RESIDUUM: suite for cello & trash

RESIDUUM is a performance/video art piece featuring cellist, Katinka Kleijn.

"No death for the digital native. Every impulse is floating on forever. The plastic has made a home in our blood, in our stool, in our water, in our children. So taking refuge in the dirty beaches becomes an act of resistance. Like having Christmas in the desert. Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate for the Midwestern winter. Another January summertime capsule. A cheap code. A life hack.

Reduce, reuse, remember. A hierarchy of waste. What you can't forget is that you can't forget; we are always taking it all with us and leaving all of it behind. Particle exposure therapy for a half-life of millennia. Every ounce of thirst is a single-use daydream. A problem for the future. A present from the past. To be united in isolation is not really a comfort. This is what happens when you take without giving. The plastic built a nest inside our organs and a summit in our oceans and a city in our conscience."

- Adam Turray, musician-writer (words in response to video premiere)

The process...

First I collected the materials necessary to build the sculptures/costumes through building life long connections with people organizing and saving bottles, cans, scrap metal, and other reusables on the streets of New York. With little to no budget, I traded money for their bags of plastic and aluminum to build the structures Katinka interacts with in this piece. 

After building a cape of over 400 cans and a nest of 200+ plastic bottles, our team schlepped to Far Rockaway. We were able to shoot the whole film in one day and I edited a rough cut in a week. The next challenge was creating the soundscore as we failed to capture any audio due to extreme wind issues day of the shoot. 

Thanks to the Avaloch Music Institute, me and Katinka spent a week at their Farm Residency in New Hampshire to record both the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds for the film. This reverse engineering of a process made it possible for the sounds of Katinka's movements to be exaggerated, tactile, ASMR-like and for the sounds of the environment to feel even more vast and strange. 

Although I was cursing myself from beginning to end with this project, I fell in love with approach and have used many of the skills I picked up along the way in other contexts. 

DOWN (in three parts)

Down is a performance piece in three parts created and performed by Aliya Ultan.

Part 1: destruction and burial of a cello (see video above), Part 2: the same cello dug up two years later (see video below), Part 3: live performance of reassembled cello (to be released, 2025).

The core idea...

One day while I was playing the cello, I realized something I had always known in my body but nowhere else—to go upward in frequency, density, and volume, one must reach downward. A new world opened up after making a point to physiologically experience this every time I'd pick up my instrument. I found that this naturally occurring paradox also served as a kind of metaphor for this particular moment in my life. By slowing down and searching deep within, one may find the core of their being like the burning center of the Earth. In this heart of magma, energy flows with intention but hundreds of miles from the surface. A desire to literally get to the core of a cello began to percolate and then it occurred to me: I needed to get a cello, take it apart, and bury it. "DOWN" presents this process in a series of performance pieces that form a loop. My hope is that this work sparks a kind of curiosity that initiates cathartic healing through dismantling the machines we choose to interact with daily.

Silver Pony (2020)

Abstract narrative short film featuring Webb Crawford.

Transmutation...

I use pink, yellow and orange plastics throughout this short to signify grotesquely human parts such as an umbilical cord, intestines, and the walls of a giant womb. The main location, a car, is therefore transformed into a kind of monstrous mothership that both feeds and consumes a young woman.

Silvery Pony is the first film I created. It explores present feelings about my early days when me and my family lived in our car. 

One night, it was stolen. When we later found the car (it had been towed), the windows were broken, our cloths and notebooks pissed on, dolls disassembled, etc... I will never forget feeling as though a friend had died that day.