About the Performance.

Special Note: The performance will take place outdoors. Please dress accordingly. The performance is interactive. For the safety of performers and audiences everyone will be asked to wear a mask within the performance area.

TMR is pleased to present Tulu, Tatlo, III—the first live performance work by diasporic indigenous Chamorro artist Gisela McDaniel.

Taking her monumental mixed media mural installation on TMR’s facade—Sakkan Eku LA—as a point of departure, McDaniel’s performance aims to expand the process, visual and sonic languages, and object-viewer relationship of her paintings to the realm of embodied experience. The performance centers around McDaniel and her collaborators Morgan Hutson and Lancer Casem who are all subjects depicted in the large scale paintings on the facade mural. Wearing costumes that McDaniel created from materials that nod to both the personal stories of the performers and histories of colonization in the Pacific and beyond, the performers stand in pools of green sand alongside newly commissioned anthropomorphic resin sculptures that gesture to the presence of other-than-human beings. As the performers begin to move in front of the mural, a new video work is projected onto it—creating layers that connect historical film footage of American expansionism to a soundscape that overlaps the stories of trauma, strength, and perseverance of the performers.

What emerges is a happening that resembles an encounter with one of McDaniel’s paintings that usually feature a motion-sensor activated sound element that triggers the painted subjects to speak to their viewers. In this context, the storytelling moment is broadened as the voices of the performers share individual narratives that converse with the projected collaged images— revealing the complex ways that charged colonial pasts evolve and manifest in the present. As images continue to shift and layer to the rhythm of the soundscape, methods of camouflage—historically wedded to militarization—are mobilized for different purposes. Here, camouflage becomes a survival tactic—a means to protect elements of our personhood and culture for future generations. As the interplay between the seen and unseen and what is told and kept secret unfolds throughout the performance, an acknowledgement of the palimpsest nature of memory crystalizes—reminding us of its importance in understanding the worldviews and circumstances of communities consistently re-shaped by both struggle and survival.