The House of Twigs

“C ontracts are really important.” It is one of the points that FKA twigs makes most emphatically when we meet in the brick-built, canalside warehouse in east London that she has made her studio. Despite earning critical acclaim for her music since signing her first record deal more than a decade ago, and this summer starring opposite Bill Skarsgård in a remake of “The Crow,” the British multihyphenate isn’t referring to royalties or merchandize agreements. She has spent recent years distilling an internal contract she calls “The 11”—a manifesto of conceptual pillars for artistic and personal elevation.

Expressed in its fullest form, the method generates a durational artwork composed of a set of 11 physical movements. Each is repeated for 11 minutes by a group of up to 11 people before they shift to the next. Twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, is adamant, however, that it should not be mistaken for a dance piece. “It’s a self-contracting system,” she reiterates. “The movements are really just a kind of self check-in.”

The method’s overarching goal is to tune out external distractions to allow you to exist for as much time as possible in a state of “eusexua”—a mental state that twigs, 36, has come to recognize is essential to producing her best work. It is “a feeling that I don’t believe there’s a word for in the English language,” she says. “It’s a moment of clarity. It’s a feeling you’ve been out dancing all night. It’s a feeling just before you have a really good idea.” She has coined terms for each of the 11 principles, too, such as the “Art of Sol,” a form of minimalism that aims to resist the temptations of consumerism, and “Primal Revelation,” which dictates spending time in nature to resync our bodies to its rhythms.

Performers meditate on each pillar with the aid of a “movement mantra”—twigs springs up and across to her dance studio to demonstrate them one by one. There’s a spectrum of intensity to the motions, from static, balletic balances to mantras imbued with the energy of krumping, a dance form that emerged out of Los Angeles in the early 2000s. “I collect different movements that inspire me,” says twigs, who grew up in Cheltenham, England, where she participated in local choreography competitions. As you likely couldn’t break out into most of the full mantra movements in daily life, she has also devised a small “physical cue” for each. These gestures are as simple as clasping your hands to remind yourself of the pillar of “keychaining”—preserving emotional energies for your inner circle.

While perhaps nebulous in its nomenclature, “The 11” seeks to address real harms that are being discussed by psychologists, educators and policymakers, with many linked to our ballooning consumption of social media. Too much screen time comes at a cost to intellectual exploration and meaningful personal connections, twigs explains, before painting a vivid picture of “Croning.” The name, she says, is “from the director David Cronenberg, whose films have lots of fleshy, technology-melding situations, like tubes going into spines and hands that are phones … I believe that is what we are doing now. We have doomscrolling—we know what that is—but Croning is one step further. Croning is when you start to unwillingly lose your opinion to your algorithm.”

The mode of twigs’ response—creating a method akin to yogic practice—arguably reflects her personal experiences as much as it resonates with movement as a universal restorative. She has spoken previously of the burdens her body and mind have endured in recent years, including surgery to remove uterine fibroids and racist attacks against her on social media while in a three-year relationship with the actor Robert Pattinson. As we speak, she is still fighting a legal battle against the actor Shia LaBeouf for alleged abuse that twigs has said altered her nervous system. Healing is a priority for her: “We’re just given these bodies once, aren’t we?” she says.

While twigs built her reputation on innovative, genre-breaking music and avant-garde fashion, she is concerned about the false promises of progress when it comes to artificial intelligence. This past April, she testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee during a hearing on intellectual property, calling for regulation and arguing that the technology “cannot replicate the depth of my life journey, yet those who control it hold the power to mimic the likeness of my art, to replicate it and falsely claim my identity and intellectual property.”

Given this strong defense of artists’ agency, it’s interesting that she seems nonplussed about which artistic subcategory “The 11” should be understood to sit within: “That’s for all the people who don’t make art to sit around and discuss,” she says, adding that they can “ponder which bit is the meat and the bone.”

Her track record in visual art shows an openness to remixing. Last year, she created a self-portrait referencing Diego Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” and an 1880s painted lacquer folding screen by Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin.

And there are parallels to be struck with other performance artists, especially those who have explored duration—time—as a key element. With a full cycle of “The 11” running for just over two hours, “as exhaustion kicks in, the movements will look different,” says twigs. “It’s about exploring these feelings until you feel exhausted and then pushing through and finding a new point of view.” This interest in consuming energetic potential echoes Martin Creed’s 2008 commission for Tate Britain, “Work No. 850,” in which runners sprinted through the 282-foot-long enfilade sequence of Duveen Galleries every 30 seconds for four-hour shifts.

I mention Marina Abramovic as I’ve heard there’s a connection between the artists. “I know Marina, and she has been so generous to me,” says twigs, telling a story of how the Serbian conceptual artist toured her around her takeover of the Southbank Centre, London, in October last year. But twigs won’t be drawn too far, perhaps again to avoid the categorization that disinterests her. “Many artists can be inspired by Marina’s work, but what I’m the most inspired by is her tenacity, her generosity and her energy for other artists.”

It seems that generosity is what she wants to pass on. This repurposed warehouse is a crucible for projects conceived between twigs, her partner Jordan Hemingway, the photographer and director, and the collective of artists and creative friends with whom she collaborates. It’s also been the place where twigs has given inwardly. She reflects: “Isn’t the beautiful thing about this method that it’s incredibly rewarding because only you can do it for yourself?”

EXHIBITION

THE ELEVEN by FKA TWIGS

14–26 September 2024 | London