Interview with Serena F. Konkin - performance artist on video for 'Afterlife'

In the spirit of collaboration, we reached out to friend and performance artist Serena F. Konkin to help with the video for ‘Afterlife’, for which she created beautiful imagery, bringing the song’s heart to visual life. We asked Serena to share some insights into her background and approach:

ELL: You are very natural, very comfortable in the video.  Have you had prior experience with performance art?

SFK: I’ve had a life-long preoccupation performing. Being on stage sparked in me equal parts terror and joy, so naturally I fell madly in love with it. I studied and experimented with a fairly wide variety of dance, theater, voice, and performance styles over the years, enjoying the process, but never fitting into a particular niche. At some point, my focus became less about the skills themselves, and more about cultivating my own person…what it’s like to present my body in a performative space, what it is to be seen, and how to create the conditions for shared and meaningful moments to occur. The more I’ve embraced my atypical qualities as a person and a performer, the more interesting and gratifying it’s been, so that’s my north star at this time.

ELL: With 'Afterlife', how did you decide where to start?  And what influenced that decision (ie, part of the song itself, or did the song bring to mind something outside the song itself that you connected to)?

SFK: ‘Afterlife’ immediately evoked for me a concept from Jungian theory, the idea of the lumen naturae. Lumen naturae is the light only found within the darkness, a phenomena which occurs as a natural part of the transformation process. It’s that moment of intuitive clarity when you’ve been really deep inside the caverns of yourself, and suddenly there’s a realization, and something lifts. I feel like the song really beautifully captures that same interplay of light and dark, and the intensity and pressure of entering into liminal, unknown space and emerging from it again. It speaks to something both so universal and personal, and I wanted to keep fidelity to that feeling.

ELL: The lighting you used was fantastic.  Describe your set-up for the shoot(s).

SFK: My set up is simple. My impetus to create during quarantine and distancing has revolved around respect for limitations, which has actually been incredibly liberating.  I shoot everything solo, at night, in my bedroom, as to have control over how much light is in the space. All my lighting equipment is pedestrian: various types of string lights, flashlights, clamp lights. I also have three antique mirrors crammed into my space, which are extremely instrumental in the shooting process.

ELL: Your own Instagram shows recent self-portrait work influenced by tarot cards.  Is this a project you're continuing, and do you have other photo projects in mind?

SFK: My tarot series started as a random, one-off project. I like creating mundane interpretations of very iconic images, and as soon as I finished one, the idea for the next just naturally emerged, so the project naturally just took on its own momentum. I’m a few photos away from completing the Major Arcana, and have deliberated taking on the entire deck, should I feel so brave. I always have ideas flitting around in my head, and a few longer term, multimedia projects that have been culminating slowly over time, but am still in the phase of tinkering and seeing what will come to fruition.

ELL: Are there any particular artists that have influenced you, or that you particularly admire?

SFK: My mother, a painter, brought me up surrounded by stacks of vintage illustrated mythology and fairy tales books and an inordinate amount of spooky folk art. She instilled in me a kind of mystical aesthetic, with the idea of art as a doorway to things potentially otherworldly. I’ve had a great admiration for artists who seem to create a universe unto themselves with their work. The surrealist painter Remedios Varo especially comes to mind for the projects I’ve focused on this winter, for those same qualities. My network and community have also been a vitally important influence for me, as those are the artists whose work I keep abreast of most. The process of watching my peers in their individual creative processes has been deeply inspiring and given me permission to be curious about my own.