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 HOLD TIGHT GENTLY 

follows ECHO POSITION  (a collaboration between Ivy Kwan Arce and Julie Tolentino for the WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2022: Quiet As It's Kept)

HOLD TIGHT GENTLY is
an eight-hour durational performance
a collaboration between Julie Tolentino, Stosh Fila, and Robert Takahashi Crouch
a single action splintered into many parts
a break, a rupture, and a mark
a feedback loop
a sonic reflection of voices, movements, and utterances
a collection of pauses, pressures, needs, and potentials
a movement meditation in the form of velocities
an invitation to reflect and to take back time
a cycle of connection and loss
a pact
a reminder
on repeat.

For this performance, the artists invite visitors to observe minimal yet attentive actions between performers and objects within a live sound and mirror installation. HOLD TIGHT GENTLY is accompanied by a day-long conversation hosted by Tolentino and Jih-Fei Cheng, let’s talk: vulnerable bodies, intimate collectivities which takes place next door in The Hearst Artspace.

In the words of Tolentino: “Hovering over an inclined, mirrored platform set against the slowly setting sun on the Museum’s third floor, HOLD TIGHT GENTLY honors the weighted impact of another person. Offered as touch, the work reflects on myriad sensorial and affective experiences: of being held, pushed, encouraged, missed, heard, misunderstood, beloved, and lost. Projected light reflects the movement imprint of care circles. The sound in the work is impacted by conversations leaking into the space from the gathering of co-conspirators in the adjoining room: artists, advocates, activists, poets, writers, museum staff, and visitors.”

The HOLD TIGHT GENTLY title is inspired by the last line of the late Donald Woods’s poem "Prescription."