Victoria Bradford Styrbicki

Caught Up, 2023-25
Multidisciplinary installation, Sound, Nets, Objects, Works on paper

When I first heard the story of my grandfather “trawling” his nets attached to his big toe, I became set on reperforming this specific act as a way to access a relationship that never was—my grandfather died when my mother was only 7. As I began exploring this disappearing art of net-making, I also started listening to my eldest aunt Dolores, in her last year of life. She shared stories of my grandfather, grandmother, and the unique way of life that was emerging along the bayous and marshes as the oil industry set in around the 30s and 40s when she was just a child. As I listened, I would weave, and I approached each net as the mark made by a durational performance that involved counting, handwork, postures, rhythms, and gestures of tying knots, exploring generational and lived trauma in the body. 

Over several months of working my hands and listening deeply, I discovered the trauma runs deeper than my own family, but throughout a whole community, landscape, and watershed. The net became a metaphor for catching people in dialogue about Louisiana’s coastal culture and challenges. I intentionally took materials and methodologies out of the context of fishing and used them to embody the complex and confounding realities of my own legacy and of those many more whose lives connect to water. 

Using tools from my performance practice, this body of work explores crochet, macrame and weaving through improvisation and iteration, devising object and image excavated from the body’s personal and political resonances. Fragmentation, failure, and creative response drives this emotion-filled, arhythmic mesh. The work itself becomes a laboratory, or a site that together with the audience I continue to approach with a spirit of experimentation, with a spirit of trial and error, even of play, and, insistently, of humor. And by humor I mean the ability to laugh at ourselves and find joy in what we come upon even as we begin to take ourselves too seriously. 

Peggy Phalen, a scholar of performance, proposed that performance’s essence is in the memory that remains, its trace, its absence, but the movement of my hands as I made these net created a presence, an artifact, a mark that carries the personal and political resonance that Phalen sought. The work illustrates how embodied resistance can serve as a form of dance, movement, or a movement, transcending conventional boundaries of performance. By capturing the choreography inscribed on the body, the work offers a unique perspective on the intersection of movement, discourse, and expression. It is an invitation for us all to come together and listen.