they do that? And then you're trying to piece together the craft and the process.
Pippi Zornoza:
Oh, totally. And just learning from people's choice of materials or colors. I mean, people got really wild here with cutouts and moving pieces, and obviously that sort of thing is not going to work so well when it's wheat pasted out. But yeah, I think I just really loved that time. And when we would do events at The Dirt Palace, we would pass off who was going to do the poster for which event. There was so many great screen printers and artists who were here. And so you might be like well, these are bands that I really connect to, so I want to do the poster for this one. And I learned a lot at that time, just about screen printing from wanting to promote events and being invested in nightlife and wanting to make something that would make people come to an event. So yeah, I learned a lot during that time just from printing a lot of posters.
Cass Fino-Radin:
What you were saying about wanting to make the poster for the band that you really care about, that really resonates. And it's interesting, it's similar to how being an organizer of shows and booking a show for a band that you really love and wanting to make sure that there's an audience there. I can see how those go hand in hand.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, I feel like fandom is a huge part of my work. Maybe it's not completely apparent on the surface, but I feel like I'm constantly referencing my deep fan loves in my work, whether that be certain music tropes or horror elements or just that collection of samples or ideas. And so there came a time where people wanted me to make posters all the time, and I started becoming really selective because I was putting so much energy into it. I'm a really slow worker too, so I just was like, I'm only going to make prints for projects that I'm really passionate about.
And so at some point I really petered off in my production around posters, and I'd be like, maybe we'll only make maybe one or two a year, actually, because I really wanted to, I mean that was felt really important to me is that deep connection to what... And also part of it's, I knew that afterwards that would be my memory. The poster would become a stand-in for the memories of the event. So really wanting to make something that documented the memory in some way, even though I hadn't had the memory yet, but my idea of what that night might be like.
Cass Fino-Radin:
That's so beautiful. So music and sound for you, of course extends well beyond your life of playing in various bands and touring all over. It's very much part of your contemporary art practice when we look at the work that you're making today. So a recent body of work of yours, in particular, that I'm thinking of is The Sound of it Hammering Against the Skirts, which consists of a whole bunch of different facets, performance, and sound, and sculptures, and kinetic objects. So I was hoping you could take us through that body of work.
Pippi Zornoza:
Sure. I think to talk about that body of work, I kind of need to back up. My progression of playing music was I was a drummer, but I really didn't want my drums to sound like drums anymore. I wanted there to be something more, maybe if I slammed my kick pedal, I wanted it to sound like a million birds taking off or something, or my snare to sound like, yeah, I wanted the percussive sound of the snare, but maybe also shrieking pigs. There's just another way that I was thinking about sound that I was just getting away from this traditional rock instrumentation that was really important to me. And I started doing that within playing the drums, but then at some point being behind a drum kit was making it so that I couldn't actually perform the way that I wanted to do because I was thinking a lot about my body and how what I was doing would inform the story of what I was telling or what I was referring to.
And so I did start making, constructing different instruments, and part of that was my drum set was completely... My kick drum was a 50 gallon oil drum that I had modded with this fan belt. And I was doing all these things of experimenting with instrument building, but I wanted to get behind the drums. And because I was really maybe thinking more in a performance art context, I had a solo project called, well I still have a solo project called Rectrix. And that's when I started maybe getting, I mean, I was already doing really performative things with Bone Dust, but really thinking about the whole performance and what kind of story that told. And as someone who had also done a fair amount of installation artwork, wanting to build an environment where I was performing that could really give that suspension of disbelief and pull an audience through me, of not feeling like they were watching someone on stage performing music.
So The Sound of it Hammering Against the Skirts was actually tying together, it was a bigger performance, tying together six different songs that I had created, but each song was in a different vignette within the space. So the audience traveled with me through this installation throughout the space, and each song had different props or sculptural objects or different performers involved. And The Sound of it Hammering Against the Skirts was actually the final song of that performance. So I titled it for the entire piece.
In that performance at the end, I had already been collecting these bells that were shaped like women for several years, and it was one of those things, I don't know if you ever had a collection of things where once people know you're collecting a thing, they just start giving them to you. So I had been collecting these bell shaped like women, just really fascinated with them. This idea of the skirt being this resonance was just so beautiful to me. And in this performance, I use the bells and I have been collaborating for many years on and off with Chrissy Wolpert. We were in this band called Bone Dust together, and Chrissy also founded the Assembly of Light Choir, which is a community choir in Providence that she would compose music for, but also did a lot of performance things with the body. We also used the choir, or members from the choir to do other performances.
And in this project, members of the choir were in the audience. And so as I passed a bell to one performer, Rebecca Mitchell, she started ringing the bell and singing the note of the bell. And then gradually, each member of the Choir came out of the audience, and the audience is all around. I mean, there's not a stage, so we're all interspersed with each other, taking bells off the table and ringing them and singing the note of that particular bell. And so you can imagine none of the bells are tuned to each other. It's like just this dissonant drone of voices and clanging metal.
And then the performer, Renee Green, and I sang a song over the top of that piece. And I think that's something that when I'm performing, it's really important to me that it's maybe less about what the audience might receive from a piece. I'm really chasing some sort of, I call it ecstatic abandon, where when I'm performing I get to totally, it's like an altering of senses or losing of myself. And that's not necessarily, has anything to do with what the work is about or what I'm referencing lyrically or thinking about conceptually, but just as a performer, that's what keeps me wanting to perform is this just all I can really say is ecstatic abandon. It's like my favorite feeling of the world in the world.
And just being able to be singing over this other worldly sound of all these voices and dissonance and these bells hanging together was just a really powerful experience for me, which is something that is just very, maybe disconnected from what an audience might get from that moment, or it's chasing a feeling. And I think trying to chase that feeling has been part of why I've wanted to lose the constraints of a traditional instrument or something that would bring me back into reality. And so being able to have whatever my body is doing deeply connected to the sound has been part of a path that I've been on.
Cass Fino-Radin:
Yeah, I would imagine being seated behind a drum set on a stage, maybe it has more of those trappings of audience performer. I'm here to perform to you, in a way maybe it's harder to achieve that.
Pippi Zornoza:
And having that experience with that choir, I mean, it's just a collective experience that we had together, and that also was something that I had been interested in. But yeah, thinking less about maybe the audience and my own experience of where I'm going through while I'm making the work and how that might also change my thinking.
Cass Fino-Radin:
So when you were initially talking about your impulse to set aside the drums or the desire to have a different sound come out of it, the sound you said a flock of birds. Initially, I was surprised because having experienced your drumming live, it's just so powerful. It has so much force to it. It's one of those things that it seems like you were just really meant to do. But now seeing what you're doing in this new extension of performative sound and handcrafted objects, it all makes sense because it's even more powerful and more extreme in a way. And I'm thinking specifically of an object that's actually sitting right next to you here that was part of this body of work, this ax that you turned into a MIDI controller and became part of a performance. I was hoping you could maybe share a bit about that with us.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, so the ax, do you want to see the ax?
Cass Fino-Radin:
Yeah.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah. So the ax is basically programmed with an accelerometer so that when, it doesn't know when it hits contact with something, but -- I like how I'm talking about the programming as if it's knowledge, but this is how I like to think about it. It's like my embodied ax, it knows. So it doesn't know when it hits something, but it knows when it's gone on a downward axis and it's stopped and it triggers a midi signal, and that then triggers a sample on my sampler. And I think that was part of the progression was when you were saying my drums, it seemed like something I was meant to do, is I was actually doing a lot of sound manipulation. My drums had their own speaker system. I was already triggering samples in that context, because I was like, they don't sound big enough.
I just wanted them to sound huge. Or also it's a little bit of amplifier worship where I just wanted them to be so crushingly loud. So with the ax, I think part of where my process ended up going was I got really into thinking about what sound design, and actually a lot of my music is actually sample-based. And I am a constantly scouring movies, especially horror genre movies, or other instruments, or other musicians work to really create sound. And part of that was coming from, I was really thinking about at the time this pretension of metal culture, like pretensions of evil within the culture of how people present themselves because they were playing this really aggressive and violent music. But within that, it's pretty traditional instrumentation and thinking about all of the horror imagery that is within metal.
It is in some ways very alienating when you think about horror genre, which I'm a huge fan of, but within horror genre contextually, most of the time, my body is the body of the victim or what violence is being acted upon. And so I was really thinking about, I mean it's a real conflict with me. It's like I have these really passionate loves that are sometimes at odds with my political beliefs and how to be invested in this music that's maybe portraying a certain amount of violence, but then thinking about violence and my relation to it, and as someone who is a victim of violence. So really taking those sounds and thinking about horror and really trying to use horror sounds. I mean, I was really influenced by Exorcist, the artist who did the sound design, Ron Nagle, where it's layering bees and barking dogs, started layering bees over the sounds of guitars or just these sounds that would make people feel more uncomfortable.
And so from that, it's like the ax, I was like well, I could create a song or music from just sourced sounds. And so with the ax, what I did was actually, this is kind of a long performance where I was buried, someone buried me in dirt. And I was sampling, there's that part in Possession where Isabel Adjani is just totally losing her psychological space, and it's almost like an interior monologue for me, not for her. She was unhinged. And then the same person who was burying me dumps a bucket of water to wake me up, and I sang this song by Simón Díaz, La Tonada de Luna Ilena, which is the song of the Full Moon. And then I grabbed the ax and started destroying the structure that I had been buried upon. And so the ax became the instrument that was triggering this sound for the song, but then I was also destroying something at the same time.
Cass Fino-Radin:
So part of this whole body of work, also I know that you produced this artist book that's simultaneously a book, it's an object, but it also contains both a musical score. And we've been talking a bit about it. So I don't know if you would perhaps consider a score for your performance art, but it is in some way, but it also reads as fiction.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, I think when I was writing those performance scripts, it was almost like my imagination about what happens within the performance, within also in the context of what is actually happening. So there is a fictional writing to it. I mean the fact that we're video documenting this conversation is an ease of mine just because I want to live in the memory of the action. And sometimes the documentation you can be like oh, my memory is not really how it happened, but I'm really interested in this friction between the memory of an event and all of the things, your associations of how, and your reference points, and what it's making you think about with the actual event. And that was something that even just within that body of work was how I started creating the sculptures that were connected to the songbook, was that I was thinking a lot about how to have sculptural stand-ins for the bodies that were present within the work during the performance.
I feel like there's just a piece that I made. I felt like such an outlier at the time. It was not connected to anything I'd ever made. But the Dirt Palace did this show at Harvard where they wanted us to create a timeline of the Dirt Place, a history of the Dirt Palace, which is something that, this is a crazy tangent but we just had never wanted to do a timeline before because it just felt like Xander and I as founders of the Dirt Palace, there was too much authority in us being the people who would tell the story. We knew that that would be just our history, and that the history is everyone who's ever been here. So as part of that exhibition, we created a timeline by making every person who had ever been involved in Dirt Palace set point got a peephole into a wall.
And so it's like under the umbrella concept that we've used before, the secret rooms in the Dirt Palace. So there is this wall with hundreds of peepholes in it, and some of the peepholes are going to maybe someone's individual artwork, like a slide image, and other ones are bigger where you're looking into a diorama. And then some other people made videos where you're looking into the wall and you can watch a video and there's sound, and there were all these eyes. You're looking into the eyes of these peepholes. And for that work, my diorama that I had built inside the wall was an ode to the days of the Dirt Palace where we had a really bad leak and the roof just leaked all the time. And something Xander and I used to say was that we were connected to the building in this way where we would wake up in the middle of the night because we knew that the garbage can that was filling with water needed to be emptied before it started overflowing. And this being in tune with the building.
So I mean, there was a lot going on inside this box, but part of it was that I had this drip of water going through the diorama that was slowly splashing. It was a mirrored box, so you could see infinity of all the images that I had inside there, but it was reconstituting these discarded contact lenses that had been collecting over the course of a long time. But it was just thinking about this, the first time that I made a piece where there was motion in it, like a sculpture where there was this dripping of the water and how that connected to the memory and how it connected to time. There was this thing that we all experienced and it was a lived experience.
And that was almost 10 years ago at this point. But I feel like I've just been thinking about that work for so long, and that's what has pulled me to where I am now, or I'm making these kinetic sculptures, is just part of thinking a lot about being a body and how that's connected to being in time. I have a lot of hangups around time, and my partner, he gave me the slim reader of Heidegger's Being and Time, and that really crushed me in this way that was almost incapacitating. It was the first time I thought of the concept of when you think you don't have enough time, it's that you're running to the future self of yourself, looking back at yourself and just being disappointed at your concept of who you were. It's actually not that you don't have enough time, it's that you're not happy with your concept of self.
And that was really crushing to me. But the first time I started thinking of time is being centered in your body or yourself. And then he also gave me a slim reading from the egoist philosopher Dora Marsden. And her writing is about how time is really motion, measured motion, but thinking about that in the terms of the blood coursing through your veins is motion, or your breath is motion. And just what she says in this book is that we are time, but we're also the measuring piece. And that feeling to me, of thinking about memories is just when I started really naturally gravitating to making kinetic work because I felt like there needed to be a time-based element to the work to ground it into being human or being a body in this way that was connected to those ideas that were floating around.
Cass Fino-Radin:
Well, and also the book containing the musical score and this very poetic performance score in a way I can see how it is a controlled environment. It's a way of forming that memory and binding it up. So one last theme, or I think common thread, in your work that's come up a few times that I was curious to just hear your thoughts about is I think in everything from your music that I've experienced over the years to your visual art, there is this haunted nature to things. And your most recent kinetic sculpture that you shared with us feels like a really tangible, palpable manifestation of that. So I'm curious if that's something you could speak to.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, it's interesting. I've only started using that word recently, and it feels really at odds with, I know every time someone comes to The Wedding Cake House they're like, "is it haunted?" And I'm like, I am so much of a non-believer. I don't even believe in reality. I don't know what you guys are talking about. There's no hauntings here. But I think a lot of what is coursing through my work is a certain...
I think a lot of what I'm wrestling with is maybe this antiquated ideal of art where I'm actually thinking about emotion and affect. And that's almost like the material of what I'm working with. And I think a lot of that is related to memory and experience. And I think there's a haunting nature to thinking about or reliving memories. Maybe that's not thinking about memories, but actually I think being in a state where you relive them, which is maybe not a healthy position to be in, but in thinking about ways of navigating different forms of grief, I think that is a common aspect of people just reliving things. And so I think that's probably how the haunted nature comes about.
Cass Fino-Radin:
Yeah. When recontextualize the word, I probably said the exact same thing when I first walked into Wedding Cake House. Is this haunted?
Pippi Zornoza:
Sorry, I didn't mean it like that.
Cass Fino-Radin:
No, no, no. But it's interesting because thinking about the word in the context of your work versus this common vernacular sense, those are such two different things. Yeah, that makes total sense. Well Pippi, thank you again so much for taking the time to sit down and chat today. This was a real treat.
Pippi Zornoza:
Yeah, thank you so much. I learned a lot from the conversation. Yeah.
Cass Fino-Radin:
Great.
Cass: And thank you, dear listener, as always, if you like what you're hearing on the show, listener support is hugely important to making it all happen. You can always join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescenc. Or if you are interested in just making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts you can do. So at artandobsolescence.com/donate. And there, you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes, all of that good stuff. And last but not least, you can always find us on social media @artobsolescence until next time take care of my friends, my name is Cass Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.