Episode 4 – Bay Area

Soundcloud: Episode 4 – Bay Area

My name is Sofia Cordova, I am an artist that works with performance video and music.I am from Carolina, Puerto Rico but am currently living right on the border of Emeryville andOakland here in California in the unseeded lands of the Ohlone.

My name is Esra Canogullari. I DJ and make music under the name 8ULENTINA. I ambased in Oakland, CA. I am an interdisciplinary artist.

My name is Khatchadour Khatchadourian, I run Khatch music. I am Lebanese by birth, I’vespent my early years both in Lebanon then in Syria. I am primarily in the Bay Area.

My name is Nadia Shihab. I’m an artist based in Oakland California that works across filmand video, sound and collage.

My name is Greg, or as I’d like to be called now reclaiming my original name as Greekor,Nemet. I used to be a photographer, currently I’m in winemaking.

Sofia: The way that I’m interested in engaging with art, reflects the way that I am interested inengaging with the world and I don’t engage with the world in a single language...or a single...Idon’t stay in a single lane, right, so whether that is how I practice my feminisms or how I ama queer person or the fact that I come from a colonized country that itself is the product of aviolent mestizaje - I’m an afroindigenous person because of terrible histories of colonialism -but that is my reality. So there is no space, in my life really, to just work in one avenue. So itwould make little sense to me to work in one avenue in my work. And that is something that Ideveloped onceI moved to the Bay Area and I will say that it actually started out as a modeof survival.

Khatchadour: I lean on several languages, I lean on my birth language, my home language - Armenian.Western Armenian. I sing a little bit in Eastern Armenian dialect. I also sing in Arabic. Irecently started singing in Persian language as well. As far as my woodwinds, I am primarilya duduk player, and if I need to create additional samples of the other Armenian instruments- pku, blul, zurna - or Japanese shakuhachi, and Arab ney, I lean on those. So that’s myacoustic point of view.

Nadia: I’m interested in spaces of becoming within diasporic and feminist histories, and nearly all mywork has a quality of intimacy to it perhaps because I often collaborate with family, and oftenwith the matriarchs in my family. The deeper I’ve moved into my practice, the more I rejectstrict categories, and the more I embrace a general entanglement of genres and forms. Ithink a lot of the creative work that I’m drawn to coming out of the Bay Area has historically challenged notions of purity in categories or genres. There’s a hybridity here that comes outof spaces of deep experimentation

8ULENTINA: I think for me, as someone who is a non-binary person, and comes from a non-westernperspective, or diasporic perspective, my creative output or my artwork...being able to be anextension of my physical body. So thinking about the limitlessness of sound, of space, andwhen we make a creative world for ourselves to exist in, when we create a context forourselves, we're really creating an extension of our physical selves.

Khatchadour: So there really is a kind of place, where all this foundation for electronic music is enabled.There is quite a bit of high level engineering and talent from that perspective, that reallybrought up a whole movement of music. To see these kinds of figures - Don Buchla, DaveSmith Instruments, now in their later age, or you know some have passed on. But to see thatmovement having translated - the Bay Area is kind of digesting that technology and allowingfor space to really understand what this technology can do, pushing the human expression ina human sense.

Nadia: I remember going to a party once and this older guy was wailing on a two headed saxophone– he had literally fused two saxophones to create a new instrument. I think that’s indicative ofa spirit that exists here. That spirit doesn’t shun technology – it works with it in unexpectedways.Materially, these fragments I draw from, come from lived experience of the worlds I inhabitand the people I love. And the worlds they inhabited that now only exist in memory, becauseof migration and diaspora. And time.

8ULENTINA: Linking to the past and to the future. Relationship to our lineage, invoking relationship tohistory, and creating alternative histories, especially since the canon and the archive ofmusic both electronic and within the Middle East is so dominated by a Western perspectiveor its often coming from a very patriarchal view. Using my perspective as a queer and transperson, as a Middle Eastern person, how I can use sound to create my own conversationswith history, with my ancestors, creating kinship. I really think about thep poetic value ofobjects, the poetic value of sound, through hybridizing different sounds... Through hybridizinga wide range of experiences you can really create different relationships to the world, andcreate a physical space and digital space for a marginalized body.

Khatchadour: I come from an informal line of family singers - my grandfather was a street singer, was astreet performer for years in his youth - this is what, six decades ago. And my aunt had asmall debut when she was a young teenager of folk music. And then I started playing theArmenian woodwind - double reed woodwind - duduk - which is a beautiful instrument, veryrich in harmonics and textures. That led to the opening of my voice. As a child I used to singin a children’s choir, of 150 kinds in Syria, Aleppo in Syria for seven years. So some musicalbackground there but not a classically trained musician. Came here to the US and once I started doing music, one collaboration led to another and it was really a process of openingup and understanding what the Bay Area community, musically, is.

Greekor: My late uncle was a photographer. My former guitar teacher back in the old country was aphotographer. You know, your lungs open up and you want to continue doing it because it'sso organic. And I was drawn to the wet process, in the analog process, that the darkroomprocess. But right at the time when everything was transitional, digital and for some reason Iunderstood that the digital was not where I want to be. Transition into wine happenedorganically because the darkroom process is a solitary process where you can sit there, youknow for hours in the dark, turning over this one image over and over until it turns into whatyou exactly what you wanted to be, how it to your perfect print. Similarly, in the cellar, theharvest, the fermentation, those cycles are very kind of communal. And the sharing of thewine, of course, kind of like the sharing of the art in the gallery, right? That was reallysomething that drew me as a parallel from the dark room to the cellar.

Sofia: but at the time I was strictly a photographer, and photography at the time as well, was veryindebted to a very European aesthetic that was incredibly formal and these beautifullycomposed, large format images. And that's what I was doing because I thought that's what Ineeded to be doing somewhere along the way, While being deeply enmeshed in theacademy and the sort of institutional thinking that it brings, I was feeling all of the history thatI carry with me. All of the subjectivity is that I carry with me the fact that every day my identityis multiple and shifts, and I'm not the same person day today. All of that was sort ofscreaming out from within, and it was so hard to synthesize all of that into a single medium.

Greekor: Everything was going into a tech oriented world, product photography less and less and lessand less of these bohemian things that I was attracted to - 2009,’10. This is when you knowUber, Facebook, everybody, that Twitter, the hyper hyper techisation of San Francisco likeshifted from Silicon Valley into SF and by default to Oakland, where I lived into everythingelse. Everything kind of became tech oriented. The reason why tech was attracted, meaninglike the tech workers were attracted to SF was because of everything that the artist classbrought to SF. But the double edged sword there obviously was that no longer were theartists able to roam freely in the cities.

Sofia: I responded by beginning to make music. So that's when I started the XUXA SANTAMARIAproject, which originally was an alter ego. It wasn't even meant to exist beyond that project. Itwas essentially an alter ego that themselves would contain all of the histories of sort of theCaribbean and the diaspora through a lens of dance music and from that video sprung outand installation sprung out and costume making and all of these other things that became aconstellation of artworks. That, for me immediately reflected my experience in a way that feltso much more embodied closer to the center of where I was coming from than these verykind of again beautiful but incredibly formal images.

8ULENTINA: People's stories feel heard here, and I think that that's a huge part of the history of whatmakes up the Bay Area's creative identity. I mean, that's changed so much over time, with somany different periods of gentrification and periods of changes in the economy. When youthink about the relationship the tech infiltration has had on the Bay Area and how that shiftedso much on so many levels. And I think if anything, as that process happened, people in mycommunities started to care more and more about how to tell stories with an intentional way.Since in a lot of ways, the story of the Bay Area and the identity of the Bay Area was beinghijacked by tech and being hijacked by all of these economies that didn't actually consider orcare for the people who really make up, what the city is, what the cities are, what art can bemade, what culture can be made is really always determined by what kind of economy ispresent. Sometimes those limitations create a really flourishing underground, but with thatamazing sort of like underground or DIY world, there's also sort of like a lack of financialsupport and lack of sustainability.

Khatchadour: It's fair to say that the Bay Area does have this intersectionality where the space ismultipurpose and those multipurpose spaces bringing audiences that are very open to beingcurious about different kinds of music, to have one foot in this door, and be performing artistin an acoustic setting, but also be inspired by the electronic music scene and and and youknow, the artists and creators in in that room.

Nadia: But when I think of the physical art and music spaces that have shaped me most as an artist,I think of the people behind them, the collectives who ran them, that act of keeping the doorsopen knowing there’s no financial gain in it, but just for the love of it and for the community itbuilds and sustains. The idea that if you’re not seeing/hearing/experience what you want tobe experiencing, you create it yourself.

Sofia: as I became more proficient as a filmmaker and as a musician, finding those people acrosstime and then also contemporaneously right. So to shout out CLUB CHAI and to shout out allof the friends of that family and all of the people that I met through, just being a musician inthe world expanded for me my vision of what is possible. And then I take all of that back withme to the studio and again, even if I'm making work that is going to exist in an institutionalspace or whatever, that spirit of experimentation and strangeness and mystery and that thework doesn't need to be eligible immediately.

8ULENTINA: People really figure out a way to make things happen. They try to find the resources withintheir immediate community to do that

Sofia: we started engaging with an audience and a group of peers that themselves found theirbodies and experience is reflected in the work that I was making so work that was concernedwith the liberation of queer, colored and colonized bodies. And that was really where the Baypushed me to work in a way that was multivalent, because if these experiences aremultivalent then the work needs to reflect that. And I think for me that was really crucial in thinking about not just my audience but how I wanted to make the work that I make now toattempt to connect with audiences beyond the kind of fancy museum gallery world that I thinkso many of us are struggling with these days,

Khatchadour: I have experimented with Eurorack modular synthesizers, which are a whole canvas ofpossibility, the way you work through them is not necessarily linear. One of the earlyfounders of ASMR, a wife of one of my former roommates, is actually in Berkeley. Sheinvited me to contribute to a ASMR Sessions where I primarily used to do a little bit of voiceand lots of the duduk synthesis to create soundscapes and ambient music.

8ULENTINA: The past five years of organizing a project like CLUB CHAI, which really like, created andfostered an audience for myself - a city like Oakland was able to hold space for the kinds ofprojects that we are trying to work on. And I think there was definitely a desire for a spacethat considered how our personal identities and how our stories intersect with sound thinkingabout things from a less drawn or specific way. We definitely had to do the work to sort offoster that audience. It was something that carried through with us in everything that we did,and even now that CLUB CHAI is over, that audience is still present in the work that I do asan individual, and the process is still really present in the output of everyone who touched theCLUB CHAI path.

Sofia: But my people are here like never in my travels have I seen a more diverse, brilliant group ofpeople that come from all over the world, that are queer in myriad ways, that are really doingthe solidarity work of collective organzing across class and race and gender, never really,and and and in very few places in the world, have I experienced that, and that is a treasure tome. So to be able to make that work here is a gift.

Greekor: You would have photographers, dancers, musicians, DJs, producers, visual artists, painters,all kind of coming together, throwing things by and large. A lot of people knew one anotherwhen you hustled in the art space, even if you didn't know somebody very well. They kind ofunderstood what your life in the Bay Area as an artist was, meaning that you're constantlykind of being pressed by this behemoth capitalist tech thing.

Sofia: Song for Sanctuary is a pretty long experimental performance that XUXA SANTAMARIA, somyself and my partner Matt Gonzalez Kirkland, did at the request of the San Francisco ArtsCommission. They were celebrating the fact that San Francisco is a sanctuary city, meaningthat folks that are undocumented will, in some ways, although this is debatable, be protectedfrom federal law enforcement, and their immigration status won't be necessarily questioned.Sanctuary, as as we probably know, is when you approach usually the Christian sort ofinstitution for protection. So for that, to them means something similar under the the eye ofthe state felt a little bit kind of uncomfortable to me, So I wanted to complicate the themes -in the American imaginary immigrants are always from Central, South America, and after avisit to the demographics office in the city of San Francisco, I learned that there's actually lotsof folks from other countries, China, Korea, that are protected under sanctuary here, and in exchange the price to pay was the complete loss of their, whether it's lands or autonomy inthe case of the Philippines and in the case of these tribes.
Trump's policy on immigration had just become so violent that I kind of wanted to like, reallypair all of those questions down and make a work about a singular journey. And I don't meanthis in an individualistic way because the work is meant to address many people the way thatthe performance was carried out was that we worked with one dancer, Stephanie Hewett,who I worked with a lot in my pieces. We see a body kind of traversing through an imaginarylandscape, and that landscape could be the desert or the Mediterranean, because I alsowanted to talk about migration across the globe as it's being experienced. In this time, shedid these sort of interpretive dances that responded to the music. Now the music was madeexclusively from samples that we collected from the radio from various radio stations that aredesignated to immigrant communities, the music being played back in their countries. It wasreally important that the source material responded specifically to the bodies of the work wasbeing made about the moment they were. They gave me choice on where I wanted toperform this. I knew I wanted to perform it around City Hall, and originally I was going to becontent with doing it out front. Outfront is where protests happened. Out front is where youkind of like kind of YELL at the building, if you will, but eventually through the work of thecommission and the very nice people actually at City Hall we were able to perform it insidethe rotunda of City Hall, and that became really meaningful because I wanted to state thateven though these folks are here protected under sanctuary, the sort of scale of the state,the sort of big, beautiful building that represents the state doesn't actually respond to thesecommunities. So I really wanted to emphasize the smallness of the dancer's body in thishuge, beautiful architectural space that is the state as we, the people, have constructed it. Soyou see this body that is kind of negotiating her space and herself, in contrast to this hardmarble cold places cold entrance to the seat of power.

Nadia: There is definitely a space where the line between art and branded content has become sothin as to be indistinguishable. I think the market is always going to capitalize on the talent ofartists, and many artists will gladly take on well-paid work for hire because you have to paythe bills. Unless you’re independently wealthy, as an artist you have to have a hustle. That’snot unique to SF. But that entanglement with the world of marketing does feel like it has leadto this expectation everything has to be similarly tight and packaged and polished – brandedbasically. It becomes part of that pressure to brand oneself, and translate work whose valueis not monetary and is not commodifiable into just another piece of content in that infinitedeath scroll.

Khatchadour: Like the very cutting sharp economy of the Bay Area, the artist has become an entertainer.The artist can be an entertainer, but the artist can be a storyteller. The artist could be carrierof song wisdom, carrier of vibrations. The artist could be an artist. The artist could allowthemselves to time and mental space to not worry about - Oh, when am I? How am I going topay my next month's rent and food, limiting the artists - and the artists then works with thatlimitation. The artist can facilitate a certain connection with oneself with emotions, with let'ssay God with spirit. Whatever it is, the artist, through their craft, is finding a way of bringingyou back to yourself a little bit. And I think that's beautiful and for the audience to mature inunderstanding so that they see that this is not just entertainment but an intersection of beautiful possibility. As philosophical as that sounds, it may not happen ever again. Youknow where you see this isn't being played in this way with this sound effect, and you're like,blown away and it's gone. It's a moment, and you can either enjoy it and go deep into it andappreciate the artist as both the performer, entertainer and but also a craftsman.

Greekor: Places where we would host a lot of the photo exhibits became incubators. There are acouple of dark rooms that I probably spent like, I don't know, weeks on end in there. And nowI don't even know of a dark room in the Bay Area where at one point, this was the film capitalof California. SF was seventies sixties fifties Hitchcock. All these movies were always filmedhere, and in the late seventies there was a concerted effort to stop that. But the artscommunity was very tight knit people, from all walks - all disciplines came together. It's justthat the venues no longer became available. All sorts of stories that pinpoint that a lot of theproblems with the art community that erupted from it because all of the venues of yesterdayare now incubators or restaurants or some headquarter for some new venture funded X Y Z.Like I remember as I was studying photography, I was also making money on the side,working at the Jewelry and Gift exchange center in SF, and that in an in it of itself was kind oflike a microcosm of what SF is. It's essentially like this. All the jeweler's came together, right?And guess what it is now. Today it's Airbnb. That's where Airbnb headquarters and everytime I passed that building, my heart sinks, because that used to be a huge space forinteraction. Stalls of people from all walks of life in the jewelry business, which also is, youknow, has art inside of it, right,

8ULENTINA: that kind of lack of space or diminishment of space, disappearing of space over, the pastdecade. On the one hand, it's creates a really difficult dilemma for you to be sustainable ifyou can't really perform, and if you don't really feel like it's easy to access the spaces that wehave. But on the other hand, I think that's so much interesting. Music is made here becausewe don't have so many examples that we're constantly looking at, and we don't have somany venues that are known for specific genre or known for specific sound in a lot of ways.People have always been working in some sort of isolation here, and then the worksomehow exists in a community space or in a performance realm where it's been received.But I don't think that there's always this feedback loop of absorbing sounds from a certaingenre in a club and then feeling pressure to kind of like respond to that standard. I think thatwe really have such a wide range of experimentation within sound. When it comes to the BayArea, why not do whatever I want, especially if there's not already not going to be spaces tosupport this? Why should I cater to what exists for me? I should instead create my own worldin my own sounds and that inherently creates more underground spaces and moreunderground experiences or more DIY experiences around sound.

Nadia: But it sometimes also feels hard to imagine how to sustain a life here, how to make art andraise a family and buy a home. But I think that impossibility is also forcing me to be creativeand maybe rethink my expectations about what is possible. There is an ethos here betweenthe artists I know, of respect, of experimentation and risk, and of what I can only call balance.By balance, I mean quality of life. Relations. Rest. Being outside. The ocean. The forest. Thegeography here is such a gift and so unique. I try never to take it for granted.

8ULENTINA / Esra Canoğulları is the co-founder of Club Chai, an event series, curatorial project, record label, and radio show that hybridizes non-Western sounds with electronic music. 8ULENTINA’s work as a DJ, producer and interdisciplinary artist focuses on creating diasporic spaces through the use of sound, sculpture, garments and video. Their sets include a wide range of BPMs and genres, piecing together varying percussive styles and combining non-Western dance music with club, techno, rap, and R&B. 8ULENTINA’s debut EP EUCALYPTUS was released in February 2018 via Club Chai, their second EP BODYGUARD was released via London-based label TT (fka Tobago Tracks) in March 2019.

Nadia Shihab works across film, collage, and sound and engages with personal and diasporic histories to explore the ways alternative narratives can be found through a rearrangement of fragmented ones. ​She worked as a community practitioner for over a decade before directing her feature-length debut, Jaddoland, a personal documentary set in her mother Lahib Jaddo’s home in Texas. The film won five festival jury awards, including an IFP Independent Spirit Award in 2020. ​She was raised in the Texas panhandle by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.

Sofía Córdova was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in 1985 and is currently based in Oakland, California. She creates works that consider sci-fi as alternative history, dance music’s liberatory potential, the internet, colonial contamination, mystical objects, and extinction and mutation as evolution, within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism, and its technologies. She works in performance, video, sound, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is one half of the music duo and experimental sound outfit XUXA SANTAMARIA.

Khatchadour Khatchadourian was born in Lebanon and grew up singing in the Syrian-Armenian children’s choir Karoun for seven years. He credits the beginning of his musical focus on meditative genres to his early years singing in the Armenian Orthodox church. He began playing the duduk, an Armenian woodwind instrument, in 2006. He holds bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Greekor Greg Nemet began his photography in the early 2000s when he moved to the Bay Area from Brooklyn, NY. Greg studied film photography in the final days of the pre-digital era, using the wet process. After leaving SF State, he worked in various areas of the photography industry. From fashion and architecture to event photography and portraiture, Greg spent the latter portion of the 2000s immersed in the Bay Area’s photo and art scene. After the 2008 recession, with gentrification setting in, he ventured into the winemaking world and currently works as the winemaker at his family winery Kareen Wine.

Lara Sarkissian is a sound artist, electronic composer, DJ, and filmmaker born and based in San Francisco, California. Sarkissian is a co-founder of Club Chai, a record label and curatorial project that artistically hybridizes non-Western sonic and visual worlds among contemporary Western culture. She contributes regular shows to NTS radio.

Lara Sarkissian’s electronic music interweaves experimental techniques from dance and ambient with Armenian instrumentation and sampling. Her 2018 debut EP DISRUPTION is an electronic soundtrack to an imagined fictional film inspired by stories from Armenian mythology and ties these legends to encounters with familial spirits. She produces scores for multi-channel and spatial installations and video. Her work through ISM Hexadome has been exhibited at the Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Gray Area Art and Technology Festival.

Lara Sarkissian’s short film Ir Hokin Hangeest screened at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2017 as part of a V-A-C Foundation exhibition, with a live score performed by the artist herself.

Contact: contactlarasarkissian@gmail.com

Lara Sarkissian – Sampling Stories Vol. 17 on Norient blog
Lara Sarkissian – Soundcloud
Lara Sarkissian – Instagram
Lara Sarkissian – Twitter

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