Justin Shoulder: people don’t just need didactic work to understand

Since ACT is about making a change, we need to talk about impact. We must learn about the sorts of impact art can make, about the role and place of impact in art practices, and about how art practices themselves are impacted, for instance by Covid-19. 

Therefore, as part of the Learning to Impact Work Package of the ACT project, we research the many faces of impact. We do so by interviewing artists. With The Interview Series we tap into their embodied, concrete artistic practices. We want to build an understanding of how these practices (may) evolve in the face of the current challenges. How the artists learn to ‘stay with the trouble’. How the urgency of climate change, ecology and biodiversity informs their attitude towards the social impact of their artistic work. 

#7: Justin Shoulder: people don’t just need didactic work to understand

‘My name is Justin Talplacido Shoulder. I was born on Cammeraygal land and I now reside on Gadigal Country, also known as Sydney. I pay my respects to elders past, present and future, and I acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.‘

One morning here in Europe, one evening there in Australia, we meet Justin Shoulder online. The first introduction already invites us to take position, to find ground in this online exchange. We ask him about this sentence, that is also recurring under his emails.

‘I think it’s really important to acknowledge where I am, and that there’s ongoing colonial violence. I’m convinced that any kind of conversation around ecology or climate change really needs to start with a conversation around listening to First Nations people, especially here in so-called Australia. So, a big part of the dialogue within the community here is to question the naming of sites and places. See it as a gentle kind of decolonial statement, to bring back the imagination of the land before settlers came here. I reiterate that way of referring to this place as a gesture, in honoring and in gratitude as well.

many forms, many stages

Justin, who also goes by the pseudonym PHASMAHAMMER or P.H., has worked with Kampnagel before where his performance Carrion was staged. He has a practice of performance that brings him all over the world. Yet, he’s firmly embedded in Sydney on Gadigal Country. He describes himself as a storyteller who works in multiple mediums, and we can see how Justin is able to incubate his work in different contexts and on benefits from the wide array of stages that he works on: theatre, nightclub, festival, gallery, community space.

‘I’m formally educated in digital media photography and digital arts. But I often talk about the nightclub as being a big part of my education and my kind of integration within the queer community of Sydney. A lot of the works kind of stem from those spaces. For the last 12 years, me and my partner Matthew Stegh co-created an event called Monsta Gras. Monsta Gras is connected to a particular theatre called the Red Rattler in Sydney on Gadigal country. That place has been an alternative queer pride space for ten years, reconnecting to the roots of the Mardi Gras which kind of lost its way in commercialisation. It also became an incubator for so much queer performance and members of the community.’ 

Just watching the online recordings of Justin performing is already a mesmerizing experience. The shifting of shape and form, the merging of sound and landscape, the transformation of matter and bodies: it is a constant exploration of relations and mutuality.

‘As a performer, a big part of my practice is the becoming of these interspecies figures that remix human machine and animal. The early work was very much based in more formalist explorations of reconfiguring my body and working with accessible materials like plastics, balloons and other types of detritus. I would use these materials to create figures like Carrion, that I would write stories about, and I’d perform on the street or in club settings. Eventually that developed, extending into theatre spaces, which gave me the opportunity to tell more detailed narratives over durations of time that could tease out more of the themes. I often work a lot with affect – so feeling, sensation, mourning and other forms of connection. Theatre, dance, puppetry objects are a big part of the practice, transforming the quotidian, taking found objects, finding the spirit in the objects.’

This practice, simultaneously developing in theatre, in club-based performances, and at festivals, allows Justin to tell his stories in as many environments as possible and enables him to talk to a broad, intergenerational community. In no way then, Justin Shoulder believes he has to move on up, leaving for instance the club-scene behind him:

‘I’ve always tried to maintain working in the different spaces because I really feel that the club space is an incubator. It does generate a very particular type of communication and language that requires you to generate quite strong signs and symbols that people can, you know, breathe and experience.’

ancestral myth

The practice of Justin develops in communities and collectives, and in their myths and rituals. With his collaborator Bhenji Ra, he founded Club Ate, which draws together members of queer oceanic communities. Started as an event for fundraising after Typhoon Haiyan, in November 2013, Club Ate developed into a pacific collective ‘that also made art’.

‘We got invited to do things like the Asia Pacific Triennial. We’d make films and that kind of art, to fund the types of performance narratives we were creating in the club. A lot of the work we do with Club Ate is about future folklore. It’s about looking at pre-colonial mythology and animism, and looking at myths that have been used to demonize particular members of the gender variant and queer community, both in Australia and in the Philippines. We reimagined those myths, creating myths with a different sensibility.’

‘I was born in Australia, but my mom is Filipina, of Tagalog and Ilocano descent. My dad’s side is French and Irish. I speak to that because a big part of my practice is tapping into a particular ancestral myth, both within my solo practice, but also within the collectives that I work with. So, I really invest in a sense of attunement and listening, which is in many ways a very indigenous way of thinking. And that’s a kind of conversation I have with First Nations people here, as well as with friends in Tonga or elsewhere. I guess I’m really interested in how these myths connect to ecology, and senses of attunement and listening and interspecies kinship.’

impact and context

We ask Justin how he thinks about the impact of his practice. Given the diversity of stages and contexts in which it develops and emerges, we are curious: each of these contexts will enable a different way to engage the audience.

‘I think that seeing the body in space for an extended period of time is the most optimal, because I think you can gauge more sense of vulnerability and connection with the audience. And I think the strongest reactions to my work have been in theatre context. The altered state that you can create for the audience does require a certain amount of time to have more impact. And I’ve always really loved things you can feel in your body through light and sound and that they are equally as important in telling this story. I trust that people don’t just need didactic work to understand.

We’re surprised to hear from him that the context is never an issue: the work speaks with the same force in Gadigal Country, in Montreal and in Hamburg. ‘

You don’t have to know that I’m from Gadigal country, but I think that essentially it’s about knowing and listening and understanding that you’re part of an ecology of which the human is dependent.’

He tells us about the work Carrion, which opens with a very classic, theatrical stage-setting. Ballet-like lighting, a curtain that would rise, a kind of mediaeval music playing. From there it develops, breaking down and deconstructing this classical stage-narrrative. But apparently, the roots of the work reached beyond this ‘deconstruction’. He tells us:

Interestingly, you know, was what happened when I performed the work in Jakarta. There this very prominent performance artist, Arahmaiani, who I really look up to. She reminded me that the work was deeply ancestral and that the type of mask performance I was doing was tapping into something very much a part of my culture in the Philippines, which at that time I had just begun to understand. So it’s true the language is different, read differently depending on where you are. I don’t know if I can fully control that. No… well, maybe that’s something that you can strive towards, you know?

These deep roots speak clearly in the work. Asking about the impact, Justin tells of the letters people write him. Schoolkids who visit his work, as part of their curriculum, and have to write him as an assignment from their school.

‘This young girl situated on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka when I was performing in Montreal, wrote me a letter, and she wrote it based on her interpretation of the work and what she saw. And she related to her own pain she felt and her fear and desire around environmental catastrophe, around, I guess, like human relationship to technology. I keep a copy of it. And actually that particular one really I think about that a lot because I think: I’ve travelled to the other side of the planet…. and I can still connect to people’

give people options

This is important for us, because it is a clear indication how the response to his work is, and how explicit its impact can become.

‘People do have diverse responses to work, often very bodily responses. You know, I just started going back to the theatre recently and it was such a gift. I saw a work that kind of moved between very overt political statements and then much more poetic openings. And there is value in both. I think you need both. I think you need you need space…Some political work can really hit you over the head with ideas. There is value in the dreaming space to give people hope in the horror. That’s a big part of what I’m trying to do. It’s that sense of wonder that you have when you’re snorkeling in the reef and you remember that you’re connected to things and the world around you, and you care about the world around you. That’s just my approach… but there are many others. So the thing is: to give people options.

Then we’re back at the beginning of this interview, where we saw the broad array of stages, collectives and contexts that enable Justin’s work. Yes, he says,

‘I guess I’ve always framed my own work as being part of an ecology. ‘Holding space for people’, events and performances in the club scene, events that are very connected to long activist histories, the claiming of identity… and then like how that connects to new forms of storytelling in the club, the theatre.. and then it goes out into the world …. And yet, on a more local level, like in my everyday life with the children I care for and the community I live in, I access those networks and work within those networks to do other forms of very concrete sharing: food, share resources at the community center, whatever. And I’m just trying to say that that’s all connected.

More from Justin Shoulder: http://phasmahammer.com

See an 8′ excerpt from the performance Carrion (2017): https://vimeo.com/244806270

This is the seventh article in The Interview Series on Impact.