The conversation was held as a Zoom meeting on February 12th 2024. Following transcription has been slightly edited for readability.

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John Carberry (JC):

What is your work called? In my head, it was something about dragons, a martial arts form, something like a dragon pot's the seal or something?

I guess you're a photographer, right?

Rebecca Ann Tess (RAT):

Yeah, mainly photography and videos are currently still my main media, but it's shifting. I think it's at a turning point where it gets more performative, and I'm working more with movement, both my own and possibly in the future with other people's ideas about choreography.

The work title is See Through the Dragon Head. The dragon directly refers to this martial arts form; it's one of the five animals in my kung fu style, or qigong, but qigong is kung fu, which a lot of people might not know.

On one hand, it's very closely linked to this martial arts movement and this very specific form. At the same time, what interests me is the perception of space. At one point in my own martial practice, I realized it was the most precise idea about space I encountered in my daily life. I started to watch myself and other people move through space and realized it was often very linear. Even in sports, people usually move frontally or backward; they don't turn or have a full 360-degree awareness of space. It felt like a small box of movement.

In the martial practice I participate in, it's so detailed. Small parts of the body are slightly differently oriented than other parts, and from this personal experience, I started wondering about these qualities and knowledges. Kung fu, as a Chinese martial art, is not just movement. It's a huge philosophy about health and life. If you pay attention in the practice, you feel it unfold in your body without needing prior knowledge. It's a very rich idea about life.

I started wondering what happens to this knowledge when we don't experience it anymore. I do a lot of sports, but most of the time, I'm here with you and others on Zoom, being social in various ways but very still and frontal with flat screens. I got curious about what happens when we stop knowing this knowledge exists because our bodies haven’t evolved as much as our surroundings.

In this work, I perform three different parts of the dragon. I reduced it so my legs are still because the dragon moves in space, but it’s already so much information. What you see is not just me performing but the phone placed in my hand, making my hands the dragon heads. You see through my hands or through the dragon heads. It combines the movement in my body with the surroundings. Practicing this dragon for years allowed me to see the whole space through the dragon’s eyes and how it interacts with my body. 

JC:

I’ve been filming people a lot and have been on set, not behind a camera, so what the camera sees and what the performer sees are very different. They have no idea. It’s interesting in your work because if you put the camera in the subject’s point of view, the dragons are your hands. That’s quite interesting.

RAT:

And at the same time, I think it’s interesting because having a smartphone in my hand while doing kung fu is very contradictory. Kung fu time in my day is when I'm disconnected from everything else and very present. The phone becomes another entity, and it was challenging to find the same presence while having this tool of connectivity. There are moments when you see the phone in the shadow, which raises questions about nature, technology, and the body. It's a small piece but opens up a lot.

JC:

It's hard to know when something is finished, isn't it? Sometimes you need to just stop working on it. But no, it's interesting.

Could you talk about your process a little? I don’t know what you do.

RAT:

I have different paces. I just finished a half commercial, half artistic work that needed to be done by December, so everything was fast and involved many people. It worked because there was a clear outside demand. Without a deadline, I can take a lot of time because there's always something you can add, which can be tricky. I realized that sometimes, if I'm too long in my head, things get too big and complicated. 

For See Through the Dragon Head, the first idea was one and a half years ago. It was the last day of a residency on the coast, and I didn’t have enough time to record it properly. A year later, I returned and filmed it. It was already there, but I could have edited it in summer. Something was blocking me; I felt there was something missing.

JC:

Yeah, sometimes you have an idea, but you can’t do anything with it until it all comes together. Like the video I did in Sweden, I had been thinking about it for a while, and then I just did it in a couple of days when it all clicked.

RAT:

For me, it's about having all the elements together and then trusting in your work. See Through the Dragon Head is the first time I performed myself, which was a big step. Watching myself, I saw all the things I could improve. I had doubts if it was too close to a romantic idea of nature. I waited for an idea to balance the nature in the piece. Now, I think it might be enough with just the shadow of the phone.

JC:

That’s something people don’t appreciate about artists. There are a lot of mistakes and things that don’t work. You keep working until it does. Your first idea isn’t your best idea; it’s the obvious idea. You have to dig deeper.

RAT:

And sometimes the first idea is the best, but it seems too easy.

JC:

It feels like it can’t be right if it’s too easy, but you have to go through all that.

RAT:

I worked on a big commercial artistic project recently. It was mine, but also a collaboration, so I had to make sacrifices. It was partly a money job, so I felt free and creative because I knew if they liked it and I didn’t, it was okay. Maybe I should take that into my own practice because it was enjoyable. You need to renew yourself and allow for experimentation and play, even if things look weird or kitschy.

JC:

When I started working with film, we used actual film, which was expensive. Everyone was serious and scared because of the cost. Now, with SD cards, it’s more free. You can try things and just do it again if it doesn’t work.

RAT:

In my filming, it mattered because I didn't have many SD cards, batteries, or time, so there were a lot of restrictions. But I liked that because you make decisions while filming. A combination of freedom and restrictions is ideal for me. If it’s too open, I lose myself in details.