Weaving, Unweaving and Reweaving: A Conversation Between Ilya Noé and Jaime González


Jaime González (JG): I’d like to begin by asking you about Ilya Noé, beyond your presence in the cinematic fabric of Eva. In the bio on your website, you describe yourself as a “former gymnast turned visual/performance artist-researcher, compulsive walker (and talker), backstrap weaver, (over)eager collaborator.” Based on this particular definition, I’d like to ask you about your artistic practice: What points of exploration and research have you built on it? How are they connected or differentiated from the Eva project?

Ilya Noé (IN): Your question made me look into past blurbs, and there’s one from the mid-2000s that stood out: “Visual artist with a scrambled genealogical tree, daughter of Noah and Eve, made in the city formerly known as Tenochtitlán, and continuously disassembled and re-assembled on all sides of the Atlantic and Pacific”. I’ll set this aside for a moment, though, and tackle the reference to gymnastics, if only because I recently added it to my current bio when I realized how profoundly my athletic years shaped and continue to shape my approach to things. These days, I am reading every piece I’ve made since art school, every experiment, as an attempt to step away from the ethos of extreme competitiveness, goal orientation and body indoctrination that I was immersed in as a child, and toward ways of practicing that are collaborative, eco-responsive, process-centering, non-linear, open-ended and do not fetishize individualism, efficiency or “perfection.” It has become increasingly clear to me that, as a result of being trained to disallow environmental conditions to impact my performance, to make every movement look effortless and to mute my body’s protests, I developed a deep need to prioritize modes that nudge my subjectivity and entanglements back into more caring, distributed and co-extensive pathways. These days I (mostly) choose to do—and undo—things slowly, by foot, and/or by hand and/or in co-creation. I tend to make a point of making the messy labor behind things visible, while embedding and embracing error and failure in every act. I’m quite partial to the small, the subtle, the unstable, the ambivalent. Now, regarding your question about Eva, I had been shortsightedly deeming it an outlier in the frame of my overall work, unsure as to where to locate it, but the process of unpacking and reworking the piece has helped me recognize that auto-archeology is something that I have been doing for much longer than I admitted. Furthermore, it is a piece that is deeply anchored to the body, like everything else I do, where it is easy to identify some of the constants in my work such as repetitions, reconstructions, re-mappings, recyclings, reclaimings, repairs, revisits, redoings, undoings… not to make perfect (replicas) or go back to some mythical “original” state, but to negotiate other ways of storying, of being in the world. In short, to make different (i.e. generate alterior ecologies and values).

JG: Ever since I saw the piece, I was surprised by how the transposition of the identities of Eva and Ilya disconcerted my gaze, which ended up accepting the ambivalence between the mother and the daughter, the spectator and the agent, one’s own story and another’s. Could you help us to understand why you were concerned with addressing your relationship with your mother through reviewing and editing the family video archive?

IN: While I made the first version of Eva almost two decades ago, I’d say that it wasn't until now, more than two years after my mother’s death, that I gave myself permission to engage with my relationship with her in my work. For the longest time, I chose to dismiss that iteration as a mere tinkering exercise, an “orphaned” piece at most, partly, as I mentioned earlier, because I couldn’t see how it “fit” with the medium and mode of working I was busy in/with at the time, which involved sculptural installations that were becoming more process-based and what I term site-particular. Looking back, though, I suspect that the main reason I dismissed it is that the topic spooked me: it felt way too personal at best, and an operation in navel-gazing—quite literally—at worst. I find it telling, though, that one of the projects I was developing at the time also foregrounded the family archive and an aspect of my relationship with my father, but that one did not give me any pause. It consisted of building three-dimensional structures based on drawings of houses I made as a child on my father’s stationery and which my mother safeguarded for many years (my dad is an architect and I grew up planning to follow in his footsteps, but ended up going to art school instead). At some point during this time, while pursuing my MFA, I decided to experiment with video, so when I came across the box of Super-8 films while on a holiday trip back home, I didn’t think twice about reclaiming that material and using it to teach myself editing software. Perhaps of note is that I digitized it by throwing the projections on a wall without even trying to clean them. Full-on “rascuache bootlegger” mode. The themes of the transference of identities, transposition of familial roles and oscillation between entanglement and estrangement emerged during the cutting process. They sneaked up on me. I managed to shoo them away after wrapping up that first version, but with my mom’s death in the fall of 2020, I finally gave in to them and I now find myself stitching and restitching further tellings of the story of my mother and exploring the (im)possibility of “reassembling” her genome.

JG: I feel it’s important to turn our attention to autonarration and the effects it has on narrative conventions. In this sense, the characters reach toward entities that escape their interpersonal scale. What implications have emerged from searching for identity through your family history? How have you addressed this concern in your research?

IN: When my mother passed away at the height of the pandemic, I was unable to fly home to Mexico to be with my family due to being bedbound with Long COVID. This propelled me in a myriad of unexpected directions, the first of which was/is autobiographical performance work, something which I’d always been fiercely biased against. I also began to build a family tree—yet another thing I was sure I’d never do, as I have always dismissed genealogical research as reproductive of patriarchal and colonial structures. I approached it rather tentatively in the beginning, but then with hungry vigor as the records I kept finding reminded me of (and rebodied me with) all the family stories that she shared and I never had the good sense to write down. Suddenly I was spending time with my kin after all—albeit the dead ones—resurfacing their pathways, many of which were violently intersected by the Conquest, the Inquisition, countless wars… I also started weaving and unweaving on a small frame loom similar to the ones I remember my mother used when I was a child, and which I stubbornly refused to let her teach me to play with. To my dismay and delight and solace and distress, I found myself morphing into my mother and coming closer to her than I ever did while she was still alive, which ultimately confronted me with—among other things—the internalized sexism, racism and ableism I’ve long been harboring. Later, guided by the results of a mitochondrial DNA test, I decided I needed to learn to weave on a backstrap loom. That new practice, this ancient technology, is further changing the way that I see myself, my mother, my body, my family, ourselves, our mothers, our bodies, our families, our lineages, our shared histories.

JG: This version of Eva is different than the original piece from 2004. Due to the incompatibility of files and editing programs, you reconstructed an almost identical video to the one from 2004, yet it is not the same piece. When we discussed this process, Penelope came to mind, weaving and unweaving the same shroud over and over as a careful strategy to stop time. What new implications arose from the performative act of reconstructing a video from its fragments?

IN: I’ve been thinking that maybe Penelope is not so much trying to stop time as much as she’s trying to keep Odysseus alive. As she is weaving the shroud and drawing nearer to finishing it (and thus having to remarry), it is as if she’s burying her husband, but when she is unweaving it, she is reviving him. There’s a Native American creation story that describes a similar operation to Penelope’s. It’s the tale of a woman weaving a blanket while her dinner is cooking in a pot over a fire. Every time the soup boils over, she turns her back away from the loom to attend to it. At that moment, her dog gets up and proceeds to completely unravel her work. When she sees what has happened, she simply starts all over again without missing a beat. The story goes that this scene has been going on forever and it is said that if the dog would ever fail to unravel the blanket, allowing the woman to finish it, the world would end. So it’s a (re)creation story. As I relay these tales, I realize that I am not done with this process and it is certainly not done with me, and so it is not three but at least four or even five temporalities—plus multiple distinct materialities—coalescing in this matryoshka-like new iteration of Eva. In addition to five decades ago, two decades ago and the current moment in which I am putting back into rotation a record of my recording of a record, the moment of my mother’s death is also present, having changed the piece before I even set out to rework it, as well as a projection—or series of projections—into the future. A future in which I keep embracing all the dust and scratches, and continue to make space for the process to remain open to the emergence of new delays, overlays, iterations and incarnations. I guess this is my (other) way to try to keep my mother(’s memory) alive…