“Sonja Khalecallon goes to live on the blockchain”
Interview with the artist Cibelle Cavalli Bastos
Printed in The Non-fungible Body? Performance and Digitalisation.
Distanz Verlag Berlin 2023.
FF Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel was the title of a music album you produced back in 2010, during a period when most people knew you as a singer. Shifting your career to the field of visual and performance art, you always play this record in Sonja’s performance installations. Sonja’s hellish lounge is orchestrated with its deliberately exotic sounds. Some of it has been inspired by Brasilian Tropicalismo, and the domestication of “world music” in post-war suburban capitalism. How would you recall the beginning of this performance series?
CCB Sonja initially was an equation for a state of being that I was using for a couple of years. Sonja’s story starts in a Nature Reserve in Brazil that visited with some fellow artists. We were at the beach there, shouting out alter-ego names from what were our vibes. I went underwater, submerging myself, and I came up and her name came to me, “Sonja Khalecallon.” Right on this beach, we later shot the photos for the Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel album.
FF There is a hyper-formalism to Sonja, when she situates herself and her audiences in her instal- lation-based post-apocalyptic setting. How did she actually find her path to this universe – where does her radiant name come from?
CCB Sonja connects to the idea of non-attachment practice, of letting everything run through your body, and also conceptually pays tribute to strong “femme artists.” Khalecallon, on the one hand means “fake hair” [Kanekalon, a type of synthetic hair extensions] and is a synthesis of the names Frida Kahlo, Sophie Calle, and Yoko Ono. Sophie Calle’s strong conceptual performance practice was one of the inspirations to Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel. For The Hotel, she took a job as a maid in a hotel in Venice, recording whatever she found in the rooms that she had been charged with cleaning. Likewise, Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit has been influential on the trans-dimensional ways Sonja may deal with language. Frieda Kahlo, as a reference, expresses a queer, butch-today-femme-to- morrow, rebellious, absolute queen of Surrealism spirit. My work also relates to how a character like hers is associated by many only with a sentiment of kitsch and an imaginary of Latinx exoticism, when in reality it goes for beyond these assumptions and fetishisations of femme Latinx.
FF The album’s release marks the initial arrival of Sonja in a spatial setting, when you installed her “Products for a better Life” in a gallery space in São Paolo. Since then, Sonja Khalecallon has been present in your work since then as an avatar or alter-ego figure that keeps re-appearing. In this decade of Sonja, you have taken her from Brazil to Clocktower Gallery in New York, Kunsthalle Athens, Art Basel Miami to Martin Gopius Bau Berlin, Mimosa House London, Rio de Janeiro, to the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and to the Austrian towns of Graz and, most recently, to OK in Linz. Was this performance developed with the intention to circulate and be re-performed?
CCB Sonja is (and isn't) a character that I put on. Instead, I just let everything affect the state in which she comes into being. What I mean by this is that Sonja is never not circulating. The piece has a complex timeline to it, as Sonja has been coming back from the retro-future now for ten earth-years. My each-time process of “becoming Sonja” for a performance, then, attempts to adopt her floating consciousness, borrowing from strategies of method acting. Carrying her embodiment is growing a challenge on my own physical body as well.
FF In Sonja’s case, what makes the core of this work – the core of its physical manifestation – the part that needs to be repeated exactly as before for each of its iterations?
CCB The core of this work, and the larger scope of my work, tackles the issue of femme-phobia, the root of all evil in a patriarchal society. The dimension of “femme” that the performance addresses is that of a caring energy. Care is important: types of connection and spirituality that are not mediated by men, the pathway of healing our societies, of embracing the parts that need to be replenished goes through a recalling that which we have come to call “the feminine.” Instead, what do most people do when they feel empty and unfulfilled in this society? Right, they go shopping.
FF Sonja’s work points to this entanglement of capitalism and femme-phobia.
CCB ...and to the consequences of planetary destruction through keeping people hollow and insensitive, as its overarching theme. “Las Venus” is an amalgamation of what is left of planet earth, inspired by liminal, pre-gentrified areas of human social reality. It expresses a space which white, classist, heteronormative supremacists would not ever admit to visit, despite the fact that it marks the place where they find their aliveness. In an institutional context, Sonja also puts up a mirror for all those who are working with me on the installation as well as for those who visit it as audiences. The story of Las Venus is the story of a place that people keep returning to, whilst colonising and gentrifying the whole rest of the galaxy in the meantime.
FF In an earlier interview about this performance at Steirischer Herbst, you refer to Sonja’s existence “under the sign of femme” as an act of intense labour. She embodies the condition of a permanent self-seller and caretaker. With Sonja, we meet someone who has to perform. How do you see the notion of performance and its enforcement of behaviour in the context of the work?
CCB Sonja’s communication aims to fracture those patterns of patriarchal communication that are looped into us like algorithms. Sonja is a “she” because she collects classics. She takes the “she/her” pronoun as a classic, as something she collects, takes into high-femme-postures and then deconstructs in the next moment. Her chaotic nature in this sense also messes with the expectations of people who want to experience her performing for entertainment. Sonja may do that, yes. She may sing, she may entertain, but maybe she will just sit there and cry, or do peoples’ nails.
FF The performance thrives with the live situation.
CCB Exactly, the body is the ultimate host. The performance situation is impacted by how the body that keeps it copes. The way how I run this work is through myself, it is existent the whole time even during times when it is not installed. Sonja’s timeline is always pro- gressing, growing, and becoming more layered. The material space itself also keeps an energy that is transmitted and charged with each re-installation.
FF Can you say a word on the materials you use for the installations of Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel?
CCB The walls and floors of the space are covered in printed oilcloth that has partly been painted on and taped together. Oilcloth associates to me with my auntie who lived in a poor area of São Paolo, with stories of labour and migration. The wall-coverings of Sonja’s installation have also been exhibited separately in gallery spaces, as kind of ready-mades. Each installation of Las Venus also features loads of glittery
party decor, inflatable objects, half-broken pieces of furniture, and of course strobe-lights. Sonja is very fond of trash, but her approach to keeping things and re-installing them is also a sustainable way of making work. I recycle even her digital images; for example, there is a video which I keep on using, each time moshing its dataset a little bit more. The “new” video then is like a mini-appropriation of the previous edition. In terms of audio, I always play Sonja’s original album in the installation.
FF Sonja is falling into even deeper glitches each time she re-appears.
CCB Think of it as a transmission. For me, it is really important to mix all kinds of aesthetics and effects to convey the feeling of a retro-future, where you do not know anymore where exactly you are in time. The atemporality of resources confuses people’s sentiment into an “eternal kitsch.” It is kitsch forever, but you do not know where from. There is no need to pin down resources on the binaries of time, origin, or other categories. Pin it on the “constant” instead, pin it on change, on aliveness, on things that are happening.
FF You have multiple times addressed the artistic labour of performing a work like this, describing the re-appearance of Sonja’s character as a feeling of hauntedness.
CCB For the installation in Linz, I have developed the first 3D renderings of Sonja’s things, working together with Coco Magnussen. They were shown on a Holofan [a rotating blade surface to project the 3D video content in the space.] Additionally, we also started to digitally model the installation space. The project of transforming Sonja’s analogue space into a full meta-version is still in progress, though. The performance in Linz was intended to begin the implementation of AR into this work.
FF For the digital exhibition that followed the festival, you have, for the first time, minted an NFT from your Las Venus performance, titled Sonja Loves You.
CCB For Sonja, this might be the moment to move on: to live in virtual space, releasing her from the need to interact with people on this earth. This first NFT, “Sonja Loves You,” speaks a welcome! It expresses the sentiment of Sonja as a host and has appeared in multiple physical installations of the performance. I also love its gestural dimension. It starts with a black screen, features text in the worst font one could use, as well as layers of data-moshed images, of Sonja and some spheric landscape shots. It includes video footage I have collected over the years. The result is just totally bad in the best way, as an entrance to “Las Venus,” setting the tone. I might soon mint a full NFT collection of Sonja’s “Products for a better Life,” but there are many factors that need to be wielded when deciding which fragments to mint from such a body of work that has been developed over a period of ten years.