Ten Huts. Jill Sigman
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With Toby Billowitz in ZsaZsaLand.
LOLLY KOON
I began reconfiguring these materials—vigorously tying and wrapping and dipping them in wax. Making bundles that, like vodou paquet congo, derived their power not from their appearance but from what was inside them and the histories of those contents. In this reinvention of my post-production detritus, the “backstage” became the “onstage,” the inside became the outside, the means became the end. ZsaZsaLand reclaimed.
This process shifted my focus. I saw each object through a new lens. The cardboard box from the cheapo burner I had used to melt the wax for the wax body parts (the one that kept catching on fire) and the tarps I had used to protect the floor became as interesting as the wax legs they had helped to make. The iconic plaid 99¢ store bags that carted the costumes became more significant than the costumes themselves. The history of an object became more important than its appearance in the choice to use it. The scraps and crumbs and broken branches and bubble wrap all became ingredients for conjuring. Everything was something.
I first made a number of sculptural pieces—heavily wrapped, slightly sinister-looking packages. Then I began to turn myself into a package as well, wrapped with wire, clothesline, old pantyhose, and fake moss. I did a performance called Nu-Gro, dressed as a post-apocalyptic concubine refugee. My movement vocabulary (mostly crawling) came from ads in the back of the Village Voice, and I carried soil in an improvised plastic backpack and seeds in my mouth. While Nu-Gro allowed for maximal efficiency (recycling of materials, less waste, less storage) it was not a manifesto for re-use. It was a call to action: Here are the insides, the refuse, the stuff you throw away. You cannot ignore it. How will you transform it? This is the beginning of composting and revolution.
Rehearsing ZsaZsaLand.
JORO BORO
Composting takes what is unwanted, rotting, discarded, and makes it into something valuable, fertile, usable: rich soil. For a long time it’s just a hot mess—ugly, smelly, disgusting, offensive. But prettiness and propriety are overrated. Composting says, embrace the dirt and look at what will happen. Transformation. Alchemy. And maybe eventually vegetables. And revolution? Seeing differently, upending values, re-valuing what has been deemed worthless is the stuff of revolution. But more on that later.
The first hut, built at the end of 2009, was an impulse. I wanted a place in my studio to take refuge. A lair. It was also a place to contain things. After doing a multi-week outdoor performance project, in parks, under highways, and in big public spaces where the energy dissipates, I realized that, despite its potential elitism, a theater contains the energy of a performance and allows magic to happen. It holds us all together in the same space at the same time. In doing so, it is a kind of container. The first hut was a way of creating such a container on a primitive scale. A charged space that could function like a theater without the exclusivity of one. What would it be like to be inside an empowered object? I expanded package into structure.
Over five years, I built ten more huts. These containers became meaningful to me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I danced in them, slept in them, ate in them, hosted discussions about housing, water, sustainability, and permaculture, gave workshops, talked to countless strangers, served lots of tea, made videos, told stories, showed films, invited people to make music, hosted a dance party, prepared reclaimed food from supermarkets and dumpsters, and grew micro-greens.
Performing in Nu-Gro.
JORO BORO
Performing in Nu-Gro.
JORO BORO
Packages in Nu-Gro.
JORO BORO
The huts are simultaneously stages, sculptures, and dwellings. Like ritual spaces, they are places where someone might have an experience they wouldn’t have in daily life, and where that experience can be contained and understood through a special space created to hold it. Perhaps because they are made of waste, they are spaces outside of the consumer world and off the map of “normal” social transactions. For example, strangers might watch a performance in a hut and then eat food I prepared for them—sautéed mushrooms grown in a permacultural system on and around the hut, salad made of sprouts growing in a split drainpipe, tea brewed from herbs planted on the hut sipped from a found teacup. Eating in this way is weird; it’s magical; it’s like being on the edge of the universe. Apocalypse light: there’s no central heating, but there’s hot chocolate. In the unfamiliar but intimate context of the huts, I witnessed people talking to others they didn’t know, tasting things they wouldn’t normally eat, and thinking thoughts they wouldn’t often think.
Cooking mushrooms and herbs at Hut #5.
LINDSAY COMSTOCK
For each hut, I created a specific set of activities that responded to that hut, that population, and that site. With some huts there were many hours of activities (like the three months of events at Hut #7) and with others there were just one or two events (like the performance and community conversation at Hut #8). But what was most important to me was the creation of a kind of microculture with practices indigenous to each hut. Things like planting seeds, having tea, taking a tchotchke from the “hut grotto,” or drawing your own home’s floor plan.
The huts are a come-as-you-are affair. Reality show meets church bazaar meets postmodern dance. I am me and people are who they are. Visitors of all sorts participate as themselves, watch performances, eat reclaimed food, learn about composting or permaculture. And through their being there, each hut becomes fully what it is.
When I was working on Hut #6, I made friends with a woman named Makka. She was from Somalia, living in Norway, and working as a janitor at the Norwegian Opera. Every night during her shift she would come by and visit as I built the hut, and we would talk about huts in Somalia and emigration in Norway and food and life. One night she helped me drape plastic on the frame I had built, like we were hanging out laundry together in an opera house lobby. Another night, we chatted with a young female guard about cooking and food waste; they had never talked even though they both worked the night shift. Finally, when the hut was finished, Makka was my first guest for tea. And when she came by during a performance, she was herself. And so were all the other people who had been part of this unlikely process—guards and volunteers and ballet dancers and tourists and students from the language school for immigrants and the young woman who sat on the bridge every day asking for money. Like the end of The Wizard of Oz, “You were there, and you, and you …”
With Makka Ahmed at Hut #6.
ODA EGJAR STARHEIM
Why bother to create such a grassroots potluck of personalities and experiences? Because this mash-up of people and cultures and characters is beautiful. Young Norwegian soldiers having tea with Turkish immigrants and Brazilian tourists on a hot pink fake fur. Elderly Italian-American Brooklynites making music with contemporary musicians and twenty-something hipsters. An African American carpenter who disassembles Fashion Week runways teaching a young Polish woman how to make a shelf. These things happened at the huts. Because art should be for everyone. The guards and the janitors and the neighbors and the gallery goers and the little boy who saw Hut #10 the first time he ever entered a museum. Because at some point it’s not even about art anymore; it’s about us all being human together.