Cat Tyc is an artist, writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her videos have screened all over the world. She is a published poet and fiction writer and is currently a Writing and Activism MFA candidate at Pratt Institute. Lately, she has been organizing clothing swaps as part of a project called CONSUME(S) ME that explores ethical consumption through fashion. Tyc’s latest swap is happening tonight in NYC (see details at the end of this post), and it seems to combine all of her artistic practices. Last weekend, I had the chance to ask Cat about the interdisciplinary work she has been doing and why it is taking the form of a shop.
Cathy de la Cruz: I notice the press release for this week’s event describes you as an artist and writer. Do you see the two as separate? How does this event aim to connect them?
Cat Tyc: Do I see the role of being an artist and writer separate? Sometimes. But not all the time. I am identifying as a writer first mostly these days because that is my primary creative act in this moment in time. The last few years I have been focusing on filmmaking but after a while I found myself wanting to differentiate from the conversations I found myself in. If I called myself a filmmaker, the conversation would always devolve towards film festivals, camera models, distribution models, financing…. All of that felt really disconnected from some of the things I feel most passionate about in filmmaking and making art in general which are story, character development, and directing. After being frustrated in this way one too many times, I remembered that all of those aspects I loved stemmed from writing and I realized it might be a lot easier to get back to my favorite parts of filmmaking if I just stopped and said, ‘Hey, I’m a writer.’ I think creative identity, like most identifying quantities, is for the individual and the individual alone to decide. It also feels important to mention too that in honing my focus back on writing…it helped me reconnect to the literary, or to be more specific, radical poetics, which are at the foundation of my education and have been my primary creative community for most of my life. Several of the participants in the POET TRANSMIT are people I have known for several years, including Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo who I have known since I was a teenager and often call my ‘poet parents’. I am also really interested in modality and how image and language transform across platforms. I am thinking a lot about the story and the narrative impetus and what that means in this current moment as a contemporary story teller. This interest in renegotiating notions of form are where the ‘artist’ sensibilities come in to play. Both sensibilities move towards the clothing swaps as a way to present my research practice. The swaps have evolved to be more performative, which wasn’t my original intention but now I am learning to embrace that aspect. By re-enacting this ‘retail’ space, we are pushing that further than any other time I have put on a swap. But at the end of the day, this is primarily a presentation of the sustainability, clothing, and consumption investigation I have been doing for a poetic project for several years. Some iterations of these writings for the project will be at the core of the swap, acting as the ‘soundtrack’ of the space, replacing the role of how music drives the consumptive moment in real retail space. Performing them will be the ‘currency’ for participation.
CD: How are the daytime shop and evening reading connected?
CT: The Shop in the daytime and reading in the evening are connected in that it all takes place in our Shop, which will be a space laid out to feel like a retail space but where only barter will be taking place. The currency for the exchange is poetry.
CD: Can you tell me more about ‘official’ office? Is your piece one of a series of projects? Were all the pieces about shared exchange?
CT: ‘official’ office is the name of ESP TV’s residency at Recess. It is part of a series that Recess curates called ANALOG. CONSUMES ME/POET TRANSMIT is the culmination of ESP TV’s residency where they have been instigating a series of events for the past year that interpose bootleg material into realms of broadcast to examine the effect live TV has on our culture.
CD: Do you see this as an activist event?
CT: I don’t think identifying as a ‘activist’ has to be the default to identify as a politically minded person. I operate from a space where I believe that consciousness can be transformed by dialogue and engagement but I have no interest in being the person or being around others who feel the need to pat themselves on the back for instigating these types of things. I am more interested in empathy as a force for mobilization.
CD: Can you talk to me about shopping as ritual? Do you think of it as a female-specific ritual?
CT: I am only relating shopping as a ritual to articulate how multiple kinds of consumption are a ritual. Much like how we eat, etc. I feel troubled calling it gendered because we all consume objects in our own way no matter where we fall on that binary. Clothing might not be the priority for all but we all consume something and the modes of production for how those things are made/produced leaves something to question. Clothing is just the object I choose to focus on for this project.
CD: How does this piece challenge traditional presentation? How is this piece feminist?
CT: The viewer participates in CONSUME(S) ME to analyze modes of consumption that some of us participate in on a regular basis. The project is feminist if you believe that feminism is geared towards creating a space of equality for all. Our desire to project the faces and narratives of garment workers in a space recreating a store is an attempt to point at these glaring inequities and question why they have to exist in the first place.
Garment workers in Bangladesh (image via CONSUME(S) ME Press Release; from a film by Anna Troupe)
CD: Is your ultimate goal to get people thinking about the invisible labor of clothing production, or are there multiple goals? The press release shows an image I presumed to be of garment workers. Is there a specifically gendered experience to clothing manufacturing that you’re trying to reproduce? Why Bangladesh?
CT: I am not sure its an ‘invisible labor’ at this point. When I first started this project, people were aware of sweatshops but didn’t really want to think about how their own clothing consumption fed into this ‘demand’ to keep garment workers working under the conditions and with the hours they are expected to so they can stay on top of this so-called demand. This is changing slowly but its still a process because we have to wear clothes and the state of our current economy doesn’t enable the majority of us to invest in clothing that is supposedly ‘sustainable’. For most of us, the $5 t-shirt isn’t a choice as it also isn’t for the ones who have no other choice but to support themselves by sewing them. The environmental implications of this excess is another issue on display here, but we are not pointing at that explicitly beyond where I may talk about it in my texts. The still on the press release is from some of the footage we will be projecting that my friend Anna Troupe filmed in Bangladesh when she interviewed some of these garment workers about their lives. The majority of the workers are female, but this doesn’t feel like a particularly gendered issue. There are also men in the factories and they are also interviewed on the tapes. Bangladesh is one of the primary countries that get outsourced garment production from the western world. Other countries that also get this work are Cambodia, India, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. In April of 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse happened in Bangladesh. It killed 1,129 people and left 2,515 injured, making it the country under the most scrutiny for their work regulations. My friend Anna Troupe moved to Bangladesh shortly after the disaster and started ReadyTogether, which focuses on improving gender equality as a first step to sustainability by creating career paths for women in RMG. In Jaipur, India she leads a home-sewing model called Hunar Revolution to build skills and economic empowerment among impoverished women and has become my primary access to understanding what is happening on the ground over there in regards to these issues.
CD: How did your collaboration with Anna Troupe begin?
CT: We have been in touch over Skype for the past few years thinking about how to utilize the access she has, and I feel like this has also been the perfect way to expose what she sees on a day-to-day to basis and give space to these workers to tell their stories in their own words.
The CONSUMES ME store/POET TRANSMIT event happens Thursday, September 3, 2015 from 12pm-8pm at Recess on 41 Grand Street in Manhattan. From 6pm-8pm there will be a taping of poetic performances by Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo, Billy Cancel, Saretta Morgan, Ariel Goldberg, Stephen Boyer, Alaina Stamatis, G. Lucas Crane, Anna Moscavakis, and more. Attendees are encouraged to bring clothes or a prepared text, but neither are required.
