On February 18, 2016 Ernesto Pujol visited the Grant Street Studios in downtown Phoenix to discuss the concept of conscious culture. “When a vital piece of our humanity is being lost, artists take notice," said Pujol, a site-specific performance artist who uses walking as a form of contemporary art. Walking is a daily activity so inherently part of us that most of us do not even remember when we learned how to do it. However, Pujol notes that we walk less and less--to work, to the grocery store, in our communities. By using walking, Pujol uses a common, habitual practice to create new site-specific, experiential contexts.
Photo courtesy of the Honolulu Museum of Art.
In one piece, “Speaking in Silence,” Pujol choreographed walks in twelve different sites with historical significance for Hawaii’s previous constitutional monarchy and the effects of colonialism. “Nature is full of sounds,” Pujol said, “So when we say we want silence, what we want is the absence of human voices and sounds.” These were silent walks, performed with objects and in red clothing, a color associated with the Hawaiian monarchy. They created a quasi-mythic history showing “home” as something “invisible within the visible.” Walkers carried dual-language books of Hawaiian and English to demonstrate the threat to the preservation of Native Hawaiian and recall a different kind of experience in a place that is otherwise familiar to locals. Pujol calls himself a fan of spectacular experience rather than spectacle, so it can be observed and not consumed in resistance to our consumer culture.
In another piece, Pujol choreographed a work in Utah involving both Mormons and ex-Mormons called "Awaiting,” based on the Mormon concept of waiting, particularly in the way Mormon women wait for male permission to do anything, even to enter heaven. Pujol choreographed walkers to walk up and down the capitol steps in perpetuity as the literal embodiment of waiting. Pujol noted that the Capitol Building in Salt Lake City felt like Jacob’s Ladder and provided the perfect site-specific material to weave the fabric of these memories and histories. He does not believe that religion should be off limits to artists because it is a cultural product. “I’m there with a bag of tools,” Pujol said, “to facilitate the portrait of a place.”
Pujol has initiated other site-specific choreographies across the globe: in Boston Harbor retracing its colonial history, in St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City (a place of refuge for 9/11 responders) to reflect on our solitary yet connected community and the paths we take, in Venice with Turkish walkers uncovering the muslim history of Italy, and in Tel-A-Viv exploring the power in vulnerability without choosing an Israeli or Palestinian side. According to Pujol, these performers are simply revealing not reclaiming history that intellectually belongs to them.
Pujol does not see his performances as focal to him, but rather that he initiates metaphors of the people who make up a community in any given place. He takes an interdisciplinary approach, stating, “When you mix art with a non-art-making discipline, it might just be that you make something that is not recognizable as art or that you have given up the anxiety of making art.” What follows is “something else that the community needs more than art,” he said.
Pujol very much so sees his performances as social service, as visual portraits of the variety of people and places that make up the world while highlighting their oneness. He resists his own projection in the works and advocates for a kind of deep listening to create a more conscious culture. Though the performative walks lack permanent physicality in the sense that they cannot be bought or sold, perhaps another resistance to consumer culture, they are as ephemeral as the human portraits they depict, existing in finite temporality as we all do.