Social Residency 2020 at Human Resources, Chinatown Los Angeles
Presented by untune, March 13 to 17, 2020
Note: Most of the events related to this exhibition were cancelled due to the COVID pandemic.
An all new iteration of what initially began in 2017 at untune with Alison O’ Daniel, Kathleen Kim, Marcia Bassett, and Angel Chirnside. Joined by Fiona Connor and other members of the Varese Group, artists reconstructed separate ideas involving tone, slur, entropy, action, and residency under the binding umbrella of Social.
Marcia Bassett – Social Entropy
Marcia Bassett, given the concept Social Entropy, explored the idea of social theory where social and natural worlds have constantly shifting relationships. Sound collected from participants and the environment were assembled, collaged, processed and transformed into a quadraphonic sound installation.
Bassett invited six women to contribute voice responses to the theme of Social Entropy. These voices along with a collection of sounds that capture day-to-day moments and personal experiences submitted by the other Social Residency participants and Bassett were worked into the quadrophonic piece that is presented as an installation. Bassett is very grateful for the response from six women who contributed voice to this project: Bridget Hayden, Áine O’Dwyer, Crystal Penalosa, Ursula Scherrer, Jenny Graf Sheppard, and Eva Sidén.
Unfortunately Bassett’s live performance event (scheduled for March 14) was cancelled due to the social distancing mandate that the city implemented that week. The event was intended to extend her process to a durational length to be observed and experienced as a gathering, embracing social interaction, ritual gestures and serendipitous configurations through extended time intervals.
Alison O’ Daniel – Social Tone
Alison O’ Daniel, given the term Social Tone, processed a series of Skype sessions – a live collaboration with hard of hearing friends where repeated, indecipherable, and filtered communication of parts of her film script will then be utilized as new text, dialogue and sound within the script.
“Breathing Isn’t Silent”- Alison O’Daniel
It’s called Breathing Isn’t Silent. It’s a frame by frame slowdown of every moment in Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s Boomerang where they have audio problems and it is combined with the frame by frame slowdown of an interview with a Deaf woman (voiced through a speaking hearing interpreter) about her experiences with sound as a meditator.
Kathleen Kim – Social Slur
Kathleen Kim, a prolific advocate for civil and immigration rights, added Social Slur to Social Residency. In early conversations, Kim had considered the term a playful albeit literal alliteration. The ambiguous connotation of slur also seemed broad enough to include the group dialogue on social justice themes blurred with music improvisation, that Kathleen contemplated. Further conversations invoked multiple meanings of “slur,” from music symbol, inebriated speech, to racial epithet.
Originally scheduled as a impromptu dialogue about social justice themes present in her work, Kim wanted sound improvisation involving audience participation to blur and bleed into the conversation and create a starting point for communication. However this event ( Sunday March 15, 4-6pm) had to be re-cast as a small workshop conducted via zoom as Social Distancing was implemented.
Social Slur Group Dialogue and Open Jam – 3.15.20
Angel Chirnside – Social Action
And as most stories have a beginning, middle, and end, Angel Chirnside will prove otherwise. Intercepting with Bassett’s relational intersections, Chirnside provides the most significant building block to Social Action – literacy. In a participatory intergenerational (kid-friendly) reading room, she will facilitate storytelling with visitors, with special attention to kids, utilizing colorful felt cutouts she has made, with no scripted story in mind, that can be rearranged by visitors to tell new stories with varied outcomes. The felt pieces provide catalysts for a variety of narratives.
Here were here event instructions (though unable to execute due to Covid19:
The reading room will be stocked with picture books from the library. These should be suitable for anyone from very young readers and up. Visit, sit, read to one another. There will also be a large felt board with pieces and shapes that you can arrange and re-arrange. Play and make up your own collages or stories. We will photograph the table at regular intervals to document the interpretations visitors make over the course of the show.
Angel will sit in at the reading room for unstructured storytimes/reading hangouts on Sunday 1-3, Monday 11-1, and Tuesday 12-2. During these times they will read books to you if you want, play felts and make up stories, and be available to chat about reading, storytelling, playing, narrativisation, and whatever else comes up.
Varese Group – Social Residency
Bringing forth and integrating the very essence of the term Social Residency, we are also extending a warm welcome to Varese Group, founded in 2017 by Fiona Connor with an intention to meet consecutively until 2021 in Northern Italy. Taking the form of one-week symposiums, the group consists of artists, designers, architects, writers, and curators, engaging in dialogue and conversation about ideas and their projects, intercepted by shared meals and excursions. The materiality of location is a central aspect to their exchanges. Every year a press release is produced (as the only public presentation) – this year’s iteration was presented in this show as well as a video installation of Ten Minutes in Binio, a series of ten 1-minute videos taken by members of the group when they met last year in Northern Italy. This is the third iteration of a project organized by Sasha Portis. Each year all are invited to contribute a video that will be screened on the last day of Varese Group, with the following parameters: one minute in length, a single shot, static (no moving or zooming), and no editing. The clips capture day-to-day experiences as members respond to their temporary environment.
More documentation can be found on untune and Human Resources instagram pages
Helga Fassonaki 
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