ICPP → Tosh Basco

Related Materials

This interview took place within the framework of the course “Entrepreneurial Strategies.” It was recorded over Zoom on Thursday July 23, 2020.

Timeline of Research Encounters

 • Public Event: Untitled: darkness, November 7, 2020 on Zoom, commissioned by ICPP in conjunction with the Zilkha Gallery exhibition A Sculpture, A Film & Six Videos

• Private Interview: ICPP Interview #1 with Tosh Basco, Entrepreneurial Strategies, Zoom, July 23, 2020 (transcript and video; 1:56:57)

• Private Interview: ICPP Interview #2 with Tosh Basco, Entrepreneurial Strategies, Zoom, November 8, 2020 (transcript and video; 1:53:59)

Interview Framework

• What is your current work and what key themes, priorities, approaches, and/ or conceptual frameworks are shaping the work?

• What brought you to this work?

• I’m particularly interested in how you began performing in the club scene in California, how that evolved into an ongoing practice and way to make a living, and how that continued evolution has brought you to this moment.

• What have been some pivotal moments of establishment/growth/transition in your career since then? Let’s make a list of periods, and feel free to keep adding to the different periods, and to identify positive experiences and successes, as well as the harder lessons and experiences of failure. If you wish to anonymize any aspect, just let us know.

• What are some of the key knowledges you have accumulated through those identified stages? What themes/concerns emerge as significant at each stage?

• What relationships, affiliations, networks, and/or systems of provisioning do you deem integral to your work as an artist and your evolving artistic trajectory? How do these relationships (institutional, interpersonal, and otherwise) manifest and what makes them effective? What do you crave from those relationships?

• If they have not already emerged in our discussion, how have organizational and financial structures mapped onto these key moments in your artistic trajectory?

• I imagine a few different things will prove relevant over the course of your career. I also have particular interest in the next phase of your work at the theater in Switzerland. I imagine you will know so much more about this by the time we all gather again to talk in November. So perhaps we can save any detailed discussion about that transition for later, but it would be great to have some preliminary insight into how the opportunity came to be, and your vision for what it will make possible.

Questions prepared by Deborah Goffe