Richie Shazam skypes in from New York, Garrett Nelson from Sicily in Palermo, and I from Berlin. The last time we were all in the same room was in February this year, prior to Nelson and Shazam’s seven-hour looping performance Blind Audition at the Kunsthalle Basel for the New Swiss Performance Now series. A minimal installation of sweeping cream convexed curtains, latex to sequin dress changes and short abrasive autobiographical dialogues were delivered seamlessly over techno beats. The two pounded through their lives, loves and fears, never missing a beat.
While discussing the conceptual narrative behind their one-off performance for SLEEK, Nelson says: “This shoot was initiated as an experiment in which we performed for the camera and responded to each other visually, it was an epistolary photoshoot, practising our concealment and exposure as we did in the performance, using objects and outfits that were important tools.”
“The geography was equally important,” he continues. “My shoot outside Palermo in the Capo Gallo nature reserve is a hallowed cruising grounds. The rocks and caves are spaces for concealing and revealing bodies, sex and views, as gazes sharpen and fade around objects of desire in cyclical waves of searching. I see my marble sculptures of genital protective cups mixed in with these other sacred rocks, caught like fish in knee-high fishnets and my legs emerge from lava flows.”
As for his creative partner Shazam, Nelson thinks the distance between them offers different possibilities. “Richie responds to these images in NYC using pieces by Gauntlett Cheng, a New York-based queer fashion label. Richie’s are in a completely different location, a different space, this mirrors the way we respond to each other in Blind Audition. In a philosophical sense, you could say this is attained through love, as in one basically understands the world as difference, ‘that which is not I’, so we recognise our differences. It’s a collaboration through call and response, across oceans, seasons… bang.”
“We are glittering the universe with our faggotory!” agrees Shazam.
This feeling is nothing new to either party. Their collaborative work hits viewers like a tsunami, flooding the room with emotional jibes and tormented views. Their outing at Kunsthalle Basel, which Richie describes to me as a “blur”, is probably their best-known performance as a duo so far.
“Each time I conjure up any memories they can only be pinned to gnarly flashbacks or haptic moments,” says Shazam. “ I remember breathing into the marble gas masks and the power of breathing was almost a homage to our queer predecessors who fought for us to exist freely.” Alongside their performance, the duo delivered a powerful set of poetic autobiographical lines such as, “Hookers collapsing, Johns waging, tricks squatting, blood pressure dropping. I couldn’t sense my reflection in this echo chamber as fisting dildos submerged into the deep canals of the ganges.”
When asked what drove him to create this live homage, Nelson says: “It was intended as a conversation and an exchange. I may be the catalyst but it’s a polyphonic, multiple-identity work. It’s the idea [that] sharing personal narratives, poetry [while] making those conversations public is a political point – it’s subversive and it is art.” At times throughout the performance, this made the Kunsthalle feel like it was filled with radical gossip. Standout utterances included Shazam saying, “He wouldn’t stop. He turned me on. I was about to get Jeffrey Dahmer-ed.” And Shazam replying: “My mother is the Sun. Savitree is my DNA. She carried through the umbilical cord the migrational trauma of the women of my sacred land. Chopped and screwed, diasporic colonial abuse, alluring shame in with every tenet of my being. I am here to pick up your psychological trauma as it lives deep within my subservient coding.” Shazam says, “I don’t even remember the text, even though it was so important at the time for us.”
After the two-day performance in February, Shazam tells me they got back to the house and “didn’t feel drained but instead felt like I had been given a holistic replenishment,” adding, “So many things were spilled onto that floor during the performance, and we mopped and washed it all away. So many truths and lived moments became voiced.” When asked if the Kunsthalle was a safe space, Shazam replies, “What allowed for this was the trust between myself and Garrett which then, in turn, resonated onto the audience.”
“I felt this energy in Garett that I was so safe even though we were very vulnerable, that for me was when we really started to collaborate. A light shone between us.”
“One member of the audience [at the Kunsthalle] had left a note at the reception praising us and the curator for bringing our queerness to the Kunsthalle,” continues Nelson. “We weren’t really accessible to the audience, so this note was kind of like adding a comment on social media. The Kunsthalle saved the note, they were so touched by it, they have never had that happen in their 180-year exhibiting history.”
The kinship Shazam and Nelson share is powerful. When asked how they met, they both laugh. “Toothless blowjob stories,” Nelson says. “It was in New York on a rainy day, wandering through Chinatown. I grabbed an umbrella from a shop as it started to pour and we had this unforgettable windy, rainy, intimate talk about experiences with toothless blowjobs.”
“We were so excited we had both had this moment which was both so obscene and so exciting – so thrilling,” adds Shazam. “I felt this energy in Garett that I was so safe even though we were very vulnerable, that for me was when we really started to collaborate. A light shone between us.”
I ask Shazam about their prolific Instagram account and following. To Shazam, Instagram is an extension of their artistic practice. “I would definitely see myself as a modern-day Renaissance woman,” they say. “My artistic approach revolves around queer ideologies and aesthetics, but then I just generally fuck it all up.”
As Nelson suggests, however, the world of social media is also a hurt box. “[It] has such a strong potential for abuse,” he notes. “The more followers the more abuse. For me, being closer to Richie was kind of a wake-up call [for how] the Internet has this dark side, that you’re not in a safe environment like the Kunsthalle, but actually, you’re exposed all the time to the evil Internet.”
“I like to call it ‘the courage behind the fingers’,” agrees Shazam. “I’m more interested in IRL spaces. I want people to hear my voice. I want people like me to see me and have hope, see that we exist and [that] we are taking up space and [that] we have agency.”
Shazam, however, isn’t just outspoken online — their life is dedicated to agitating the outdated societal chains that have been cast onto them. “I aim to have a punk attitude of not caring,” they say. “All I want is to destroy this patriarchy of gender binaries and [these] antiquated notions of sexuality. And that’s indicative of Blind Audition.”
Images: Blind Audition — Exercising Visibility, 2018, an original photo series for SLEEK
Taken from SLEEK 59.