The 100 Day Project #18
Invisible City - The Muses
Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2008
The 100 Day Project, Day 18
To be a woman is to become fluent in the language of being watched and being silenced. From childhood: how to hold your body, how to modulate your voice, how to make yourself legible to a world that has already decided what parts of you it wants to see or hear. Mythology gave us the Muses as the ultimate expression of this arrangement — vessels of creative fire who existed to illuminate the work of others, rarely their own. Eternal sources, never subjects. Inspiring, never inspired.
Invisible City fractures that dynamic. The project brought together over 20 women artists to create texts, dances, sound pieces, film, photographs, and drawings within Tucson's urban core. It was an experiment in merging the creative processes of artists working across distinct disciplines in the downtown of a city slow to revitalize.
The quadriptych form is not incidental. A composite, broken into four — because this is how women have so often been known: in fragments, in parts, never quite experienced as their whole self. Too dangerous to reveal it all.
And yet something subversive is happening in each of these panels. Here, the gaze is not received but wielded: an eye pressed to a makeshift telescope, a hand cupped to amplify or to silence, a mouth whispering into a megaphone. Each image is an act of agency, a resistance. Each one a challenge to who controls what is seen, what is heard, what is said.
This is what the Muses were never permitted. They could inspire, but not be the art, the voice, the vision.
To be seen on your own terms. To be heard when you choose to speak. To be seen or be invisible, when you choose.
Being a woman has always been the radical act.
This photograph was made during The Invisible City, a five-week, site-specific experimental arts lab exploring public space in downtown Tucson. Co-directed by Lisa Bowden, the project was a collaboration between NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre and Kore Press, a Tucson-based feminist press. Through writing, dance, music, and visual art, we envisioned and activated new workspaces out of vacant parking lots, city plazas, and sidewalks. Our laboratory experiment culminated in a multidisciplinary performance incorporating video projection, spoken word, live music, and modern dance on the roof of a parking garage.
I loved being part of this project. Many of these photographs remain among my favorites — and I think it's because of the tension they hold. A body in motion against concrete and vacancy. Softness in a hard place. Art insisting on itself in a city that hadn't yet made room for it.
More from this project throughout this week.
About the 100 Day Project: A global creative challenge where thousands of artists share a piece of their practice every single day for 100 days. I'm joining creatives around the world, and I'm excited to bring you along. Each day I'll be sharing one of my photos — some recent, some old, and some from my current project — along with the story behind it: where I was, who I was with, and why I love it.