• The Space of an Encounter: An Interview with Sharon Hayes
• Gwyneth Shanks (bio) and Sharon Hayes (bio)

One of Philadelphia-based artist Sharon Hayes’s earliest works is The Lesbian from 1997. The solo performance is based on a three-and-a-half-month research project she conducted earlier that same year, in which she drove some 10,000 miles cross-country. Along the way, she [End Page E-73] interviewed lesbians, documented—through photos and video footage—what she describes as “evidence of lesbian communities,” and performed in lesbian living rooms. In the performance, however, Hayes is the only figure visible onstage; she plays a tour guide, leading the audience through an exhibition in a museum dedicated to the “natural history” of the lesbian. The spatialized exhibition form, though (i.e., walking from gallery to gallery), was translated into the temporal divisions of theatrical scenes.

Video documentation of her journey accompanied Hayes onstage, but mirroring her solo live performance, she is the only person visible in the footage. While the performance and research project seemingly revolves around an excavation of identity or community that might lend itself to the presencing of many lesbians, Hayes refuses such facile representations. Rather, The Lesbian locates its political and relational force precisely in the interplay between presence (Hayes’s own body and voice) and absence (no one else is visible). Through these performance choices, Hayes questions the “essentialism of identity politics” through what might be described as tactics of temporal and embodied refusal. The audience, in other words, is forced to “construct meaning from absence rather than presence.”¹

I begin this introduction to my interview with Hayes by describing The Lesbian for a few reasons. It illustrates her investment in and history with theatrically based performance traditions, even as her subsequent work has expanded, now also encompassing video, audio recording, multichannel installations, and text-based pieces. The Lesbian indexes her continued investment in a deeply rigorous research-based and often archival artistic practice. But it also centers what have become primary threads in Hayes’s work: namely, the ways queer desire, intimacy, and attachments can be cited/sited and how we contend with thick or dense time, as what is present or absent in a given encounter grapples for authorial claim over our understanding of a past, present, or future. This June, Hayes and I connected over Zoom to discuss her work and the ways in which she makes sense of space, time, and the re-circulation, or distribution, of ideas and histories in her artistic practice.

I want to start with a question focused on installations, as our interview will appear in Theatre Journal’s special issue focused on installation. How do you conceptualize your work and its relationship to space?

I have never found the term installation art terribly useful, because I don’t think of installation itself as a medium that creates the pressures that, say, video, performance, sculpture, or painting do. I’ve never used the term because I think that all work—video, performance, sculpture, and painting, for instance—moves through various conditions of installation in its path to meet an audience. So, I appreciate that you started with space because that’s really the question. How is space connected to place, institution, framework, discourse, and/or belonging?

For me, foundationally, space, which is also always place, is a container—and I mean that architecturally, institutionally, psychically, socially, and culturally—for the work. Space, or place, is the container that holds an encounter between the work and the audience. What that means is that I am accountable for and to the entirety of that encounter and holding it in architectural, psychic, social, cultural, and institutional space. Now, of course, it’s not the only encounter an audience has with the work, but it is a significant one. [End Page E-74]

As somebody who came into exhibition practice via theatrically based performance practice, space was an immediate site of both familiarity and unfamiliarity, confusion and possibility. The thing that was animating and vexing were the points of difference between theatre and exhibition, which had to do with...

• 邂逅的空间：莎朗·海斯访谈录
• 格温妮丝·香克斯（传记）和莎朗·海耶斯（传记）

费城艺术家 Sharon Hayes 最早的作品之一是1997 年的The Lesbian 。独奏表演基于她同年早些时候进行的一个为期三个半月的研究项目，其中她驾驶了大约 10,000 英里穿越国家。在此过程中，她 [End Page E-73] 采访了女同性恋者，通过照片和录像记录了她所说的“女同性恋社区的证据”，并在女同性恋客厅里表演。然而，在表演中，海耶斯是舞台上唯一可见的人物。她扮演一名导游，带领观众参观一个致力于女同性恋“自然历史”的博物馆的展览。然而，空间化的展览形式（即从一个画廊走到另一个画廊）被转化为戏剧场景的时间划分.

她的旅程的视频记录伴随着海耶斯上台，但反映了她的独奏现场表演，她是镜头中唯一可见的人。虽然表演和研究项目似乎围绕着身份或社区的挖掘，这可能有助于许多女同性恋者的存在，但海耶斯拒绝这种轻率的陈述。相反，《女同性恋者》将其政治和关系力量准确定位在存在（海耶斯自己的身体和声音）和缺席（没有其他人是可见的）之间的相互作用中。通过这些表演选择，海耶斯通过可能被描述为暂时和具体拒绝的策略来质疑“身份政治的本质主义”。换句话说，观众被迫“从缺席而不是在场中构建意义”。¹

出于几个原因，我通过描述女同性恋来开始我对海耶斯的采访的介绍。它说明了她对戏剧表演传统的投资和历史，即使她随后的工作已经扩展，现在也包括视频、录音、多通道装置和基于文本的作品。女同性恋者索引她对以研究为基础且通常是档案艺术实践的高度严谨的持续投资。但它也集中在海耶斯作品中已成为主要线索的内容：即，可以引用/定位酷儿欲望、亲密关系和依恋的方式，以及我们如何应对厚重或密集的时间，因为在给定的遭遇中存在或不存在的东西正在纠缠不清对我们对过去、现在或未来的理解的作者主张。今年六月，我和海耶斯通过 Zoom 联系，讨论她的作品以及她如何理解空间、时间以及在她的艺术实践中思想和历史的再循环或分布。

我想从一个以装置为中心的问题开始，因为我们的采访将出现在《剧院杂志》以装置为中心的特刊上。您如何概念化您的作品及其与空间的关系？

我从来没有发现装置艺术这个词非常有用，因为我不认为装置本身是一种产生压力的媒介，比如视频、表演、雕塑或绘画。我从来没有使用过这个词，因为我认为所有的作品——例如视频、表演、雕塑和绘画——都会在其路径中通过各种安装条件来与观众见面。所以，我很欣赏你从空间开始，因为这确实是个问题。空间如何与场所、制度、框架、话语和/或归属感相关联？

对我来说，从根本上说，空间，也总是地方，是一个容器——我的意思是在建筑上、制度上、心理上、社会上和文化上——用于工作。空间，或场所，是承载作品与观众相遇的容器。这意味着我对那次相遇负责，并对整个相遇负责，并将其保存在建筑、心理、社会、文化和制度空间中。现在，当然，这不是观众与作品的唯一接触，但它是一次重要的接触。[结束第 Ck-74 页]

作为一个通过戏剧表演实践进入展览实践的人，空间是一个既熟悉又陌生、困惑和可能性的直接场所。动画和令人烦恼的是戏剧和展览之间的区别点，这与......