Share Hardships: Accord Resonant Experiences (S.H.A.R.E.)
A speculative narrative experience by Emmanuel Cortés
Context
Three key experiences shaped my current art practice. The 2024 Aids Archives and Arts Assemblies in Belgium project, my participation in the Write it Out! program in New York, and a pivotal performance and feedback moment at Kaaistudios in December 2024. We decided to split the audience after our performances at Kaaistudios. White audience members went to another room to do a workshop with my dear friend Pascal Lièvre, while Jaouad and I (both queer, racialized artists) had an important and deep exchange with the remaining racialized audience regarding our performances. The intimacy we shared prompted me to explore this kind of exchange further. I wondered how to make art and feedback into community action.
Since 2024, I have been actively writing a speculative novel in a fragmented and cyclical way, which has sparked a new way of understanding my artistic process. I'm working in a loop of writing, art making, performing, getting feedback and back to writing. This cyclical process interested me to focus my research on the feedback which I find to be a crucial aspect in community building. However, getting constructive feedback is difficult to find for me and others who do not fit into the heteronormative, white cis-gendered majority.
As a mexican-american HIV-positive (Poz) queer artist, I embody a diverse range of communities or groups that intersect with my lived experience and work. My creative output can connect with and be relevant to many different social groups simultaneously, particularly communities that may be marginalized, such as those living with HIV or immigrant communities. I believe there is promise in focusing on community building to strengthen my work, and thus share more easily to a diverse audience.
S.H.A.R.E (project)
This is a project whose title I borrowed from a speculative novel I am writing which now frames my creative process. The novel takes place in the future, and follows a person living with HIV on an almost barren planet. Art works are extracted from this novel (whether they are a short theater piece, a series of sculptures or costumes) and used to have transformative deep dialogues with my audience and peers. These dialogues help unpack the topics I am exploring in my work, such as homophobia, serophobia, immigration, and institutional racism.
The project serves as a protective veil to talk about these topics openly through art and within art institutions. Serving as a basis for critique and rethinking why we make art. It is an anti-capitalist stance, to think about art outside of the commercial scene and more as a community tool.
S.H.A.R.E Novel Synopsis
This is the story of Harmony Wilde who invents a gadget that allows sharing music with anyone effortlessly. Music, in planet SSK-2084, is contraband, as anything creative or imaginative is now forbidden by law unless it “directly benefits the well being of all citizens”. The gadget was designed to take over nearby people’s sound devices and play whatever Harmony was listening to as they passed by another person. In hopes to find others who’d be willing to give into the music. The gadget would infiltrate their nervous system in ways no other mind meld device had ever done. The immediate connection one would feel when the gadget worked, gave each person a sense of familiarity one could only read about in the care olympics era of planet earth, speaking about chosen family, consent, cancel culture and safe spaces. However, this gadget would only work when certain circumstances were met.
Harmony, as any classic superhero, will need to learn how to control this newfound power. Overwhelmed by the experience of sharing their music with multiple people for the first time, it is with the help of a few willing and patient beings that Harmony learns the ropes of this gadget. However, there are forces at bay, a secret machine trying to steal joy from Harmony's hometown as they are propelled into a new dimension of wonder and discovery.
How will Harmony and their friends beat the machine?
Share Hardships: Accord Resonant Experiences
This highlights the idea that when people share hardships, they develop a mutual understanding and empathy that allows them to connect on a deeper level. The experiences they share resonate with one another, creating a strong foundation for mutual support, solidarity, and lasting connections. While in Eutobaria— the city this story takes place in — this is a mechanism of manipulation, raising children with fear; MOTH implements S.H.A.R.E. as a socializing and educational system, through torture-like life experiences.
On an island somewhere on a planet’s defunct waters where people learned to “share” at a very young age. The notion of socializing infants is no longer instructed as postmodern parents did. This was a time in the third wave of the information revolution. Social circles had become shared spaces and mind melds. The 3W’s of an old planet had deeply ingrained dreams of a Network State, this however, did not work on this planet.
Edging
Performance. A collaboration between me and Manuel Groothuysen exploring the making of the device. This is a sound and movement piece. Together we explored music composition, imagined machine mechanics, and the relationship between maker and machine. It is extracted from a scene in the novel where Harmony is working on the device in their workshop. Mixing and matching gadgets from a lost planet to make a new invention that would eventually help him find clarity.
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The Encounter
A Short form play. Written throughout the Write It Out! program 2024. The scene I wrote is the encounter between Harmony, the protagonist, and Indigo the main supporting character. This is the first time these two characters enter into dialogue, and find out there is more to life than blindly following orders.
- Read Cold Moon In Gemini
- A blog post about my trip to New York at the end of 2024 and the Write It Out! program.
- Read S.H.A.R.E by Emmanuel Cortés
- A blog post about when I found out I was accepted to the WIO! program and what it did to my artistic career!