No Place: Conversation with Saya Woolfalk

In this episode of Broken Boxes we hear a conversation with Saya Woolfalk, a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. Saya’s work builds new narratives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. I first met up with artist Saya in the summer of 2023 at her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York to chat about her practice. We walked around the bustling industrial warehouses along the river with her dog, Mr. Mochi, and amid a cacophony of forklifts and semi-trucks, we had an incredibly generative conversation about her practice. Unfortunately I was not able to publish the audio of this conversion on the podcast due to noise interference, but sections of this interview are archived within the new Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue publication available now through UNM Press. Recently Saya and I reconvened for a second conversation where we focus in on her origin story of becoming an artist and her decades-long investigation into speculative fiction within her practice. Saya shares about her 2006 work Ethnography of No Place—an installation which invites viewers into the immersive environments of “the Empathics,” a fictional race of women able to alter their genetic makeup and fuse with plants. Saya relates how for years she has utilized fantasy to understand our present reality and to dream of multiple futures. She shared how her present work has expanded far beyond No Place into envisioning the possibility of humanity existing beyond linear time and space. Saya communicates her ideas through sculpture, installation, performance and video art and has been at the forefront of conceptualizing ideas around speculative fiction, fantasizing and world building as an agent of change. We end the conversation with some practical advice on how Saya has learned to survive as an artist and she imparts some great tips on ways to utilize the systems in place to work in your favor and do more with less when you have to. Saya continues to show us that to truly enact radical change, we must create spaces for empathy and ease, and that we must continually reflect on how we practice compassion and connection with one another.This episode is hosted by Ginger Dunnill