s(o)(e)wing communal seeds: Marisa Tornello Threads Textiles and Stories in New Performance
s(o)(e)wing by Marisa Tornello.
Clockwise: Daniela Favaloro, Mayah Lourdes Burke, Marisa Tornello, and Shara Lunon.
Marisa Tornello has been creating buzz on the scene as an interdisciplinary artist whose work pushes the boundaries of sound, visual art, and performance. We’ve been eager to chat with Marisa about their upcoming performance s(o)(e)wing on November 22 at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. In this interview with Melissa West, Marisa shares insights into the creative process and what inspires their work.
What is your first recollection of art—your first art memory? How old were you, where were you, who were you with? What sounds, textures, or sensory memories can you recall from that experience?
I grew up around a lot of visual artists who had dedicated their lives to other careers, but would so often come alive when working on an art piece. So, a lot of my early memories of art are of people in my family painting. But there is one particular memory that stands out. My whole family was very involved at St. Rita’s Church on Bradley Ave and this one year, my mom, dad, and sister worked on a big gingerbread house painting on a canvas for the holiday fair. I think I was 4 or 5. They worked on it in our attic, and I remember going to the attic and seeing the three of them painting together, the cold attic smelling of paint with my family in coats, playing Christmas music on the boombox. I remember touching the dried sections and loving the inconsistent textures on the canvas, getting glitter stuck to the bottom of my feet. And when we all went to the holiday fair, I was beaming with pride at the creation my family made, front and center in the auditorium.
You are what I would call a “multi-hyphenate” artist, as your work spans disciplines and media. How do you describe your art?
Marisa Tornello, image by Michael McWeeney.
At its core, my live art usually has a foundation of music and performance art that anchors all other aspects. As an improviser who works in extended vocal technique, creating live sonic landscapes in Ableton, I find my solo work lives in the electronic music world primarily. When collaborating with a team of artists, I love to incorporate visual art as a graphic score and use textiles and paint on stage. There is also often movement, poetry, and theater in these environments. When it comes to my pre-recorded mixed media art, I’m fascinated by mobile interface design, glitch and graphic design, and love to screen record using my phone to create short-form videos that have video art, text, and music. Much of my pieces deal with topics surrounding mental health challenges or seeking community. My goal is to communicate a sense of connection and communication in my work and to widen perspectives and create an openness towards observing experimentalism in art. But I hope that how I describe my art will always be changing and evolving. I’m eager to explore new mediums and forms of artistic expression and am eager to get more experience in lighting, scenic, and costume design for future projects.
You grew up on Staten Island and live here now. How has this borough influenced and impacted your artistry—or not?
I think my art is completely inseparable from my experience living on Staten Island. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I volunteered at the Alzheimer’s Foundation of Staten Island with much of my family, being on the youth board with my sister and cousins. As I got more involved in music and started to compose in college, I wanted to make a musical around two things I knew, which were dementia and music. I would not be a musician without the musical and vocal guidance I got as a child from Nancy Robitzski and Sandra Gargaloni at St. Rita’s Church, and I would not be making work around mental health without the guidance I got from the Director of the Alzheimer’s Foundation of Staten Island, Gladys Schweiger, and my grandmother who also worked at the foundation. Now, all of my work involves themes around inner turmoil and seeking pathways toward resolution with music as its foundation. As an adult, my relationship with Staten Island has transformed. Watching other Staten Island artists create work, like Queer Van Kult, the poetry and open mic community, and the incredibly vast music and theater scene, is deeply inspiring. I started to shift my work towards more sound poetry when I met more artists in the poetry community, and through the open mic community, felt more comfortable regularly experimenting with different short-form concepts. The creators of Queer Van Kult introduced me to all of these communities, and I am deeply grateful and indebted to them. They are creating deeply nuanced, complex work, and the focus on growing up around religion and queerness on Staten Island is deeply influential. I am constantly inspired by their boldness and seamless fusion of mixed media. I am also very inspired working with Day de Dada, which is full of performance artists whose performance scores and mail art pieces are some of the most innovative pieces of art I have ever seen. And through incredible resources provided by Staten Island Arts and the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, I feel like I can have a true artistic home here. Staten Island fully made me who I am and continues to help me mold what I want to be.
You are presenting a new work, s(o)(e)wing on November 22 at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor. What is this new work about and what can audiences expect from the evening?
s(o)(e)wing is a multidisciplinary piece for 4 vocalists, a sound designer, and a crochet artist. It explores the themes of sowing a seed and sewing a thread and how that can be reflected back to our own behavior as humans. The vocalists weave in and out of each other sonically and physically, as materials are destroyed and created again. The audience can expect to add to a large yarn score before the performance starts and see how their choices shift the musical landscape of the piece. There will be sewing machines, electronic manipulation of the voice, live crocheting, soil and seeds, and a lot of yarn. Over the course of 70 minutes, submerge yourself in a textile world that looks not too dissimilar to our own.
I am typically intrigued by titles, and have noticed that your work tends to play with language and meaning: through the use of parentheticals and capitalization (or the lack thereof), by playing with words that may have multiple spellings and functions, and by exploring the material sensibilities of particular words...what role does language play in your work?
I think titles are a really important part of the piece and can themselves be a little micro-art pieces. s(o)(e)wing formatted in this way points to the homophones sewing and sowing and how they can exist separately but can also be the same in their behaviors. I’m very inspired by the poet, e e cummings, and have always found there to be such intriguing potential in meaning when playing with what is expected in language and formatting. It feels in itself an extension of experimentalism: to look at formatting as a choice and to see how it can manifest in ways we don’t expect. I’ve been writing poetry since childhood, and incorporating playfulness and exploration into how words can carry meaning beyond their literal meaning has been a slowly evolving journey. I use words to communicate but I also love to study the shape of words and perform their shapes, as if they were little graphic scores. So, using parentheses, putting unusual spacing in my scores, and exploring capitalization is telling a sonic story, too. For s(o)(e)wing, the parentheses sort of remind me of thread loops, so there are some structurally literal choices in the title.
Promotional image for s(o)(e)wing.
How did the idea for this project come to you? How do you develop a new idea?
s(o)(e)wing came to me after my great aunt passed away last year. She was an incredible seamstress and maker. At her funeral, so many stories of her relationship with textiles emerged, and the way the stories were told felt as if the textiles themselves were relics, living, breathing objects that my Aunt Stella had created and woven every moment of her life into. Then I started thinking about how we choose the careers we choose, and specifically how my Aunt Stella chose hers. Her parents, my great-grandparents, were farmers and had a farm in Arrochar, Staten Island in the early 20th century. They would share their surplus with the immigrant community of the area, and suddenly I started to see these beautiful parallels - how sowing a seed could create such community and nourishment, and how sewing a thread could also create the same. s(o)(e)wing is in many ways a homage to the Assenza family, a family of makers who figured out a way to create and share.
When it comes to new ideas in general, it usually starts with something like that. A moment of observation. In truth, as cliche as this is going to sound, I think everything around us is art. It’s very easy to find beauty and a narrative behind every little thing we interface. And so, when a seed (pun intended) starts to form a new idea, I try to give it time and space. I’ll take little notes here and there in my notes app as images emerge that remind me of the original idea. And then slowly it starts to take a shape of its own. I am definitely in the camp of making work with bursts of energy throughout many months.
How do you approach collaboration? This piece features collaborators coming from different practices (including Mayah Lourdes Burke, Daniela Favaloro, Shara Lunon, Daniel de Lara, and Jeans Gallo). What does the collaborative process look like, in this and other work that you’ve made? Is it different each time?
I approach collaboration differently with every project, as each project has its own unique format for preparation and interpretation. However, when it comes to interpreting graphic scores, I don’t think this should be limited specifically to experimental vocalists. Each of these people I have met in different environments in the arts, and have observed truly beautiful things about each of their art. This piece, as is many of my pieces, I am truly a collaborator in the sense that all of these artists are making their own artistic choices during the performance. I liked to call my pieces “structured improvisation” because there are many moments where each artist is interpreting a score as they wish and moving music as they wish. No matter what, I think I always want to be able to provide that freedom to all of my collaborators. Oftentimes, I will shape the piece even more after I have brought people on board and allow the piece to continue to evolve and change as late as it has the space to.
For s(o)(e)wing, each artist is incredibly unique and powerful in their own right. I recommend you follow and explore each of their work: Producer/Director/Artivist Mayah Lourdes Burke (@mayahlourdes), Actor/Vocalist/Facilitator Daniela Favaloro (@danielafavaloro), Vocalist/Composer/Improviser/Curator Shara Lunon (@sharalunon), Maker/Mover/Organizer Jeans Gallo (@jeansgallo), and Sound Designer/Musicians/Creators Daniel de Lara (@asiandan) and Darrell de Lara (d_rr_ll).
Promotional image for s(o)(e)wing.
What are you hoping audiences will take away from your new piece?
Much of my former work dwells in darkness with a hope of light at the end. s(o)(e)wing is different. It instead interfaces with two concepts that reflect itself back at the audience. I’m hoping that audiences will think about how so much of weaving, of planting, of tearing and breaking and repairing is about humanity. I hope they can go home and treasure a memory they have with a piece of clothing, look at a flower they planted and think about the memories with it, mend a sock with a hole in it, and maybe sit down with someone they love and be with them. More than anything, s(o)(e)wing is about stories and how those stories live in material and in nature.
What is one art dream you have? In a world with unlimited resources and possibilities, what kind of project would you create?
OK, I’m going to be really specific right now. I’ve always dreamed about a piece where there are 100 sopranos circling the perimeter of a water fountain that goes 20 feet in the air. Every few minutes, one of them submerges themselves in the fountain by tilting their body back slightly. They all sing a chord that is slowly shifting into other chords over the course of many hours, with the sound partially obstructed by the sound of the water fountain. They go back and forth between beautiful sonic expression and full body submersion. This is just an image I’ve had in my brain for a long time, but I am not sure how or when it would work, but it’s a dream!
What is your hope for the Staten Island arts communit(ies)?
My hope is that we get more resources and platforms to create our work! These communities are vibrant and innovative, and some of the best art pieces I’ve seen in my life have been in backrooms of bars, in the backyards, and the living rooms of artists on this island. We deserve small interdisciplinary venues on the island that are actively programming our art and providing financial and developmental support in accessible locations throughout all parts of the island. I hope that newspapers in NYC come to Staten Island and review our work, and that the power these arts communities already have are elevated by these sources. I hope our communities grow and that younger artists know us and see us and find that reason enough to stay to add to this ever-growing environment.
Do you have other projects or performances on the horizon that you’d like us to know about?
I’ll be singing with Infrasound for InfraPop! on December 3 at Brooklyn Art Haus! I am also very excited to be a Resident Artist at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club this coming season. In terms of projects, I am currently developing a solo piece called Melancholy of the Spleen which explores the very complex and often compromising nature of Illness Anxiety Disorder (IAD), and how this can be communicated through sound, movement, and performance art. I am also eager to continue to expand s(o)(e)wing and see how it grows in future iterations.
What is your favorite obscure fact (about yourself, art, or the world more broadly) that you’re just dying to tell us?
My favorite obscure fact about experimental art is that some of the most powerful pieces of activist art in history have been experimental and abstract work! Oftentimes, the general population turns away from this art form because it does not seem accessible to them, but my theory is that all it takes is a simple shift of perspective to enable people to understand and embrace experimental work…and yes, love it! So, you know how when you were in high school, when you learned about poetry, you learned about metaphors and similes? How reading something literally doesn’t mean you can interpret it accurately and you might have to study it a little bit to understand it? I think if we were to talk about all art that way when we were younger, we’d have an easier time with abstract work. Because, that is really what it is! You might see an amorphous visual piece or a performance art piece that seems simple, you may even say the sentence, “I could do that!”. But the truth is all of these works are bits of poetry. The challenge isn’t for you to see how easy it is to digest, it’s to ask you to understand context and to find your own meaning, and in many ways, to be your own artist and create something that you found was there. So, seek out things you don’t think you’d like or that you don’t understand. Try to find your own meaning, read about why the artist is doing it. I assure you, it’s a beautiful journey!
Where can we learn more about your work online?
You can find more about my work on my website, www.marisatornello.com, or follow me on Instagram at @riitornello.
Melissa West is a choreographer and curator based in Staten Island, NY. She is the Director & Senior Curator of the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor, and co-founder of the Shaolin Art Party. West is dedicated to creating local opportunities and innovative cultural experiences for artists and audiences alike. mwestdances.nyc