I was exploring the idea of choreographing my own wasp dance when I was turned on to the work of interdisciplinary artist, aricoco (Ari Tabei), by my mentor and artist, Iviva Olenick. aricoco too, for different reasons, has a lifelong fascination with insect communities. Her current project, PIPORNOT[1], which explores division of labor within communities was under development when she let me interview her. The day we spoke also happened to be November 4, 2020, the day after Presidential Election Day, when we were still anxiously checking our phones for any news of results.
Ariyeh: I read that in your work, you like to include references back to rituals you did as a child about running away. Can you tell me about that?
aricoco: Oh, because I do performance work, my performance is based on reviving my ritualistic play when I was a kid. I needed to run away from home, but not in a sense that, I don’t know, I would just go outside and escape from the drama, the house. I always go back to that and I feel like I’m still doing that. I ran away from my country; that’s the biggest runaway act.
Ariyeh: I just thought that’s very relatable because a lot of people have a version of that childhood ritual and I wondered if that is why you return to it or is it more related to your interest in disaster readiness and temporary communities for survival?
aricoco: I think because it’s my way of nesting, cocooning and then making my own encasing, and then the ritual part is to make my surroundings accommodated to my own existence. That’s the key thing, but why I always do that, I don’t know. I think it’s because when I was trying to survive every day [as a kid], that’s just the same thing I’m doing now. I work with different materials, but the ritual stays the same, I am always being the girl who was performing run away.
Ariyeh: It’s like an anchor point for your work that expresses itself in many ways.
aricoco: Yeah, and then the insect [interest] came because of my phobia, and because I had a, you know, not pleasant relationship with my father. This fear for insect kind of overlaps with my fear for my dad. Yeah, it was a typical…hierarchical relationship. So, this anxiety or fear, it kind of comes back and haunts me in my nightmares, so I always have a night terror. It’s always about insects, giant insects coming after me.
Ariyeh: So, is it the fear, itself, that has made this parallel between your dad and insects?
aricoco: It’s because he’s like the scariest person in my life, but also was the one who could protect me from the insect. It’s a contradiction, always.
Ariyeh: Oh, but that’s so true, isn’t it? It’s like that paradigm of the protector and the scary one. I totally connect to that with my dad because he was violent, but he was also the one who checked under my bed at night to make sure there were no witches.
aricoco: Yeah, but the power – he can protect me. He wanted to show that to me all the time. I’m so afraid of even little bugs. If you put me in the same room with a small bug, I couldn’t do anything. You know if you’re afraid of something that’s all you think about. Eighty percent of the time, I’m thinking about them. [both laugh] So, for me, investigating an insect is not…you know, some people think that I’m doing this for therapy. It’s not. For me, it’s just an acknowledgment of my fear. I never want to try to overcome it because this is part of me. I always tell people that there’s nothing wrong with me…I can live with fear.
Ariyeh: I love that.
aricoco: Yeah, but it makes me realize how important that life itself is because for me, a little insect threatens my entire existence. We’re like, equal. I don’t underestimate them. We are like that little bug; we’re surviving at this moment. I’m not superior to them, that’s what I’m saying, I think.
Ariyeh: Acknowledging fear and also maybe acknowledging we can learn from this tiny animal?
aricoco: Yeah, yeah. Learning it’s like an acknowledgement in that way too, really. Then I found there’s a social insect, and my name, Ari, in Japanese is like Ari – ant, but it’s a totally different Chinese character, but so ironic.
Ariyeh: Was learning about these social insects, then, how you went from making your own home to making a home with a community, in a colony. I’m thinking of the documentation I’ve seen of Furoshiki (see figure below) where people are cocooning as a collective in a cocoon that you have made, which also gets at the element of the sculptural garments in your work.
aricoco: Right, right. That was the first time I collaborated with other people. It started with me encasing or nesting. Actually, making clothing was the only thing I could do when I started making art, but also my very first piece was about running away from home. I made a little runway bag as a sculpture piece, and then transitioned to the sculpture garment. So, I’m becoming a bug making encasing and the clothing is a manifestation.
Ariyeh: Yeah, and I’ve heard you refer to these bags as nests, right?
aricoco: Yeah, that was the idea in the first place. The bag was a nest…my own home, but after I learned more about the social insect, oh, I need a colony, and then each “human ant” his own role to play in the colony to make a temporary community. That just coincided with the time of the natural disaster that happened in Japan, and then how do you form a community, temporary community, in an emergency situation?
Ariyeh: There’s a website, 80000hours.org, and they have this method of calculating the most important global causes we can devote our time to. One of their priorities is global catastrophic risks.[2]
aricoco: Yeah, growing up in Japan, disaster preparedness is the core of our daily lives, and then I read about this ant colony. Interesting thing is, they all have different roles – like the forager forages, but then when an emergency situation happens and the nest is being attacked, they start to shift roles and there’s always these stimuli outside and change happening and that is shaping how the colonies are structured.
Ariyeh: And they’re adapting to the good of everyone, not just their personal good. That’s what amazed me about the experience that I told you about of trying to relocate the wasps. I was so ready for them to respond to us with anger, but all they did was go straight to work trying to re-attach the nest. I was blown away by that, so I feel like there’s so much we can learn from these colonies. Which I think…I don’t know what your “mask politics” are, but I feel like that’s one of the missing pieces. It’s not just about whether any of one of us might get sick as an individual, it’s about shifting behaviors to reduce the overall threat to the community.
aricoco: This pandemic situation also made me think more about this altruistic tendency. I’m focusing more on biological altruism, but in the human. We also have a tendency to be altruistic so that’s why I’m reading David Sloan’s work.[3] He’s an evolutionary biologist and he does this interesting community work as well. They are looking at how to apply the idea of collectivism to the hyper-individualistic society of humans, right?
Ariyeh: Especially, do you feel like… I feel like in the U.S., it’s very pronounced. Since you grew up in Japan, is that difference palpable to you?
aricoco: Yeah, but that’s why I came here to be free and more individual. [both laugh] And then, yeah, now I see different extremes. Not completely, but in Asian countries, I think we are more…discipline is very important. Discipline and acting cohesively as a group. The group is so important and that cost me…freedom of creativity, the freedom of speech, whatever. But here, I see people can get selfish and that costs people’s lives.
Ariyeh: At its most extreme…yeah, it can be deadly. I do feel like we need a both/and, a balance of sorts.
aricoco: So that goes to the learning part, I wanted to learn more, so that’s why I reached out to a biologist, Dr. Daniel Kronauer, and ended up visiting their lab at Rockefeller University. He also let me get in touch with his postdoc researchers, Yuko Ulrich and Aniek Ivens, and then we started to have a conversation. And we did an event together; it was so fun.
Ariyeh: So yeah, that brings us to your most recent project, PIPORNOT, a multi-phase project which you are still working on, where you have incorporated biologists and tango dancers as part of the investigations. I understand with the biologist, your aim was learning about insect qualities that can apply to human communities.
aricoco: Well, with this recent conversation with the biologist, Dr. Daniel Charbonneau, as part of PIPORNOT: Division of Labor and Tango, I was specific about division of labor; that’s what I wanted to know. I asked him to do a lecture on that, but prior to that as part of PIPORNOT: Insects & Emergence, I collaborated with the two postdocs. One of them gave a lecture about ants and colony and emergence theory. That led to researching tango later, but for this first event the two scientists had this structure. First, we used improv-based activities, and then we did a game that the two scientists invented. The game is about discovering people’s ability to function as a group without a leader or hierarchy. It was interesting because we had to adjust ourselves to the group situation based on reaction threshold.
So, the ants, use reaction threshold as one of the mechanisms of their nonhierarchical systems. It’s a lot like the dirty dish theory for people. If you live with roommates and one of them always leaves dirty dishes in the sink, somebody has to do them, but the threshold for everyone is different. One person has to clean up quickly, but one other person can wait until the dishes pile up. So that’s how ant self-organization happens too. It’s not like a leader telling them what to do.
Ariyeh: I’m definitely seeing the connection between reaction threshold and social dance because if you’re a polite social dancer, you will gauge your partner’s ability to deal with more advanced moves or their comfort with physical closeness then adjust the space between your bodies, and even the size of your steps to accommodate your partner. It should default to the least comfortable person’s needs.
aricoco: Right, so I started to do some workshops right around 2016, when I was communicating with the scientists, to explore the ways for us to function as a group without a leader. That’s the theme of the workshop, so I use different drawing exercises and then movement research. Then my friend who happened to be a tango dancer, said how about the social dance scene? That’s a small community or a temporary community. And the patterns! I thought this is kind of like fractals! Then that brought me back to emergence theory and it’s all… okay, so it could be all connected, but I’m still trying to figure out how. It’s interesting to engage in group activities using tango because it’s doing something together but spontaneously. Before the pandemic, my collaborator and I wanted to create our own patterns, to see how patterns emerge.
Ariyeh: OK, so with this project you’re investigating through performance, mark-making, improv, game-playing, and these dance moves all inspired by self-organizing, non-hierarchical insect communities and it’s all a playground for experimenting. I think that is one of the values of art. One thing by itself won’t change everything, but if we do enough of these things we can start to try to think differently through our collective effort.
aricoco: That’s exactly what I read in the book actually. Yeah, there’s principles of emergence; it’s a collective effort.[4] You can’t solve the problem with one specific thing.
Ariyeh: Is looking at insects and engaging in these practices changing the way you’re relating to people at all?
aricoco: I think so, because my good friend’s husband is a Trump supporter and, well, we don’t support Trump, but they’re only human too… and definitely learning about ants changed my perspective. I just…yeah, we share this world with them.
Ariyeh: Coming from a pretty conservative state, sometimes I can get really frustrated because I don’t lean that way or whatever, but at the same time, growing up here, I do understand certain aspects of it, and I know so many good people who vote differently than me. Even if we fundamentally disagree on certain things, I think we have to look for the areas where we can agree. We’re so busy arguing on all of these issues – climate change, healthcare – where we could probably find points of agreement and ways of moving forward. But, yes…and today is a rough, rough day. [Checks phone] There’s no update, it looks like…yeah, he’s still 248 to 214, so no one has won while we were talking.
[1] “PIPORNOT (=Primus Inter Pares or NOT),” PIPORNOT, accessed November 2020, https://www.PIPORNOT.com.
[2] “Reducing Global Catastrophic Biological Risks,” 80,000 Hours, accessed March 2021, https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/global-catastrophic-biological-risks/.
[3] “Does Altruism Exist? | Yale University Press,” accessed March 2021, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300189490/does-altruism-exist.
[4] John Rennie, “Emergence: How Complex Wholes Emerge From Simple Parts,” Quanta Magazine, accessed March 2020, https://www.quantamagazine.org/emergence-how-complex-wholes-emerge-from-simple-parts-20181220/.