Fractal Murmurations

At the beginning? No, not the Beginning, Merely Today’s Point of Entry.

'I care about you understanding, but I care more about concealing parts of myself from you. I don’t trust you very much. You are not always aware of how you can be dangerous to me, and this makes me dangerous to you.'
- Eve Tuck and C. Ree, A Glossary of Haunting

Ama: In 2021 I was part of a residency project with another Black artist and, not unusually, an all-white producing team. At some point during the creative process there was a breakdown in communication, where images of a Black artist’s body and practice were being withheld from the artist. At the time it was unclear exactly what had caused this internal breakdown in communication amongst the producing team, yet the consequences for the artist, whose right to see and access the images of their own body were being questioned and delegitimised, remained the same. I knew that the artist had reached out over multiple channels using carefully calm, considered and “neutral” language in an attempt to both communicate the problem, and express the importance of receiving these images.

There were several moments throughout this residency, particularly during the resident parts of it, in which I became concerned that our safety and wellbeing as brown bodies within the English countryside was not being taken into account by the team. After this accumulation of white dissonance - read: the white noise that seems to mask an apparent inability of white people seeing their own whiteness and the  ways this enables them to move through white spaces differently - I reached out to the team with a strongly-worded email expressing my disappointment and frustration with how we were being (mis)treated by the organisation and in solidarity with my colleague, who still had not received the images, which they needed to complete the commissioned work for the exhibition the residency was set to culminate in. I spent about an hour composing, editing and reviewing this email. I worked hard to impress upon the producing team the political significance of withholding images of a Black person’s work and of their body, and the ways in which structural racism was clearly at play in the ways they had been responded to by the various team members they were in contact with. I made it clear that if their images were not released as soon as possible, I would have to withdraw from the project.

My email was an impassioned, frustrated, yet still open hand.

It was a calling-in and an opening up.
It was an investment in our working relationship, and in the ability of the organisation to work ethically and justly with Black artists in the future.
It was a re-commitment to the arts industry in general, which continues to be, in the UK and across Europe, a field which compromises, wears down and disregards the souls, bodies and politics of Black artists, whilst benefiting from and capitalising on what has been called “a second Black renaissance”.
It was an opportunity for learning, for growth, and for dialogue.
It was an act of significant emotional labour.
It was an act of love.

In response, the arts organisation cancelled the exhibition and said that they felt communication had broken down too severely for us to continue. They were clearly shocked by my email, and by the versions of themselves I reflected back to them. Clearly I had misunderstood the kind of organisation they were and the kinds of people. They were not like that - I had simply misunderstood, or perhaps had merely gotten carried away - letting my negro hysterics spill out all over the page, interfering with what was supposed to be a well-intentioned professional relationship. They had thought we were all friends here. Clearly they had been wrong (about me? about themselves? about the project? about the state of race relations in the United Kingdom and in the arts?).

During an evaluative follow-up conversation, some months later, the team member I spoke to was deeply surprised by my feedback that that email had been, from my perspective, the beginning of an important conversation, and not the end of one.

'And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims.'
- Frantz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness

In the past eight years of my work as an artist in the United Kingdom and Europe, I've encountered endless instances of this mis-recognition in the arts. Perhaps because we - artists - are so profoundly invested in the business of representation, it hits us harder than others. It wears down at the soul, the muscle that - above all others - is so necessary in the development of a practice; in the creation of art itself. It rubs us down and burns us out. It makes us tired, and sick, and retire early. It pushes us into teaching, and into writing about our own work and out our friends and colleagues work, in a desperate attempt to reclaim the narrative of our life’s blood sat pooling there on the white-box-gallery floor; or the black-box-theatre; or the wooden-panelled concert hall; and all the spaces not built for us to be free in. To be seen, not as they wish to see us, but as we are.

'To perform as evidence of the institution’s purity, the identity artist has to exemplify a race/gender category, but as soon as she steps into the institution’s embrace, she becomes an example of universality. She is artificially cleansed of race/gender even as she is called on to represent it. Tokens are currency, and currency only exists insofar as it’s exchanged.'
- Hannah Black, The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic

Yet we try, again and again to change these spaces, these torturous mechanisms that would string us up in a rictus of Black performance. We face our oppressors with the love, sweat and guts of our souls, both in the work but also in its administration. In a thousand Acts of Love, a thousand requests to receive the care we need just to be for long enough to make something worthy of our names.