“Emotional Architecture” charts a fragmented compilation of eight performances that occurred rhizomatically and liminally in the wake of Los Angeles’ Safer at Home emergency order in March 2020. The California shutdown occurred on the very same day that rehearsal was supposed to begin for a performance score written for the doorway of my upcoming thesis exhibition. An investigation of architectures of loneliness and transition, that movement piece was devised from a series of scores I had written while somatically researching the psychogeography of dams and rivers located in the Western and Southwestern United States.

Covid has drastically restructured our relationships to our bodies, the bodies of our friends, and the bodies of our buildings. In conversation with this, performers were invited from the doorway of the gallery into the doorway of their homes: a familiar architecture now embodying a limitation and consequential threshold. Our score-based inquiry sprawled over the course of four months and expanded and contracted alongside the larger cultural experiences of infection, fear, quarantine, pandemic, and inequity. Through writing, video, drawing, and sound: the body in the threshold, encompassing the frenetic ambiguity of “in-between” and “unknown,” pressing into the grief of the shape, struggling or finding stillness in illegibility. At the start, each participant was asked to draw a map of the space they were sheltering in. From there, the correspondences fluctuated like water, unexpected and at their own pace, as the first months of lockdown dripped and flooded.