“I think a lot of artists of color are being asked to create works that are easily encapsulated, for the sake of legible soundbites or educational moments. So a problem with the demand of representation is that you’re asked to represent in ways that kind of flatten what would otherwise be a nuanced or individual perspective on how one represents a culture or a class or a race or gender.”
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects have leveraged open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship.
Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Walker Arts Center, and many others.
Stephanie Syjuco spoke with Darren Lee Miller via Zoom on Tuesday, July 26. 2022
Dee Miller: When we began the curatorial process, we started talking about the golden records that were included in the Voyager spacecraft. They were intended to communicate a story about planet Earth to extraterrestrials via 12-inch, gold-plated, phonograph records containing an archive of sounds and images to portray the diversity of life and cultures on earth. I feel like the images that make up Block Out the Sun interrogate the kind of ethnographic images that were included on those golden discs. I'm curious to hear what you think about your works being shown in this context.
Stephanie Syjuco: Block Out the Sun is responding to photographs that were taken over 100 years ago, so I see my intervention or overlay on top of these as a conversation with the historical record. It was very common for photography to be used as a tool for ethnographic study, as well as a kind of pseudoscientific analysis of non-Western cultures and peoples. In the context of the exhibition, it brings it back into dialogue with how we're currently examining lots of things, whether it's image making technologies, or cultural and political perspectives. I think it's good to revisit what we have deemed historical.
Miller: These images came from a historical archive in the state of Missouri. Can you talk a little bit about what was the original purpose of those photographs? And can you also talk about your research practice in that archive and the resulting studio process for you to make that work?
Syjuco: I was invited to do a solo exhibition by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. One of my works focused on the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. It was one of the largest at the time, and became a vehicle for the United States to show off its newfound position as an empire. The photographs I used for my work were staged in a faux Filipino village at the fair. It was common at the time for what were called “human zoos” to be set up and essentially act as educational-entertainment experiences. A lot of the photographs were literally people posed to highlight their perceived exoticism and were circulated in postcards and tourist brochures. And, to be honest, they were meant to highlight the subject’s racialized inferiority to American whiteness. I spent two weeks going through image files and records in different St. Louis archives. What was really crucial about that process was that, unlike an online database in which you're scrolling through images on a screen, I was able to physically touch photographs. That act of touching literally became part of the work, with my hands intervening on top of the photos. These were physical processes, as opposed to the more passive browsing and image-surfing that happens online..
Miller: One of the things that just stood out to me as you were talking is the Spanish American War made Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines part of the United States at the same time. I know that you immigrated to the United States from the Philippines when you were a little kid, and in adulthood you made the conscious decision to become an American citizen. In 1900 would you have been American by default?
Syjuco: No, citizenship wasn't automatically granted to people residing in the territories the US “won” after the war. There are legal definitions of who is and who isn't a United States citizen, and this has shifted over time, much of it around racialized lines of exclusion. There was a moment in history when the Philippines could have been kept as a territory, like Puerto Rico. Or maybe it would have gone more like what happened in Hawai’i – formal annexation into a state. But for multiple reasons that didn't happen. But because of this colonial history my family has been tightly intertwined with the United States for over 100 years. My grandfather became an American citizen, having fought in World War Two as a Filipino on the side of the American military, and was granted US citizenship in return for his service (which was actually an anomaly, given how many Filipino servicemen were still fighting for their promise of citizenship decades later). I happen to have been born in the Philippines to an American citizen mother and Filipino citizen father, and because of some turn of paperwork, was not filed as an American citizen at birth. It makes me think about how when we say, “immigrant” or “foreigner,” there's a tendency to assume very stark delineations to those terms, whereas the reality is much more porous and integrated, especially between empire and colony.
Miller: Yeah, it's a really messy proposition, I go back and forth between Columbus, OH and San Juan, Puerto Rico all the time, because my partner is Puerto Rican. And I find that it's really humbling to face all of my blind spots, the ignorant preconceptions that I have as a white American, sometimes not being aware of the things I'm assuming. It's interesting to think about the language that we use, which can be really insensitive when we're talking about immigrants, whether someone's “legal” or “illegal,” or the term “alien.” I could use this as a kind of tenuous segue back to Voyager and space aliens. Tim and I talked a lot about the presumptions that must have been required to even undertake something like the Voyager project. I feel like maybe I can bring the utopian impulses of someone as brilliant as Carl Sagan back down to earth by acknowledging that this kind of archiving time capsule project was an outgrowth of imperial white culture. So NASA launched those things to communicate with aliens, and maybe to precede us colonizing the stars. But it seems like the real audience was right here on earth. As I was preparing for this interview, I stumbled across your 2018 conversation with curator Astria Suparak, where you discuss activism, audiencing, and free speech relating to your project Cargo Cults at MoMA back in 2018. In that interview, you told Astria that even in the context of the show in MoMA, with very clear signifiers present in the images, the works didn't always communicate clearly, especially to those whose privilege might have made them unable to receive the critical message. I haven't formed this into a question, but I was wondering if you wanted to respond to some of the threads that I'm trying to connect here?
Syjuco: In reference to what I was saying to Astria, one thing I learned from producing Cargo Cults, which attempted to critique the genre of ethnographic photography, is that it's very difficult as an image maker to counter public perception of certain types of images. We're kind of wired to make automatic assumptions about what an image is saying. When I was working to critique ethnographic photography, I found that it became really difficult if I presented anything that looked vaguely like an ethnographic photograph, because it was too quickly read as the real thing. That was the dilemma I was facing. Another thing I learned is to never use myself as a model in my artwork because then the work is read as somehow autobiographical. People are always referring to Cargo Cults as my self portraits, when they are just totally fabricated farces. And I was just like, would you say that to Cindy Sherman? I think for artists of color whose cultures are not well represented in the larger imagination, there is the added dilemma of the larger audience demanding a form of cultural “authenticity” — and they think they can see it, even when it’s a complete fiction.
Miller: You're asking how we can unlearn to see things in a particular way?
Syjuco: Sometimes art can be good for challenging historical ways of seeing, but I think it's up against a lot.
Miller: When you describe Cargo Cults and Block Out the Sun, and when I think of your project Citizens, I’m reminded of when Coco Fusco collaborated with Guillermo Gomez Peña to perform Two Undiscovered Amerindians. I also think of Carrie Mae Weems’ From Here, I Saw What Happened, and I Cried. Do you see your work in conversations with these projects specifically, as a continuation of their critiques of systems of domination and subordination?
Syjuco: Yes. I went to school in the early 90s, and so there was a lot of emphasis at the time on The Pictures Generation and notions of appropriation. I've become much more interested in the idea of image trafficking, which is not necessarily about the images themselves but about their ability to circulate and thus gain power – in both a positive and negative sense. I focus on what gets promoted by this circulation, and what gets stifled.
Miller: I’m curious about your use of that particular terminology. When I hear the word “trafficking,” it makes me think of something that, if it's not illicit, is violent and harmful.
Syjuco: Definitely. There's a controversy right now around Harvard’s collection of Daguerreotypes taken of an enslaved individual named Renty Taylor, and his daughter Delia. Their descendant Tamara Lanier is attempting to get these photographs from the University, to remove them from circulation because Harvard gets both capital and cultural currency, economic and cultural benefit from circulating them through licensing, reproduction fees, etc. To Lanier, these images are family. We're at a point where you could argue that there's power in images, but there's just as much power in how they are trafficked. So yes, in the internet age when everyone celebrates how easily and widely images can circulate, we should think about whether all images need to circulate, and if so, how can we do that more carefully.
Miller: The way that things are being interrogated does give me hope; but still, everything everywhere is, in one way or another, still white supremacist. It's basically the air that we breathe. And sometimes I feel like anything made from outside of that framework is seen as antiracist by default, even when it's intending to do something else or communicate within subcultures or in groups. Do you think dominant culture forces BIPOC, queer, and differently-able creatives to carry this burden of continuously educating majoritarian colleagues and peers about racism and structural bias?
Syjuco: On the one hand, there are a lot of white folks that are seeking to learn more right now. They are asking others to provide that knowledge, which makes perfect sense given how lopsided things have been for centuries. And on the opposite end, there are folks who never want to see or know more because they've already made up their minds about what the dominant structure should be. I think a lot of artists of color are being asked to create works that are easily encapsulated, for the sake of legible soundbites or educational moments. So a problem with the demand of representation is that you're asked to represent in ways that kind of flatten what would otherwise be a nuanced or individual perspective on how one represents a culture or a class or a race or gender.
Miller: I’ve struggled with that to a certain extent when I'm trying to have my work communicate on different levels. I think you've said this in other interviews, that when galleries or museums are talking about whether or not your piece is legible, what they really mean is, how easily is it understood by the majoritarian culture.
Syjuco: I've had to realize that maybe there are some cases where I make artworks that need to be legible, because they're in a certain context, and I understand that's how they're functioning. And in other cases, I can make work that speaks on multiple valences. It's a kind of code switching, but overlaid on how one makes artwork.
Miller: I feel like we're talking a little bit about audiencing, and about how explicit things are. In Citizens – and particularly the image where you have the gray and white checkerboard, the sort of Photoshop background that is a shroud for one of the sitters – how do you strike a balance between the didactic and the aesthetic within that process and the resulting pieces? Both for the portrait subjects, and for art collectors and gallery viewing audiences?
Syjuco: To answer the first part of your question, that was a project that I did in 2017 with (now former) students at UC Berkeley that grew out of participating in and witnessing protests in response to a rise in white supremacist and white nationalist groups coming to campus to bait the community into conflicts. Many of the students I work with belong to targeted groups and we were collectively talking about how to react and live through this moment. I came up with the idea of photographing students as stand-ins for the anti-fascist protestors who were present but couldn't be photographed. The students and I talked through what we saw, recreated approximations of the clothes the protesters wore, and then posed the formal portraits. That process was a kind of inter-pedagogical dialogue when we were making it. It's been interesting to see those images circulate since. I've had people tell me recently that, considering they were made four years ago, those images are still relevant, because we still see white nationalism rising. The white supremacist marches in Charlottesville happened around the same time, too, and I just remember thinking, this isn't going to go away anytime soon. In fact, it will get worse.
Miller: I really appreciate and admire the dialogic processes you're deploying in the work. And I was wondering – especially for, say, a marginalized student who may be at risk of deportation, or other students who, maybe we're only seeing their eyes, but even so, if they're identified, they could be at risk of being targeted by right wing activists in some way – how do you negotiate feelings of safety? And how do you work with these participants to figure out what the boundaries or limitations are that we want to observe?
Syjuco: That was an upfront part of the discussion, and I held space for that. Also, I don't know if this makes a difference or not, but I don't profit from these images. I've decided that if I'm working with someone from a marginalized group that is the subject or the center of my image, that my portion of any sale goes either directly to the individual, to support them, or to a cause they want to support. I understand that there's a power dynamic where as a professional artist and professor I might gain cultural capital from this work, whereas they'll perhaps have to be anonymous. The portrait of the undocumented woman with the checkerboard transparency veil, she was able to start a nonprofit organization called the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective, and all the sales from that work – and it was quite substantial – went directly to the organization she founded. Subsequently, she came out publicly as undocumented a couple of years afterwards, and she was able to do that on her own terms. She's an activist now in her own right, which comes back full circle.
Miller: What are some of the difficulties of participatory, collaborative work, and using dialogic processes? Or what are the benefits?
Syjuco: If you're working with others, the choices of how everyone is depicted and represented ultimately affects what gets produced. I've had to learn how to be comfortable making hard pivots. I wouldn't even call them compromises, but it's meeting a design challenge, so you change the work to change the function. I have whole other bodies of work and projects that I completely author, where I don’t feel like I'm either putting people at risk or potentially misrepresenting them, and in some ways that can be easier.
Miller: One of the things I've experienced in my current project, where I'm collaborating with people on how their portraits are made, is that it's both very rewarding and very slow.
Syjuco: It's so antithetical to the traditional model of the photographer orchestrating things in a studio, or of a journalistic documentary style where you pop into someone else's life and click. That way of working can feel really extractive.
Miller: Do you call yourself a photographer?
Syjuco: No, I don't actually, that's funny. I speak to a lot of photography departments, and I make photographs, but I generally say, “I work with images.” I think it's because I have a deep respect for the craft of photography, and I'm not a technically trained photographer. That's why sometimes work with low resolution images and things that can be distorted.
Miller: You're making photographic objects. Some of them are large banners, canvases with sculptural elements and photographs. The only places I've seen your works are in museums and galleries. There are certainly opportunities when showing in those spaces, but when you talk about advocacy, is it approached and seen by the audiences you want to reach, outside of collectors?
Syjuco: Yes, but with a caveat. I make a lot of work that doesn't necessarily get recognized as art. I've been lucky, and I'm thankful for the museum and institutional and gallery support, because they offer a very formal, high end presentation space for work. And it enters a certain dialogue that not everyone finds themselves participating in. But then I can do a lot of other cultural work, and I don't even know if I would call it art. It's just part of my practice. I create resources and databases and things where people can access information or distribute / contribute to things. Sometimes it gets talked about as social practice.
Miller: That makes me think about the work of Rikrit Tiravanija, and people are like, “is it artwork? Or is it an opportunity for fellowship?”
Syjuco: I have study centers and collections of zines, like how-to manuals and resources that you can download. I did a project where I was creating an aggregation of shared teaching syllabi so that teachers who are new to the profession don't have to start from scratch.These activities aren't really artworks, but I think they're part of this notion of how things circulate. I just call them all projects. I leave the word “art” out sometimes because I find it's actually not useful.
Miller: Do you think of that work as a kind of activism? Or would you categorize yourself more as an advocate?
Syjuco: I do work that has an activist bent, but I generally don’t say outright, “I'm an activist”— not because I'm embarrassed by that term, it's just that I have colleagues who are hard-core activists and that’s a different kind of work. Maybe I'm an artist activist, or I'm an artist who sometimes does activist work. It's hard to say. Even though I'm based in the Bay Area, a lot of my recent work involves research and travel all over the country, including the Midwest. These projects have focused on the construction of the idea of “America” and as an American artist, I appreciate being in dialogue in these multiple contexts.
