In Honour of Flightless Birds

Art Acts of Love

Widening the Circle - Inviting Acts of Love

26th March, 2021. As part of my curatorial research fellowship with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and EVA International (Ireland), Jussi Koitela puts me in touch with PUNOS initiative who, he says, are interested in collaborating with me. 

Ki and Anna-Kaisa - aka PUNOS - invite me to think with them about a possible commission responding to the theme of Abundance, which “tackles the problematic environmental, political and economic narratives of scarcity (of resources) by imagining alternative framings and developing new stories.”

On May 3rd, 2021 at 3.15pm GMT / 5.15pm EET - we meet for the first time, on Zoom. It remains the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic, and we are in that tricksy non-time when the still-evolving semi-lockdown conditions have gone on so much longer than any of us imagined they would, when we fear we may never “go back to normal”, and when - for some of us - the fear of what going “back to normal” might look like is worse still. We fear we have been irrevocably changed and would not be able to survive in the “post-Covid” world our government leaders continue to tell us is just around the corner. Looking back now we were right and we were wrong. There is no “post-Covid” world to survive, and the world we have is one that so many are not surviving. Those of us that are making it seem to be dragging ourselves through the years, only a breath away from collapse. 

But for now all of that is a hazy, intangible future, and we are learning how to re-enter a world in which Russia has invaded Ukraine, and all the guises of post-racial multiculturalism have fallen away as Black people are not allowed to cross the border, and the UK offers to pay British families to house Ukrainian refugees. Ki talks about the bodily memory of the fear of invasion currently rippling throughout Finland, as the aftershocks of occupation and violence remain fresh in the minds of their great-grandparents generation, and in the inherited energy-bodies of their grandparents and parents. I did not know that Finland was invaded and then occupied by Russia from 1809-1917. I do know that the trauma of war does not end when the history books say the war did. 

I find that I do not know very much about Finland at all. I am eager to learn, and am surprisingly moved to find that the “post-Black-Lives-Matter-2020-Phenomena” - in which arts Institutions across the Western world seemed to become suddenly aware of systemic anti-Black racism, and that they were playing a part in it - was gripping Black artist communities in Finland as well. It was an awful, jagged, terrifying sort of moment when we did not dare to hope real change might be possible, whilst at the same time feeling it more within reach than ever before in our lifetimes. It was a constant conversation you were having in your head with your descendents about why you reached toward that possibility or why you didn’t. It was a moment that felt abundant in so many things. Very few of them good. 

When I initially proposed the idea of the Acts of Love project to Ki and Anna-Kaisa in response to their invitation to join the list of commissioned artists for the Who’s Climate, Who’s Futures series, one of the first questions they asked me was:

But how will you take care of you? If you are doing all of this caring for the other artists, does that not re-enforce the unsustainable system? How can this be a project that feeds rather than depletes you?

So I suggested a circular system of intergenerational mentoring, a lidded pot in which we might hear ourselves think and breathe. A container in which care might bleed into divulgence, might bleed into acknowledgement, might bleed into listening, might bleed into holding, might bleed into autopoiesis.

What might a sustainable system of Black artists caring for each other look, sound and feel like? Not me leaning on you for a while, and then you taking your turn, but a system of collective holding, in which we are all being held.

Later, Ama’s colleague and support worker Phoebe Beckett Chingono would join the project as the assistant producer.

Ama Josephine Budge (1991)  is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates queer explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Her installation, written and video art works have been commissioned, exhibited and published internationally. Ama is Course Tutor in Culture, Criticism & Curation at Central Saint Martins UAL, and is currently completing her PhD on Intimate Ecologies: Queer Speculations on Pleasure, Blackness and Decolonial Aesthetics at Birkbeck University of London. Ama has written more short-stories than she's ever actually counted, was nominated for the 2021 Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award, and is working on her first novella, a speculative meditation on sentient trees, queer erotics and isolation.

Sonya Lindfors (1985) is a Cameroonian - Finnish choreographer and artistic director that also works with facilitating, community organizing and education. In 2013 she received a MA in choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki. She is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa, an inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new discourses and feminist art practices. UrbanApa facilitates  workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things. Lindfors makes her own and collaborative works such as performances, curated programs and performative actions.

Nene Jeyne Camara has created and produced performances with/for schools, club kids, friends, and for their own enjoyment. Nene originally began dabbling in producing while participating in Battersea Arts Centre’s Young Producer’s scheme, from there they launched themselves into a performance-making degree, finding inspiration from their communities, peers, and collaborators. Nene has worked alongside festivals, cabarets, galleries, artist-led collectives, and student unions. As their practice developed, they became more interested in deepened creative processes that attempted to create more sustained support for their communities. Structures that attempt to go beyond capitalist and imperialist designs and attempt to foster prosperity, art-making, and tenderness.

Phoebe Beckett Chingono (1997) is a British-Zimbabwean anthropology scholar and arts worker. Her practice transverses archival research, ethnographic methods, and choreography. Her professional work focuses on supporting ethical and sustainable practices, within the Community Sector, with grassroots social justice organisations, including Grenfell-based communities, and within arts and academia. She’s currently involved in projects related to PanAfrican cinema; the Black Anthropologists Association; public programming of political-economic lectures; and collaborative choreographic practices, at Siobhan Davies Studios and Chisenhale Dance Artist Community. A recent graduate of the University of Chicago’s MA in Social Sciences, she specialises in theories of value, semiotics, history of science/ideas; particularly within imperial ‘margins’ in the Caribbean region and Sub-Saharan Africa.

'Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen and dark.'
- Teju Cole, When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)

Phoebe and I work our way through some of the many pages of notes accrued from our meetings with Ki and Anna-Kaisa, and from our mentorship meetings with Sonya and Nene. These latter meetings were closed, our conversations expansive and personal, painful and liberatory. What we share below is a fractal of the murmurations we formed and flew in for a while before disbanding to other pursuits, pressures and commitments. They are thus both fragmented and opaque, yet this does not diminish their value. We maintain the right to remain obscure, unseen and dark. 

We organised four mentorship sessions: 

1: With Phoebe, Ama and Sonya

2 & 3: With Phoebe, Ama, Sonya and Nene 

4: With Phoebe, Ama and Nene 

The following fragments are shared with their permission.

Phoebe: What is an act of love? How should we love? 

In our first mentorship session (with Sonya Lindfors, Ama and I), it came to light that there are loves we are not for. A distinction was being made while we were speaking between loving acts as defined by this project and maternalistic and paternalistic paradigms of care. Sonya brought reflections on her recent discussions about why it is always minority participants that have to give advice, love and criticality. By initiating Acts of Love, once again Ama is doing this same loving work, Sonya raised, but what will be the contribution of the institutions, so as not to reproduce the same dynamic? If you give love do the institutions give love back? 

This last question appears no longer to be the direction of our murmurations. That is to say, if love toward institutions (in order that we transform them) was an initial formulation of the project, we’re also wholeheartedly embracing that acts of love are for other Black artists. The acts of love we are accounting for are ones between Black artists, not toward arts institutions. This is not a kind of critical maternal love which criticises from a place of caring and wanting to teach or improve, that shields, controls, protects. 

Can these two loves, the acts of love as defined by this project and maternalistic and paternalistic paradigms of care exist simultaneously? What is their relationship? We can think of the former as spiralling laterally, bypassing the hierarchical cycles of care and violence that trap and encircle the individual black artist and the institution itself. There’s bowls within the bowl within the bowl. The project has led to many discussions on ethics (our ethics; the projects ethics; the contributors ethics; an institutions ethics), as the collected emails, though anonymized, could be recognized by the recipients, or other parties. Should or could the writer of the email be guaranteed safety in that case? Is safety even possible? What might safety mean? 

'Most people are caught in quotidian and humble complicities that are entangled with the very acts of sheltering, eating, cleaning, and surviving that are in turn knotted to a cacophony of consumption and harms within supply chain capitalist webs… [...] Our relations are not just supportive, they can be injurious and toxic. [...] These non-innocent webs of relations are densified as white supremacy, multi-national corporations, and settler colonial nations.'
- Michelle Murphy, Against Population, Towards Alterlife

Ama: One of the conversations we went back and forth over was around anonymisation. I always envisioned the email artworks being anonymised. We would request that artists redact their own letters before sending them, remembering that the anonymisation is of the institutions not the artists. The institutions may of course recognise who the artists are, they had the exchange with the artists in the first place, however this negates the possibility of an institution saying that they are being defamed. More importantly though, it is to move away from exceptionalisation of a single “institutional incident”, where the focus might be sensationalised on a particular site/exchange. This is a systemic issue. All institutions are entangled. All institutions are “non-innocent”. All institutions are complicit. 

Phoebe: There are different levels of complicity. There are calls that can be made culturally but at upper levels our reliance on financial forms determine the frames we can work within.

Ama: Yes. I like Murphy’s idea of ‘quotidian and humble complicities’, but we are all complicit and non-innocent. I think that moving away from systems/insistences of innocence (personal or institutional) is part of the point, part of the “solution”. 

It should be clear that the anonymising process is not to protect the institutions. The anonymisation is key because it’s about making a connection between systemic incidents, making the pattern - the web that works so hard to remain transparent - visible. It’s about protecting the artists, not the institutions. It’s about connecting the artists within that web, it’s about fighting the ways the institution tries to isolate us, tries to make us the problem, the disposable, “difficult” artist.

Phoebe: It was suggested that an agreement be embedded within the invitation but that this agreement would not be a contract. In this way the artist can give consent whilst acknowledging that we can't guarantee their safety. We can’t create a “safe space”. We wanted to move away from the idea of a “promise” of safety. A promise is paternalistic: the way a parent may speak to a child. Contracts which make promises don’t make the thing more ethical. The contractual promise is really just the euphemisation of power, where the effects of domination are made to last by disguising themselves as moral relations. Therefore, protection becomes impossible. There is only solidarity.

Ama: Exactly. And consent can be withdrawn at any time. Consent should always exist in the present. They would not “promise” to consent indefinitely either. We are working towards crafting a collectively made bowl.

Phoebe: We are working to make the container of the archive, which won’t be filled, but will have a few inhabitants. We are crafting the process so far but not yet gathering. 

The letters amassed will produce further contexts but there is no obligation or expectation of production. Punos want to support this conversation and knowledge and say this is enough, the conversations are generative and can be enough. We don’t need to expect deliverables and tangible outcomes, to extract the thing more and more. We are trying to work at the pace of our own and others' gentle, if-possible-pleasurable, capacities.

Ama: Working this way is how we intend to delegitimize productivity. Non-productivity can mean just staying in the hot springs, where the mud clings to you.

Phoebe: This requires a degree of keeping each other in check, to say “you are rushing ahead in a forward moving arrow of linearity towards a thing”.

Ama: This is a way of decolonizing time, of working in “thick presents,” with hazy temporalities, spurred on by the possibility of becoming something Otherwise in the meantime, not at the end.

 

We are still thinking about this. 

Still worrying about it. 

We want to keep worrying. 

Worrying keeps us accountable, keeps us questioning, keeps us in the conversation, in the now. 

We are still worrying about failing, even though we know we inevitably will. 

We are not trying to not fail, we are trying to not harm. 

We are trying to heal. 

Here at this moment of pause and reflection, I am thinking too about how to honour the flightless bird. The flock still waiting to take flight. The elements of our project that are still hibernating, storing up enough energy to lift off.