Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 243: League — with Germaine Koh
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Germaine Koh
[theme music]
Kathy Feng 0:03
Hello listeners! I’m Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by artist and curator Germaine Koh. Together, they chat about some of Germaine’s work, including her ongoing project League, and the incorporation of sport into art. Germaine also shares stories about receiving the Governor General’s Award, the importance of unproductivity, and her projects on Salt Spring Island. Enjoy the episode!
[theme music fades]
Am Johal 0:39
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted you could join us again. This week, we are at our studios at 312 Main Street with our special guest, Germaine Koh, welcome, Germaine.
Germaine Koh 0:51
Thanks for having me.
Am Johal 0:53
Germaine, why don't we begin with you introducing yourself a little bit?
Germaine Koh 0:57
Sure. I have taken to describing myself as an artist and organizer who makes work that ranges quite widely in terms of media that can include interactive installations, urban interventions, but I also—in the organizing vein, I've started up a few different artists organizations and initiatives. So, it's a bit wide ranging.
Am Johal 1:24
My first question I wanted to start with was just, you know, how did you find yourself getting involved in the art world or becoming an artist? What was the thing that, kind of, tipped you over the edge that you, this is the direction that you went?
Germaine Koh 1:40
Well, I've had reason to sort of tell the story recently, which is that I went into university as a young person who had a lot of different interests and didn't want to give them all up. And it felt like being involved in the arts was a way that you could maintain all of those different interests and not have to, you know, foreclose some of them. So that's where it started. And so my interests in sports, in how things get administered and policy and, like, questions of strategy, questions of, you know, language, and so on... Could all be maintained, I could maintain those kinds of research interests.
Am Johal 2:19
You're currently Shadbolt Fellow at SFU. And you'll be—you're already involved in a bunch of different activities and classes and things. And I know you're doing some collaboration in Theatre and Performance, wondering if you can maybe share a little bit about some of the work you've been doing at SFU?
Germaine Koh 2:38
Sure. Well, at SFU, I'm officially based in the Urban Studies department. So I've been sitting in on some of the classes there, talking, particularly when there's subject matter that lies close to my own interests. Like I sat in on a class on ethics and urban space. And we'll do another one around housing informality. So I've done a lot of that, ties in with some of the work I've done around construction. And then this term, I'm participating quite heavily in a course that James Long in the Performance department has organized, sort of, growing out of an ongoing project I have around play as a form of creative practice. And this project called League is one in which... The premise of it is we gather community members together to play and invent new sports and games. And that has, in turn grown into a couple instances where we organized a tournament of invented sports called The n Games. So in this performance class, we're doing a lot of workshops around game development and play as a form of problem solving—but also creating problems, new problems to be solved—with the idea that we're going to bring all of that together into another sort of event around presenting invented games to the public.
Am Johal 4:01
Now you've launched or presented League in several formats and places. Wondering if maybe you can talk a little bit about the other iterations that League has taken on.
Germaine Koh 4:12
Sure. Yeah, so we've, so I launched League maybe 10 years ago now, as one of the projects that was housed in the Vancouver Park Board's Fieldhouse program. So I was based at a... I was had the use of the fieldhouse at Elm Park out in Kerrisdale. And the premise there was that we would gather people sort of once a week, and we would just... Sometimes there would be a prompt, like we tell people "bring a stick." You know, some people would bring hockey sticks and lacrosse sticks, but other people, you know, broomsticks, bamboo sticks, chopsticks, USB sticks, things like that. And then, and we would just make a game with that. So it would be like each week we would sort of explore different prompts or different starting points, and it was a chance to, sort of, explore collective problem solving. What happens through iteration, what happens through conversation, what happens through... You know, when we suspend the relationships that we have in our daily life and, and enter this—what play theorists would call this the "magic circle of play," a place where you feel like you're in a protected space suspended from the outside world. So that's, that was the sort of ongoing presence that that thing had. And then there were a few different special events, including a couple iterations of this n Games tournament, which ran kind of like a sports tournament. I mean, it was great. because we would have—
Am Johal 5:32
Sports day!
Germaine Koh 5:37
Yeah, we would have… we had, we invited a bunch of different teams. So there would be, you know, for example, there'll be business teams. We had, you know, a pretty high profile advertising firm, they had a, they sent a team. Video game development companies sent a team, we had—the Double Rainbow Dodgeball League sent an all star team. That was like, it was pretty neat. And so it would be time for the next match. And we would literally draw a paper out of a hat that had the rules of the game that they were going to play. So they, they read the rules of the game immediately before they had to play it. And then so, it was really, kind of, like immediate strategizing that they would have to do. You know, and rely on the, on their knowledge of their different teammates relative aptitudes and skills. You know, who were the strategists? Who were the physical people, who are the, you know. So it's really, it was very interesting.
Am Johal 6:34
Besides just the sheer joy and fun of bringing people together to do this sort of random sets of activity, as structured as they are, what were some of the aesthetic or artistic questions at play in the work?
Germaine Koh 6:48
Right. So, I mean, when you bring artists into play, there's also... Or rather the better way to put it is, when you get people coming from a not necessarily sports background, but from different kinds of backgrounds, you start to understand pretty quickly that some of the conventions around sports competition, they're kind of odd. And that there's other ways you could approach them, right? Starting from the you know, questioning whether competition is even necessary, right? Or else, picking up on some of the interesting particularities that have grown out of sports. So, for example, one of the games that we played during The n Games was—I think it's called, I can't remember that the names are really great. But this one was, it was based on soccer. But the idea was that each team would get to change one of the rules of soccer. Or start to change, change the rules. And so one of the teams decided that the rule that they were going to change is that after you make contact with the ball, you have to dive and roll around as if you're injured. Which is, you know, kind of a thing that happens in soccer anyway, but this was now the rule that you had to do that. And so all of a sudden, you had played differently, because you had to take into account the time it takes for you to fall on the ground and roll around before you could then get up and play on the ball again. Or, or whatever, but it's so it's, you know, anything looked at from a different lens or deliberately misunderstood, you know, is going to produce interesting results.
Am Johal 8:14
Wow, League took on so many different directions. What are some other things that came up?
Germaine Koh 8:18
Okay, so at some point, we decided, we should do a, kind of like, Pecha Kucha type event. But since we're in the realm of sports, everything needed to be participatory, or embodied. That it would be a, kind of, presentation event, short presentation event, but all embodied presentation. So we had, for example, Bruce Emmett, who's an artist and educator and has this ongoing project where he's trying to convince people to dig up the first skate park that was built in, in North Vancouver. So that was, so we kind of laid out that on the field. We had one of the teachers from the Take A Hike program—which is an alternative outdoor education program—he did a kind of like embodied first aid kind of exercise. We had, we had your friend, Matt Hern there. And Matt was, was one of the—I want to say star participants in Justin Langlois's activity, which was... not a series of debates, but a series of armwrestling matches. Right, where, where the debate was, the debate was physical rather than... (laughs) Rather than auditory, right. And so, yeah, we call that event PushupKucha, instead of Pecha Kucha.
Am Johal 9:39
That sounds right up Hern's alley.
Germaine Koh 9:41
Yeah, yeah. I don't remember what Matt had presented on it. But yeah, it made me think that there's more room for embodied dialogue events. Yeah.
Am Johal 9:58
Totally.
Germaine Koh 9:58
And like, yeah, so we should, we should totally book out the Centre for Dialogue here at SFU. And, and do something there.
Am Johal 10:05
Love it, love it. Now you've been an athlete for a long time. I know you did roller derby for a long time, but also other sports over the years. And a number of your artistic products, they happen out in public space, they can be kind of a spectacle in many different ways. Just before we were on the air, we were talking about a boxing match you had staged in Toronto. But wondering if you can speak a little bit to kind of these public interventions in urban space and, kind of, what the, kind of, stakes are that you have in attempting to, kind of, disrupt the everyday urban life of the city? And to take up public space in different ways or to intervene into urban texture, and kind of what the possibilities of what can happen when that happens.
Germaine Koh 10:53
Right. So a lot of my works, they derive from a belief and a faith in general audiences being able to—or you know, having the capacity to, you know, recognize patterns of behavior, think through what happens when those are shifted or changed. And so a lot of the work that I do, it really draws upon commonplace phenomena like situations that we recognize familiar objects, a knowledge about how spaces are typically used, and so on. To me, these are like points of references that are a rich source of common knowledge and common purpose, and so on. Right? So the piece that you mentioned, of the boxing match. That was derived from me... You know, I'm always on the lookout when I'm out in public spaces, I'm like observing patterns of behavior, and so on. And I'd always notice this funny space at the—in downtown Toronto at the foot of University Avenue where it meets Front Street, there was this concrete, square concrete pad with some chains around it. And I think it was protecting it from—because it was underneath it was the vent for a parking garage. But I always thought it looked like a boxing ring. And of course, it's Downtown Toronto business district. And so it's surrounded by the office buildings that, you know, surround this little grassy area. So it had really this feeling of being, like, almost like an arena. You know, and the downtown business district, of course, is a place where we have all these ritualized meetings and even like, a kind of, combative situations sometimes. So I thought, "Okay, well, let's mash up the language of business conflict with sports conflict."
And so I challenge this other artist to meet me at this site at high noon and, and fight me. (laughs) So we arrived, and we had a—we both had gym clothing under our street clothes. So we stripped down to our gym clothes. And we had someone planted in the audience who was on her bicycle, and she rang her bike bell to start and end a few rounds of boxing. And so it was completely, it was—I mean, it was announced within the art world, but the larger audience was an accidental audience of passersby, you know. And so it becomes like—it presents this, kind of, like, situation, which it at once it's sort of presenting a situation that everyone who sees it would recognize, is not going to last very long. Not only if we—if one of us, you know, gets knocked out or, or whatever. But it was, you know, it's not a thing that is going to last very long. So it sort of calls for a, kind of, attention and, kind of, like thinking through in the moment, what's going on here and so on. So to me, it's like creating a situation that's asking for an active participation on the part of an audience or something. We did get some, you know, unsolicited coaching advice from the audience and so on. But yeah. (laughs)
Am Johal 13:35
In terms of some of the projects or games or sports that were, sort of, invented through League, were there some that had promise as a kind of like, something that could last? That you could see that like, "Wow, I could see this really becoming a thing?"
Germaine Koh 13:51
Yeah, there is. There, there were some actually. The, so I'll give you an example of one in particular, that had particular relevance once at the beginning of COVID. So there was a game that we played called Petri. And so a lot of the games they end up being like mashups between other games, where they have, there's bits that you can recognize from other games. So I would call this a cross between bocce and curling. So we drew out a bunch of circles on the ground. And those were the place—those were the petri dishes. And then we had a bunch of different kinds of balls, like two different sets of colored balls. Like one, maybe one was even stones and one was like, you know, golf balls or something like that. They were, they're quite different, they had quite different character. And so the teams would take turns pitching their set of balls into the petri dishes, and the balls represented different kinds of molecules. And so if you had, if you managed to land your ball into a petri dish that one of your opponents already had a ball in, that would inoculate their—so it would neutralize their scoring, or their ball, right. So, and then when we went to score the things, if there was—if they had been neutralized, there's no score. The scoring would be by multiplication. So if you had, you know, three balls. It was sort of like you would, you know, the cube of the score that you get. Anyway, in any case it was a chance for runaway scoring.
Am Johal 15:15
Yeah, right.
Germaine Koh 15:16
And in a way that we started to understand, all of us collectively understand, when pandemic came around, and we were all of a sudden talking, you know, on the street about our values. And like, you know, and trying to not let the effect to run away. So it was like, I felt like that was a game that fully came into its own at the beginning of pandemic.
Am Johal 15:33
Yeah. I want to come back to roller derby. I'll swing back to art in a bit. But you did that for a number of years. You were deeply involved.
Germaine Koh 15:40
I was yes. I mean, roller derby is a really interesting sport. What would you like to know about roller derby? Should I just tell you a little bit of it?
Am Johal 15:48
Just in terms of your involvement, how you got involved. And I imagine you did it purely for the sport, but maybe there was an artistic, cultural kind of aspect to it as well. There's certainly a performative aspect to it.
Germaine Koh 15:59
Yeah, I mean, roller derby—which takes the form of these days, mostly Women's Flat Track roller derby. So it's no longer on the, kind of, bank tracks that you would have had in the 1970s. And it's more like, takes place on in spaces similar to a hockey rink would hold it, or tennis court, even. It's a really interesting community, because it involves a lot of people that are... For whom it's the first sport they've played, or the first team sport that they've played. It's people coming from a wide variety of cultural communities. It's a sport that is really insistent on, you know, having a sensitive approach towards questions of gender. And to the extent that it's, it's really like a sport that has been leading in terms of developing policy around gender inclusivity in sport, right? It's really community, grassroots led, right. Like, I mean, I guess a lot of amateur sports is, kind of, self organized, but especially roller derby is really only that. So for sure, I entered it as someone who has played a lot of sports before, but I had lots of teammates who had not ever done sports before. And so a lot of it was, was something else that I'm interested in, which is like kind of learning, just embodied learning. And so there was a lot of people that were just, like, experiencing the world of sports in a new way. And again, forging a maybe a different way of doing sports.
Am Johal 17:30
And so you now you're an early stage pickleball player, early stage.
Germaine Koh 17:36
I think we all are, it comes to a point where we all have to play pickleball, at some point.
Am Johal 17:40
I'm ready, I'm so ready for pickleball. Yeah, can't wait. I wanted to talk a little bit about—I know that you were an Artist-In-Residence in the Engineering Department. You've done so many different types of residencies. But that one's particularly interesting, because when people think of the Engineering Department, they don't think of an artist-in-residence. But wondering if you can speak a little bit to your time doing that?
Germaine Koh 18:02
For sure. So I was the first Engineering Artist-In-Residence for the City of Vancouver. That would've been between 2018 and 2020. So they started that as a, kind of, pilot project with the idea that that would be a way of integrating art projects into infrastructure projects. Now people may not realize—one thing people may not realize is that the kind of budgets for infrastructure projects, like sewer projects, or you know, road projects, is... The budgets are hugely bigger than the typical public art—or projects that get public art funding, right. And so, the idea of trying to find a way of integrating public art into those kinds of projects was a really tantalizing one. What I started to realize is that there... Along with that initiative, and that interest, needed to come a fair amount of internal education about how artists operate, what would be needed to, to bring art projects into, you know, into a sewer project, for example. And that is, those kinds of questions, administrative questions are something that public art offices do. That the public art office here had not previously been involved in those kinds of projects. That maybe, might have been more detailed than we needed to go into. But for sure, it tends to be... I think it's fair to say that artists and engineers tend to operate differently. (laughs)
Am Johal 19:32
(laughs) Even after a deeply immersive project, it's still the case.
Germaine Koh 19:38
Well, you know, I mean, some of us do like. I think, I have a pretty—well we, it's just that our... the creative activity that happens happens at a different, at different points. Like engineers—there's many engineers who are really creative people actually, like their jobs are all about kind of problem solving, right? But so, to introduce art into those can take the form of like a wrench in the works. And on the, on the side of artists, we're sometimes not used to doing all of the advanced planning before we are allowed to make things. We just want to make things. And so lots of artists don't, you know, they don't accept that you have to do all of this, kind of, like... You have to do up all the drawings and make sure they're structurally sound and all of that before you're ever allowed to make a thing. And so sometimes those two worlds don't find a way of working together.
Am Johal 20:27
Yeah, I wonder if—I remember when you did the project at Centre A with the bottles. And I remember you are in touch with Ken, Ken Lyotier, who passed away just a couple of years ago. We actually interviewed him just a few weeks before he passed. But wondering if you can speak to that project. You've done so many other kind of urban interventions, but that was a really interesting project at Centre A.
Germaine Koh 20:53
Yeah, that was a really exciting one. And I think one that they really still—they, they remember really fondly within at Centre A, because it, it ended up creating a slightly—forging a slightly different relationship with the public than most of their projects did. And I'll explain, I'll explain why. So the idea was that I started out with this premise, like, why don't we create a kind of experimental situation where we'll divert into the gallery some of the enormous flow of bottles that passes through the Downtown Eastside. Because it's—binning is such a—has been such an important, not always recognized part of the local economy, right. So we made this agreement with with Ken over at United We Can, that we would take—for the duration of this project, a few months—all of the bottles that they received that they couldn't give people refunds for, because they were, you know, they were already broken, or else they were like, not the kind of bottles that have refunds attached to them. And then we would just sort of bring—we would collect those in the gallery, so there became this kind of shifting mass of bottles. We cleaned them, and they were just sitting on the floor of the gallery. Almost like this, kind of, like a tidal flow, you know, or a wave of stuff, right. And, and it would shift around like, it had no kind of fixed situation. But at the same time, these bottles were standing on the ground, and they you know, the shape of a bottle has something—has a sort of anthropomorphic shape to it, right. There's got shoulders and a neck. So you can think of it almost like as a, kind of, stand in for a person. Plus, you know, we ingest the contents of a body. So there's like a kind of, it's a stand in for a person in some way.
But it created this really kind of interesting situation where you'd get people with, like, people with their faces pressed up against the window, just like, looking at the bottles. Like really examining them, assessing their value, and, and stuff like that. And you would get people coming in and really wanting to talk about how, you know how, in fact, the bottles that we had, there were actually not valuable at all. Because there was, like, this interesting inversion of, of expertise between the citizens of the street, and the people in the gallery. You know, normally think of the gallery as the—you know, wants to be the place of, where they hold the expertise. But in fact, in this case, it was the community that was bringing this expertise about this bottle—when they would just, people would want to come in and talk about these bottles. And, and there also developed a kind of attitude, or an agreement that this installation represented a, kind of a, sort of memorial to people had suffered substance abuse. Right. And, and so it, it was an interesting case of, like, a piece that was set out as an experimental piece. You know, with some calculation that maybe it might be, you know, could be understood in those terms and, and just kick started and operated.
Am Johal 23:36
Wondering, I know that, more recently, you're looking at starting some artist residencies over on Salt Spring Island. Wondering if you can speak to that.
Germaine Koh 23:48
Sure. Well, the residency that I'm—that I've started operating on Salt Spring, it arises out of an ongoing project. I have a lot of ongoing projects. (laughs) Good at starting things, not so good at bringing them to a close.
So one of the ongoing projects is that I have, I have an initiative I call Home Made Home, which is to start to... It's to look at alternative forms of housing. You know, that could be in the form of small scale housing, housing that can be self-built, mobile houses, like tiny houses on wheels and so on. And so, some of these building projects that I've done have needed to be located in a specific place. And so the place where they have been located is on a piece of property that I, well in quotation marks own. Understanding that our property system is a fundamentally invalid colonial construction. But within that colonial construction, I quote unquote own a piece of property. And we've been building, doing some of these building experiments there. And usually involving people who want to learn some construction skills, or, you know, people who are just fired up about the idea of thinking through these questions collectively.
So the very first structure that we built was a 10 x 10 foot off-grid studio over on Salt Spring, solar powered. And then as soon as we finished it, people started using it as, kind of, like a getaway. There's the people that have the sweat equity in helping to build it. And so it started being used as an unofficial artist residency and retreat immediately. So we've over the years—that's about eight years ago that we finished that—that has started to become more and more formalized as a destination for people to come into. Especially, well, either get away in order to do work or, or to get away from work. (laughs) Or sometimes to sleep, or to, you know, use as a place to go hiking or... You know, so either space to be productive, or have space not to be productive. Eat, have campfires, have good conversations, and so on. So I'm starting to formalize it, so that we can start to offer people artists fees when they want to do things that do intersect with the public. But at the same time, it feels like it's really important to keep some part of that residency informal, so that people can come and go on very short notice. Or that they don't have to feel the pressure to be productive. Which is super, I mean, super important. And you know, you might think, oh, people are going to take advantage of it and not do anything. And it's like, but honestly, the most of the artists I know, and of course, I know a lot of artists... They work so hard. And what they really, really need sometimes is just to... Just to catch up on their sleep, or just to have—to try to find some space where they, where a new thought could enter their mind in between all of the productivity that we're conditioned to, to continue.
Am Johal 26:52
Yeah, just telling you, last night I was reading Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, and just a lot of the themes around the importance of unproductivity, or like, that creates the place of reflection. And how much of our lives, even our leisure time gets commodified and taken over by a, kind of, production. So, so important, it's totally needed. Like, we're all just sitting around the production office here. Kathy's here and she's like "When do I, when can I go?" (laughs)
Germaine Koh 27:25
But it also, yeah, I mean, that, it actually relates to that whole question about play. And in this research I've done around play and what happens during play the kinds of breakthroughs and, and so on. They... there are folks who point out that, that some of our greatest breakthroughs happen when people pursue the, kind of, anomalies that aren't, that aren't really on their program of work, if you will. Like the example that I like, I often use is the physicist Andre Geim, who's to this day, one of the only—or the only person who has won both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel Prize. Ig Nobels are for, like, research that seems like it's frivolous at first, but then produces interesting results. You know, and he was, he talked in his Nobel Prize speech about how important it was to pursue these kinds of questions that seemed frivolous at the time, but that are... Right, that's, like, a really key part of his route to eventual breakthroughs, right? Yeah.
Am Johal 28:27
Yeah. If they don't put any, you know, rules around you Germaine Koh, there's gonna be like some sort of life-sized, public crokinole thing in the middle of Salt Spring soon?
Germaine Koh 28:39
Well, well, actually, we did build—
Am Johal 28:40
That'll be actually kind of fun.
Germaine Koh 28:41
Well, that we did sort of build something like that, because, you know, on Salt Spring everybody has, has a little farm stands. Roadside produce stand. So I thought, "Okay, well, we should have a roadside produce stand." But I don't want it to be just the place for vegetables. I want to be a place that will be unexpected, where the unexpected—where you might encounter the unexpected. So instead of a produce stand, we just built a, kind of, a platform a multipurpose platform. That can be it's sort of the size of a... Well it is basically the size of a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. But it's sized so that it's kind of like a table, table-height, but it could also be used as a small stage or something like that. This was recently completed, so I'm thinking it's going to be a site for sometimes performances, sometimes exhibitions, sometimes... You know, sometimes there's a, kind of, like, a chest that appears on it that looks like a loot box. And so, I think people will understand that as being you open the chest and whatever is in there, you can take. The people, you know, gamers, that's what they're used to. So you see a loot box and you open it and and it's yours.
Am Johal 28:41
Germaine, you recently got the Governor General's Award. Congratulations!
Germaine Koh 28:49
Yeah, that was weird. Thank you.
Am Johal 29:32
I want to hear some, like, inside story of what that whole process looks like. Going to the Governor General's house, like all that.
Germaine Koh 29:57
Well, okay. I want to say the very best thing, part of that whole week—well, it was a bizarre, it's a bizarre week. Because you know, the life of an artist, it's like unrelenting criticism. Except this, for me, there was like this one week where people turn around and say, "Yeah, actually, you did, you're doing good." (laughs)
Am Johal 30:18
(laughs) A little—every few decades or so, a little bit of positive reinforcement is like, it means a lot.
Germaine Koh 30:23
Yeah. Well, it's like it's, you know, the set roles within the art world are such that, you know, you put stuff out there in order for it to be torn right down. (laughs) Yeah, critically torn down. But yeah.
So this particular year, they did—they usually have an evening Gala, that is quite a big deal. This year, because they hadn't done a ceremony for the past three years because of COVID, they gave out four years worth of awards all at once during a daytime ceremony. So I got to meet so many luminaries, got to hang out with Dempsey Bob and David Ruben Piqtoukun, and all these other people that I have that... So there was a lot of mutual fandom being expressed. But the very best moment was when the Governor General Mary Simon, who's Inuk, was giving out an award to Germaine—the other Germaine—Germaine Arnaktauyok. And they just, they just stopped everything, and they just had a conversation in Inuktitut. And that was just the best, it was just like everyone, was just—I feel like everyone's hearts were just warming. We're just, we're just melting in the audience. Yeah.
Am Johal 31:37
That's amazing. Well, it's so well deserved. And I hope you had a wonderful time there. And I think it's, it's so important to recognize people, because, you know, you've been at this a long time doing so many—juggling multiple projects, you know. And not having an institutional position, you know, in a way, like the difficulty of maintaining that life of making work. And I'm thinking now that, you know, we have a lot of students who listen to this, who are earlier in their art careers, or just finishing school. And what advice you might have to, you know, how do you survive those lean years, those difficult years, when you're in between projects? And how do you make your financial life work? You know.
Germaine Koh 32:22
Yeah, for sure, it's, well... The sad news is that it's never not a struggle. Like even this is, like 35 years, I've been doing this now. It's still a precarious life. So that can sort of, you know, start to weigh on you after a while. You know, so I, the way that I've made it work is by doing things that most young artists will do, which is have part-time jobs. So I have been teaching sessionally, on and off, I do that. You know, for me, I pieced together a whole bunch of different types of work, sometimes I do public art contracts, sometimes I do consultation. Artist fees that you get from exhibiting are never really enough to, to live on. So it's some combination of modest living plus piecing together various bits of like, little tiny bits of income. Yeah, and on one hand, you could say there's a kind of freedom that comes with that. But at the same time, you're—you lose a lot of time towards the, kind of, making things. Yeah, just piecing things together, you know.
But at the same time, there's... You know, you never, you just have to keep doing it. And you never know when things are going to bear fruit. The kinds of—you know, everything you do sometimes, you know, has the possibility of leading to another thing. Like, for example, I just had a call last week from someone who had seen a show that I did in 2004. So, almost 20 years later, I got the call from someone who saw a show and wants to—you know, and is wondering about working together, so. It's not always going to be that long, but you also can never tell what's going to come out of anything that you do. So you just have to, you have to find a way to keep doing it. Important for younger artists, you know, that are making the bridge from school to an ongoing practice is to find some way, whatever you can do, to not stop working. I know we were just talking about the fallacy of productivity, but I'm more talking about not losing momentum, in a sense and not losing track of the community that you have around you. Like being in school, you've got built in community, but if you can somehow assemble a community around you as you're leaving school, of people that you can talk to, people that, you know, that you can mutually support, that you can—where you can mount things together, invent your own shows, and so on. That's, those are the kinds of little strategies that you can enact to help you through those.... Yeah, to keep that, keep the practice going. Right? Yeah.
Am Johal 35:02
Germaine, I wonder if you can talk about—what are some projects you have currently going on right now? Or you're thinking about doing?
Germaine Koh 35:09
Sure. I started up a group, a working group, that has coalesced around a project that we're calling Fleet. Which in some way grows out of the work I've been doing around construction, in that I—2019, I acted as the general contractor, and construction manager for the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency, which is a new organization in town that was formed to rehabilitate the Blue Cabin—which was the, we need to give a bit of background information on that. The Blue Cabin was the last of the so-called squatters shacks that were on Burrard Inlet existing in the intertidal area. So it was the last of this kind of community of self-built dwellings, and that was going to be evicted or removed in 2015. A group of arts organizations got together and saved it, rehabilitated it and put it onto a float, along with this new—a new deck house, which I built. So I built the new studio. And then, and that floating artist residency now is moving around the lower—the waterways of the Lower Mainland, the waterways adjacent to the mainland—serving as an artist residency. And I said to some of the people that I worked with, associated with other sites for artist's projects, which was the organization one of the organizations involved there, that we should, we should bring that kind of energy to land as well and start up an organization that would build a fleet of mobile artists studios. That would, at the same time, address the continuing loss of artists studio spaces, which we're seeing around Vancouver, and potentially bring artists production to unexpected locations within the city—like residential areas or places that are not particularly well served by arts infrastructure.
So we have, you know, scaled... we've done the groundwork, community consultation and design processes with the local First Nations and community. And we are just heading into a construction process where we're going to build two of those studios. So one of them is going to land at Edmonds Park in Burnaby for the first couple years. The other location we haven't quite settled on. But the construction process is happening at Granville Island as we speak. So that's one. I've also, I don't know if this is... Maybe it's partly Salt Spring acting on me, but I've taken up weaving. It was very craft based art world out there. A lot—a big creative community, and it's largely craft based. But yeah, so I'm making some woven objects that are sitting kind of in the realm of fashion, or fashion adjacent but very slow fashion, like I'm taking apart discarded clothing and weaving the threads back into new fabric and then sewing the fabric into these garments. Or else using discarded plastic bags and making fabric out of those so it's very slow fashion objects.
Am Johal 38:10
Well, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Germaine Koh 38:15
Thanks for having me, nice to chat.
[theme music]
Kathy Feng 38:20
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Germaine Koh. You can head to the show notes to learn more about her work and ongoing projects.
If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
[theme music fades]