Carmen Winant

I'm Jordan Weitzman and you're listening to MAGIC HOUR. Artist and writer Carmen Wynant is my guest on the show today. Just last weekend, a piece of Carmen's, a portrait and multiple images of Toni Morrison was featured on the last New York Times Magazine cover of the decade. The culmination of an eventful past couple of years for Wynant, she released two new books, Notes on Fundamental Joy with Printed Matter and My Birth with SPBH Editions. That book accompanied her show of the same name in MoMA's New Photography in 2018. In that powerful installation, she used two facing walls to tape up over 2,000 found photographs of women giving birth. Wynant was born in San Francisco, studied at UCLA in the California College of the Arts, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, artist Luke Stetner, and their two sons Carlo and Rafa. She's the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University, where she teaches as well. We got together in Toronto and I was curious about what her studio back home looked like. I've never been one to keep a clean studio, in part because I don't know that I'm capable of that. Like it's just not my tendency. Yeah. And in part because I understand that messiness to contribute towards the greater end. I don't really even work on tables, I mean I work across the floor, which is probably terrible for my back. And I spread images out and I walk on them and I sort of see what accidents happen, like what kinds of images come in contact with what other kinds of images. And I think that if I kept them in really tidy drawers or something, then those accidents or those points of friction wouldn't be made possible. So just in terms of what the studio is like to enter into, it's chaos. In terms of my actual studio protocols, those have really shifted since I've had children. So as you ask about my studio life, I'm thinking about my former studio life, in which I was in the studio for nine, ten hours a day, making things and failing and having accidents and then having that accident yield something, just like working, working, working, bringing my body in contact with the material. There wasn't much foreplanning to be had. Now that I have a one-year-old and a three-year-old and a full-time job, that way of working is not really possible for me. And I really long for it, to tell you the truth. To just be able to go into the studio and just play around and work. Yeah. I mean, that is my preferred way of working. I mean, that's the only way of working that I really know how to do. And so now, to tell you the truth, I've become more of a sort of a project manager, which is interesting. It's like, you know, it's equally vital way to work. But in some ways, I've sort of become an administrator of my creative practice. And I really am aching lately to get back in the studio in a more dedicated way. But I also have to incorporate the terms of my life, you know, into the way that I work. What do you actually want to get back to? Like, what's the actual work? Right. Well, it's hard to answer that question. I mean, it's different for different projects. But I don't often enter into work with anything but a loose frame, you know, a sort of loosely preconceived idea of like, the idea of, you know, injury and testimony or something, you know, and that I've been collecting maybe images that seem like they might tend to that, you know, and I'm going to start moving them around on the table. And I happen to have this like, fabric dye, and I'm going to try to dye some of them to see how well they saturate. And then like some accident happens where they crystallize. And so then I, you know, it's like, then I can use that as a kind of sandpaper, right? Like, it's sort of like, one, one sort of problem in some way leads to another. And I mentioned sort of phrase earlier that I think about often, which is bringing my own body in contact with the work. I feel as though, you know, there's a kind of, I don't know how to use this word, but like an instinct, right? Like a kind of curiosity that I can be responsive to that I can't necessarily anticipate or when I do anticipate it, it feels more stale. Which may be in part, I think, is stemmed from my own history as a long competitive long distance runner, which I did for a decade. This like idea of like, you just keep bringing your body into the equation, you know, like you keep, you sort of engage with repetition, you engage with boredom, you engage with failure and like eventually with a kind of ecstasy and it's all, you know, it's it all moves through your body. And so that's always how I've known studio life too. And so as you can imagine, this new way of working is thereby like a big shift for me. I came across something really interesting in a talk you gave that I want to read. You said, athletes spend only rare moments in competition. Athletes spend 99% of their time devoted to a torrent of self-regulation. What is the nature of this practice? Can it exist for its own sake? And what trace does it leave? Athletic practice not only denies itself of an audience, but the binary terms of winning and losing. It is composed of thousands of private hours repeating often grueling tasks to build strength, skill and endurance. Unlike during competition, where an athlete confronts an opponent in practice, the athlete confronts their own inadequacies and attempt to patch, strengthen, move forward, never quite reach fully realized potential. Physically, psychologically, as any athlete will attest, a life in sport is less involved with the big game than with infinite rehearsal. There's a sentiment in this that relates to art making. I mean, I know you said it, but I'm curious how you feel about it. Maybe there's a sentiment in it that has to do with doing the actual work itself is the reward of being an artist. Is that a... Yeah, definitely. I think that's a large part of it. And actually, that essay that you just quoted ended up in a lot of ways becoming this book project that I'm working on, which is to say, like a full length book of text, not an artist book, although there will be images, which I've been working on, God, for about two and a half years. It's been installed by each of my pregnancies and births, but I sort of keep returning to it. And the idea underwriting that book is that there is a kind of shared practice between athletic life and creative life. And in fact, when I moved into creative life, which is to say, when I became a visual artist, I was at, in some ways, like the peak of my athletic life. So when people kept using this word, practice, practice, practice, that was like 2001, 2002, when it was sort of just starting to come into vogue, I felt like, what the fuck are they talking about? Like practice for me would occupy a different universe, it was athletic practice. And for so long, I tried to kind of partition and compartmentalize those parts of my life, those parts of myself, I think because I was the only, I was a student at UCLA at the time, and I was the only artist that I knew who was an athlete, and I was afraid that would sort of compromise me in the eyes of my artist cohort, that I wouldn't be considered intellectual because I lived a life of the body. And so it took me a really long time, in fact, to come around to the idea that they had something to offer each other. And so often, I can go on about this, so I'll keep it short, but so often, I think that when people become frustrated with this word, practice, it's because it's equated to professional practice, like who practices, of course, if not doctors, dentists, lawyers, writes like white collar accredited work, which so more and more, you know, artists do and perform. But I saw this other kind of opening up to work my way around to your question from my life in athletic practice, which was all those things that you described, right? It's sort of like the private turning over and over and over, you know, and the kind of pulling apart, you know, of your body in some literal and physiological sense in order to quite literally, again, become stronger. And so I understood some parallel between those things. And that's really what the book is about, examining all the sort of private work that we do, right? And how boring it is, and how much failure there is inside of it, and how in a lot of ways, that is the interesting project, right? Like that is the depth of our work, not necessarily like the climax, which is to say, the big exhibition or something in which everything is glossy and resolved. Right. Yeah, because I mean, you end up spending so much more time in that practice than the actual big event itself, that it almost has to hold that kind of meaning. You were just included in new photography at MoMA. How did that feel for you? Did your feelings about the practice and the whole process of it all kind of hold up to that? Well, I've tried. I don't know how successful I always am, but I have tried to, in a lot of ways, manifest the sort of unreliableness of the studio or the energy of the studio, to transmute that into the work and make it vibrate. For so long, my studio was the way that I described, right? Like it has always been this way, sort of chaotic and frenzied. And then I would like make these polished objects to go live in the world, because that is what art looks like, you know, sort of capital A art looks like. And at some point, I just got so fucking bored with that. And I looked up quite literally on my studio walls, and I thought, if this is the project, what does it mean to transmute this project into the world? You know, like, how can I sort of keep the vulnerability of this or its unfixedness, you know, in the gallery space? And like, where better to do that than MoMA? You know, a place where, you know, the most rarefied of kind of gallery contexts, to make something that wasn't in a frame, to make something that was volatile in terms of its archivalness, to make something, you know, that was taped to the wall and like fluttering when people walk by, to make something that can never be installed the same way twice. So that, to me, is like, that's the heat of the studio, you know? Must have taken a lot of courage to do that. I mean, here you are, you have an opportunity to present work in, you know, in the greatest institution of all. And to make that decision feels pretty vulnerable to me. It was in some ways, I tried to talk myself out of it. And to her credit, the curator, Lucy Gallen, talked me back into it. I mean, you know, she was incredibly open and supportive. But she had seen a couple of different installations that I had done of a similar nature. And I think really, you know, believed in them. So I felt like I had partnership, you know? That's not to say that when it started to go up on the wall, I wasn't nervous. Not only because of the nature of the work. I was actually one of the last people to install. And I was looking around and seeing all these like big, beautiful, glossy frame photographs. So already, you know, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel vulnerable. And then to boot, right, there's pictures of vaginas like splitting open and passing life. So it's sort of a kind of double vulnerability. Let's go back even a little bit earlier. You were talking about, you know, you're an athlete and you became an artist. You got into photography. Your practice has evolved into one where you deal a lot with archival photos and found photos. Was that interest always there? Did the original interest in photography start with wanting to make your own photos? Yes and no. You know, I look back to my teenage bedroom and I can, of course, understand retrospectively the impulse intact. I mean, my walls were covered beyond the extent of a normal childhood bedroom, right? That has like a couple of posters. I mean, you couldn't see the walls. And I would just keep layering and layering and layering. I have no pictures of this and I really regret that. I have the same feeling. It's like you just want to see what your bedroom looked like and what was on the wall. And it was such a dedicated project for me. You know, I started it when I was maybe like in seventh or eighth grade and I went all the way through high school. And then when I left, my parents took it down or they moved shortly thereafter and took it down. And I never, of course, thought to document it. And I really have deep-seated regret now. To answer your question, that impulse to live inside of a world of pictures, I think, belonged to me from the very beginning or I ascribed to it from the very beginning. But when I went to UCLA, I became very interested in making my own pictures. I didn't necessarily see so much of a distinction. I took a class with Kathy Opie, which, you know, like radically opened up my imagination to the possibilities of photography. And it was, you know, that interest was seeded in my life as an athlete. So I was sneaking my camera to our events, you know, despite the fact that my coach had sort of out, you know, outlawed it and taking photographs of my teammates and other people who, you know, strangers to me who had passed the finish line and sort of crumbled, you know, were sort of like couldn't control their bodies anymore. Which, again, sort of retrospectively, I think, has something to do with the project, you know, kind of like both exiting your body and entering into feeling so deeply. I mean, they were bad pictures, but like that was my impulse. And Kathy encouraged me to take stock of my own life and to take it seriously, you know, of my own experiences, which was meaningful. And then I eventually, I think I just started, I started taking pictures of other people's pictures. And then I finally realized that that was, you know, where my interest lay. And I never took another picture. You just put the camera down. Yeah. You know, I actually recently for this portfolio for Aperture revisited these photographs I had made in Kathy's class when I was 19 years old when I was learning how to use a large format camera. And I saved these prints, you know, these like 16 by 20 prints all these years. And I incorporated them in the piece. And it did give me like a tinge of longing. I don't rule out the possibility of making my own pictures again, but it's sort of like running. It's like these things that I did in such a dedicated way. And then one day I stopped doing and I actually felt some relief around. You've kind of alluded to a little bit talking about, you know, that experience of your childhood bedroom. But I'm curious about what you feel your relationship to photography is today or what it's become. I feel distrustful of a lot of photographs, which is part of the reason I think I don't make them anymore. How so? I find them too beautiful, too sanitized, too familiar. Not surprised enough? Yeah, I mean, they it's maybe it becomes hard to surprise the photography because they start to reiterate each other. I was telling you last night how, you know, when I was in grad school, how I was making pictures of my parents. And I used to tell my mother like, OK, look a little look a little bit more sad, right? Like this idea that I wanted to project a kind of moodiness that I understood as serious. You know, I wanted to create a kind of seductiveness of the picture, which I could do through underexposure or whatever, right? Like I felt like there was sort of I had these tools, which is a limited number of tools which we all have as photographers. And I just grew suspicious of them, you know, as as sort of conveyors of whatever a beauty of truth, you know, of metaphor. It seemed as though, you know, this is not to this is not to dictate how other people should work. All I can speak for is sort of my own impulses, you know, and I felt like there was something more unwieldy and more uncomplicated and more, excuse me, more complicated to be had in dealing with the photographs of other people. Is that the kind of work that continues to excite you? Like in work you come across? Yes, although I mean, I, of course, have my own biases. No, but I'm curious about your own biases. Yeah, I mean, it's it's I of course, I do love photography. I'm troubled by photography, you know, but yes, of course, like that means a lot of different things. It means that like I love, say, like Leela Dare's work, you know, but it also means that I look for those kinds of instincts across other ways of working, you know, like the writers that you know, like the reason that I gravitated towards like Gertrude Stein and language poets or something, you know, was because I understood a similar impulse of like pulling apart, borrowing, repeating. So if anything, I feel like I don't look at a lot of contemporary photography or art necessarily. I, I find my own tendencies are oftentimes more echoed in film or in writing. That's where you spend most of your time, like that's where you pull most from, film and... Yeah, I mean, I spend most of my time changing diapers, but yeah, I mean, that's the most meaningful for me. And, you know, I find that, you know, teaching in a department of art, you know, our references can be rather limited and myopic, you know, so like when I ask students what is feeding them, they talk about like a very limited number of photographers or painters or whatever that are working the way that they are. And when I encourage them to look at a, like a poet or a filmmaker, they look at me like I am out of my mind, you know, so I think this, I mean, for me, at least this kind of expansive practice just proves a little bit more generative. Mm-hmm. We were just talking about your exhibition at the MoMA exhibition. My birth at MoMA is basically comprised of all found photos that basically line two walls that you walk through. When you put that many images to interact with together, I mean, of course, everyone's experience is very subjective, but how do you want someone to encounter that work? Do you have a feeling that you want to try and evoke in people in it? Yeah, I mean, the idea, the sort of, you know, underlying idea is that the work be evocative, but what that means to different people is quite different. You know, I no longer live in New York, so I couldn't spy on people the way that I wanted to, but on the two occasions that I did go back to the show and which it was open, I did kind of just like loiter around and try to watch people, you know, behave with the work. Arbus used to do that, apparently. Oh, is that right? Yeah, she used to hang around the exhibition. Right, nothing creepy at all about it. Yeah, and you know, what was amazing, I will say, about the work that I didn't necessarily anticipate, this sounds like a sort of put on thing to say, but it's really true, is the way that people activated it, you know? I didn't think much about that, embarrassingly enough. When I was making the work, I was just sort of focused on bringing it together. And of course, the thing that amazed me the most is that people stayed inside of it, you know, in part because it was a small gallery that you had to pass through one sort of, there were two large galleries that constituted the exhibition in this small passageway between, and that's where my work was. And so that meant it was really populated. And it also meant, because of the nature of the work, I think that people stayed with the trouble, you know? I mean, that to me was remarkable, because we have such deeply ingrained sort of systems of moving through work, right? In galleries or museums, it's like 10 seconds, 12 seconds next, right? Like we flow in a certain order. And all of that felt completely disregarded. And there were people who stayed in there, you know, I was maybe there for 45 minutes, and there was one woman who was there the entire length of that time and was still in there when I left. So that was meaningful to me. And then, of course, it was meaningful to see different people. different ages and different genders coming into the content in contact with the work in different ways and probably most of all seeing an older set of women not to discriminate here the work is for whomever the you know the work is for but you know there's a dedicated demographic of women for whom in the States at least for whom birth is a sort of experience of denial refusal shame invisibility you know where either they were sedated or they were told you know basically the implication was that they should never speak about it again or that it was sort of like repulsive right or that their husbands weren't there or you know what or that they were cut open and they didn't receive the proper you know sort of whatever psychological or physiological care and so my feeling is that that's a deeply buried kind of experience to have undergone and to witness it then surfaced and to a certain extent celebrated right made valid understood as important in the sort of a hallowed space that is the MoMA that wasn't that kind of interaction between those people and that work to me was and it was moving did you start making it while you were pregnant yes yes yeah so I had Lucy the curator approached me about creating some sort of installation yeah when I was about three months pregnant with my second son with your second son so I already had I had a child at that point it was about a year little over a year old so I worked steadily on the book project and on the installation until I was about eight and a half months pregnant hmm was making the work as did it resolve any insecurities you felt about not being able to see enough of that or or relate to other women's that is a complicated question yes I mean in some ways I set out to make the work because I had undergone the experience of birth which was full of many different sensations pain among them although not only and I was desperate to sort of understand that experience right to like to come to terms with it in some way through the tools at my disposal are you know photographs which are images and to sort of you know insist on that question being asked over and over again you know the question of whether or not photography itself you know can be a political agent right can convey sensate experience and also to sort of come up against the problem of its failure to do so right like no matter how many times I insist on the image of birth nothing will actually touch that sensation you know so there were these kind of dual and conflictual problems inside of that it was useful for me you know it was a useful exercise to try to understand my own experience in that way you know through the collection and sort of aggregation of so many other women undergoing similar postures and experiences but ultimately I'll just say briefly that as I became more and more pregnant and as I prepared to give birth again I had to stop working with the pictures because it became too intense for me frankly to contend with them on an hourly basis I'm Jordan Weitzman and you're listening to my conversation with Carmen Winant that we recorded in Toronto follow us on Instagram at magic hour podcast or visit us at magic hour podcast org to see more of Carmen's work and to find out more information about the show let me ask you about the book now because the book coincide with the exhibition you worked on it with Bruno Seychelles from self-published be happy and the book takes on a different form where basically the narrative has to do with a combination between pictures of your mom from family albums giving birth to you juxtaposed with found photos that rhyme with those pictures I wonder if you could just talk a bit about how you discover those relationships between those family album pictures well unconventional family album pictures and found photos that you were looking at sure I think that I always had a sense of clarity around the installation the book as you say was much more of a muckier kind of process I only really knew when I approached Bruno that I wanted to make a book and then I wanted the book to have a certain kind of restraint to it that the installation of course doesn't possess it's like completely overwhelming and explosive and you know I had I had these albums that you describe I had discovered when I was a teenager and they had entered my work in different ways over the years I had made drawings of them I had rephotographed them so in some ways I think they were the beginning of everything without me even knowing it right like this way that we kind of circle back to whatever the objects that have touched us so I really am so grateful to I mean my mother for having those photographs made initially and then sharing them with me you know there's such profound generosity and both of those acts and to return to your original question I think I always had the idea that that would feature as a part of the book project and I don't think that I knew that it would be the book project right like that would sort of be the rhythm or the kind of the spine of the book and only through working with Bruno over the course of many months did we both really kind of come to understand that that was the case and still my impulses are sort of to like to be additive we're taking over right I was trying to like throw more and more images into the book and Bruno had to keep saying like no no you have to keep you have to peel these back right because in fact as you say like that rhyming is you know that's the tension of the book that's like the sort of the beating heart of the book and and to just you know kind of default to your tendency to have a thousand pictures in this book is is not actually the right move here so that was a that was a deep learning experience for me and one that I try to propel forward so those image combinations might be the beating heart of the book but I feel like there's two text components that are almost equally as moving and powerful and especially in the way they work with the image and text I wonder if you could talk about how you develop that writing and maybe the tone in which you wanted to have I mean I have to say it really reminded me a lot of Moira Davies writing which someone I greatly admire yeah I mean there's a quality in her writing as well as yours that feels so approachable in a way but is actually very complex and profound in terms of what it's dealing with so the first component of writing is a list of questions that you ask and the second part are just almost little thoughts or well I don't know how do you describe them even well I wrote the text as an essay yeah you know the with the questions themselves sort of embedded in the essay and then we kind of pulled the essay apart into these different constituent paragraphs which were still to be read as a kind of in a narrative sequence and as such they lived both as a kind of coherent essay and also as pieces throughout mm-hmm I'm happy to talk about the writing process or yeah I'm curious yeah well I've always been I don't even want to say that I've been a I've always considered writing a part of my art life and work and practice you know an inquest so those things for me were truly not so easy to pull apart you know and it was a question of like well what is the right tool to ask these questions is it making a picture is it finding a picture is it writing about a picture you know and for me it's not so useful to partition those things but I have found them to be perfectly honest difficult to entangle in the way that I always want inside of like what becomes a finished project you know I always worry that the language might read as too heavy-handed or sort of overly didactic and I never want the language to act as a sort of explanation right so this project was really meaningful for me because Bruno and Brian both the designer who's really brilliant helped me conceive of a manner in which they could be you know laced together so that one didn't sort of behave as the description for another but rather they were sort of equal and complementary parts of the whole right I'm curious what I mean your work has a has a great feminist agenda what does feminism mean to you I've known like in other interviews you've talked about your mom and how she was a radical feminist and you kind of grew up around it but you didn't necessarily relate to a lot of what earlier generations subscribe to I'm curious what being a feminist means to you today that is also a very big question possibly answerable in just a few minutes or okay so maybe maybe let me narrow it down what was it the bothered you about early waves of feminism that you didn't relate to I actually do relate in a profound way to earlier waves of feminism and I think that puts me at odds with a lot of contemporary feminists okay really yeah that's not to say you know movements evolve and change and revolt against themselves you know axioms change I mean I think that that is sort of this the strength and the effect right of something like feminism so that's not to say that I wanted to remain static in time but I have become interested lately I mean in my life and in my work in the power of radical optimism as I see it you know which in some ways belong to this generation before me we now call second-wave feminists were once called you know once called women's liberation this idea that in fact we have to be able to I mean it sounds so fundamental and obvious but we have to be able to in fact imagine a world different than the one that we occupy you know and when I teach feminism now to students you know the art movement the politics ideology the history whatever and I asked them can you imagine living in a world outside of patriarchy they look at me like they don't understand the premise of the question right and I think that is dangerous it doesn't really answer your question about what I subscribe to between ways although I think it points to it there there is something so powerful and so effective about being able to imagine world-building right being able to imagine a life outside of patriarchal structures capitalism included and if you can't fucking imagine it then that's a problem right that means that like optimism itself in a certain way has been foreclosed and so when I look back to yes what we're called the radical feminists I understand not only the power of organizing and you know sort of a collective agenda which we no longer share right there's certainly a much more there's a sense of feminism being much more kind of fragmentary and individuated I also I also sort of look back with the idea that you know they possess that kind of imagination they possess that kind of optimism and that in and of itself is radical what does that optimism mean to you today I mean what is that that imagination consists of yeah well it's interesting because I'm TM when I get back to Columbus in a couple days I'm starting to teach this summer intensive class for grad for graduate students at Ohio State where I teach on contemporary feminism and and so as a result I mean we're here in Toronto and we're doing all these events and in between them I'm like frantically trying to finish my reading and and so I've been thinking I mean I've been reading a lot about in particular younger feminists or feminists of my generation sort of looking back looking backwards and sort of trying to glean from you know the generation that came before and and thinking about frankly like what they're what there is to be gained you know from doing that and what I see happening over and over is they're kind of longing for a commitment to again like not just a feminist life but in fact a new world right like to be a feminist is to according to these feminists like not compromise you know not sort of tidy up within the master's house but like burn the master's house down you know and it's interesting to see I mean I think we are in a moment where there are some younger feminists who are sort of thinking about what that charge could mean now hmm and I count myself as one I feel like it must be such a great teacher I mean you're so passionate you have so much energy no it's it's it's unbelievable well you know well thank you first of all I mean I feel I was reading this book that I recommend to everyone I made mention of it yesterday by Sarah Ahmed as a HMED she's a very famous feminist the sort of writer and theoretician and she wrote a book last year called how to live a feminist life and she said she says in the introduction to the book something along the lines of like when did feminists when did feminism find you you know like at what moment did you become a feminist was it when at what moment did feminism speak to you at what moment did feminism speak you and I thought like oh holy hell you know like there was something in that writing that was so persuasive right where she was putting her finger on this idea that it's not just a sort of like ideology outside of ourselves that we subscribe to right that it actually enters our bodies right and becomes the becomes the sort of air that we breathe you know the words that come out of our mouth that to me was profound and it was familiar I'm curious about your a little more about your upbringing and your mom what she was like or what she is like yeah cuz you kind of grew up around it yeah well I mean I would say both my parents are feminists you know my parents were kind of children of the new left as we could say in the States what do they do my father is a sociologist and a race theoretician and my mother works international reproductive women's health well so I am a kind of brainchild of the two of them and I have two siblings and my brothers in labor history and my sister studies poetry and so you know we are of course the kind of beneficiaries of our parents intellectual you know inheritance and so I feel really grateful to have grown up around that you know and there was never a sense of you know prescription I never felt like I was kind of being lectured to or told what politics I should conform my life around you know it's more as these things go more a sense of the kind of climate that you grow up inside of right what is given value what's talked about at the dinner table you know it's not like there wasn't conflict in the family or there wasn't rebelliousness or strife but yeah retrospectively I feel really lucky you know to have grown up inside a consciousness and I think often about what that means to imbue consciousness in children now that I have two of my own and not only that but two young boys do you feel very inspired by your upbringing is that something you want to kind of do you want them to have a similar kind of experience that you had in some ways I mean you know it changes across you know time and context but yes I mean I would like for them to feel a sense of responsibility towards their world you know I would like for them to sort of have a political consciousness to understand these things that we talk about regarding you know privilege entitlement you know refusal I feel not I don't always know how to do that but you know I think about it certainly what are you working on now I'm working on a couple of different projects the thing that's sort of the nearest in time is this book that I'm working on well the really that I've completed with printed matter and that is a book that focuses on these lesbian separatist lesbian feminist separatist communes in the States and communes that produced in you know enormous number of photographs that now live in personal archives institutional archives so my job in creating that book in a lot of ways was as a curator you know to make sort of editorial decisions about how that work can live in the world and not to sort of take credit necessary for the photographs all the photographs you know have a copyright and have it you know an author's name attached to them so it's a really different kind of project and they contributed a text to that book and the writer and photographer Ariel Goldberg also contributed a text they're really interesting person so I'm really excited about being able frankly to kind of play out these some of these ideas that we're talking about right like what does it actually look like to live in a world without threat what does it actually look like to leave patriarchy behind right to leave capitalism behind like what does a free body look like you know here it was made manifest and that's powerful and you know it's full of cracks right like they didn't survive very long and people left and they got you know jealous or they ran out of money or whatever the case may be but there's this sort of moment in historical time documented thoroughly right about this experiment this radical experiment and so my job is really to kind of shine some light on you know the images that already exist. Can't wait to see it. You and me both. Carmen thanks so much for getting together it's a real pleasure. Thank you Jordan. That was my conversation with Carmen Winant that we recorded in Toronto. This episode was produced by me Jordan Weitzman and was edited by Crystal Duhem. Original music in this episode by Adam Feingold. To find out more about the show visit us at magichourpodcast.org and follow us on Instagram at magichourpodcast. If you have a sec give us a review on iTunes it helps others discover the show and we'd really appreciate it. Happy New Year from Montreal and see you next time.