In 2015, I interviewed Silke Otto-Knapp for Ragen Moss' project view-inter-view. The view-inter-view website no longer exists, so I asked Ragen if I could share our interview here. My copy may differ with how it appeared on her site. We edited the interview down, and had posited presenting a more expanded version in another context, but that never came to fruition. I also didn't maintain a further dialogue with Silke in the years that followed, which is a regret I can't quite wrap my head around. She died of ovarian cancer in 2022.
I studied with Silke in the spring of 2011, my final quarter of grad-school at UCLA, before she became a tenured faculty member there. She was one of only two people I realized I wanted to have dialogue with when Ragen gave me the opportunity of participating in view-inter-view (the other was Jutta Koether, who declined when I approached her). This is another regret of mine -- to be so self-limited. I think Ragen may have even suggested that I reach out to Silke, I felt so shy on my own. I probably should have tried harder, and thought of others. And, perhaps generating dialogue, in a public way, is something I can revisit now in another capacity. I never wanted anyone I reached out to to feel I was using them for my own gain, which I think prevented me at times from reaching out at all-- I have never liked the power differentials inherent in notoriety vs invisibility, and the fear of being misinterpreted may have prevented me from trying to bridge the divide even with those who might be willing.
My dialogue with Silke began with a visit to her studio, which, back then, was a storefront on the second floor of an outdoor shopping center in LA's Chinatown. She had a small pile of tangerines on a table by the door, and offered me one or several. They must have been either from someone's garden or from the farmer's market (no grocery store tangerines were these- just the ubiquitous tree-fruit of our city). Los Angeles changed the way I think of citrus. I don't remember if I ate a tangerine there, in her presence, or later, but I saved the peel, the moment felt so special. This is not a typical ritual of mine; I saved the flowers I bought in honor of my grandmother the day she died, but those flowers and this tangerine peel are unique. I still have the peel, decaying in my studio, almost a decade later. I meant to preserve it in amber, but never did. I had one more visit to her studio later, but otherwise, our dialogue took place in writing via email. We turned to Elizabeth Bishop as Silke had chosen a poem of hers, Questions of Travel, as the title of a 2014 show. I was first introduced to Bishop's poetry, and to the concept of a book of poetry as a discrete and specific object, in a high-school English class. We read Geography III, and I have loved Bishop ever since, so it felt like a point of connection. I will see what more I can write about this time (I would want to say something about the dissonance of an interview) but for today (May 14, 2024), I will leave it at this.