Lydia Lunch is well known for her photography, writing, and music from the past three decades. Based in Barcelona, she recently released the new album Urge to Kill on Rustblade with her band RETROVIRUS; her 1990 spoken word work Conspiracy of Women (C.O.W.) will be rereleased this month on limited-edition vinyl by Nicholas Jaar’s label, Other People. Lunch will perform the piece on June 5, 2015, at 7 PM at Howl! Happening in New York, where an exhibition of new photography and selections from her archives are also on display through June 5. Here, she talks about her process, formative influences, and being an expat.
I’VE BEEN COMPILING MY ARCHIVES over the past two years. After so many spoken word and music shows, I have a ton of documentation—letters, live recordings, and boxes of photos that I’ve been taking since 1990. A lot of my photographic and video work happened after I left New York in 1990. I moved to New Orleans and began taking photos of rural decay, graveyards, crashed cars, and teenagers. I was trying to say to my subjects, “Look, this is you—don’t conform. This is your power, this is your beauty.” This exhibition is only my second photography show in the US; it highlights the work I could not do in this country, which is why I had to move.
I left America when Bush was reelected. I knew that the US was going to turn into a police state, so I went to Spain, a country that was thirty-five years out of fascism. There, I began visiting the ghost towns, investigating for my photography and video backdrops. An important one was the village of Belchite, which Franco bombed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, killing six thousand people. The place is now in a chronic state of decay; they just built a new town beside it. Nobody goes there, nobody cares, because amnesia is written into the constitution post Franco. They don’t talk about the civil war or the dead they can’t find. I wrote a spoken word piece called The Ghost of Spain, which is also about the ghost of Fallujah and Islamabad, Detroit and Trenton. I just connected the tissue of man’s insanity. That crumbling village is in some of my photos in the New York show. One is called Collateral Damage and it’s of this little boy at a German music festival. I took his picture and overlaid that with a piece of a destroyed wall in Belchite, which looks like a bloody smear of brick.
Spoken word has always been my priority—it’s intimate and hypnotic when done right. The word is what matters the most. One of the things I love to say from the stage is “Don’t be afraid to be ugly,” because we’re so indoctrinated to think, especially as females, that we’re not good enough. When I first started doing spoken word, there were more political artists doing it at the time, like Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins, Exene Cervenka, and Wanda Coleman. I was called an exaggerator then but everything I was talking about is exactly what’s going on now. I’ve always felt we live in apocalyptic times, maybe because of what I was born into. In the show there’s an installation titled You are not safe in your own home, and nearby is “The War Is Never Over,” a series of photographic montages. The installation is an homage to relationships that are formed out of trauma bonds and the creativity that comes out of that. The show goes from the political trauma zone to the personal trauma zone, and the archival stuff on view is just to show how I managed to survive all that. The art is the proof of survival. I always turned the knife outward.
