Embedded in Larger Contexts
Susan Metrican interviews Karen V. Hansen
In considering how "Root Shock" would come together in conversation with the cascading research, I sought artists who were thinking through the intersection of topics that are part of the foundation of the research. The three women artists' work and creative practices represent their responses to enormous global/individual issues, and while Hannah Chalew, Daniela Rivera and Corinne Spencer are aware of the universality in these topics, they're able to locate themselves within the narratives of their work.
In her site-specific piece for the exhibition, "Without Trace/Sin Evidencia," Rivera responds specifically to human rights abuses in her native Chile during the dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. The Rettig Report was disclosed in the 1990s, detailing a clear picture of the human rights violations from that period. Rivera read the report when just arriving in Boston in 2002. She had the idea then for the piece and linked it to the invisibility of domestic abuse and the erasure of traces of violence, with each bar of soap suggesting the individual bodies of victims and transgressors. The piece installed in "Root Shock," many years after its inception, is constructed of bricks of Mexican laundry soap. Though visually subtle, the scent of the soap provoked physical reactions from some viewers. When the piece was removed early due to these effects, Rivera countered by encompassing these reactions into the meaning of the work with a display of framed images and text acting as placards at the site of a significant historical event.
The notion of resilience is laid out in Hannah Chalew's work on climate change, and she regularly gives paper-making workshops and artist talks on the significance of her "futuristic gardens" that depict evidence of creative survival in a dystopian world. Thinking of how Chalew has structured her practice in New Orleans through incorporating these community workshops lends importance to what she considers her role as an artist living through this tumultuous time.
The term "root shock," borrowed from the title of Chalew's drawing in the exhibition, typically refers to a condition of plants being uprooted too abruptly without proper care, which can compromise the health of the plants. In the context of Corinne Spencer's work, the "shock" takes place through an acute awareness at the moment when roots are exposed to air. Her work operates from a place of being resubmerged, like the once-exposed roots, resulting in a relentless dreamlike tension. Spencer considers the politicization of the black feminine body, and the kinship between the figures in her videos speaks to a mode of survival between women.
I spoke with WSRC Director Karen V. Hansen about cascading and its connection to "Root Shock."
Metrican: Can you talk about the genesis for cascading and the significance of your past research on gender and networks of care?
Hansen: In a country that celebrates opportunity and upward mobility, I am struck by how increasingly difficult it is for the next generation to sustain the economic and social well-being of one's parents. Research shows that a child born after 1980 is just as likely to move down as up; and a tumble is more likely for children of color than white children. The downward mobility of middle-aged white men has gotten a lot of media attention because of their high rate of suicide and their political expression of rage and despair. This project takes up the question about how downward pressures and social and economic triggers affect women.
Cascading is the process of falling from a particular status in ways that spark additional declines. While fundamentally driven by an economic drop, Cascading coexists with and provokes multiple losses, which can in turn become a constellation of descents — social, interpersonal, aspirational. A cascade may be triggered not only by large-scale structural events — war, recession, environmental disaster — but also by individual, family or community problems, such as illness, divorce, addiction, imprisonment, a mental health crisis or being the target of violence.
Through studying care for school-aged children, I have discovered how profoundly families, the primary site of child rearing and emotional expression, are embedded in networks. As a researcher, I am prompted to ask how historical processes have shaped what families look like and how they struggle today.
Metrican: It's exciting that this project is happening at Brandeis. Over the past two years, the focus of cascading has both broadened its scope through its multidisciplinary and collaborative approach with other researchers. Who are your collaborators, and what are some of the avenues of cascading currently being explored?
Hansen: With support from the provost's office, we constructed a monthly workshop to convene policy analysts from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, and historians and social scientists from the WSRC and across the Brandeis campus. We read research, hosted speakers, such as Thomas Shapiro ("Toxic Inequality") and Arlie Hochschild ("Strangers in Their Own Land"), and asked a key question: How do we interpret the multiple, interrelated consequences of an economic and social downward spiral?
The concept of cascading draws on the idea of dynamic change and recognizes that movement through events, jobs and relationships has unexpected, intersectional consequences. Because current approaches to precarious conditions tend to neglect gender, we center our inquiry on the lives of women, both women of color and white women.
Innovation often erupts through the cracks of a discipline or at its edges. That is why interdisciplinary dialogue — between sociologists and economists, poets and social policy analysts — has been essential to this exploration. "Root Shock" embraces that spirit of conversation between art and research and these three artists and their various media.
Metrican: Art as a discipline typically requires innovation, and as artists specifically examine their own lives and environments, they take on the roles of both researcher and subject; it can yield peculiar results. Chalew, Rivera and Spencer's work does burst through the cracks, in a sense. How do you see the role of kinship in relationship to cascading?
Hansen: Kin provides a buoyant network of relationships whose connectivity can cushion a tumble or alternatively yank down someone who otherwise felt secure. As a fundamental kind of connective tissue, through nurturing, inventiveness, fortitude and support, kinship amasses a constellation of resources. From infancy through adolescence and adulthood to old age, families formed by choice, law and biology commit themselves to caregiving and nurturing, if not always love. They cleave individuals to society and have the potential to intervene when a triggering event threatens a cascade.
Metrican: What I realized about the three artists' work is that they use "home" as a starting point from which to express concern about specific human conditions. "Root" in the title also lends itself to this idea.
Hansen: This show brilliantly takes up the multiplicity of meanings of dislocation. Beginning with home, humans search to locate themselves in space and in social relationships. The unpredictable consequences of uprooting can trigger a cascade.
Amid rising economic inequality and profound racial-ethnic hierarchies, kinship can buffer or reverse a decline, offering the tools of resilience and mitigating isolation.
Metrican: Now, more than ever, artists have the great potential to address these ideas, and many are doing so with urgency.