Stealth Mode & Spiritual Shelter with Hanaé and Vanessa Thill
Interview by Tina Hanaé and Vanessa Thill
Long periods of mystery, soft indeterminacy, coziness, and darkness––this could describe a day in quarantine, or a primordial soup. What those two things both have in common is that something completely different will soon emerge. This is how friends and artists Tina Hanaé Miller and Vanessa Thill are contemplating both their creative processes and social change amidst an unknown future. Tina is currently sheltering in place in her hometown of Miami. She released her new single “All of This” at the end of March, in which she reflects on loss, ecological crisis, and visions of alternative futures. Vanessa is currently in New York, working on an upcoming solo show at Deli Gallery. Together, the two friends consider transformations before and during quarantine, in their creative processes, and in the world around them.
Vanessa Thill: Hey! Congratulations on the release of your new single, “All of This”— can you talk about your process of creating this song?
Tina Hanaé Miller: Thank you! Sure, yeah, I’d love to –– I can’t even pinpoint when I first came up with the lyrics or melody, but I had been circling around impending crises, collapse, grief, the process of losing my hometown of Miami to sea level rise over the last few years. That’s how the song slowly took form.
The tracking took place over only a couple days in my friend Sabine Holler’s basement at “Bootleg Mansion” in Brooklyn. It was super DIY, we would shut off the heater and sit in the cold to record layers of vocals, strings, and taiko drums and other percussion. It took forever to finally mix it.
Vanessa: What were some of the challenges of mixing the track?
Tina: The mix of the original track was perfect, but anyone who tried to touch it couldn’t retain that sense of looming uncertainty that was happening at the ending.
Then there was also finding a person I could feel safe working with. I’ve had some scarring interactions with collaborators in music; dudes who were undergoing their own personal issues and ended up taking them out on me and my work. In one case, around the time I started this project almost five years ago now, I was pushed to this place where I either had to give up my authorship and pretend that a collaborator had created me, or basically start over and learn how to do everything myself.
Vanessa: Wow.
Tina Hanaé Miller
Vanessa Thill
Tina: Yeah. So I chose to start over. Though I sometimes feel like I lost so much time in that process, in a wonderful unexpected way, it also led me to some beautiful and supportive people. People who have really helped me heal my understanding of collaboration and my relationship to music. Fili from Studio Apothicaire in Montreal mixed the track and that was a crucial part in not only finishing the song, but also recovery and letting go of the past.
Vanessa: I can relate to that. There is something about materiality in my work that I’m always wrestling with, I’m not as comfortable working with heavy duty materials and I often have a hard time asking for help. But it’s tremendously satisfying to develop a process that feels true to me, even if it takes longer or is not the easiest way.
For instance, right now I’m making a series of “portals” and it’s the first time that I’ve made large free-standing sculptures out of wood, metal hardware, and resin-coated paper. I ended up making these structures out of big branches I collected and joined together in my own weird way.
I’m curious how you are feeling now, about your projects? Are you working on anything during quarantine?
Tina: I’ve mostly been in this state of reflection and letting go. I’ve been thinking a lot about quarantine as a kind of chrysalis phase of gestating and developing. New forms slowly coalesce from the goo that you become as you disappear. The isolation can be hard, but I’ve learned a lot of coping mechanisms over the years from other experiences with intense loneliness.
One instance of this was a summer I spent in Berlin for a research grant years ago. My German was terrible. I felt super alone. And then this epiphany suddenly came to me one day. I was reading about the microbiome at the time, which led me to this dawning realization that I was never actually alone. And then I just thought it was really funny to think about the implications of this––like, what if your microbiome could talk to you?
Vanessa: That’s amazing.
Tina: [laughs] Yeah, so there’s this unimaginably dense population of beings in your body. What if they could all talk? I mean, you would never be able to get peace! It’d just be like a cacophony of chatter –– you’d basically have Tokyo or New York City in your intestines. In a way, I found that comforting.
Vanessa: I think about that a lot in my visual work too. Once you get over the initial fear or freakiness of thinking about non-human life all around you, it becomes a kind of humbling experience of existing within that turmoil. The idea that we are all deeply connected life forms, even within our isolation, does that resonate with you in your approach to making music?
Tina: Yeah, I see music as one possible vessel for the kind of ideas and world that I’m interested in exploring and sharing.
What about your studio? Have you been able to stay motivated to work on your upcoming show at Deli Gallery?
Photo courtesy of Vanessa Thill
Vanessa: The meaning of motivation has definitely shifted now. I try to do everything really slowly. I’m alone most of the time, but I’m still interacting, consuming a lot of information, and experiencing emotions very intensely. I like your point about gestating or going underground, it’s kind of metaphysical. I’ve been reading a lot of mystical Kabbalah texts that talk about how divinity is distributed throughout the universe through emanations of energy. I’m thinking about how we perceive things that are beyond... well, just beyond. Invisible in one sense. But as real as anything else.
I’m working on this delicate silver beaded net. I’ve always thought about nets in my work as markers of time, almost picturing how energy flows through nodes, points of interaction. I like the idea that it will be nearly invisible in the space, once it goes there.
Tina: That’s so interesting! I feel like there’s this tension between the desire for visibility and the comforts and pleasures of being unseen. There was a study that found American cultural values have dramatically shifted towards valuing fame above all other values in the last decade, but I think that’s going to turn soon, or already has. In the age of surveillance and internet call-out culture, being hyper-visible just doesn’t seem as appealing.
Not to throw a trend at an entire generation [laughs], but Gen Z is apparently into “domestic cozy,” which I really love! We need room to play and not feel scrutinized about messing up or having to constantly carve out a brand or a space. I love the state of the unknown, to hide in that dark matter. I’ve been thinking of it as “stealth mode.”
Vanessa: To me, a deeper idea of visibility reminds me of shelter. I want to be visible in the sense that I want to be able to be truly present, find safety, or even coziness. Because of this quarantine period, I’m reminded that I’m not interested in constructing an image, I’m interested in feeling and creating in ways that sustain me and offer me, and hopefully others, some form of spiritual shelter.
Tina: Yes! To feel nourished and okay. That’s the other thing about cozy, cozy doesn’t mean the threat vanishes or you’re no longer there. Dark matter very much exists in a way that takes up space, and stealth mode doesn’t mean you disappear.
Vanessa: It’s interesting to me that we are literally watching a process of being acculturated to a new reality, where something unimaginable has become mundane. Honestly, it has happened very quickly. The whole paradigm shifted in the course of a month or so.
Tina: Definitely! There’s this quote I’ll always remember from permaculture expert Brock Dolman about human behavior and climate crisis: “people don’t change until they have to, and then they change really quickly.” A lot of Floridians get this. Quarantine has felt a lot like hurricane season, with the long lines at the grocery store, except we know we won’t lose power or water. But people will not change until the flood is at their door. And the most potent time to make hurricane-related policy changes is always right after the hurricane, when the memory is still poignant in people’s minds, the clarity that a storm can completely upend their entire lives.
We have this window opening up, now, too, as far as making changes in our society. We can learn and pay attention to how to care for each other and have to confront where people are falling through the cracks. I think people might be more ready for major change when we come out of this.
Vanessa: My main goal for organizing during this time is to connect this crazy moment to work that was going on prior, so that we can throw our weight behind policy changes that workers have been fighting for over the last few years. The huge scale of the rent strike reveals how precarious we were in terms of housing, and how our government enables investors and corporations to do anything to cover their bottom line. I’m frantically energized by how Covid is shifting people’s personal connection to different social problems that we need to solve together.
In your new song, I was curious about the intensity of the ending, which felt like a kind of spiritual shelter to me. Can you talk about this part where you go into a higher vocal register?
Tina: That’s the part that we had the most trouble mixing! It felt so important to get it right. People say that you’re not supposed to put the most interesting part of the song at the end. But to me, that’s the heart of “All of This”: it’s the unknown, the future. And you don’t know what that destabilizing force will be like until the end, until you’re there.
The lyrics, “all I’ll be / depends on what falls / behind,” –– we are in the midst of that right now. We can’t possibly know what the next step looks like. How can we plan, when we don’t yet know what we will lose? Toni Morrison talks about how for her novel Song of Solomon, she visualized her narrative lifting off into the air at the end, becoming this exponential of the character taking off, taking flight. That image really stayed with me.
Vanessa: That part of the song accesses a realm that is beyond the every day, it does feel like it’s lifting off.
Tina: I’m glad you felt that! Hopefully this is just the beginning––I’m excited to see and share what happens next.