Interview with Bad Unkl Sista
By kSea flux

To date, this has been one of my most anticipated interviews (by me - I really don't like doing interviews, honestly), and perhaps one of my favorite.

A few months ago I knew Anastazia only through photographs, performance, & a very brief meeting through a friend where little was exchanged except names. Still, I had that Style tab you see above this to fill with something, and so I contacted her and Anastazia invited me to join her at a venue in San Francisco where she frequently performs to get a taste of what she does, who she is. I jumped on it. (Any reason to dress up and wear what some people would consider a costume, I'll take...) After the evening was over we talked a bit, but unfortunately I was pressed for time and what I use to record the interviews was being used by it's owner - but there was a beautuful fuidity in our conversation. A couple months later, we finally found time to talk. I met her at the same venue, gave her a ride home to the BUS Stop Gallery, her event space - and what you see below is the conversation between two incredibly exhausted people. Enjoy. ~ kSea

kSea:  So at long last, here we are. I would like to focus on what you’re doing as what you call a ‘fabric sculptor,’ which I think is an ingenious way of putting it, for the creations I’ve seen, but you’re so much more than that.  In every show I’ve seen, not only fashion shows (which I don’t see you too often in anymore, and you’ll explain why later), it’s pure performance, and that’s what you thrive on.  Tell me about what made you get into designing, or sculpting, fabric.

BUS:  Well, for me actually, let me say that I actually have never actually been in a fashion show.  I have only provided a performance at the end of fashion shows.  Just because they happen to happen on a runway does not mean that I do fashion shows.  I do not do fashion shows, I do not do a ‘one model walking down the runway standing for a moment with a vapid style.’ [laughter] That is not what I do.  What I do is provide for a moment a dreamscape in which you can release all of your ideas of what fashion may be, all your ideas of what you think style may be, or beauty or anything of that nature.  For me, beauty is not some skinny model on the end of a runway in a pretty outfit.  For me, beauty is what we can find inside ourselves, what we can find all around us, what we can find in our dreams. Our dreams, I think, is where the true beauty lies.  Now, the way I got started in fashion, if you must call it that – actually, I never started in fashion. [laughs]

kSea:  Let’s not call it – I prefer not to call it that. Just the word itself creates too many preconceived ideas in the mind of an empty world where nothing matters but appearance…

BUS:  Right.

kSea:  Let’s use the word ‘creation’ from now on out – or try to.

BUS:  Right.  I’ve never actually been involved in fashion yet. [laughs]  It just happens that that’s where my things end up.  For me, I started creating different pieces when I was part of Carpet Bag Brigade, which is an acrobatic stilt-walking troupe. We created a 45-minute stilt-walking opus and we were going to perform it within two weeks, and we didn’t have any costumes. We were in the middle of the desert in Arizona and you can’t just go to a store and buy red silk stilt pants,  and the director of our troupe, Jay Ruby, decided that we would all make our own stilt costumes.  I was livid.  [laughs]  I was absolutely beside myself, pissed off that I had to make my own stilt costume because I didn’t know how to sew, and neither did anybody else.  We had to make all of our own costumes.  From that moment of making our own costumes, to a year and a half later where I was the main costume designer for the group, for Carpet Bag Brigade.  I’ve been an artist since I was very small, since I was ten.  My world just revolved around art.  I grew up dancing.  My mom is a dance teacher.  We had a studio connected to our house.  I’ve been performing since I was five. The performance and the art went hand-in-hand with me ever since I was tiny.  Using material as another medium for doing artwork became a new interest.  It became something that was very exciting, so I began sculpting costumes, sculpting anything that I could make.  As you have noticed, I have an obsession with anything alien, Victorian, Japanese, or insect-like.  So, this is the meager beginnings of where I come from.

kSea:  In the pieces you create, what inspires you? Is it perhaps a mood for the show, or do you read people and find something that would fit them?

BUS:  Mostly,  what inspires me – well, it’s a few different things.  I’m obsessed with head pieces, so I get inspired by what I’m going to put on the head.  I used to create a whole costume, and then think, ‘Oh, now I can do the fun part! Let’s make a crazy headpiece.’  Now, I’ve started the opposite way and I create a crazy headpiece, and then create the costume to go with it.  Now, within creating, I have an original – either a piece of trash or a piece of a strange article of clothing – just random things inspire me to make headpieces, to make costumes.  I couple that with who I know would wear it, so I get inspired by the people that I am having in the show.  I am lucky enough to have many amazing people that will let me put any number of painful things on their bodies [laughter] and perform in them!  I always tell my performers, ‘The more painful your costume is, the more of a compliment it is to you, because I trust that you can carry it out, that you can act – really inhabit – that costume.’  So, for me, if I know who I’m going to have or if I have an idea of who’s going to be in that, then I design it around them with the strangeness that is coming up from me.  It’s really a collaboration of the wonderful people that I surround myself with, and the strange garbage that I can find. 

kSea:  Right on.  So you definitely consider who might be wearing this as you are creating your –

BUS:  Oh, yes. I sometimes create an entire piece for someone that’s going to be wearing it even before I’ve asked them to do so.  [laughs]  Because I know they’ll wear it!

kSea:  I just raised my hand, for those who can’t see this in print. [laughs]  One of the things you mentioned very recently to me is that you are, first and foremost, a performer and really don’t want to be targeted or tagged as a designer.

BUS:  Right.

kSea: Doing what you do and creating the phenomenal things you do – the clothes, the pieces, the wearable art – that must be an insane struggle and hopefully through anyone who reads this, you are, first and foremost, a performer. You create what you need to in order to accentuate the performances, but I would imagine that you too often get pegged as a ‘fashion designer’

BUS:  Right.  The places that I’ve been seen most lately are runways.  That is quite difficult because I have many people call me to do runway shows, and then I have to explain to them that I don’t do runway shows.  [laughs] 

kSea:  ‘But wait, you’re a fashion designer.’  ‘No, I’m not, I’m a performer.’

BUS:  Right. That’s exactly the thing.  I will come and bring my work to any avenue in which I feel that it can be seen, and there’s not too many places that you can show nineteen costumes, big costumes that are two feet in circumference and two feet over and above the head, all at one time.  So if I have a space in which I am able to bring that many pieces forward without creating an entire event in and of myself, because that is a whole other bag of worms – I just want to show up with my nineteen performers and throw them out there and send people into another realm of imagination.  It happens that those venues have been a way to do that.  I’m actually trying to pull away from that.  I’m going to have people hire us as a group performance, like we did Yuri’s Night in which we had an entire stage.  It was not a runway.  We also had 111 Minna, where we had an entire stage setting.  For those things, we choreograph.  We use as many as 19-25 costumes that are huge, over-the-top. 

kSea:  Also, very recently you did the Exploratorium which was pure performance, gorgeous costumes.  It was nothing close to a fashion show, more like a surreal dreamscape.

BUS:  Right.  They actually contacted me because they wanted me to be a part of the fashion show.  I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ [laughs]  I said, ‘I would be happy to do an installation and perform on your opening night but I will absolutely not do a runway show because I am not a runway artist.  I am not a runway designer.  I am a performance artist, so if you’d like to work with me on that level…’  They were very excited.  I actually have a 25-foot installation there right now that can be seen until September.  Two days after the performance –

kSea:  I’m sorry for interrupting, but tell me about your installation at the Exploratorium.

BUS:  Yeah, well, that’s what I said.  I said I would be happy to do an installation, so what we were going to do is create this huge installation that we would perform inside of and then it would be there for 6 months.  The actual place in which they wanted to place the installation was a very slanted rooftop, so that didn’t really work with the choreography of the piece, so we did the piece in another part of the museum which I actually set up a huge installation for, then took it down two days later and placed it another part of the museum which is almost in the center of the museum. 

kSea:  I'll keep those pictures up.  I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I have a very amateur review of what I saw that evening with pictures of it.  Some of those will definitely be up but I’d also like to get more photographs of you performance without focusing on the amazing costumes you create. 

BUS:  The installation, though – You should check that out.  It’s a 3-D installation.  As you walk up to it, it’s different, and as you go around each side of the installation, it changes because I made an entire atmosphere, an entire other world within the installation.  It’s totally three diminsional.

kSea:  I really like other worlds. [laughs]  This one’s working, but you know…

BUS:  I just had an interview there for Yahoo.  The Exploratorium called and had me come there in full costume.  They put me inside my installation and had me dance inside my installation for a full interview that was going to be on Yahoo.

kSea:  Wow, where on Yahoo?

BUS:  I have no clue. [laughs]

kSea:  So, basically go to Yahoo and search for ‘Bad Unkl Sista.’

BUS:  I don’t know.  I guess they’ll let me know when it shows up.  [laughs]  I just had a big spread on Threadbangers as well.

kSea:  Threadbangers – I have never heard of that before.

BUS:  Someone came all the way from New York, from the Threadbangers website to interview for ‘Second Skin.’  There’s a big interview there with Bad Unkl Sista as well.

kSea:  Earlier this evening, before this mad recording device was turned on, you told me that you have absolutely no idea how to sew.  You just throw things to the machine and see what comes out the other side. 

BUS:  That’s right.

kSea:  I found that awesomely inspiring. That is, I think, one of the most rousing things I’ve ever heard because I don’t know how to sew and I’m an anal piece of shit, and because I don’t really know how to sew – I have a machine, and I’ve created a couple of things, but that struck a serious chord in me-  I mean hell, this magazine was created with only a vision, but no knowledge of how to do it. I essentially threw it in the machine and this is what came out the other side… How do you create the amazing pieces you do, without – as you say – knowing how to sew?

BUS:  Well, they teach you. The pieces teach you.  They tell you what they want to be, so if you just keep shoving them through there [laughs] something’s going to come out.  I call myself a ‘mistake media’ artist because it’s the best mistakes you never make.  If you work mainly in mistakes, there aren’t any, so you just keep throwing it through and throwing it through and putting it on your body, seeing where it fits.  Where does this fold go?  Where does this little pouch go?  If you try it on your body in so many different ways, you’re going to find one way that works and then you’re going to go with it.  It’s like free-writing.  When you start just writing off the top of your head, it eventually goes somewhere.  If you start folding a piece of paper, it eventually goes into something.  If you start free-drawing, after a while something shows up, a little creature.  You can do the same things with sewing.  If you keep throwing it through and throwing it through, something’s going to show up. You just have to have the patience to keep going.  The thing is, the more you do it the more you’re going to understand that, ‘Oh, last time I threw it in this way, so it had this curve here.’  It starts to become a puzzle, become a meditation, become something ‘other.’  If you just let it speak to you, if you just release, then you can actually meditate on the fabric.  You can release yourself from ‘it’s supposed to look this way.’

kSea:  That touched me when we were talking before, because the largest problem I have is having an intention when I sit down at the sewing machine, or having an intention and not knowing how to create it.  Therefore, I never sit down at the machine – out of fear, out of ‘okay, what if I destroy what I have?’ What you said, letting go and letting it happen by itself and learning from it, not trying to make it be what you want to be, is incredibly freeing.

we aren't done - the continuing conversation with Bad Unkl Sista!