it/EQ Collaborative, 2005 - Present
About
it/EQ is a community based collaborative in NYC, working to promote arts/artists in a community exchange through showcasing vital unknown artists, providing multicultural exchanges, and visibility to minority or underrepresented people. it/EQ’s debut project, “The Emperor’s Premiere,” opened in July MMV, which showcased underground local artists/activists in a multimedia fashion show performance with current political subtexts @ Le Petit Versailles, a community garden (www.alliedproductions.org). Subsequent works include a sci-fi opera at Dixon Place (NYC MMVI), a surrealist cabaret dance at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (NYC MMVI), and a month long series of workshops and performances related to political contexts surrounding secret societies, corporations, and information technologies (SF MMVI), anthropological survey of Uranus (NYC MMX). Videos on these performances have been screened in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, CA, and Houston, TX. Funding for projects have been sponsored by private individuals, MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, and a grant from the Puffin Foundation.
The inspiration for this project/collaborative, is one out of love. Carlo and I met early 2005 and we started working together on various projects. The dynamic and the creativity brought to various political and artistic projects was so intense and wonderful that I can’t help but want to create something beautiful with him.
Press
Publications (contact for availability)
Escape to Uranus (DVD +TShirt)
All That The Eyes Can See (MIX NYC Festival TShirt)
Ides of March, Exhibition Catalog, ABC No Rio MMVIII (PDF)
UniTee (Psychic TShirt)
No More Drama: The Saga Continues, Exhibition catalogue, The Center for Book Arts, NYC MMVI (PDF)
Tragic Bride Fashion Victim (DVD)
The Emperor’s Premiere (DVD)
Fashion Shows
New New York, MMXV
CARLO QUISPE AND ETHAN SHOSHAN LAUNCH WEARABLE ART CLOTHING LINE. Art fashion house it/EQ, celebrating 10 years of divine inspiration, has launched their wearable art clothing line. Designers Carlo Quispe and Ethan Shoshan have released adult jumpsuits, onesies and unionsuits. Their third collection is more intimate, more based on their body needs and their daily routines than their previous work, which reflected the lives of their muses and clients. “What I enjoy is realizing our passion to dress ourselves and it’s even more fun to wear the clothes.” That is the story of it/EQ, says artist Carlo Quispe, who transforms over-sized 1990’s comic book T-shirts, comfy sweaters and hoodies into jumpsuits and onesies to wear in multiple combinations. “My clothes are re-purposed bedsheets into summer light utilitarian unionsuits complete with buttflap!” says artist Ethan Shoshan. “In New New York, the streets are the runway!” This is the 3rd installment in a series of our experimental fashion haus, and instead of creating an event we decided to create these intimate video portraits of ourselves wearing our creations in our neighborhoods.” The it/EQ team decided to engage Patrick Arias to help produce the new video, “New New York/New New Work”. Patrick is a NY based photographer and a muse. The production reflects the multiple personality of it/EQ. Ethan is an expert at making unionsuits and Carlo, hand-sewed party onesies.
Escape to Uranus, MMX
ESCAPE TO URANUS is an outer-borough adventure showcasing the culture and couture of the distant planet URANUS, the planet next in line for colonization after the Earth's natural resources have been depleted and global warming has burned up the air and water. it/EQ proudly brings to Earth an exciting and controversial anthropological survey of Uranus and its wondrous people.
The 7th Planet from the Sun, Uranus The written records of Uranus go back eons and suggest that the people of Earth once had an orgasmic matrifocal civilization that used space travel to escape the climate change that destroyed the dinosaurs. Sir William Herschel, one of the founding Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, was the first queer to see Uranus through a telescope in 1781, ushering in the human modern age. Her discovery of Uranus coincided with the Romantic movement, which emphasized individuality and freedom of expression. According to the written records, Uranus initially developed the principles of the Enlightenment and radical political ideas of equality and freedom, among other things.
The planet Uranus is very unusual among the planets in that it rotates on its side, so that it presents each of its poles to the Sun in turn during its orbit; this causes one hemisphere to be bathed in light, while the other lies in total darkness. Due to the gassy surface of Uranus most people reside in Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, the largest moons. Miranda, one of the most majestic satellites, has intoxicatingly beautiful undulating and chaotic icy landscapes and erratic orbital patters. Uranians extract the element called Assium, used in the manufacturing of dildos, and enjoy the benefits of their gynocratic society.
Uranus secretes the principles of genius, individuality, new and unconventional ideas, discoveries, electricity and inventions. This civilization is dedicated to humanitarian and progressive ideals. In Uranus, the planet of sudden and unexpected changes, freedom and originality rule; revolutionary events that upset established structures, radical ideas and people rule. Immigrants are free to come in Uranus as much as they want, there are no taxes, no pants, no army and no government.
Great figures such as Aleister Crowley, Emma Goldman, Jimi Hendrix, Angela Davis, David Bowie, Benazir Bhutto, Kenneth Anger, Isadora Duncan, L. Ron Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, Nico, Maria Callas, Robert Anton Wilson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Greta Garbo, Sarah Bernhardt and Marilyn Manson have been influenced by their visits to Uranus.
Uranus has also been cited as a key influence on many esoteric individuals, including figures like Marija Gimbutas, Gerda Lerner and Riane Eisler, Simone de Beauvoir, Kenneth Grant, Martina Navratilova, Gerald Gardner, and to some degree Ágnes Heller, Raya Dunayevskaya, Austin Osman Spare, Dorothy Edgington, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucio Fontana, Harry Hay and most importantly philosophers like Judith Butler, Iris Murdoch, Marilena Chauí, Andrea Christofidou, Patricia Churchland, Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Arendt, Octavia Butler, Babette Babich, Annette Baier, Michèle Le Dœuff, Rosa Luxemburg, Nancy Cartwright, Julia Kristeva , Marjorie Grene, Mary Hesse, Jennifer Hornsby, Luce Irigaray, Harriet Martineau, Mary Midgley and more.
Let us open up to the wonders of Uranus with… Andrew D'Angelo, Aries DeLa Cruz, Bill Coleman, Bizzy, Boris Godunov Pevzner, Carlo Maria Ampil, Damon White, Daniella LaBocca, Davina Cohen, Devon Gallegos, Dominic Wetzel, Ferrin Scott, Greg (Veruca) Labon, Ian Kowaleski, Jack Waters, Joey Kipp, Jools Palmer, Keef Davis, Leslie Lowe, Mandy Graves, Nodeth Vang, Noele Phillips, Pearl Lin, Peter Cramer, Ricardo Horatio Nelson, Shizu Homma, Sloan Lesbowitz, Sofia Quispe, Sylvie Degiez & Tiffany Smith.
The Emperor’s Premiere, MMV
Documentation of a gender-ambiguous fashion show performance. Each model is wearing clothes out of recycled fabrics and perform an identity they create inspired by the clothes while escorted by men in military uniform. During the performance, one model gets harassed on stage, forced down to the ground, and humiliated. The show climaxes with a sexualized Abu Grab/Ku Klux Klan/Homeland Security inspired outfit. The performance incorporates political subversion, dance as resistance, and the construction of gender. The performers excite the audience through sexual flirtation and fantasy while at the same time are kept in line by men in military uniforms causing tension between freedom and oppression. The performance shift perspectives, bordering between subversive fashion and symbolism to expose ideas of how cultures, political movements, and identity can be co-opted and rendered powerless through superficial trends in style and popular media relegated towards consumerism, voyeurism, and inherent dynamics in sexualized power relationships. From torturer to tortured, fantasy to reality, acceptance to resistance, each model transgresses gender.
Radical Polygender Fashion in the East Village
Featuring: Seraphim B. Penumbra, Joe Tullgren, Douglas Lussier, Frank Susa, Jonah Tully, Stephen Kent Jusick, Ananda La Vita, Mike Diana, David Boutille, Ileana
Military Escorts: Frank Gargiulo, Shane Luitjens, Robert Cafaro, Cornelius Conboy
Make-Up: Seraphim B. Penbumbra
Video: Carlo Quispe, Andrew D’Angelo, Peter Cramer
Performances
Secret Society, MMVI
A multimedia performance event for the public. Participants entering the performance are initiated into a temporary cult of garbage, media, and pan-sexual Goth fashion. Genetically engineered business men transform into the last creatures left on earth, trading in their extra limbs and super internet connectors for hand crafted mutant head-dresses. The dotcom business model mutates into a virtual reality machine slowly sucking away our bodies and minds into mutant machines for war. A critical commentary on today’s secret societies, this performance exposes the hidden agendas of the current political climate by bridging technology with reality, cultish right wing propaganda with piles of garbage, and exposing the secret societies that function, control, and lead countries into war by transforming them into a public spectacle. Unlike other secret societies, this secret society invites people of all walks of life to participate and create deeper bonds within the present communities. The performance is a culmination of it/EQ’s month long free public dance, costume, performance and book making workshops in involving C.E.L.L.space, Million Fishes Collective, Experimental Performance Institute, and Galeria de la Raza. Performance ends with a raving parade to Quetzalcoatl for an outdoor gathering.
The Call of the Wild, MMVI
2 business men in fox masks have a no hold’s bar cockfight. Find out who really measures up in this raunchy cock battle. See who loses their nuts while the dow jones goes up in annual stocks. Find out how business really works in this world… Business men with extra large phallic prosthetics proceed to have a cock fight on the street. Fight gets interrupted by cell phone calls and massaging wounded prosthetics. Performance ends in castration followed by a drunken camaraderie between businessmen and audiences. Done as a benefit for anti-violence projects. it/EQ Community Arts Collaborative performance in San Francisco in front of the Roxy Theater as part of Experimental Performance Institute, Crash Cabaret August 5th @ Midnight. Performed also for the Precita Eyes Mural Project @ Balazo 18 Gallery.
Times Have Changed, MMVI
A 7 minute surreal cabaret performance based on each performers own hopes and goals – a panoramic view of multiple dreams intertwined. Performance at BAAD (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance). Performers: Carlo Quispe, Melissa Jameson, Ethan Shoshan, Sachio Ko-yin, Devon Gallegos, Dominick Wetzel, Dominic Cloutier and Marc Arthur
Tragic Bride / Fashion Victim, MMVI
at Collective Unconscious in Tribeca, NYC
it/EQ launches “The Emperor’s Premiere” on DVD in Tragic Bride/Fashion Victim, a full installation performance event integrating art and social space while crossing gender divides, exposing interpersonal experimental narratives, and creating spiritual/healing rituals. From the carefully composed invitation to marry and tie the knot to invocations, projected images, meditative spiritual transformations with music, clothes, and performance, to enacted rituals of healing, meditation, and trance-work that carries the spirit onward.
LIVE Performances: Andrew D’Angelo (music), Kalup Linzy (performance), Joseph Keckler & Co (cabaret), Blk w/Bear (music), and Hawk Kinkaid (spoken word)
Videos & Visuals: Stephen Varble (images), John Eric Broaddus (images), Hunter Reynolds (images), Millie Taylor (animations), and Tim Lonergan (video performance)
Living Installations: Juan Betancurth, Marc, and Devon Gallegos
with MC’s it/EQ (Ethan Shoshan & Carlo Quispe) and the esteemable duo Jack Waters & Peter Cramer
About the Show
At the entrance into the Collective Unconscious, JUAN BETANCURTH, a Columbian graphic designer/artist working with self portraits, chickens, and catholic saints, waits for his past lover arriving from Spain after 4 years of separation with the desire to marry him. Projected animations by MILLIE TAYLOR, enwraps the audience in a fanciful world filled with obsession, playfulness, and eccentric twists, followed by healing meditative video performances by TIM LONERGAN, a Baltimore artist confronting desire and his body in symbolic performances. Projected images of STEPHEN VARBLE and JOHN ERIC BROADDUS wearing extravagantly crafted costumes known for parading through the streets of Soho circa 1970s. HUNTER REYNOLDS enacting drag performances through sexual imagery, the queering of the body, and internal desires. Varble, Broaddus and Reynolds performances become a mediation of the healing properties of performance with careful understanding of clothing, nature, and the elements that form their bodies. Sporatic live performances by MARC and DEVON GALLEGOS enact lost tales banned from the Bible, set to modern queering sexuality.
Music artists BLK w/ BEAR [Washington DC] is the audio-art pseudonym for queer visual artist JS Adams. His audio artworks include both temporal turntable installations and laptop compositions utilizing forced looping technique of altered vinyl recordings and media decay along with manipulated voice synthesis and deconstructive turntablism. RH BEAR [NYC] is bassist for industrial noise rockers BILE with an upcoming collaborative release of electro-acoustic noise and improvisation. During the NYC debut of BLK w/ BEAR, along with RH Bear will create minimal meditative soundscape incorporating recorded clips from everyday travels as a way to construct and build form to chaos.
HAWK KINKAID, sex worker activist involved in various social projects with sex workers and artistic ventures, will read poetry from his life experiences, desires and the world surrounding it.
JOSEPH KECKLER, a hammy depressive, multi-media visual and performance artist, essayist, playwright, actor, divo and chanteur will sing a few songs with a fellow diva, playing with farce and kitch surrounding sex and clothes.
KALUP LINZY, a video and performance artist known for his playful personas around gender, sexuality, race, class, and popular culture, will lead the audience into rapture. Using multi-layered characters and subplots that weave through the works, he constructs powerful critiques of the laws of romance and desire, family and trust, truth and hypocrisy. We the viewers are forced to confront the ways we deal with our own yearnings and acknowledge the dirty little secrets that everyone knows.
ANDREW D’ANGELO, experimental jazz musician known for his intense improvisations and breaking down the walls holding the brain, will bring the audience into a musical trance leaving the body behind, transporting the soul beyond this dimension. PETER CAPELLE has composed electronic score to accompany Andrew.
Moving Men, MMVI
Dixon Place presents new dance performances by it/EQ collaborative (Carlo Quispe + Ethan Shoshan) performing a haunting dance of military violence and redemption followed by a post-apocalyptic queer sci-fi opera. Each performance was 7 minutes long. Curated By Arthur Aviles
Gay Dollar, MMV
Money handed during gay pride events in NYC, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. Each location had a group of people interested in handing out this fake money criticizing gay purchasing power, consumer identity, and the loss of values in “gay pride,” while promoting a better understanding of queer community and basic human rights that minority LGBTQ communities are fighting for including trans-rights, homelessness and healthcare instead of gay marriage.
In the very earliest of times, men lived in the dark and had no animals to hunt. They were poor, ignorant people, far inferior to those living nowadays. They traveled about in search of food, they lived on journeys as we do now, but in a very different way. When they halted and camped, they worked at the soil with picks of a kind we no longer know. They got their food from the earth, they lived on the soil. They knew nothing of all the game we now have, and had therefore no need to be ever on guard against all those perils which arise from the fact that we, hunting animals as we do, live by slaying other souls. Therefore, they had no shamans, but they knew sickness, and it was fear of sickness and suffering that led to the coming of the first shamans. The ancients relate as follows concerning this:
Human beings have always been afraid of sickness, and far back in the very earliest times there arose wise men who tried to find out about all the things none could understand. There were no shamans in those days, and men were ignorant of all those rules of life which has since taught them to be on their guard against danger and wickedness. The first amulet that ever existed was the shell portion of a sea-urchin. It has a hole through it, and is hence called itEQ (anus) and the fact of its being made the first amulet was due to its being associated with a particular power of healing. When a man fell ill, one would go and sit by him, and, pointing to the diseased part, break wind behind. Then one went outside, while another held one hand hollowed over the diseased part, breathing at the same time out over the palm of his other hand in a direction away from the person to be cured. It was believed that wind and breath together combined all the power emanating from within the human body, a power so mysterious and strong that it was able to cure disease.
In that way everyone was a physician, and there was no need of any shamans. But then it happened that a time of hardship and famine set in around Iglulik. Many died of starvation, and all were greatly perplexed, not knowing what to do. Then one day when a number of people were assembled in a house, a man demanded to be allowed to go behind the skin hangings at the back of the sleeping place, no one knew why. He said he was going to travel down to the Mother of the Sea Beasts. No one in the house understood him, and no one believed in him. He had his way, and passed in behind the hangings. Here he declared that he would exercise an art which should afterwards prove of great value to mankind; but no one must look at him. It was not long, however, before the unbelieving and inquisitive drew aside the hangings, and to their astonishment perceived that he was diving down into the earth; he had already got so far down that only the soles of his feet could be seen. How the man ever hit on this idea no one knows; he himself said that it was the spirits that had helped him; spirits had entered into contact with out in the great solitude. Thus the first shaman appeared among men. He went down to the Mother of the Sea Beasts and brought back game to men, and the famine gave place to plenty, and all were happy and joyful once more.
Afterwards, the shamans extended their knowledge of hidden things, and helped mankind in various ways. They also developed their sacred language, which was once only used for communicating with the spirits and not in everyday speech.
– Rasmussen, Knud. Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos translated by William Worster. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-1924 vol 8 no.1-2 Copenhagen.