By John Dean Alfone

       Kirsha Kaechele is an American contemporary art curator and artist who lives in the 8th Ward. A native of California who was also raised in Asia, she moved to New Orleans to found Life is Art Foundation | KKProjects (http://www.kkprojects.org/). Interviewed in several national and international magazines and publications, she has become a face of the avant-garde New Orleans arts and cultural Renaissance.
       Kaechele's current work includes a land art exhibition of an acre and a half living sugar cane sculpture in Theriot, (rural) Louisiana, by Norwegian artist Anne Senstad. For this year’s Voodoo Experience, it has been announced that she will debut a series of large scale, interactive art installations throughout the City Park venue where the festival is held annually.
        Where Yat Magazine recently talked to Kaechele about her involvement with site-specific art installation in general and her work at this year’s VoodooFest.

WYAT:   How did you come into contact with Stephen Rehage (AKA "Rehage") about curating an outdoor sculpture exhibition at Voodoo Experience? Why an outdoor sculpture show and why now? Please talk about the themes that will be covered and how they will be embodied by sculptors whom we should know about.

Kirsha Kaechele:  Rehage.  He he... I met the legendary character at a dinner the night before-and normally I don’t bring this up- the big hurricane.  There were twelve of us at Brad Adam’s boathouse having a feast, and at about one in the morning, Rehage, a stranger then, made an announcement: “This dinner, all of this- is great, this house is beautiful, but I have news for you- it’s all going down.”  At that point he walked into Brad’s wine cellar and began pulling out armfuls of the finest, most irreplaceable bottles and opening them.  It was a true playing-the-fiddle-as-the-ship-goes-down scene- something I enjoy very much.  
    Then, he attended our last Life is Art Foundation (formerly KKProjects) feast for the Biennial. We had a three hundred foot long table with water and fire by Dawn Dedeaux running down the center of the street, and the abandoned houses all illuminated with art installations.  He said,  “You are crazy! How can this even exist? You have to bring this to Voodoo!” 
    As for themes… Well, as usual, the exhibition is organizing itself.  I apply the Duchampian method of engaging chance to curating, so I can’t tell you exactly what the themes are yet, though we have some good clues. One might think this results in a willy-nilly mess of unrelated installations, but I believe the exhibition comes into form through a process of attraction and coincidence and is a reflection of one’s current, largely unconscious mind. 
    What is happening in that mind?  Well, judging so far, it looks like we are dealing with themes like:  The Ongoing Triumph of the Nonlinear over the Rational, Ecology and Symbiosis, The Dissolution of Individual Senses, The Absurdity of Constructed Reality, and The Essential Connectedness of the Technological Vanguard and Traditional Native Methods.  In this sense we have a very cohesive show and one far more delicate and complex than my conscious mind could have come up with.



WYAT:   Will the City Park sculptures and installations resemble the work of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude perhaps best-known for "The Gates" exhibit in New York City's Central Park (7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels that ran 23 miles)?  If not, will the sculptures be more in line with the untitled outdoor concrete Donald Judd sculptures found at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas or with New York City's Socrates Sculpture Garden with its myriad of outdoor sculptures that seem somewhat unrelated to each other at least thematically?

KK:  Well, if I had my way the whole world would look like Judd’s Marfa installation, so let’s thank goodness I don’t. Because we create site-specific art, the artists and I had to embrace as context the qualities of the festival- a very avant-garde set of conditions from my perspective.  I was so intimidated by my own ideas about appropriateness that I almost could not do the project. Then I realized that art belongs exactly where you think it doesn’t, and I began to get very excited about the idea of the raucous festival environment as medium. Some of the artists were shocked at first by the idea of moving out of sanctioned zones of contemporary art, but then became very interested in the challenge of the festival context. The work also engages the natural landscape of City Park, which in itself is inspiring, and encourages conversation with the long-term elements of nature as well as the frenetic energy of the festival.  
    The result is a wide range of scale and mediums, unified by the sensitivity with which they engage the park and festival, and the desire to elevate the human from ordinary experience.
    Art that destroys mundane experience turns us into children again.  And that is what I am doing, making a show for big babies!  I want to be a big baby, to experience everything for the first time.  And in the precious few moments when I have had the opportunity to be one with friends, I’ve learned that they too want to be babies.  We all want to rediscover the world as if for the first time.  So you can see we are working with very strict curatorial parameters.
    Beyond the Chinati Foundation, Burning Man has been a great inspiration for this exhibition, and many of our artists have a history there.
 


WYAT:  Can you please tell us more about Hammock Mother, a giant hammock constructed to hold 30 festival-goers currently being woven by the Zapara tribe in the remote upper Amazon- an indigenous, shamanic culture battling extinction. How is their struggle our struggle? How is the idea of a giant hammock outdoors a metaphor for Americans battling for cleaner air, water, sustainable energy sources and simply freedom?

KK:  The artist, Daphne Park, and I share an appreciation for the Amazonians and both spent time working and taking ayahuasca with them.  Hammock Mother represents a continuum of Park’s work, which is essentially her effort to bring their way of seeing and understanding to a western audience using contemporary art language.  From this perspective, reverence for the environment and appreciation for sustainable systems simply follow- when one is aware of life’s interconnectivity, each action is performed with awareness. 
   The Zaparas are not just weaving a hammock, they are putting their healing songs and intentions into it. Through her collaboration with the weavers, Park is healing the Voodoo Experience goers by bringing physical expression of shamanic work, performed by the Zaparas especially for this audience, to the event.  And at the same time she is bringing awareness and assistance to a people who in recent years have seen their numbers dwindle from 20,000 to 350. 
    To answer your question, in a sense our challenges and theirs are inverse- we gain possessions and material power and suffer from a lack of connectivity to each other and the land; they lose land but hold connectivity.  This is part of why collaboration makes so much sense- it is symbiotic.  Meanwhile, we both face the challenge of seeing past ourselves, past all our material pursuits and surface distractions, into the heart of life.  They have ayahuasca to help; we have music and art.      


WYAT: The piece Illusion is a field of very large balloons, some floating and some at ground level, with lighting programmed within them to respond to sound.  As we move toward a more technologically-advanced society, how do art pieces like this put us back in touch with the essential experience of the universe?

KK:  It is very simple. When we witness something that does not belong in the normal program of life we are free.  Expectations are a veil that must be lifted to experience the vastness of life- of life on earth, of earth in the solar system, the solar system in the universe.  Perhaps because we are unable to keep pace with our own inventions, creatively applied technology offers an excellent way to awe the human mind.  It is a great medium if these are your goals, and a natural medium for the festival environment in general.  The philosophical underpinnings of the piece are universal, and though the medium is entirely different, it shares its conceptual basis with Hammock Mother.

WYAT:  Any particular VoodooFest acts you are personally looking forward to? Will you be amongst the legion of admirers waiting backstage for Gene Simmons after his VoodooFest debut? Being a native Californian, are you more aligned with Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine? Or, being a resident of the 9th Ward will you be supporting fellow 9th Ward residents Quintron and Miss Pussycat?

KK:  Well first of all, I am a resident of the 8th ward. But Quintron and Miss Pussycat have never held that against me.  I am always most excited to see them, as I’ve been a back up dancer / maraca shaker for them over the years. Then there is Justice.  I am very excited about their show as I spent, along with Aimée Toledano (my beloved colleague who put the Justice bug in Rehage’s ear) last New Year’s eve in the snow creating elaborate routines to their remix of Electric Feel on 100 play repeat.  Finally, there will always be a special place in my heart for Perry Ferrell.  We used to create art installations in Los Angeles.  In fact, he is how I got my start with site-specific installation work.