Pew Fellows Carmen Maria Machado (she/her) and Vitche-Boul Ra (he/it)  might work in different mediums, but both are storytellers, through and through. Machado is an author and memoirist who examines topics ranging from queer experience to true crime and has published book-length works, a graphic novel, and story collections—including Her Body and Other Parties, which was a National Book Award finalist. Ra is a performance and installation artist influenced by Black American dance languages, gaming culture, and more. Both thrive in the surreal and use their mediums to erode the line between the self and artifice.

Recently, Machado and Ra had the opportunity to connect. Their conversation follows. It has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Carmen Maria Machado
In addition to being a Philadelphia-based artist, you were also born and raised in Philly. Do you think of being Philadelphian as fundamental to your practice?

Vitche-Boul Ra
I do. Growing up in a larger city has definitely shaped my worldview and practices. Philly specifically feels like it’s gifted me the wherewithal to blatantly recognize harsh social truths and multiplicities while also understanding casualness and the role of pleasure—the fact that people are just getting through their daily lives. 

Energetically, Philly is “matter of fact.” Though the city can be chill and have a certain laid-back attitude, I find my people from here don’t actually like to dilly-dally, and that definitely shows up in my practice.

Ra
I find that with most artistic practices there are the front-facing duties and doings that everyone looking in expects and can understand, but there also tends to be at least one or two hidden aspects and considerations that people outside of the discipline don't perceive as easily. Are there any unseen aspects of your work/practice that you wish more people understood?

Machado
Oh, this is such a good question! I feel like I can answer it two ways. On the boring/technical side, I do feel sometimes like a weirdly large percentage of my job is answering emails and filling out forms. But in terms of my work, I think that something people don’t get about writing/creative practices in general is that a huge percentage of it is unknown to me. Often, when I sit down to write, I am encountering some piece of my subconscious, or some other mystery. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing until I’m writing it—or after, or never. People talk about what things “mean” in fiction like it’s a riddle with a 1:1 solution, but for me, it’s something closer to a dream.

Machado
Your work is a mix of image, sound, language, sculpture, dance, and performance. Do any of these media/genres ever compete with each other? Do you move between/among them equally, or impulsively, or methodically? Do you think of any of them as primary or first or central in your work?

Ra
Performance is increasingly becoming a bully over in these here parts! There used to be a time in my practice where I concretely separated my disciplines and they each distinctly stood on their own without needing to interact, but now it’s becoming clear that all roads will usually lead to performance. I guess that’s what keeps leading me back to it as my primary practice, when fabricating performance, I get the chance to skirt through all the mediums I’m interested in.

Usually when working through something conceptually, I do process the idea through each medium to feel it from different ontologies. How a concept gestates in a vocal study will likely be completely different to how it would in a physical material sculpture study, simply because of innate differences, such as one needing physical space and the other being unbound and ever present. But in turn, the combination might give me a new starting point for how to approach a body-based movement study.

I will admit though, I am of the school of thought that everything I produce is a sculpture! [laughs]

Ra
I'm curious about the process of how people choose to describe things, what they prioritize as critical information and what gets tacked on later to fill out an image or a feeling. Can you walk me through a way (as I'm sure there are many) that you might choose to use when describing something? Whether you see it in front of you, you're pulling it from a memory, or building it fantastically as you go, what are your thoughts as you enter into guiding someone to understanding what you already "know?”

Machado
Years ago, when I learned about Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization,” I was completely tickled because I’d been obsessed with the idea ever since I was a kid—sometimes laying down on the floor of the kitchen and refocusing my eyes until the floor became a landscape, the table and cabinets and appliances distant mountains or structures, and so on. I had no name for it, but it was something very pleasurable. As I got older, I became very observant about the physical world. (I also studied photography in college, which trained my eye further.) So, it makes sense to me that as an adult my work is very sensual, very sense-forward. 

I also have an unusually good sense of smell, so often I am sitting at my computer trying to figure out how to describe a particular scent or sensation. Or I catch myself trying to parse it in real time. Like once, I was cutting up garlic and noticed that there was a particular slip-and-stick sensation of the garlic juice that reminded me of something, but I didn’t know what. I kept rubbing it between my fingers and thinking about it until I realized it was exactly the same feeling as blood—almost lubricating, but with a kind of purchase or toothiness at its apex. I paused what I was doing and jotted that thought down, because I was worried that when I went to write about garlic or blood I would not be able to summon this thought again. 

At this point in my life, this sort of describing is instinct. But at the beginning I think I just wanted to be able to explain to other people what it felt like to be me.

We asked the two artists a few questions of our own, as well.

What was the first work of art that really mattered to you? Did it influence your approach to your work?

Ra
Honestly, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. Admittedly, I’ve always been a fantasy girl, in love with mythicizing and pure fiction. I’m reminded to manually stretch the world around me and explore realities that are adjacent to plain sight or “actuality.” Though the world in WoW has a rather traditional High Fantasy lexicon of elves and mages and orcs and so on, it was pivotal in my development of an interest in embodying/inhabiting others and gaining experience as something else. Obviously, even in the deeply outlandish and fantastic worlds we create the worlds we inhabit are ever present, which gives us a tether; fiction is a two-way street for information. To this day, I can use my experiences as a Blood Elf Destruction Warlock to inform the ways I move through this world.

I should also mention WoW probably increasingly mattered to me for two external reasons: 1) One of my older brothers introduced it to me and played with me (after we moved on from Runescape); and 2) I was playing it in middle/high school as I was already deeply engaged in acting and musical theater.

Machado
I don’t know if this is quite literally the first, but a real turning point in my reading life was encountering Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick—a gorgeous picture book made up of a series of surreal illustrations with a story title and single sentence accompanying each one. I found this way of entering into the story—not to mention the images and text themselves—to be completely thrilling. The Mysteries of Harris Burdick is the first moment I remember encountering a genuinely novel form, a story built of fragments with a fictional frame story that opened up into infinite possibilities. Reading it, I felt wild with joy, like I could make anything, like a story could be anything.

What is your biggest motivator as an artist? What is your biggest fear?

Machado
My motivator is that I am alive once and never again, and I want what I do to matter—to be beautiful and mysterious and interesting and funny and real. My biggest fear is that I will die before I finish having things to say.

Ra
My biggest motivator is possibility (the “I wonder”). My biggest fear is perhaps that there will be no more questions or statements.

If you could collaborate with anyone alive today, who would it be?

Machado
Maybe John Darnielle? Or Kelly Link. Or Ilana Savdie.

Ra
Ligia Lewis is so cool.