Lucian Gomoll is a visiting fellow at UC Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society. He holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. His book manuscript, Performativity and Difference in Museums, explores various ways that bodies have been incorporated into exhibitions and archives. He resists a common presentism and rhetoric of “the new” in discussions of performance, interactivity, and experience in museums, connecting recent trends to ways that bodies have been displayed and collected since the early nineteenth century. Gomoll’s research has been previously supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan University, a Eugene Cota-Robles Presidential Fellowship, a James and Sylvia Thayer Fellowship, an Irvine Memorial Fellowship, and an Institute for Humanities Research Dissertation Fellowship. He served as the director of Museum and Curatorial Studies (MACS) at UC Santa Cruz from 2009-2012, where he organized with Lissette Olivares the international conference The Task of the Curator: Translation, Intervention and Innovation in Exhibitionary Practice. He is currently an editor for the journal Museum and Curatorial Studies Review and a curator for various exhibitions related to his scholarly research.

Project Description:

Curating Research for Performance Art – At the Hemispheric Institute’s 2013 Encuentro in São Paulo, I was the convener for the work group “Curating Performance: Re/activation Strategies.” Participants were diverse and included artists, curators, and scholars from across the Americas, and their projects and interests were just as varied. We took a collaborative approach to the topic and several lasting relationships formed as a result. Gina Athena Ulysse, a renowned scholar and artist, participated in our activities with plans to enhance her performance work through gallery installations that would historically and materially reinforce references she makes to Haitian culture, art, and religion. For Ulysse, staging her performances in proximity to a space of exhibition would add an important layer of interactivity through which her audiences could further engage with the issues she addresses. This strategy would work to resist a potentially flattened bricolage that is possible for audiences that are unfamiliar with the citations she makes, while also implicating everyone in the histories and processes that are fundamental to her interventions.

In addition to our work group discussions, I attended Ulysse’s performances for the São Paulo Encuentro’s Trasnocheo, a nightly lineup of ten-minute performances that were staged in a traditional proscenium environment. She began her contributions by chanting from out of sight, after which she walked onto the stage and proceeded to recite poetic interventions into how Haiti has been systematically misrepresented by the “voodoo” racial kitsch industry, as well as earthquake “relief” efforts that have provided almost no help to victims (and instead make white figureheads wealthier). These powerful performances in São Paulo were preliminary presentations of actions that will eventually be part of a multi-faceted production entitled VooDooDoll: What if Haiti Were a Woman? In April 2013, Ulysse named me lead curator of the exhibition component of this production which is currently in the development stages and will feature artfully-formatted silk screens of the poetry she activates via spoken word, a life-sized “voodoo” doll commissioned by an artist, various artifacts related to Haiti’s culture and history, and of course, her performance art. As her curator, I will therefore be collaborating with Ulysse, visual artists, and an archivist as I contribute my own research in support of her performance art.

The exhibition will consist of several gallery installations and performances, and each will stage a particular intervention into misrepresentations of key moments in Haitian history and Haitianisms. For example, I plan to construct a gallery room that demystifies the fictions of “voodoo” dolls through historical and perhaps ethnographic research that I conduct in collaboration with Ulysse. This section will include bocio figures (or images of them) made by the Fon peoples of Benin and southwest Nigeria. Bocio sculptures created during the slave trade featured binding and pricks that documented and affectively responded to the horrors of kidnappings and other trade-related violence. Such accumulative practices were brought with enslaved Africans to Haiti and are believed to have influenced part of the material culture of Vodou, a Haitian religion that has been consistently distorted in white visual culture as superstitious, magical, and evil.

I will curate a genealogy of the “voodoo” doll by actively mapping diasporic citations and transformations of bocio figures over time. In addition, I hope to include a number of figurative sculptures (or images of them) that might be placed in altars or other important locations, with captions that account for some of their meanings and functions, as well as their reinventions as part of the living spiritual practice of Vodou. The more didactic sections of this gallery will present “voodoo” dolls as racist kitsch that portray Haitians as foolish and superstitious, a strategy deployed especially in the United States, at first to undermine the significance of the Haitian Revolution. An array of images from American popular culture, past and present, will be particularly effective to showcase here, because my guess is they will sadly be already familiar to the audiences. My curatorial strategy will be to show through visual contrast and cross-citational wall texts how the “voodoo” doll emerged and continues to be a perverted mutation of Vodou and Vodun material practices. I might consider including with this part of the exhibition personal quotes from Haitian people about the challenges and pain they have faced as a result of the “voodoo” stereotype. I do not imagine this multi-layered genealogy as ending with a narrative conclusion; instead, I’d like to leave visitors with open-ended invitations for sharing on a board or kiosk their responses to the installations and performances. As the show travels, visitor responses may be curated and further incorporated into each iteration (CEREV’s exhibition laboratory as well as conversations with other working group participants will help me to explore digital possibilities for this).

As I imagine them today, the genealogical installations based on my research, as well as visitor responses, will surround a vitrine at the center of the room that contains an artist’s sculpture of a life-sized “voodoo” doll, pricked by tiny flagpoles with national emblems and family crests related to groups of people that have benefitted from the exploitation of Haiti. Of course, there will also be room in every set of installations for Ulysse to stage her incredible performance interventions.

I will therefore develop in the work group the installations I describe above, as well as other, similar genealogical constructions that will make up the rest of the VooDooDoll exhibition. The 2014 Encuentro will also be a fantastic opportunity to get everyone’s feedback on our ideas for the production.

In addition, Ulysse and I will stage (10) The Voodoo: That’s How They Spell It as part of the Encuentro’s official program. This performance-installation will be available for the duration of the Encuentro and will change every day. It will eventually become part of the larger VooDooDoll exhibition, and thus I will also discuss it in detail during my working group presentation. Beyond the specific installations mentioned above, I will also explain how my individual research and other collaborations – particularly as they relate to performances in museums – inform my curatorial practice more generally.