PO: I had the big teddy bear.

JW: And you had the same winged dolls, suspended overhead. And you had the same dolls with the nooses and the wings.

PO: Yeah. They're also in Bregenz on the second floor. The dolls are a very special series for me. They're these kind of angels, by way of miracle and wound, which is sort of what always makes an angel. I have grafted bird wings on them from people's pets that have died. And then there are all of these used, stuffed animals from different thrift stores around the country and my own personal collection. I take them and I rip them apart and sew different parts on each other and they get all of these different limbs, bodies and eyes and I kind of make these new, Frankenstein angel monsters. And then they're noosed and hung from the ceiling. In the first series, I hung them from trees. But I mean, to hang an angel is the impossibility. But the lived reality of thinking, “what does it mean to always already be dead?” The weight of that. And also the lived reality, relationally, of how we view, for me, black life in America thinking through spectacle, erasure, continuous death. It's all wrapped in that.

JW:  Adam Phillips speaks about the transitional objects of childhood. There's a tragedy in there. I mean, it is kind of a wounded miracle because the dolls that are loved so devotionally also need to be trashed.

PO: It needs to be trashed. You have to let go of the thing you love to transform.

JW: We were supposed to enact this ruthlessness and not actually kill anybody. 

PO: Which frees us. Which is why in Bregenz, I have that giant teddy bear that everyone's laying on, it's kind of like a huge bear that's been discarded. It's left all by itself. And then I make this music that's supposed to take you to this kind of hypnotic state of where you're allowed to allow the body to go into the state of resting, where you can allow yourself to let go of ego. Which is a very hard place to get to unless you're doing lots of darkness meditation and endless psychoanalysis! I just want a little bit of a fragment of that—what does rest look like, actual rest with others. And I'm like, "Oh, maybe our collective loss can hold that in some way. A tiny little moment for restructuring of breath."

JW: In Winnicott’s paper on “The Capacity to be Alone” he says that aloneness is playing in rooms with other people but you play alone. So it's not alone, but it's the capacity to be alone when you're with others and not be so fixated on them. Or be intruded upon by them. How do you rest in their presence? He said what matters most is the afterwards… And in childhood play, he describes the reassertion of the ego as a burst of selfhood, when the child slams everything down, breaks everything. You can't continue, can't decide to rest, can't continue playing, and have to just blow it all up.

PO: And that's where I think sometimes the tantrum is important in play. Sometimes, I'm like, give me the tantrum, give me the explosion, because then we can move on. Sometimes I don't want to hold the feeling anymore. And then in there is a rebirth. I think sometimes the space for that is important. I'm really about pushing myself to extremes and I think it's its own special portal—the extremes. The pleasure sometimes, and then the letting go in there, it's a very continuous collapse.

JW: You have a rebirth in the Kunsthaus Bregenz show. You have the garden upstairs and you also have a video of a plane you are flying. 

PO: Yes, with the recitation of a poem. And that is kind of a rebirth for me. There is like a restructuring of space and time for me when I'm in the sky in a different way that I'm allowing myself to be trapped up there. There is a freedom there. Freedom is a continuous and always flight. I need to be continuously humbled and remember. There's something being held in the sky and you really feel the inexplicable oneness of everything. I'm like, "Oh, there is no way to be inseparable." I feel really held by everything.

JW: The garden that you grew there also had butterflies which are a symbol of rebirth and resurrection.