I met Martine Syms at a microscopic art gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 2012. We’d both been invited to give presentations to an audience so small we were essentially performing for each other, and although I can’t remember what either of our talks was about, Martine’s slides had a deep purple background—her signature color—and featured an elegant font I’d never seen before (a year later, the font, Lydian, was everywhere). At the time, she was calling herself “a conceptual entrepreneur.” Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if she meant she was an entrepreneur only conceptually, or that she sold ideas. Both might have been true, but neither quite encompasses the artist she was then, and has since become.

Martine was born in Altadena, California, in 1988. She was homeschooled off and on by her parents and spent her teen years in Los Angeles’s DIY art and music scene, volunteering at all-ages punk venues and experimental cinemas and shilling zines before going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating, she ran a speakeasy project space called Golden Age there for five years. When she came back to LA, she founded Dominica Publishing, dedicated to exploring Blackness in visual culture. In 2017, she had her first solo show at MoMA; she was barely thirty. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind: solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; a Creative Capital Award, a Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award, a Future Generation Art Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship; teaching at CalArts and earning an MFA from Bard College; commercial work for high-end fashion houses; and, in 2022, her feature directorial debut, The African Desperate, a witty, scathing, formally audacious send-up of art-school delusions.

In her work, Martine moves through mediums and ideas like a freeway moves through neighborhoods. That is to say, directly, easily, without much regard for the old world. For a long time, she had a show on NTS Radio called Ccartalk LA, on which she interviewed people as they drove though the city together. In Los Angeles, car routes are currency, and how you drive, she figured, reflects who you are. Martine drives a black two-seat convertible with a vanity license plate; on the road, as in her work, it’s very clear who is behind the wheel. She draws heavily from her own life, merging selfie videos, personal notes, and clothing in nonlinear, stylish installations. She has a facility with both archival and new media, easily mixing virtual avatars, machine-learning-driven conversational bots, and augmented-reality overlays with home movies and amateur photography culled from personal and institutional archives.

This formal boundlessness has always reflected a cinematic vision—the product, perhaps, of growing up in a city where any place can become a location, and can cross the boundary between reality and fantasy. In the last few years, however, Martine has made that vision more explicit. Although she’s created lots of video work and even a feature-length film, Incense, Sweaters and Ice (2017), intended for gallery exhibition, The African Desperate is her first movie for theaters. In the film, cowritten with poet Rocket Caleshu, she mines her own grad-school memories to satirize art education in America, which operates under a false premise of equality, which, as she told Artnet in 2022, “every single person knows [is] bullshit.”

In the film, Martine’s friend and longtime collaborator Diamond Stingily stars as Palace Bryant, a Black artist on the final day of her MFA program at an Upstate New York art school (the film was shot, mostly, at Bard College). The opening scene, of a loaded and cringey critique session with Palace’s thesis advisers, sets the tone, and the film pulls no punches about just how exasperating the creative class can be. But like everything else Martine makes, it leaves open the possibility of transcendence. The African Desperate takes place over the course of a single long day, a convention that reflects Martine’s fascination with time, which she has called her medium. If she’s managed to make so much with the time she’s had, it’s because Martine knows something that nobody else does: that time isn’t real.

—Claire L. Evans

I. “Does the process know I’m trusting it?”

THE BELIEVER: You’re big on cycles. You work harder than anyone I know, and then you have these periods of release afterward. Where are you in the cycle now?

MARTINE SYMS: Where am I in the cycle? I’m working on much larger projects than I ever have. And I’m not used to this kind of timescale, where I’m spending nine, ten months on just one part of something—there’s gonna be much, much more to come. I think I have to figure out how to take breaks. I like to work in bursts, but it’s just not possible on a project that’s going to take me three years. I would die.

BLVR: Working on something you know is not going to see the light of day for that long, you have to have a speculative mindset. What is the world going to be like in three years?

MS: I’m having a hard time with it, honestly.

BLVR: Think about how much has happened in the past three years.

MS: Yeah. But creatively, I have to have periods when I’m just taking stuff in, because otherwise I’d get really stale. I have to sit with things. I used to work for the photographer Barbara Kasten. I was really young, and she was in her seventies. At that time, everybody my age was like: You make something, you put it on the internet immediately. I remember being very enamored by the way she would shoot something, put it up in her studio, and look at it for a while. And I’d be like, “Oh, is that one going in the show?” And she’d say, “No, I’m still thinking about it.” [The artist and filmmaker] Lynn Hershman Leeson said to me once that after she had a kid, as a single parent, certain things just took longer than she wanted them to take. But she accepted it at a certain point, because she felt like time made everything better. I don’t think time necessarily makes everything better, but I know what she means: you come back to something and you’re like, This part of it was cool. What I’m writing right now, I started writing last year. I’ve come back to a lot of stuff I wrote last year that I thought was shit at the time. And it probably was, but now it’s been recontextualized and I’m like, Oh, actually, the idea was there.

BLVR: When you start something new, do you have a sense of the shape you want it to take?

MS: For a long time, I would have a very, very, very clear idea of what I wanted to make and what I was trying to achieve. A couple years ago, that stopped being that interesting to me, and it just became more fun to go in blind, even with shows. The show I did last summer [Loser Back Home] at [the Los Angeles art gallery] Sprüth Magers, I was like: I don’t know what this thing is going to be. I’m just going to let it become something. Certain things you have to plan, because there are other people involved. But to a degree, the unknowns are fun for me. Honestly, in art, I love an unknown; it’s great. That’s the whole point to me: I don’t know what it’s gonna look like, I don’t know what it’s gonna be, I just have this weird idea in my head: let’s see where it takes me.

BLVR: I think about this with writing books—you can’t let yourself imagine the cover or where it will sit, on which shelf. Because if you start thinking that way, it constrains you so much. Later, there’s a transition that has to happen between “the document,” which you and I talk about a lot, and the final form, which other people consume.

MS: Do you show people your doc, ever?

BLVR: My doc has never been messier. I’m trying to trust the process, but it is hard sometimes.

MS: Yeah, that’s been one of my mantras this year, even though at times I’m like, Does the process know I’m trusting it? I’m trusting it so hard.

BLVR: When there’s only one set of footsteps in the sand, that’s when the process is trusting you. I always come away from hanging out with you with a new sense of what’s possible. I feel like I can do anything, because you’re so in control of what you do, and you really make things happen. I wouldn’t call it manifesting, because that makes it sound like there’s no effort involved. In your artist bio, you use the word grit.

MS: I didn’t write that, but yes. I use it. I identify with it, I suppose.

BLVR: You’re really good at seeing things through.

MS: It’s hard for me not to talk about astrology with regard to this. But you know I am a Taurus, and I’m a Capricorn moon, two signs that are like, We’re just gonna stick with this. We’re just gonna climb this mountain. Better be the right mountain, because we’re not getting off it. I don’t mind the word manifest. One of my friends says align, which I’ve also adopted. I’m aligning with the thing that I want. It’s already there. I’ve already done it—I’m just aligning with it. And I get excited about projects too. That’s what’s hard about this long project: I’m finding myself losing enthusiasm for it. This acting teacher I once had, she was like, “I don’t require myself to be excited.” Take excitement off the table. If you decide you’re going to do something, you’re going to do it. You don’t have to be inspired, and you don’t have to be excited, and some days it’s going to suck, but if you just take that requirement off the table, then you can show up and do it. And that’s my thing with writing. At a certain point you just have to sit your ass down.

I’ve been describing myself as a “descending” kind of writer. I’m putting so much material in, and all the ideas are in that first draft. Some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t, but it’s gonna be too much, and I’m going to whittle it down. Whereas in screenwriting, there are some people who build it up. I don’t think one’s better than the other—ascending is maybe more efficient.

BLVR: Efficiency is totally overrated. You get to where you get to, however you get there.

MS: Did I need to write those pages? No, but I did, and they’ll find their way.

II. No Clocks, No Subscriptions

BLVR: You were talking about alignment before. I’ve been getting served all these Instagram videos for “timeline jumping.” Do you know about this? It’s people who genuinely believe they are somehow mentally moving from one timeline to another.

MS: I use that phrase a lot, but I don’t know if I actually believe I’m jumping timelines. But I like the idea of it, in a sci-fi way.

BLVR: It feels right for you. You’ve talked about how when you were making The African Desperate, your crew “opened up portals” to get the film done.

MS: The quantum is very, very important to me. People are always like, How did you do all those things in the same period of time? I don’t know, but I could show you—all the clocks in my house are covered. In any city I’m in, I like to go to the metaphysical bookstore, because you just find cool shit, or maybe meet some weird people. Before we started shooting The African Desperate, I bought this book called Waking Up in 5D because I liked the cover. When I first tried to read it, it made absolutely no sense to me—it was literal gibberish. We shot the film, we did all this other stuff, and maybe a month later I was back home, I saw the book and picked it up. Suddenly it all made perfect sense to me. I’m not even kidding. I know that sounds weird. It felt like I was reading a different book that was written for me in that exact moment.

It had all this stuff in it about time, which sometimes I refer to as my medium—that’s what I’m playing with. That’s what I like about film: it bends time and space. You can put things next to one another; you can make it seem like something happened in between. You can compress time, you can extend it. There’s a very phenomenological aspect to it. But then also, when you’re making films, weird things happen. What was that movie, Roma? Alfonso Cuarón re-created his childhood. You know how trippy that probably was for him? He went back in time.

But anyway, in this book, they talk about compressing time, or having a quantum experience with time. I used to get The New York Times every day. This book was like, Cancel your subscriptions, cover the clock on your stove so you’re not constantly being reminded of what “time” it is. Like how I put that in quotes? And say you have to drive somewhere and you don’t have enough time. You just say to yourself, I do. I’m going to make it. And honestly, that has opened up something for me.

BLVR: A more fluid way of existing in the world.

MS: Yeah, because I am very time-conscious. I’m clocking, counting basically all the time—so it was very freeing for me. I try to think about it as, like: There is no time. Even when I’m late on a project, and I have that feeling—I have that feeling all the time: I’m late! I had a dream the other night that I was supposed to do this whole project, and I just forgot about it. I’m always having a dream where I’m late for a flight. But now I’m just like: There’s no time, so I can’t be late.

BLVR: That’s a great phrase, “There’s no time.” There’s no time, as in “I’m in a hurry.” But also there’s no time, as in there is none. Part of the reason I stopped going to my weekly chess club was because it made time go faster. It was always Sunday again, Sunday again.

MS: When I was living upstate, the days would be so long. I would feel like, OK, I’m gonna do nothing today. By 1 p.m., I’m like, it’s only 1? Jesus. I’m going to the studio. I got up, I got groceries, I swam, I went for a hike, I read a book, and it’s still only 1 p.m.?

BLVR: Your installation work is nonlinear. Videos overlap, audio bleeds, you create these architectures that allow viewers to pass between the works in different ways. How does that square with feature film for you? Are there ways in which you’re trying to expand the shape of what a movie can be?

MS: Obviously, the experience of it—you go to the movie, you sit down, there’s a beginning and an end, you get up, you leave—you can’t get away from that part. But I think within the story itself, or the storytelling, there’s a lot you can do. I’m sort of anti-continuity. I’m talking about the idea of continuity in film, where you’re shooting and you’re told you should get a lot of coverage—coverage being all the different angles, so when you’re editing you can cut to this person, then to this person, and it all feels “continuous.” I don’t care about that. I’m not interested in that convention. In some cases I use it. It’s not like I don’t use it at all. But ideologically, I feel like it’s oppressive, and it makes for one way of seeing, because the way these things get presented is how people start to frame their own experiences.

The other day I was listening to music, fake DJing in my house. It’s really fun to me to put very different styles of music next to each other and find what’s continuous between them. Whether it’s the BPM, or the key they’re being played in, or an instrument, or words, the lyrics, I like finding a connection between them that’s not a genre. That’s the way I edit, in general. One time I was DJing at this party, and this girl was like, “Oh, you just put anything next to anything else?” She was kind of saying it shady, but I was like, “Yeah, look, everybody’s dancing.” It works; you just gotta listen to it in a different way. I feel like that’s the whole beauty of editing. You literally can put any two things next to each other and you just have to figure out the way they connect. I like thinking about the cut in film as a kiss. It brings things together.

III. A New Age Filmmaker

BLVR: I just saw the writer Akil Kumarasamy give a talk, and she was saying she writes novels as though she were making a film, in the sense that there’s a finite budget for locations. I thought you’d like that—treating one medium as though you’re working in the conventions of another. It creates new constraints. Because fiction is so infinite, right?

MS: Fiction could be, but film’s so not. People treat film like it’s the same medium it was a hundred years ago. We haven’t gotten very far past that. Honestly—The Birth of a Nation, supposedly the first Hollywood-style film? We’re still making the same kind of film. In music, there’ve been so many styles.

BLVR: As a viewer, I love to find continuity errors in films. Part of that is a “gotcha” thing—like, Oh, they fucked this up. But part of it is also being excited about seeing the seams, seeing the materiality. You get a glimpse into what it must be like to actually make a film and how many moving pieces there are.

MS: I like that “gotcha” thing. I also like recognizing locations.

BLVR: That’s so LA of you.

MS: Yeah, exactly. When I was growing up, one of my sister’s friends’ house was the exterior of Brenda and Brandon’s house on 90210. That was the exterior of their house, and they always had tourists in front of it taking photos. Pasadena is used as a lot of different places in movies—like in American Pie 2, the city hall in Pasadena is supposed to be Spain. It’s very funny when you’re like, That’s definitely not Spain—you see the seams. A film that does that in an incredible way is Zia Anger’s movie My First Film.

BLVR: That’s a movie about a movie that was made but never finished, right?

MS: Yeah, the original movie was an aborted project, and then, six years or something after the project was canceled, or didn’t work out, Zia started doing a performance talking about it, and then My First Film is a fictionalized version of the performance.

BLVR: Are there any things in your own past that you’d want to revisit like that?

MS: I feel like The African Desperate was a revisiting in some ways, because I hadn’t gone back to campus until I made that film. It was a funny way of re-creating things and revisiting memories. One of my friends I went to school with, I saw him sometime after he’d seen it, and he was like, “I felt like you were in my memories.” I’ve heard that from different people, which has kind of been fun. Capturing something true. Not exact, but true.

BLVR: Having other people say your words is a thrill, I’m sure. But having actors pantomime experiences you’ve drawn from your own life is like sublimating your memories through other people’s bodies. What does that feel like?

MS: That’s why I call it a portal. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of constellation work? I’m gonna call it “new age” because I’ve been trying to bring that phrase back.

BLVR: I didn’t realize it left.

MS: Like “ambient music”—they don’t say “new age music” anymore. People say, Oh, that person’s witchy; they don’t say, They’re new age. I’m going back to new age. I’ve also been using the word starfucker again. We need to bring that back. Clout-chaser is so ugh.

Anyway, constellation work. I’ve done it as both the subject and the resonator [a stand-in for the subject’s immediate family or ancestors]. If I’m the subject, I’m trying to work something out from my past. I tell the facilitator what it is. They don’t tell the other people in the group. And then we open up “the field,” which I’m very big on. Then I, as the subject, will start asking the other people, the resonators, questions. The facilitator will start to work with them, and then they act out the thing you’re working through. Once you open up the field, the resonators can feel it. It’s so crazy. You’re like, How did they know? The person who told me about it, Asher Hartman, is a playwright and an intuitive.

BLVR: So what you’re saying is that you’re a new age director.

MS: I feel like this idea of constellation work does apply to acting, because when you’re working with actors, they’re interpreting your words, but that’s only one level of it. Something else is being accessed. They have access to something. That’s why I love actors—it’s also why they’re kind of insane people: because they can access this whole range of emotions. The first time I started working with actors, I was like, Oh shit, this is a whole other level of the material. Sure, I wrote it, and there are things I’m thinking about, there’s a subtext, blah, blah, but a good actor has so much more they can bring to the words. They can bring out subtleties. I find it really incredible. I’m so into the collaboration of it. That is actually what got me into wanting to make features. I was always into it, and I’ve loved films since I was kid, but it wasn’t my dream. I felt pretty confident that at some point I would make one, but I was very content in the work I was doing. When I started to work with actors, I was like, Oh, this is cool. It does feel like we’re tapping into something. That’s what is exciting to me—that and all the visual stuff you can do, obviously. I would love to be Christopher Nolan making some weird set that rotates. Doing some Tenet shit would be cool.

BLVR: Someday.

MS: Someday.

IV. “Don’t try to escape your time”

BLVR: How would you feel about working with other people’s material? Writing an adaptation?

MS: It’s a funny thing to adapt something, because in my art, obviously, there’s text or things I’ve been referencing or thinking about, or, you know, I’m taking stuff from one medium and putting it into another, being like, I read this book and there’s this thing I was thinking about. But that’s such an abstract adaptation. It’s not a true adaptation; it’s just an inspiration—or an idea, or a trigger. Whereas actually adapting somebody else’s words is more like channeling—that’s gonna sound really new age. I guess that’s where I’m at this morning. Some days a different me comes out: the craft me, the new age me, the business me. We’re getting “deep channeler” today.

I think Charlie Kaufman’s [film] Adaptation is one of the best adaptations ever made. Obviously it’s not very faithful. But I was watching interviews with Susan Orlean about that film, and the craziest thing to her was that she did have stuff going on in her marriage when she was writing that book. She was having these other emotional things that she didn’t think were present at all in the book, but that he brought up as top notes in the film. She was like, How? I was talking to another friend of mine who does a lot of adaptations—that’s her specialty in screenwriting. And she was like, “Yeah, dude, you just gotta channel it.” You read the book and then you have to put it away and be like, What is this actually about? Because there are things you can do in a novel that you can’t really do in a movie, in terms of interiority. You have to visualize or make things present through interaction or dialogue—so you do have to channel it.

BLVR: I just assume you’d be good at adapting a novel, because you’re always adapting your own life. You use yourself as source material so often in your work, culling from your Notes app, from your camera roll.

MS: Those are daily practices for me, but I’m actually taking a break. I used to carry a camera every day—from the time I was eleven or twelve until, like, two years ago. Recently, in the past week or two, I’ve been like, Just bring your camera again. If you’ve read The Artist’s Way, there’s a part where [the author, Julia Cameron] talks about the moment when you want to take a photo of something, but you’re with people, so you feel like, No, I’m not gonna do it, I’m being weird. So [in The Artist’s Way twelve-week course] there’s a week when you just do that thing: You hang behind so you can take the photo or jot down the note. I think that’s something I started doing really young, but I got sort of annoyed with it in a way I’d never felt before, maybe because it started to feel like, I don’t know—hip? I, too, have my 35 mm camera and my old digital camera. I started to feel very Oh god about having a camera on me all the time, which I’m trying to get through right now. So I’ve started carrying it again.

But, yeah, writing down my dreams, having a camera on me, taking photos, the Notes app, or a notebook, or a sketchbook—I’m just recording all this material, all the time. There was a long period when I very religiously journaled. I mean, I call it a diary. I really recorded my life. And there would be gaps when I wouldn’t do it, but then sometime in 2021, my grandfather was like, “You forget stuff. You’re gonna forget stuff. You don’t think you are, but you’re gonna forget all this. You’re gonna forget all these people. You should just write it down.” He was like, “The stuff that I didn’t write down, I truly don’t remember.” The OCD in me started to record everything that was happening. That stuff, though—I use it. I’ve used it in short stories, I’ve used it in films. I’ve used the dialogue, I’ve used so much. I do feel very attuned to people’s speech patterns, the way they talk or write. I think that’s something that’s just a natural gift. It’s something I paid attention to as a kid for no reason. I would repeat the way somebody said something, or I would hear a phrase from someone and think, Oh, I like the way that sounds. That’s also why I’m into music. There’s something about listening. I like to go somewhere and just hear what people are saying.

BLVR: You’re so good at capturing things from life that are specific to your experience but also universal. And also things that are in between the personal and the public, that straddle the authentic and the performative—more quantum Martine stuff.

MS: It’s a funny thing for me to navigate this interior-exterior thing, or public-private. The things I share in my work don’t actually feel private to me. I’m just recording what stuff looks like, where I am, what people are saying around me. It’s almost like a documentary. If I hear something funny, or poetic, I’ll put that in my notes. That’s just how I build. Yes, it’s me—obviously it’s me, listening. It’s my perspective. It’s what I think is funny, or what I think is a weird way of saying something. It’s what stands out to me, to my eye. But it doesn’t feel that personal, or intimate.

Even something like [my 2020 book] Shame Space, which is taken from my diaries, from a tough period of time—I edited it so much. It’s not the whole picture. I was specifically looking for stuff I wouldn’t want to share with people. Someone asked me about it, and they were like, “Did anything good happen to you that year?” Lots of good stuff happened, but I’m just choosing the “bad stuff,” because that was what I was interested in showing—what we think of as bad or shadow material. By the time it was a book, it felt so worked.

BLVR: Do you think the way you work with that personal material has anything to do with the fact that you’ve also worked a lot with archives? Because I think you have an eye for what might be useful, or interesting, later—in a different context.

MS: I guess I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s true. l do work with a lot of archival material and with actual archives—like, going to an archive and finding stuff and scanning it. Because I spend a lot of time doing that kind of thing, I love that. At some point I was going through the Altadena Historical Society archives. It has a locations photos archive that’s incredible, incredible. When the person was shooting those photos, they probably didn’t think much of it. But it’s fascinating to me now. I do probably treat my own material in the same way, where it’s something I can use in service of an idea. And it tells me about the time too. I’ve been working on this book for an exhibition I’m gonna do at [the Paris art gallery] Lafayette Anticipations. I’m going through all my work, which has been a very weird feeling. Talk about quantum. It feels like different lifetimes.

I’m going through all the stuff from Golden Age, which was a project space, bookshop, whatever, that I ran in Chicago—recently I heard somebody refer to it as a “speakeasy,” which I thought was funny. But I was going through all these photos from it, and when I was taking the photos, I didn’t think of them as any kind of time capsule. It was much more about “Javelin’s playing, Lucky Dragons is playing, let’s take a photo of it so we can put on the internet.” But looking through all these photos and at all the people that were in the crowd—that was the thing that was really getting me. I knew a lot of the people who came to these parties, obviously, but I didn’t know everyone; there are people I’ve met since that were there. Like, a friend of mine in Paris—there’s a photo of him and his now wife outside this one party. And I was like, Oh shit, that’s crazy. I’m looking in the audience, and I’m like, Wait, that person was there? And also the way people are dressed…

BLVR: Oh my god, I know.

MS: It looks so old. It was almost twenty years ago. If I was to re-create that time, which I thought would be fun to do, this underground scene—I mean, you were very much part of it, so I don’t have to describe it to you. I have had this idea that it would make a fun movie. The petty drama of it all. I had an idea of what it looked like in my head, but looking at those photos, I was like, Oh no: that’s what it looked like.

BLVR: Somewhat related to what your grandpa said about how you don’t remember anything unless you write it down—you also don’t realize how much things change until you look back at those recordings you made. Art is a marker of time.

MS: It is. I’ve always been like, Don’t try to escape your time, as much as I love to time-jump. There’s a word that art historians use [style] to describe the qualities that are shared by work made in a certain period. And maybe this is to your point of using myself as source material, but I’ve always felt it would be impossible to escape that quality, even if I didn’t like it. I wanted to be a Gen Xer when I was a kid. I have photos of myself at six, wearing a mechanic’s shirt. I wanted to be that generation, or even older, you know? I was like, God, this is so lame, being a millennial. This just sucks. But at the same time, I can’t escape it. I’m not consciously trying to make something of this time, but I’m not trying to get out of it, either. Something about me has always been like, That’s impossible.