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Q: Right.
M: The commercial...It's very possible to imagine what happens when a city runs out of space for dead bodies. Get it out of the city. I can imagine that they had the whole system manufactured just to get bodies out of the urban area.
Q: Right. It's the beginning of an industry of death and of funerals, which is still very present and very elaborate today but is not evocative in the same way that the train is evocative. I could have picked any funeral home anywhere and just showed the variety of coffins and services and treatments that are available for the dead today and it gets in some ways to the same point. But not in the, I think, much more interesting way we are talking about with the railroad.
M: Yeah. I just don't think that piece fleshed all of that information out for the viewers.
Q: Yeah, I think there needs to be a little more entrée into that history. I think that's where it falls down a bit for me.
M: It's really hard to do, because how does one artist think about presenting research material and then go out and make work. You want to use the material but you want to create something new, besides the information.
Q: Well, something you've talked about before, about your film [Horizon, or, Do Fish Drink Water] is that it was a matter of taking in a lot of information, you did a lot of interviews, you talked to a lot of people that don't appear in the film, but that was all a matter of building up narrative for yourself that you then translate, or the narrator in the film translates to the audience.
M: Hmmm. I think it was a matter of finding context. One thing that was important for me was being out there gathering information and actually looking for stories that I was interested in. Just a matter of finding a story I have an affinity with. I enjoyed that kind of active research aspect of it. Maybe the way a fiction writer would approach a story, just finding a way to tell stories.
Q: I think it’s a matter of having to find this sort of external thing that you have an affinity with. This other, the idea of Nauru and what Nauru means in its relationship with Taiwan. I feel that's the way I've been working for some time now. By finding very external sources, but trying to tie them into some personal interest or fear or need that I have.
M: So there's the outside thing and then there's the inside, artist thing. I can't get at that goal post.
Q: You should be able to jump at some point. [Monkey falls] Not like that.
M: I know.
Q: I think if you rush and jump you might be able to make it over there.
M: It's all monkey business.
Q: But, I've felt in the past watching some of your performance work that the sparks were these little bits of interest that you had. As opposed to…well, they did involve research. They involved you finding more information to create these stories that the characters in the performances would tell. But they seemed, I don't want to say arbitrary, but not super personal. Like Moisture.
M: I sort of like words like moisture or horizon. I think it's a pretty big word but I have somehow found ways to connect with it in one way or another. Like the idea of fear maybe. I guess taking one word and trying to draw stuff out as much as one can by making associations or analogies or cultural references. And I think there is something, I don't want to use the word “poetic”, but something poetic about that. Being able to jump across the gap... [Monkey tries to jump across a gap] (forced laughter from both)…of two things. I think that operates within language and visual things. It's being able to put two things together in a seemingly abstract way, but it always has for me a level of humor and a level of poetry.