A small crowd had already gathered on the lawn when I arrived at Comfort Station, forming a semi-circle around the multicolored structure, most people seated or sprawling in the grass while a few odd groups of people said hello and chatted. The purplish twilight imbuing the scene with a somber, pensive quality. I paced back and forth along the sidewalk before deciding to sit in the grass where I would have the clearest view of the wedding gown, which I assumed would be a focal point of the performance because of its central position. The gown, constructed from white flowers—baby’s breath, lilies, roses—was positioned inside the multicolored structure. The gown’s bodice was segmented by a small shrine, a platform where three candles flickered. Unworn and displayed on the grass, the gown strangely resembled a roadside memorial.  I recalled one memorial that I walked past daily for years—a white, spray-painted bike chained to a streetlamp, adorned with bouquets of purple faux flowers, and occasionally decorated with a few flickering votive candles. The slow burning-wicks suggested the mourners were nearby; nursing their never ending grief. 

The performance began without introduction. Four performers started to circle the multicolored structure while the audience continued to make conversation, unaware the evening’s event was underway. The performers vocalized a melody reminiscent of a religious hymn, finding sonic harmony with their voices became a form of angelic presence.  

I greeted Vince Phan, who was pacing back and forth near the edge of the structure and complimented his handiwork. I correctly guessed the wedding gown was Phan’s contribution to the collaboration; he regularly repurposes leftover flowers from his professional floristry to build installations or garments for his artistic practice. A year prior, I witnessed and wrote about the Eden-like installation he assembled for “At Rest,” a collaboration between Phan and performer Ále Campos for Jude Gallery’s final exhibition. Phan explained the inspiration for the wedding gown without prompting, “Inés wanted a wedding gown to play on this idea that nuns are the ‘Brides of Christ.’” He made air quotes with his fingers around the phrase “Brides of Christ.” 

I looked around for Inés Arango-Guingue, the curator who invited me to attend the performance Suspira Es Hacia Adentro, Susurrar Es Hacia Afuera (translation: Sigh is Inward, Whisper is Outward). I spotted her through one of the structure’s neon-pink architectural screens: I recognized her long black hair, which shimmered like the surface of Lake Michigan rippling and reflecting moonlight at night. Phan shared that Arango-Guingue worked for the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU) in Bogotá for a time, an exhibition space owned by the Banco de la República Art Collection. During Arango-Guingue’s time at MAMU, the museum hosted an exhibition of 46 crowned nun portraits from their collection. The portraits captured nuns in their final moment, lying supine with floral crowns and palm fronds while wearing the habit of their order. Their death is the defining moment of their life, their unification with Jesus, to whom they are betrothed. The day of their death is also the day of their wedding. 

I recalled Phan’s wedding gown, its similarity to a roadside memorial, and momentarily speculated about grief, pondering whether it could be characterized as a set of rituals, a ceremonial practice of remembering the spectral or missing beloved. The gown, paired with the music and the setting sun, caused the crowd to become silent, like churchgoers awaiting instruction from a spiritual leader, someone who might model how they should interact with this familiar scene, to interpret this new experience.  

The performers passed each other without acknowledgement and trailed their hands along the metal structure. The structure is a combination of blue pipes that form a cubic outline of a home, several interconnected squares with a triangular roof at one end that can be reassembled and rearranged. Titled SCAFFOLD, the original, modular structure was commissioned in 2021 and designed by Via Chicago Architects + Diseñadores as an adaptable structure to host outdoor performances. The title of the work refers to the temporary, movable platform workers use to stand or sit while repairing or constructing buildings and has moved across the lawn of Comfort Station repeatedly over the years as part of activations by countless artists who adorned the structure with metallic foil or hung a square of sod from it. SCAFFOLD has become a familiar visual fixture at the heart of Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood; One of my friends once made an Instagram story describing SCAFFOLD as “appallingly ugly” and wondering if it would ever be removed. Enjoying an opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge, I sent her a link to the artwork’s description on Comfort Station’s website. She responded, “Thanks for sharing, Diva, but I still think it’s ugly af.” 

Suspira Es Hacia Adentro, Susurrar Es Hacia Afuera was one of numerous performances organized by Comfort Station to activate Edra Soto’s La Casa de Todos (Everyone’s Home). Soto designed multicolored, decorative panels inspired by the iron screens that became a popular fixture in post-war Puerto Rican residential architecture to transform SCAFFOLD into a new public installation before the artwork was decommissioned. SCAFFOLD offered a unique entry point for both Soto and Arango-Guingue to adapt an existing structure and transform it by reimagining how we ornament this structure and interact with it as a physical space and artwork. Together, they recouped elements of their artistic lineages and used them to rework this monument and create a new visual language. 

During the short walk from my apartment to Comfort Station, I noticed scaffolding everywhere on Milwaukee Ave, a worrying sign that capital, the greed of real estate investors, has arrived to transform the neighborhood even further. A large sign on the lawn of Comfort Station near La Casa de Todos announced that the nonstop construction on Milwaukee Ave that started in earnest this past spring when Capitol Cement dug up the sidewalk from Central Park to Kimball Ave was made possible by Joe Biden’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. This proliferation of scaffolding throughout Logan Square preceded the arrival of a new vintage clothing consignment store, private equity-backed dental office, and typical grayscale “luxury” apartments. If SCAFFOLD possesses an ugliness, it is because it partly symbolizes capitalism’s mythic belief that endless change and revitalization is necessary and imperative—that a new Sweetgreen will solve a neighborhood’s woes. Investment violently shifts the boundaries of the neighborhood, reshaping how the community moves through and uses public space. 

Both Soto and Arango-Guingue used SCAFFOLD’s architecture to explore how culture crosses or collapses boundaries, literally and metaphorically, through colonial conquest in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin and South America. Arango-Guingue was inspired by Soto’s rejas, ornamental ironwork screens popularized and used to safeguard colonial homes during Spanish settlement of Puerto Rico. These architectural elements originated from Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th Century, influencing Spanish architecture and later the colonial churches of Arango-Guingue’s home country—Colombia. Celosía, otherwise known as architectural lattice work or jealousies, become representations of a cultural syncretism enacted through violent conquest.

One of the performers gripped the pink screen and rocked back and forth: ecstatic. They began singing louder. Their hands slipped through the gaps of the screen like a neighbor’s garden climbing greedily through a fence. The screen flexed in response to their grip. The performer kneeled before the wedding dress. Suspira Es Hacia Adentro, Susurrar Es Hacia Afuera was scored by Beatriz Eugenia Diaz’s CeloSie, a 2005 composition inspired by Diaz’s first visit to Convento Santa Clara La Real in Tunja. Diaz discovered a musical score left behind by a cloistered nun that influenced her own composition. Watching the performers circumambulate the colorful structure, humming this tune, I am reminded of the choral echoes of church hymns sung on Sunday mornings. The lurching choreography of the performers channeled, I imagined, the feverish devotion of cloistered nuns who retreat into isolation, desperate to unite themselves with God. Perhaps Arango-Guingue wanted to encourage her audience to retreat from the furious pace of Chicago inside La Casa de Todos, this structure so many Logan Square residents walk past every day, and find God—or at least spiritual insight. 

Arango-Guingue recalled CeloSie while researching architectural jealousies, the title of the piece itself a combination of celosía and Sie, a goddess of water worshipped by the Muisca, an Indigenous tribe who live in the region around Bogotá. For Arango-Guingue, these architectures, the music, became a method to understand history, nodding to Catholic syncretism in Latin and South America as the church absorbed Indigenous practices and belief systems during Spanish conquest. And they also illuminated the division of private and public, feminine and masculine, and allowed Arango-Guingue to reflect on her ongoing interest in colonial Latin American mysticism and poetry. 

Soto’s decorative panels are similar to Spanish artist Christina Iglesias’ Celosías, a series of labrinythian latticework sculptures, an explicit influence for Arango-Guingue’s activation of La Casa de Todos. Iglesias’ wooden, copper-powder-coated structures resemble Islamic and Catholic architecture, creating private space, similar perhaps to such as a confession booth or isolated convent halls where nuns retreat from public life to bring themselves closer to God. Through architecture, women are concealed. Isolation becomes the precursor for their union with God. 

I wanted to move closer so that I could see the obscured performers moving around inside. I was compelled to join them, to reach my hands through the gaps, to whisper through the latticework, prayers or sweet nothings, anything that caused me to experience a similar emotional rapture and throw myself face down into the grass, overcome with feeling.

As the performance continued into the night, I began to notice images projected onto the multicolored latticework by projectors mounted on folding chairs and nestled in the dry, yellowed grass. They were photographs of bare feet cast in blue light, fingers stuffing food into an open mouth and neat rows of teeth, indistinguishable planes of flesh fragmented by the structure. The fragmentation gave the photographs the appearance of light passing through partially closed blinds, elongated slivers of light that slowly move across the room, marking the passage of time. Bawden’s photographs collapsed the boundary between inside and outside—a division that creates the possibility for interiority. The photographs expanded the scope of Arango-Guingue’s performance, encouraging us to think about the psychological effects of our separation. We might peer out at our neighborhoods, the world, from the privacy of our homes, yet Bawden’s photographs reversed our spectatorship and played with our sense of ownership, asking: What does it mean to see ourselves from either side of these boundaries? What happens when I encounter the outside and bring it back inside with me? Will I become a besotted lover who adopts the habits and tastes of their beloved? Will I be transformed? 

Arango-Guingue drifted away from the performance with a notebook in her hand. She approached and appeared to whisper to audience members one by one, who began to enter the structure, emboldened by her invitation no doubt. She crouched beside me in the grass. I was tempted to say hello, to acknowledge our relationship. The last time we saw each other was her birthday party, where she delicately prepared lemon and shrimp kebabs to roast them over the fire in our mutual friends’ backyard. But her steely expression that night demanded reverence. She cupped her hand over her mouth and asked, “Do I have permission to whisper in your ear?” I nodded. Her voice vibrated erotically against my eardrum, and I shivered momentarily, worried about behaving incorrectly, or missing her instruction in my nervous daze. 

She read an anecdote about Islamic architecture and the etymology of latticework, explaining that the name was drawn from verbs “to drink” and “to see.” “Tonight, we are trying to summon the water goddess Sie,” she explained, and then moved on to the next audience member.  Through her instruction, I became a (brief, albeit insincere) worshipper

I joined others who had taken the tealight candles being passed around and entered SCAFFOLD. We formed a small line to light our candles using the wedding gown shrine. We were churchgoers lighting votive candles. Our prayers took physical form through the flame. Some people continued to carry their candles carefully while others placed them on the structure itself, balancing them in the empty space between the colored screens or placing them in the grass. I carried mine, unsure if I wanted to participate and overcome by claustrophobia as more audience members filtered inside. 

After I fled the structure and settled onto the lawn again, I was dismayed. I felt I was unwilling or incapable of ritual, ceremony, or the rigorous discipline and devotion required for self-abnegation—which might represent a failure of my femininity. I recalled a passage from Rachel Cusk’s novel Kudos. The novel’s narrator Faye attends a writing conference dinner where one of the other attendees urges her to try the hot, delicious tarts served between sessions—a beloved national staple. He explains to her that the original recipe was invented by nuns who used enormous quantities of egg whites to starch their habits and needed a purpose for the excess egg yolks. He muses that the tarts symbolize the nun’s sexlessness, their divested femininity, handed over on a plate, and that the country’s men, and their appetite for pleasure, are tricked by this inferior substitute. But he cannot imagine suffering could result in the tart’s superior flavor; these women, he imagines, delighted in their life without men. In this scene from Cusk’s novel, cloistered nuns represent a fundamental antagonism between the sexes for this unnamed character, a suspicion that women enter the convent out of a desire to be isolated from men. That their reclusion and ritual represents an immutable boundary between men and women. 

However, as I watched audience members quietly move in and out of the structure, partially concealed by the screens, I suspected that this physical separation wasn’t inherently subjugating or alienating, as portrayed in the novel. A convent’s seclusion and a nun’s devotion to spirituality might require self-abnegation, but these women invent an unexpected vehicle for their own libidinous desire—the tart. A new way of living becomes possible through reclusion. Desire is transmuted. And transformed. Women become nuns; egg yolks become pastries; men become hungry mouths; egg custards become a national identity. 

When the performance ended, the crowd began to disperse, fleeing the structure seemingly all at once as if they were instructed to. The few people who continued to hold their tea light candles placed them in the grass or on the structure including myself. People gathered outside Comfort Station’s entrance and chatted idly. Phan briefly considered disassembling the gown and then decided otherwise, urging everyone to take a bouquet. Propelled by unusual boldness, I was the first to take an odd arrangement of baby’s breath, white roses, and a single lily. Two women joined me as I plucked flowers from the gown to assemble their own bouquets. I clutched my flowers in my fist as I said goodbye to my friends and acquaintances before walking home along Milwaukee Ave passing underneath several stretches of scaffolding. 

At home I removed a mug with faces of notable modern artists, mostly men, with a few exceptions—Leonora Carrington, Alice Neel, Remedios Varo—and used it to display the bouquet on my desk. The performance was my last professional and social obligation before a major surgery the following week. I isolated myself in the following days to prepare homemade chicken broth, do laundry, call my health insurance, and appraise my body in the mirror—questioning whether I was making the correct decision. Each morning I noticed the flowers aging, the white petals turning yellowish, like jaundiced skin, before browning. They become ugly and begin to stink. Watching their slow death, I was possessed by the urge to write, to whisper through the gaps of my self-imposed confinement, to make sense of these transformations. 

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