9 Vases & 9 Vases Back Together
2026
8:00 video, unfired clay
Performed by Moira Easton, Wilson Finlay, Julia Freudenberger, and Calvin Pfisterer
Music by Sean Atkins and Calvin Pfisterer


Greco-Roman cultural artifacts are overbearing in the museum, given special prominence as symbols of Western dominance. This conceptualizes history in a framework of linear progress, turning the museum into a record of authority and empire. For this project, I organized clay into a classical Greek form to recall this cultural hegemony. These nine vases lack their distinct red and black glazed surface, moving them further from historical record and closer to silhouette. Where museums uphold Greco-Roman ceramic fragments as a symbol of a fundamental stepping stone in history, this project contextualizes the silhouettes’ fragments with the destruction of their forms. The clay is never fired and the material resists foreclosure.

Hydrated clay is an effective tool to index a process of dismantling, with the accompanying video showing the collectivity necessary for this action. Notice how the movements of the performers differ while remaining focused on a shared intention. Their actions are means based, with the objective being to destroy ends. The clay’s possibility is reopened as it returns to a precarious position of materiality without functionality, acquiring a new use value that is yet to be legible.

Walter Benjamin characterized divine violence as a way of negating structural power through destruction without replacement. By highlighting means rather than ends, this project parallels these ideas. Rather than altering the form, which accepts its insisted value, this project refuses any aesthetic resolution by returning the vases to raw material. When the form is attacked, gouged, and breached, fragmentation opens aesthetic possibilities which deny European colonial standards. Saidiya Hartman uses the word ‘otherwise’ to describe living in tension with aporia; counter-practices which make visible seams, fissures, questions. When these classical forms are denied their functionality through rupture, it opens the clay’s potential for an aesthetic that is ‘otherwise.’