Performing Empathies: The Art of Saya Woolfalk

I’m always thinking about what are the potentials for the body. What can we be? Who could we be? Who could we become?

—Saya Woolfalk

For more than a decade, artist Saya Woolfalk has engaged with difference and relationality as modes of becoming in various artistic projects. Known for her immersive installations of imaginary and futuristic worlds, Woolfalk’s practice is a labor intensive and meticulous process of cultivating characters, building and making material and cultural objects representative of these imagined worlds. These worlds are characterized by highly chromatic displays, skillful precision of matter and form, and the incorporation of media and live performance.

The artist’s exploration incorporates utopian ideals, technocultural studies, racial discourse, animacy, and ethnography; and yet, these frameworks combined do not adequately describe her imaginary landscape in works like No Placeans and The Empathics. While her art incorporates a range of materials and technology, embodiment and performance (often as play) are also central tools for the artist as she considers the possibility of what “we” can become through a radical aesthetic investigation of relationality, difference, and belonging. Thus, “we” is an operative and charged term in her art as various forms of embodied characters experiment with difference, separation, hybridity, and togetherness. Through sustained artistic investigation, Woolfalk explores how “we” conceptualize our relationship to each other through and across difference in the twenty-first century, simultaneously taking into account histories of differentiation.

Woolfalk’s ongoing series on the Empathics, a hybrid life form—part human, part plant—is an elaborate exploration of these concepts. The Empathics project has many versions and incorporates sculpture, dance, video, painting, fabric arts, mediated and live performance. It is a carefully orchestrated and finely detailed cosmology, that at the same time is open-ended and subject to change. In many versions of the installation, Woolfalk—as researcher, interlocutor, and subject of knowledge—explicates, performs, and ritualizes the origins of the interspecies beings in a live performance. As part of the installation, a short video The Empathics, invoking the genre of educational documentaries in school and museum settings, narrates the origins of the life form:

On behalf of the Empathics, welcome. This video documents an exhibition about our biological transformation and the history of Empathic culture. The Institute of Empathy was founded to excavate a burial site in the woods of upstate New York. The bones we found appeared human but we came to realize that they had an unfamiliar genetic chimerism … Not only did the bones contain the genetic material of two distinct organisms but the organisms came from two different kingdoms of the natural world: human and plant. At first we merely studied this discovery but repeat contact with the fungus emanating from the bones stimulated our own physical transformation. These fungal spores circulated throughout our bodies, slowly mutating our DNA.

(S. Woolfalk, The Empathics)

The video offers an entry point into the artist’s concept of “interspecies hybridization” and provides legibility for the kaleidoscopic, interstellar, kinesthetic world that is constantly evolving.

Saya Woolfalk, Empathic Morphology: Herniated Consciousness (2012) Installation view of The Empathics at the Montclair Art Museum, 2012

In querying about how we come together in this contemporary moment, the artist cultivates a mode of relationality akin to the Buddhist concept of “interbeing,” an open state (and an ethical praxis, for Buddhist practitioners) that acknowledges our connection to all living beings (Edelglass 421). A concept developed by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, interspecies is a state of awareness and engagement that he describes as, “To be in touch with the reality of the world means to be in touch with everything that is around us in the animal, vegetal, and mineral realms.” Those who follow the Order of Interbeing commit “to change themselves in order to change society in the direction of compassion and understanding by living a joyful and mindful life” (Hanh 1, 9). Continual change is necessary to grow one’s awareness and practice of interbeing. Similarly, a mode of interdependent and relational change is one of the fundamental elements of the...