Altars
on rituals and places with Raya Marie Hazell
Xiaowei Wang: To start off with, could you introduce yourself?
Raya Marie Hazell: I’m Raya Marie Hazell, she/they pronouns, and I feel like I’m accepting that I’m deeply multi-hyphenated. I struggle with introductions and how to make myself legible, but in a few words, I am an interdisciplinary artist and designer and I work in mediums that span physical, digital and social space, namely doing a lot of collage, installation, web design and happenings. All the work is centered around technology futures and grief. I’m currently calling in from southern Spain.
Xiaowei: What brought you to the Collective Action School space?
Raya: I studied Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in school and for a lot of my life my work and education was in critical technology and social studies. I came to CAS because I was feeling really restless, and thinking about the relationship of my own labor to these issues. I was wanting to understand what collective struggle and movement across industries and domains would look like because I feel like I was doing a lot of internal reflecting and wanting to understand how other laborers were thinking about it, especially how I, as a freelancer and independent artist, could connect to others.
Xiaowei: What was your CAS experience? And was there a mentor or someone you were thinking about during your experience?
Raya: I think understanding the domains of labor, and organizing labor, was really impactful for me. It’s something I’ve continued to research and think about, understanding how other people are grappling with their relation to labor and labor systems. It felt nice to know that people were thinking critically about it, and that I wasn’t overthinking—there are questions we need to be asking. For me, it felt like a seminar. The things I was questioning were things that I didn’t have answers to, and things that I would have to keep working through and evaluating.
I would say I brought in two people into the space. One person is someone who I always carry with me, my mother, who’s passed. Bringing all that she has taught me and how that grief has oriented me to how I think about living. I also brought my mentor, Dr. Janet Vertesi, who is the person who really oriented me away from being a designer interested in technology to being a critical technologist interested in a social approach to technology and its entanglements. She has oriented me a lot in my learning and continues to be someone who takes her entanglement with technological systems to a really inspiring place of values, directly correlating with action.
Xiaowei: Amazing. I think that leads to my next question about your final project. How did it start, where is it at right now?
Raya: My project is a video project and in person experience focused on how we relate to place, particularly in an era in which a lot of our lives take place in digital spaces, including labor and relationships. It started with an interest in place and digital space. I think a lot about social internets, what a digital space is in cyberspace. Relatedly, I have a complex relationship to place and placelessness, as someone who moves around a lot, partly as the result of grief and loss of my mother and literal manifestation of home.
I came to thinking about labor in tech. One thing I’m hyper aware of is this concept of digital nomads and digital nomads being a trend—it’s presented as a lifestyle where you don’t have to worry about or think critically about where you put your body and where you go because your world exists online and therefore your body can go anywhere. Obviously there’s a lot of issues with that. I have kind of resisted that label, even though I think I probably count as a “digital nomad.” I resist that labeling because I think it evokes an image of being a content creator.
Where my final project is going?...I guess I would describe it as being in progress. I think that’s something I’ve been kind of frustrated with because I wanted to finish it shortly after the program. But another topic has come up, and I’ve realized it’s a big part of my life and how I relate to my labor—one that I’m always learning about. I’ve been in a period of moving: for the last four or five months I’ve been in a lot of transit. So what the project has become is this project of altar building.
In every place I’ve been and that I’ve settled into, I’ve made an altar within the first few nights I’ve been there. On my altar I bring things of my own, like I bring this photo of my mom and typically there are stones, or leaves, or natural objects, or water from the place. This altar building process has been a way of thinking about what it means to come into a place and to both be myself while having an awareness of the place itself.
I’ve been taking videos and photos of the altars and it’s coming together into a video project as well. I’m working on a soundtrack with a friend of mine, who is a friend from high school who has seen me move around. They’re fun to be working with on this because they’ve witnessed me be constantly on the go. It’s become more of a personal practice and ritual.
I’m working on a script, editing it, and working on how to bring it into conversation with the digital space, because I also have digital altars—you know, my desktop, my browser, pinned tabs, bookmarks, and extensions. I think a part of the project that is still in progress is how I communicate this externally. Figuring out what and how I relate to all of this has been a process.
Xiaowei: How are you currently relating to your project now that you’re in Spain?
Raya: It feels ongoing; my friend and I are going back and forth, we’re finding the soundtrack and I’m collecting this bucket of visuals to work with. I have a studio residency at the beginning of 2024, which I’m really excited for. It’ll take me to new places. I’m excited for the concentrated time to work on the visual output of this project. I’ve been letting myself be in transit and think about that. I’m thinking about physical alters, building new pieces, and giving myself a lot of time to reflect on what happens in this container. I’m taking photos and videos of the altars, screenshots of my desktop and the apps I’m using. I work in collage a lot and that’s very much how I’ve learned my process goes: I spend a long time collecting bits and pieces. After an accumulation period, the things become sorted. Then, at the end, there are two or three nights where I’m in the studio just grabbing from buckets, and artifacts are made. I’m in that first, very long stage of accumulating.
At the end of CAS, I had made a short video essay with inviting text and questions. This is not an anti-digital nomad campaign, and this is not telling you how to be an ethical digital nomad. I just hope to present how I’m relating through transiting and space.
Xiaowei: It’s so interesting, we live in this time of enormous migration. Who gets the label of a digital nomad? Some of us romanticize history—this narrative that we lived on farms and didn’t go anywhere. But that’s actually not true, right, including for people who make a lot of these digital technologies, who are migrants working in factories. I’m curious how your project has reshaped or made you rethink your own relationship to the digital world?
Raya: I mean, I love the internet. I’m in Spain right now, and I’m out here, without any of my community. So all of my socializing is happening in digital space, like all of my interactions with loved ones are being mediated through the internet. So I’m very aware that some of the things that ground me, such as my relationships or my labor, are happening through digital space. But I’m also very aware of the way I can make my altar. And whenever I come to a new place, there’s a process of moving in. There’s also a lot of things I realized in the digital world that are not under my control, even though I habitate digital space. I’ve been very angry at Spotify lately. I don’t’ have control over the space that I partake in online, whether that be in social media, the tools I use, or the hardware that is mediating this call. I’m becoming very aware of what my needs are in terms of space, personal space and what makes me be able to sleep well, to eat well and to move. I’m also thinking that lot of us live in the same digital homes—a lot of us have Macbooks or use Chrome or Safari, or whatever your browser is. There are these shared homes that we actually don’t have so much control over, so I’ve been thinking about that too, and wanting to make a home in my hardware and redecorate my digital home; getting frustrated when I don’t have that control.
Obviously, to me, it is very political that I can’t change the container, the medium, or the metaphors through which I talk to my loved ones. How are these relationships then, when confined to certain choreographies?
Xiaowei: That’s so powerful, thank you for that. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Raya: Definitely. Be on the lookout—there will be a video output from this that I will be excited to share and hopefully do some kind of in-person launch event, as well as a digital event. The website has the guiding text and a preview trailer. There’s a way you can register to be notified about the launch.
Like I said, this is ongoing, and it’s the first iteration. These are topics that I will continue to work on and explore. I hadn’t mentioned this, but a lot of these things are something that I’m also interested in exploring as a product of diaspora and what that means. I’m mixed racially and ethnically and a product of multiple diasporas. So I think about that too, about how it affects my relationship to place in terms of my ancestry and my ancestors coming from very different lands that I have traveled to and traversed. So this will be an ongoing line of questioning.
Xiaowei: I’m so excited for the experience that you’ll lead people through—having people make their different altars. In the past few months I feel like I’ve talked to several people about getting started making altars and when they Googled it, the examples were all from white witches, so there wasn’t a lot of helpful information specific to their ancestry and lineages.
Raya: I remember when I first started altar building. I started online and I was like, “this is not happening!” And then I reached out to friends and now my friends and I send pictures of altars. I appreciate that making altars is something people can get into and not feel intimidated by or that it’s unknown. It can be different things for different people.