jas lin 林思穎, Schindler House Haunting, 2022
August 26 + 27, 2022
Schindler House Haunting was a site-specific performance triptych by jas lin 林思穎, commissioned by homeLA as a part of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture centennial celebration Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making and curated by Chloë Flores.
Even as researchers disavow the influence of Japanese architecture on R.M. Schindler, the Schindler House evokes the haunted houses of J-horror films, which like the Schindler House, shatter notions of useful domestic space partitioning interior and exterior, self and Other. By inviting the “domestic uncanny,” lin mutates the space into a haunted house where the values and familiarities of the American nuclear family home are turned inside out.
With space as a medium, the house becomes a stage, and the haunting, a performance. lin channels specters, shaped by each spectator and the boundaries of their bodily architectures. Fear of the ghost is fear of the Other, both outside and inside of oneself– a gaze that turns queer, non-white, femme, wild bodies into ghosts. By embodying a figure of abjection, resistance, and revenge, lin collapses boundaries between human and Other, and makes visible the repression and oppression organized under dominant social frameworks.
Schindler House Haunting began under Jakob Sellaoui’s Uncomfortable Pavilion, a soft shelter that embraces the stains, dust, and decay of the uncomfortable. The musical score is composed of breaths, moans, and creaks resounding from both lin’s body and the skeleton of the house. With walls that define rather than enclose space, the house offers a cinematic experience, forming frames of seeing and not seeing. Yet unlike a traditional horror film, there is no return to normal, no reestablishing of boundaries, no purge of the undesirable. Instead, the haunting reverberates, as both specters and spectators leak through boundaried space, transforming the Schindler House into an in-between space where spirits live.
Video filmed by RYBG. Edited by RYBG and jas lin.
Music/Sound Design for Schindler House Haunting is created by FITNESSS; Costume Design created by aeon; and Lighting Design is by FITNESSS.
jas lin 林思穎 (they/them) is a performance artist, choreographer, and constant (un)becoming born and based on Tongva Land (Los Angeles). lin stages exorcisms and tantrums for purging choreographies of the learned body and shutting down internal and external surveillance cameras that suggest there is a Proper way to move through the world. their practice of deep feeling is invested in re-membering what the body has been manipulated into forgetting. they value performance as a ritual of deep presence– by returning to our senses, we can reawaken to our possibility, connection, and agency within the world around us. lin’s practice emerges from a vast lineage of teachers, from friendships to films to flowers. centering play in the everyday, they experiment with multiplicity and contradiction while dancing with the world as their body. jas worships the elsewhere and the otherwise, and loves to co-create shared fugitive worlds and live in them. their choreographies, films, workshops, and lectures have been shared around the world, including at Danshallerne Copenhagen, MOCA Los Angeles, Power Station of Art Shanghai, Kassel Dokfest, and Mitski’s Laurel Hell Tour. jas is committed to the life-long processes of un-learning and un-teaching hierarchical, Othering, and superficial ways of moving, being, sensing, and knowing. they believe movement to be a manifestation and actualization of potentiality– that together, we can dance the possible into being. www.jas-lin.work/ @allthatjasss
Schindler House Haunting is presented on the occasion of Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making, a four-month exhibition and programming series celebrating the pivotal first century of the landmark modern house in Los Angeles by Austrian-American architect R.M. Schindler, at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Thank you to the following institutions, funders, and sponsors for their support, as well as to the Centennial Council and Patron Program.
Institutional: California Arts Council, City of West Hollywood, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and Los Angeles County Arts & Culture.
Design Sponsor: West Elm
Executive Sponsors: Austrian Consulate General of Los Angeles, Bestor Architecture, Escher Gunewardena, Kikori Whiskey, Montalba Architects, Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, WTARCH, and Yola Metzcal.
www.makcenter.org @makcenter
This event is part of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture’s centennial celebration Schindler House: 100 years in the Making, with support from LA County Arts Commission, Graham Foundation, City of West Hollywood and West Elm. This activity is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. homeLA is fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts.
Photography by Tiffany Chung and V Gauthier
