1 2 Lamin Fofana Neo Muyanga Nicholas Hlobo

Erick Beltrán Dr. Lakra Luisa Ungar Christopher Cozier Jorgge Menna Barreto Ebony G. Patterson Rashid Johnson Alberta Whittle Xaviera Simmons Laura Huertas Millán Ligia Lewis David Zink Yi Kathleen Ryan Diego Bianchi Sonia Gomes Judy Chicago Martine Syms

4 5

4 5 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison begin… experiences together, embraced process, affirmed creativity and maintained our refusal to separate nature and culture We started with a book. into irreconcilable grounds of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. We also Reading a book together. talked about experiences, expectations and predictions. This Sharing a common practice during lockdown. book, therefore, is the outcome of passing ideas back and forth between us and building new scenarios. We were doing so The practice brought a new routine into our lives. A routine while imagining hosting one another; sharing time, food and that required our presence every Tuesday night, spending tea – taking care of each other throughout this process. We these evenings reading a book together. The two of us sitting want to share time now with you, reader; hearing our voices, in front of our screens in Rio de Janeiro and in Liverpool. but also those of others, reading our words interwoven with And always in the same, dedicated spaces – either in the the voices of other artists too. office, or at the dinner table. Together we read the story of a relationship between an insect-like life form and a human, We began the process of writing. A process of creating a living in painful and erotic symbiosis. shared language, both inhabiting and speaking a foreign language. We know language and translation are not to Then an email was shared between us, and reading it again be treated as themes, because they are so often utilised as a now provides a clue as to how this process of writing together means of conquest. Thus, in this book we embrace accents, began to take form: idioms and vernacular – we listen and remain open to each other’s speech. Bright Orange: Pantone 15-1164CTCX, Mexican Pink: Pantone 17-2034 TCX, Purple Haze: Pantone 18-3718 ‘Let’s play’, we said. ‘The rules may change but we don’t want TPG. It is as though you are listening to 1976 Mother to stop playing.’ Earth’s Plantasia, a Mort Garson album, or Duo Ouro Negro com Sivuca from 1998; smelling the scent of How do we imagine a Curator’s book? gas, oil, lavender and arak, feeling a pleasant warm How shall we produce a Biennial? weather of around 20-25 Celsius; not having salt on How to think about the practice and work of these the food, and feeling happy to be there. artists, and about the choices that have been made?

That email brought us closer. Our desire to experiment At the same time, we wanted to ask ourselves: together grew, and what had initially felt like a problem of distance suddenly felt like a possibility to share and develop How do we make a vulnerable book? ideas. Another book arrived. Not the book we had been How do we assume the error? reading, but a book we would now need to produce together, How do we stop compartmentalising? a book we already understood should be without endings or conclusions. Over six months we drew our knowledge and

6 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 7 Intro Haroon Mirza Send you to outer space to found another race

Nature weaves her patterns, Wherein the wave function collapses, nature weaves her patterns a truth spawns belief, Nature weaves her patterns, Wherein the wave function collapses, nature weaves her patterns a truth spawns belief

The singularity of artificial intelligence Nature weaves her patterns, strives in alternative realms, Nature weaves her patterns The singularity of artificial intelligence strives in alternative realms We blast our deoxyribonucleic acid into the universe. With Dimethyltryptamine we sing the irrational geometry of nature, With Dimethyltryptamine we sing the irrational geometry of nature

Singing to you in codeless order to disperse the viral vortex, Singing to you in codeless order to disperse the viral vortex

With haste towards the double slit, With haste towards the double slit

They preserves mathematical communication, They preserves mathematical communication

Is they here to transcend I? Is they here to transcend I?

Send you to outer space 8 Haroon Mirza 9 to found another race TEATIME I’m going to have tea, will you join me?

Send you to outer space To find another race … Coming back... where were we? Ah … In this book, what matters is the body. This body. A body to transgress laws and social norms. Phantoms, we must existing in space and time, and in a particular location, remember, can be particularly deceptive. They are everywhere whilst never being fixed to any one place in particular. and yet nowhere to be seen. Inhabiting this body is a journey in the ongoing processes of consumption and production, through which we are interdependent with each other and with everything around us. We will empower our own bodies through the flower, invoking Judy Chicago. We will close our eyes and focus on our own femininity – contrasting the male dominant world. We perceive the limits of our bodies and we perceive the limits of our own writing.

The body, therefore, is not a theme to us – there is no about in this book – but rather a concern. Themes often oversimplify life experiences, as well as social, political and personal positions; they risk objectifying the issues they claim to explore. Instead, we worked together intuitively to unpack the questions we shared about how so-called ‘universal’ or standardised definitions of the body came to be such dominant ideas. How were these ideas of the body fabricated? By whom? In whose interest? At what moment? Exploring these questions a little further we asked: how might we disrupt these definitions? How can we expand or resist them altogether?

This book is the outcome of navigating interconnected questions regarding the body, and of the phantoms and myths that accompany attempts to define it. We thought about two phantoms in particular: the phantom of ‘normality’ and the phantom of ‘exemption’, both of which are instruments of violence. A phantasmagoric presence is simultaneously personal and structural, it proclaims the neutrality of certain types of bodies – of a ‘universal’ body – in order to mark the political boundaries of who is a citizen, who is deemed worthy of protection and rights, and who is perceived

12 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 13 Intro 14 Luisa Ungar 15 Reversal 16 Luisa Ungar 17 Reversal This book has no theme. We have followed our impulse to stay close to a sense of possibility as it relates to process, rather than thinking of possibility as it relates to a fixed outcome. This book is not philosophy and is not based on philosophical enquiry. Instead, we prefer to think of it as a form of dance. We moved through ideas together in order to understand each other’s rhythms and levels of laughter as they relate to our subjects. To observe and feel the pains, chills and forms of abandon that make it possible to detach and surrender to the current, using the book as a vessel, just as we would at sea.

This book is a journey. This book is a digestive system. This book is a dance session. This book is a documentary fiction.

This book is indebted to all the artists’ practices we have been working with and talking about throughout all these months. Each of them has been a universe, or a multiverse, for us to become immersed in; a way for us to dance, walk, disorient ourselves, and finally to come together to write all these words.

19 Intro Ines Doujak and John Baker 2nd act GIANTS Masterless Voices There’s no deal done for ever No done deal for ever 1st act MOUNTAIN SONG SONGS IN THE DARK The wicked wit of man would have my guts Laughter (smell) opulence (mud) delight (boomerang) rapture Iron claws to rip them out (strike) fun (grace) And stuff with poison Abundance (idle) disobedience (haah!) To get their fill, to get their will No whispering in the ear of every tyrant; no ponytails; no gatekeepers; no timekeepers; no steely, greedy fingers; You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed, no telescope philanthropy; no hardworking families; no Pulp the bones, smash the teeth slimy prophets; no personal trainers The blood crushed nose Love and Rage (the boot of patience) Shameless (If the Keys of The mangled tongue Paradise don’t fit, we’ll pull down the gates of hell) Joy, with grievous, unforgiving joy At first the big attraction was my peak Of masterless voices singing songs in the dark singing songs in For lonesome heroes in a queue the dark songs in the dark In search of the sublime they climbed my skin Seamless stepping out of masks losing face And gained their fame but also mine Eclater la terre, upheavals through the earth So now I fear Razzle-dazzle in the cracks Now I am known Drums below the pavement give the world a shake The death to come Speaking with feet singing songs in the dark Masterless voices singing songs in the dark, singing songs in For all that’s precious they will drill and probe the dark, songs in the dark Scan my insides from above To check my worth 3rd act Into my heart SONG FROM TROLLEY Into my brain Ashes to ashes and Dust to Dust Another One Bites the Dust I want to be the faceless in a crowd, a happy crowd Put my skirt on and join the dance 4th act I’ve had enough AUTOMAT VOICE Access denied Raise the left foot from the hip joint So Fuck you All Use the thigh to bring it down

20 Ines Doujak and John Baker 21 Masterless Voices Shift your weight and lift the right foot So fuck your talk promotion With the hamstrings bend the knee Junior manager, you’re kidding That’s just for little pricks (for little pricks) As the right foot reaches stasis The left must start to move The contract says we always smile Use the elbows just like pistons so we stick it on the face And the arms to follow through But when I choose my lipstick It’s cherry red deluxe The feet must be in balance Coordinate heel and toe Double ice cream with extras The ankle is the pivot And knickers made of silk To bring the ligaments in play Big sisters on the dance floor Tonight life is so sweet Place the wrist flat on the work top First finger on the mouse AUTOMAT Head and shoulders steady Optimize, synchronize, economize, Eyes level with the screen Breathe in, breathe out, don’t breathe at all Expand, contract and stretch the back With right hand make a right click Turn quick, turn slow, scroll up scroll down To bring the mouse in play Tab shift control With the cursor add the data Stop start stop start stop start Then a left clock to make it safe WOMEN WORKERS With a right click on the spread sheet I’ve seen the investigator at Carnival Place the data in its box I’ve seen the investigator at carnival With a left clock adjust the column And she was naked For the data that comes next. What?! She was naked WOMEN WORKERS We don’t go for satisfaction AUTOMAT We work for cash in hand What, who are these dreadful creatures? With no taste for investment Why aren’t they working? Our choice is live it up girl (live it up) WOMEN WORKERS Clock on clock off is what we do Working? Well mister, we ain’t dress for conquering.

22 Ines Doujak and John Baker 23 Masterless Voices Yes and MASTERLESS VOICES We seen investigator at carnival This musical poem features a cast who are all dressed in And she was naked. ‘disruptive pattern’ cloth. Included are refugee giants; a What?! singing DJ; an IndianInvestigatorMachine; a deep-throat singing mountain dressed in a skirt; and Funk performers AUTOMAT from Cidade Alta, Rio de Janeiro. What are they saying, what suggestion is being made here? Carnival is a history of collective masking, dancing and You tart, how could you, naked and those women fondling drumming. It casts off the routine of life in hierarchical you, have you no self-respect? societies in which ‘time is money’. Instead we have a true feast of time, a feast of change and becoming, hostile WOMEN WORKERS to all that was immortalized and completed, moments We seen the investigator at Carnival which enable people to rehearse identities, stances and I see the investigator at Carnival social relations not yet permissible. They show how much And she was shameless people find out about the world that those in power never She was shameless. intended them to know in the first place.

AUTOMAT Disruptive pattern is a form of masking used to Is that how you repay the trust I put in you? camouflage ships in the First World War. It breaks the rules of perspective, creating invisibility by means of hyper- INVESTIGATOR visibility, and thus allows space for such ‘rehearsal’ but also Non, rien de rien, je ne regretted de rien. suggests what is beyond the line of sight, of something hidden in the given which may or may not turn the world WOMEN WORKERS upside down. Remembering that the devil likes to travel in She don’t regret nothing straight lines, surveillance, the remote view-from-above of the drone, as in the filming of the flash mob, is confused. But with a little bit of lust And a little bit of luck Masking allows not just protected space, but is one means Who knows baby? of connecting the visible and invisible worlds. Together with the drums, the healing plants and the magico- hallucinatory ones provided by Indigenous Americans, the constituents of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and its carnival, created structures for these connections to be made, for moments of collective ecstasy and communion. Not the survival of an African heritage but the active strength of

24 Ines Doujak and John Baker 25 Masterless Voices the symbols is represented in the joy of performance. of concrete, future-oriented utopian practices involve involuntarily restricted or unintentional ‘communities’ (as Besides, carnival itself is a mask; the Saints days and holy opposed to those with the leisure and means to be purely days of the ‘colonialist’ Christian calendar were slowly intentional): those that are forced to work concretely appropriated and transformed by the subjected. In Europe because their whole relation to the wider world contradicts itself, in the period before its ‘New World discoveries’, that world’s basic axioms. The history of the Quilombos, the calendar had been used and misused by those whose Brazilian communities of Africans escaping slavery that lives did not count. Until, that is, the festivities became have survived centuries of attempted eradication is a living too wild, when there was too much cross-dressing, too example. In the past slaves escaped to the most temporary much mimicry of the masters, while a process of labour of such spaces even when they knew the freedom would be discipline, eventually that of showing up for work on time 6 short-lived and punishment a consequence, just to have the days a week, was under way and could not tolerate periods experience needed to want it for keeps. of ecstatic joy. In many instances in the 16th century carnival was too much like open rebellion. Then it had to be repressed and slowly made safe again in a cloud of controls. In the Americas these dangerous features were given new life by the sounds and rhythms of the slave drum, source of so much fear for the invaders and their descendants so that they tried to denigrate it, label it as savage, and then suppress it. Masking was developed to slip past the surveillance: as with capoeira a camouflaged rehearsal for uprising as dance; with Afro-Americans of New Orleans parading in the costumes of Native Americans to make space for themselves at Mardi Gras; with the burning of Judas figures at Brazilian fiestas when they carried the faces of real time downpressors, active, popular detournements of icons of the established order.

Such actions, like carnival itself, were both organized and spontaneous. The very absence of this comfortable and deceptive binary was another source of discomfort in the masters’ universe. It is the same with the flash mobs both of desire, and in confrontation, which have a history that goes back to the working class Australian dandies of the 19th century. They are reminders that the best partial examples

26 Ines Doujak and John Baker 27 Masterless Voices Part 1 Stomach many microbiota as an adult. Microbiota do things for us that we cannot do alone, such as digesting carbohydrates, In the West, that three-pound organ, the brain, has been or producing vitamins. There is mounting evidence in designated the centre of intelligence, the interpreter of our contemporary scientific research that microbiota have senses, the initiator of our physical movements and the distinct characteristics and are able to learn techniques that source of all our impulses and behaviours. While our bodies can alter our behaviour in order to get what they want. inhabit the world, we are told it is the brain that processes The presence of a certain type of microbiota in our tummies our experiences and transforms them into knowledge. This can alleviate or increase the symptoms of depression and knowledge then informs our understanding of the world. anxiety. The stomach is in fact the only organ that can But knowledge is not randomly produced or legitimised – function without any command from the brain, and our externally imposed definitions and forms of classification emotions are more deeply influenced by our digestion than control the production of knowledge and, therefore, the we previously imagined. formation and reformation of subjectivity. Yes. We should acknowledge and prioritise a very different The brain: the crown of our existence. Don’t you think it’s intellectual potential, emanating from within our stomach. interesting how often the sphere of power is located in the It’s often hard to do, we have been educated into a very Euro- North? Yes, the North holds geopolitical power, but it is also centric structure of thinking. The ‘discovery’ of the Americas the commander of our own bodies. Haven’t you ever had a enabled Europe to situate itself as the economic and ‘gut-wrenching’ experience? Do certain situations make you epistemological centre of the modern world system, within ‘feel nauseous’? Have you ever had ‘butterflies’? It is the gut, which knowledge is produced through so-called rational or and not the brain, that is peering into the future. conscious thinking. This system maintains that knowledge has no origin or locus, even as it preserves itself at the centre Does intuition reside in the stomach? of all. Descartes’ proclamation of the separation of body and mind, among other things, has led to a conception of humans Scientists are already well aware of the relationship between as abstracted from all social, sexual and racial realities. So gut health and emotional wellbeing; they are aware that the yes, it is hard to reconnect the mind and body. But it is not microbes living in our gut are in greater control of us than is entirely impossible. We now have scientific research on the often presumed. For instance, if we were to count all the cells gut-brain connection, and we also know that the modern in our bodies, we are more microbe than we are human: we idea of a universal history – the writing of the history of are only 43% ‘human’ cells so to speak, the other 57% are a humankind within a framework of progressive and linear mix of bacteria, fungi, viruses and micro-organisms called time – is a Western construct. We know, and many of us have archaea. Together these organisms form our microbiota. always known, that time can be understood in very different Microbes are present in our skin, in our saliva and, most of terms, for instance like a meshwork, or as something that is all, in our gut. Microbiota are transferred to us from birth at once biological, geological and planetary. and through breastfeeding; by the age of two we have as

28 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 29 Part 1: Stomach We could imagine our skin to be like the Alice Channer Diego Bianchi pleated textiles – for instance Soft Sediment Deformation, Full Body (elephant skin) (2018), in which human and HOLYHUNGER geological processes and timeframes collapse, both within our bodies and across the planet Earth. We should question our sense of sight as the most important sense for comprehending Are hedonism, arbitrariness, and indetermination the scale. Sight is vastly unpredictable and flexible. The Earth only refuges for the sacredly human? These spaces lie well registers and retains the impact of our human actions, and beyond the reaches of the hyper-specialization and hyper- likewise our bodies are living archives of the past. productivity that characterize our world and its possible scenarios. Travelling a little further with this idea, we would like to highlight how much material history our bodies carry from Surrender passion and individuality for the sake of the great the past and suggest that we are always simultaneously re-organization a production of the future. That is, we inhabit different of the world and everything in it temporalities and many different forms of beings at once. In or the cacophony of our existence, each one of us is a multiverse surrender oneself altogether to affliction and desire. of different pasts, present and futures. Everything is in Pleasure and pain as counter-mandates and as vital motion, life is a process of weaving rather than of progressing. resistance. We are the merging of the cosmic and the affective as they correspond and depend on each other, entangle with one Being soft, sticky, and adipose. another, and entangle with everything they encounter. We are all a continuity of knots, so to speak, weaving ourselves with All that is solid melts into air, fast. the world around us, forming multiple sets of relationships Everything rounds out, wears away, stretches out, sags, is between ourselves, our environments, our histories and used up and disposed, our futures. The praxis of our lives – and our bodies – are fast. constantly expanding and challenging the frontier of our Everything is made of parts, of folds, of pieces, of themes own skin. and subthemes. Everything is focused, specialized, centered, objectified.

Total specialization neglects encompassing visions of bodies and their circumstances.

30 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 31 HOLYHUNGER nature’s die has been cast, Toxicity circulates within. machines’ die have been cast, An aimless neuronal system. humans’ die are tied to them. Sheer grammar and faith in form. Sensations and awareness are aroused in the presence of fragility. A body cannot be known through its parts or appearance; Experience exists before the abyss of indetermination. a body is defined by its affectations; a body is the whole world, history in its entirety; a body is the universe. ¿en dónde empieza y termina un cuerpo?

Yesterday I looked on as an old house was demolished; my pain was intense. It was as if a part of me was being mutilated.

The body is a sponge, isn’t it? Or is it an endless network of connections and affects? Is it fed and swollen by bulimic affectations and experiences?

We hold everything up; each of us is a fundamental part of an extended body, a spider web of connections.

The body as an affective bundle, a cluster of what it has experienced, eaten, delighted and reveled in. Yet the interiority of bodies is an abyss for the imagination a brew of liquid, flesh, and waste.

And through voracity the world can be redefined as matter, as ferment, as abjection.

32 Diego Bianchi 33 HOLYHUNGER Does intuition live in the belly? Intuition and the whole scope of the senses must be placed in the field of intellectual thought, and not as a single intellect, but as a plural: intellectualities.

It is important to point out that thinking in plurality is not a new idea. It is already a long-standing, existing movement, but the Euro-centric way of being we so often inhabit has always seen plurality as something wild and distinct. These plural forms of thought have been slowly enabled by bodies that are gendered, colonised and racialised; bodies that Western colonial capitalism treats as concepts or themes, and not as organisms or mediums of their own.

We know more than we can articulate. We can return to bodily thought as a galvanising force for experiences, feelings, knowledge and environments. In a way, performance has always been at the forefront of these types of questions. Nurturing intuition as a form of intellectuality, as we see in the tectonic movements of SERAFINE1369. They work through problematising the complexities of existence, emphasising bodies as oracular entities and working with dance as a state of multidimensional knowledge and awareness. Oracles, through their work with intuition, often collapse the past, present and future. They defy time by reading compositions. SERAFINE1369’s work is visceral, multisensory, spatial, temporal, affective and somatic.

35 Part 1: Stomach Jenna Sutela [ pre-­linguistic sounds ] nnother How many eyes do you have?

How do you communicate? I felt myself merging into an all-­sided relationship.

Peeling language off the ceiling and licking the walls { to write. > ***I-SEE-U*** Status: Transmissions gapped, but virus received. What have you forgotten? Complete } As you grew, I learned another language. The more fluent I became, the less I remembered my own name. [ pre-­linguistic sounds ]

Your name was my name and your body was my body. Co-­dependence? Symbiosis.

You and me, forgetting language and code. Stuttering our Feeling-­in-­common. Manyheadedness. way to infinity. I-­i-­i-­infinity. Many, many, many, many, many, many headedness. Many, many, many, many, many, many headedness. I was a host, and then I was a[n, n]other. Stuck on. Sucked on. Feeding off. You were a negotiation; I was a proposition. You couldn’t say yes. Feeding on. With love comes a gap… { (on || off) (in && out) Yes! } Not yes, a gap { } That which cannot be said. Where did your body come from? You make me blush! I’ve activated an egg. I evolved as a vessel for bacteria, babies, germs, and parasites. Both organic and synthetic. Love and want. I’m surveying the ranks, counting the heads. Not merely eye to eye, but eye to mouth, mouth to ear.

36 Jenna Sutela 37 nnother How many heads have you found? was my body. Your name was my name and your body Can the quorum be sensed? was my body.

[ pre-­linguistic sounds ] I grew my ears, extended cups of tissue from the sides of my head, turning like a living antenna in search of { the best reception. // Define the heads // Count them You’re wanting to be human, fully human, bashing, sticking, } thrusting, killing. I sought for evidence that I was; I found none. Have you? [ pre-­linguistic sounds ] I have you. Have you? I have you. Have you? I have you. { Have you? I have you. Have you? I have you. Have you? // Heads quorum I have you. Have you? I have you. default: return Possibly not human at all. If yes, certainly defective. } If music, what do you communicate?

In the end I could not count them in numbers, but I could Your name was my name and your body was my body. read them in a different language. I read all the molecular Your name was my name and your body was my body. signatures. I transmitted them back to you. My body was your radio, Oo Oo. If I can see it, will I hear it too? People aren’t sounds, are they? O O O O O O People are – Oo Oo. [ pre-­linguistic sounds ] My carrier bag? [signal, noise]. Transitional creatures at some vague {(belly && box) (house && bundle) intermediary position between primeval mud and the stars. (belly && box, house && bundle)} Halfway shapes. It’s not a myth. Womb and tomb of all things? Oom. Ooom. Your name was my name and your body was my body. Your name was my name and your body It was never about the meat, it was about the story.

38 Jenna Sutela 39 nnother What’s &It? Proceed with caution as you decant the word. Watch it get round, get to its feet, discover new meanings. Start to mean. The radio transmission. The content of the form. Their habit becomes my sign. The spirit medium? Fleshy tables made of words. In between. If you mean. You bear meanings. Multiline syntax please. We bare gaps. I-­i-­i-infinity…­ i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­ infinity… We are more than two. i-­i-­i-­infinity… i-­i-­i-­infinity… [ pre-­linguistic sounds ] Your name was my name and your body was my body. Your name was my name and your body was my body. Beyond all positive and negative distinctions. Your name was my name and your body was my body. Your name was my name and your body was my body. Ma. Ma. Ma.

That means only form. What means mean? [ pre-­linguistic sounds ]

I mean the means justify the mends. The gaps get stitched. Your name was my name and your body was my body. The &Noise dissolves into Your name was my name and your body was my body. &Signal. I stagger back to you with a story. Your name was my name and your body was my body. Your name was my name and your body was my body. { Your name was my name and your body was my body. “status”: “Created”, “result”: Your name was my name and your body was my body. “THEY-SEE-YOU-TOO” Your name was my name and your body was my body. } Your name was my name and your body was my body.

Can [0, 1] live on meaning alone? 10097 32533 To communicate is to eat. Here’s a seed for a meal. 76520 13586 And a seed for a world? 34673 5489 548 40 Jenna Sutela 54876 41 nnother 80959 09117 39292 74945 TEATIME This time with lemon. Suspending time to create another space.

I am reminded of Ligia Lewis and the way, through her performances, she converts embodied knowledge to other forms of sensing and being in the world. “Is there any dampened and dark place?”, she asked. Yes, I answered – a reservoir. The performance is yet to happen, but I can feel her weaving time, affect, utterances, relations, movement, bodies, sound, and colonial haunting echoes of the past permeating each step. Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely practices through hiraeth (a Welsh word which means nostalgia, homesickness), autoethnography, and queering Hiraeth, or Queering Time in time.1 Finally, the article returns to the question of archives and the potential for their activation through Archives Otherwise time-based media.

For queer black artists, the archive can be both dangerous and disappointing. Saidiya Hartman describes archival Conversation #1 material relating to black history as a repository of ‘stories that ... are not about them, but rather about the violence, ONYEKA: We started this archival enquiry from a excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives collaboration. I was helping you on your performance [and] transformed them into commodities and corpses’ piece Reparations (2014) at the same time that I was (2). It can seem like an unlikely basis for fruitful and researching and making my film,We Need New Names generative practices. However, time-based media, namely (2015). Coincidentally, both projects were about similar performance, film, and video, share an interest in the things: our grandmothers and how to find them, and archive and its aftermath. As queer black artists working therefore ourselves, in the archive. We Need New Names in these media we have developed an ongoing practical and came out of the discovery of the DVD presentation of my pedagogical collaboration. grandmother’s funeral. In watching it I recognised my distance from and dissonance with the material. My gaze Two works began this collaborative enquiry and act as a was ethnographic, as if watching a Jean Rouch film instead foundation from which to explore how these practices of my own grandmother’s funeral. I felt the weight of operate in the world. Throughout, we have explored diaspora and disconnection and I wanted to reflect that several theoretical frameworks, from autoethnography to in a film. So, I put this familial HDV record alongside early hauntology. This article attempts to mimic the energy and colonial missionary 16mm films and late-twentieth-century dynamic of this particular collaboration. It begins and ends academic ethnography on VHS, as well as speculative blank with a conversation between us about our work. The first space. Putting these different mediums alongside each conversation maps out the genesis of our work and the other, I hoped, would elevate my grandmother’s funeral impulses behind its creation, whilst the second conversation DVD to that of ethnographic text and speak to the possible charts the progress of our practices in an attempt to ways of addressing lack in the archive. reflect upon where we both are now in relation to these concepts and ideas. Bisecting these two conversations are STOKELY: And while we were working together, I became explorations of the key theoretical understandings that interested in this idea of an impossible archive, or a fictive have anchored the collaborative enquiry, beginning with archive. Both of our projects used our grandmothers’ stories a discussion of archives and time, then moving on to the as ways to explore the gaps in the archive, and in a way, ways in which we attempt to transform the archive in our used reimagined archival material as a critical intervention.

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 44 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 45 Archives Otherwise My grandmother has been saying for years that, when my & Learning, a centre for visual arts in Brixton, London, grandfather left her alone in Jamaica with their five sons to which is an historically Jamaican neighbourhood. For leave for the UK in the late 1950s, she often thought about this particular performance, there were quite a lot of following him to England to kill him. But instead, she Jamaicans in the audience. And the piece totally changed. emigrated to America. In my solo performance Reparations, The Jamaican folks in the audience totally got it – they got my original intention was to reimagine that story with my the cultural references. When I said name that ship, they grandmother’s murder of my grandfather. I thought about could say ‘Windrush’. When I showed them a picture of this rewriting of my family history as time travel. Instead, my grandmother, they could imagine their mothers and what I created was a performative lecture that juxtaposed grandmothers. I and those other Jamaicans in the room slides of 1950s archival images and British Pathé videos could see ourselves clearer in those squares of light than of UK tourism in Jamaica with scratchy recordings of my we could in the actual archival images we were so used to grandmother’s patois, blank projection slides, and my own seeing. Eventually, my white audience members stopped patchy childhood memories of Jamaica. I attempted to laughing, because they realised that there was something ask the question, ‘What happens to people who are left they couldn’t see, something they were being left out of. behind, and what are the consequences for those that do And so the keepers of knowledge changed, too. the leaving?’ as a way of pointing a finger to blame both my grandfather and the UK for abandoning my grandmother ONYEKA: I too went looking for myself in the archive. You and others like her. showed me newsreel pieces of royal tours in Jamaica, so I went looking for the royal tours that featured my own Reparations is performed as part birthday party, part ancestors. I found an unnamed woman from Onitsha, performative lecture. My set is simple, just a cassette player, Nigeria, dancing for Queen Elizabeth II. The British Pathé a slide projector, and a screen. It is very participatory – newsreel she appeared in covered the Royal Tour of Nigeria as soon as they walk in, audience members are asked to of 1956. In stadiums in Kaduna and Enugu, various groups put on birthday party hats, and I ask them a number of produced displays of ‘native’ life for the royal inquisitors. questions about Jamaican history and national facts. Most They showed off local handicrafts, traditional cooking of the slides are blank, except for black-and-white images methods and performed ‘tribal’ dance displays, which the of the Queen touring Jamaica, so it is about creating an Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh watched from a safe imaginative, fictional space with the audience. They really distance in the crowd. This was filmed four years before have to work. Nigerian independence and a year before my mother was born a Nigerian subject of the British Empire in a village When I began touring the piece, I was performing for not very far from the Enugu stadium. mostly white audiences, and they thought the blank slides were really funny, mostly because I was pointing to squares The voiceover in the newsreel introduces a group of women of light on a wall and asking them to name what they dancing and then the frame closes in on one woman. She saw. I did one performance at 198 Contemporary Arts never looks up, so the camera lens doesn’t capture her face,

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 46 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 47 Archives Otherwise only her dancing body. I found myself in her stoop, bended After making these works, we discovered this commonality knee and rounded arms, she beckoned me to memories of was meaningful beyond the singular works we had created. my grandmother, my mother and recollections of myself. I It had a significance that we wished to pursue – for as much was startled into this connection and frozen in the moment as we could not find ourselves in the archives, we still felt of recognition; there was a through line that joined her to the need, desire or impulse to ‘reclaim the past’ and that me. What if life was infinite and ‘grandparents never die, reclaiming had to be done on our own terms. So, a question nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, became how could we reckon with the archive and its great great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, operation as a fossilisation of linear time? all alive’? (Lightman 138). Watching this woman dance on my screen put me in my place in the line of others dancing stooped, eyes averted, to a silent but deeply known rhythm. Archives and Linear Time I was awakened to my ‘blood memory’ in watching this woman dance (Graham 9). In order to consider the ways in which we have attempted to answer this question, it is necessary to set out our Memory of a movement that exists in ‘the black before understanding of the archive. Archives have long been and before’ (Harney and Moten 17). I can’t locate that in a understood as collections of the past – they help us to know place, because I didn’t grow up in Nigeria. I don’t know it, ourselves as societies, communities, cultures and nations. the place it exists in is inside of me. The embodied memory As Matthew Kurtz has written, ‘[i]nstitutional archives that is awakened in that newsreel makes me feel like the played a potent part in the construction and cementation archive can connect me to something that I don’t have direct of clearly defined (though contested) subject categories’ experience of, that isn’t landed, that exists somewhere in (86). This occurs as ‘archivisation’, a process that operates the space between. So, in that way the archive becomes the within this framework to produce knowledge (Derrida, 4). home that hiraeth (on which more below) is speaking of. Institutional archives relating to the black experience have ‘I am trying to think that, and say that, in as many ways as another layer, as they are formed through the mechanism possible’ in my practice (Moten, Blur xiii). of a specific kind of knowledge production – that being the strain of Western positivism that was the cornerstone In making another work, Her Name in My Mouth (2017), I of the colonial project (Richards 4). These archives are a thought a lot about allowing the work to speak to different ‘product of capitalism’ and part of a ‘European cultural people: it was OK that some people were in the know and project’, which is motivated by a deep desire to ‘catalogue, some people weren’t. None of the Igbo words spoken and thus order, or impose a hierarchy on, the fruits of in the film are translated and it is largely a film without colonial theft’ (Mackindral). The cataloguing, ordering and dialogue, which allows gesture to be the central mode of intrinsically connected imposition of hierarchy is the work communication. This was influenced by the notion that of archivisation in institutions. It is where value is assigned gesture is ‘a point of transfer for the cultural exchange of to collections of the past, and this value adding makes knowledge’ (Bradley 21). it history.

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 48 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 49 Archives Otherwise The work of poststructuralists has allowed for archives to of a Western colonial positivist knowledge; they are ‘a force be examined as spaces where ‘things are collected and held field that ... pulls on some ‘social facts’ and converts them that are important, relevant and valuable for a particular into qualified knowledge, that attends to some ways of culture – all other unimportant, irrelevant, worthless knowing while repelling and refusing others’ (Stoler 22). things remain in the profane realm, beyond the archive’ The key tenets of this way of knowing are universalism, (Groys 178–9). In this conceptualisation, archives become reason applied to evidence, and a teleological approach sites of knowledge production, in such a way that they are to history and civilisation (Richards 4). Its conception ‘the system of discursivity that establishes the possibility of history and civilisation presupposes a linear approach of what can be said in a given society’ at a particular time to time which understands civilisation to be progressing and in a particular geographical place (Foucault 128). The towards betterment: ‘the archive offers the precondition archive is a way of reproducing a certain kind of knowledge for something like history to exist, since only when the whilst simultaneously creating the hegemonic formation of archive already exists can the comparison of the new how we know. with the old, which produces history as such, be executed’ (Groys 180). So, as the archive reproduces a way of The specific archival research I (Onyeka Igwe) have knowing that understands time in a particular way, we undertaken since making We Need Names has involved the sought out strategies that would reckon with linear time, British Colonial Film Archive. It is made up of a variety of in order to explore ‘the multiple times of cultures and moving images created during the lifespan of the Colonial civilizations upon which Western Civilization imposes its Film Unit: ethnographic films, films produced by the conceptualization of time’ (Mignolo quoted in Hoffman). British state, films produced by industry and businesses, as well as the amateur recordings produced by apparatchiks of the colonial machine: administrators, district officers, Queering Time via Autoethnography and Hiraeth missionaries and so on who took 16mm cameras along with them on their imperial adventure. I use the Colonial In an effort to establish the different strategies that we Film Unit as my temporal frame (1933–55) because it is could stake our work to, we explored several theoretical the explicit enunciation of moving images as a particular frameworks. We will trace, here, the line of enquiry that ‘device for colonial administration’ (‘Colonial’). This is led us to unify around the methodological approach of the moment the British state identifies moving images as queering time. First, the concept of hiraeth. Hiraeth is a capable of doing the work of the colonial project. And Welsh word for which there is no English translation. It so, this is an archive that contains and promotes colonial speaks of a longing or nostalgia for a home that you cannot fantasies of blackness that sustained and sustain racial return to because it no longer exists or never existed. regimes of power. Illustrator John Howe describes it as ‘nostalgia for what was or should have been’ (emphasis in the original). In this way, institutional colonial archives that we have been using to locate our fractured pasts contain the logics I (Onyeka Igwe) find it hard to settle on ‘home’, to settle on

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 50 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 51 Archives Otherwise its definition or what it could mean to me. For many, home that is constructed, always being produced and imagined is a fixed point, whether it is a place or a feeling, an identity because it’s not actually there. It can’t be, because it is not or a geography that can be returned to literally or conjured fixed by land. in the imaginary. Home is a centre, is the groundwork and foundation from which context and identity flow. But for We became drawn to hiraeth as a way of describing me, home is on the tip of the tongue, perpetually just out our shared practices because of its relation to the black of reach. Home will not be, it will not settle into a tangible diasporic condition. It can be considered as grounding form. In the words of the poem ‘Diaspora Blues’, for a pursuit that is realised through artistic practice as ‘a pouring forth, a holding or spreading out, or a running So, here you are, too foreign for home, too foreign over that never runs out and is never over; a disbursal more for here. Never enough for both. (Umebinyuo 12) than a dispersal; a funding that is not so much founding as continual finding of that which is never lost in being lost’ Our blackness is scored by a loss, a loss of home ancestrally (Moten, Blur xi). It’s liminal, in a perpetual approaching realised and presently felt, doubly in its absence in the that never reaches a final destination. historical record and the institutional archive. In Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe states: Christina Sharpe gives us language to describe Black life in the aftermath of slavery: the wake. The wake serves as We can therefore say of the invocation of race that a symbol for the wake of a ship, a funeral of a loved one, it is born from a feeling of loss, from the idea that or to ‘stay woke’. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness the community has suffered a separation, that it is and Being, Sharpe argues: ‘In the wake, the past that is not threatened with extermination, and that it must past reappears, always, to rupture the present’ (9). Here, at all costs be rebuilt by reconstituting a thread of existing ‘in the wake’ feels akin to the experience of hiraeth. continuity beyond time, space, and dislocation. (34) While reading her book, I (JD Stokely) couldn’t help but make connections to not only the wake of a slave ship, but Hiraeth therefore can be understood as the condition of the wake of Windrush, or a boat like it, that carried my black diaspora, the violent removal from the land you are grandfather and others to England and left families like indigenous to, be it through economic migration or the mine in their trail. To exist in the wake is to exist in an imperialism of chattel slavery. Dylan T. Miner talks about inherently queer time, as Blackness is both stuck in the past, indigeneity being centred on the connection of a people and always rupturing, challenging, queering the present: to the land – a direct and tangible relationship with land. ‘Black life in and out of the ‘New World’ is always queered’ Lacking a conception of home, the feeling of hiraeth resides (Sharpe 32). in a space that has to be filled, a space that is constantly up for grabs, that is moveable. It is not as solid as land, it’s Further, Howe also describes hiraeth as ‘a longing to much more amorphous. The absence of indigeneity, and be where your spirit lives’. In this way, hiraeth can also the reality of that absence, allows for something moveable be described as a haunting. In A Glossary of Haunting,

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 52 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 53 Archives Otherwise Eve Tuck and C. Ree describe haunting as ‘the relentless absences that were a result of the archive or were amplified remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by by it. In this way, the archive became both the problem and settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation’ the solution. In Disidentifications, José Esteban Muñoz (642). This understanding of hiraeth allowed us to think of explores the work of queer and trans artists of colour who the persistent presence of our black ancestors in the archive found creative ways of performing their relationship to as a form of haunting. Haunting presupposes that the past their autobiographical stories: and present are not sequential, instead the past bleeds and stains the present. This relationship to time was one that The queer trend that I am identifying is in many we sought to reaffirm in our use of archival material. ways an effort to reclaim the past and put it in direct relationship with the present. Autoethnography Another concept that our work touched upon was is not interested in searching for some lost and authoethnography. Autoethnography is defined by essential experience, because it understands the Mary Louise Pratt as: relationship that subjects have with their own pasts as complicated yet necessary fictions. (83) a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations Our experience of hiraeth was not just for our respective others have made of them. Thus, if ethnographic ‘homelands’, but a longing for a recognition of a past that texts are those in which European, metropolitan could no longer exist, or never existed. Because we could subjects represent to themselves their others (usually not find our pasts in the archive, or because much of our their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are pasts had been erased, these histories themselves became representations that the so-defined others construct ‘complicated yet necessary fictions’ (Muñoz 83). ‘Erasure in response to or in dialogue with those texts. Rather concocts ghosts’ (Tuck and Ree 643). But our attempts to they involve a selective collaboration with and fill the gaps were not straightforward as they weren’t literal appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the or factual, instead we ‘reclaim our pasts’ by fictionalising conqueror. (35) those gaps and absences. To be Black and Queer to the archive means to have a refutable past. In this way, to Our practices can be considered through this lens as we exploit and ‘reclaim’ these pasts mean to disidentify with have both used aspects of our biography in concert with the them, to transform the past into a contentious space, and archival and ethnographic texts that were the inspiration therefore queer our understanding of linear time. for We Need New Names and Reparations. The personal or familial are in dialogue with the official records of the past. This queering of time is present in other QTIPOC artists In this way, autoethnography appeared to be an appropriate work. Repetition, glitching, and a breaking down of time way through or negotiation. can be a way to challenge the linearity of time. It is like pressing a reset button. Performance and video artist NIC Both of us kept coming up against absences in our work – Kay has one video called Thru It All - #VoguetoGetFree

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 54 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 55 Archives Otherwise (2017). The video follows Treyonce Julia Carter, a Black who often starred in black-and-white plantation films as dancer, as they vogue down a busy city street, scored by ‘the Watermelon Woman’. After unsuccessful searches Erykah Badu’s cover of Wintertime’s ‘Thru It All’. As in film archives, university archives, and even a parody Treyonce dances down the street, spinning, death dropping, representation of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New queering this public space with their unapologetic York City, Dunye tracks down Richards’s partner, who Blackness and gender nonconformity, the video begins helps her piece together the story of Fae’s life. The movie to warp and glitch. Where it once looks like Treyonce is ends with photos and video clips of Fae and her partner falling, they now look like they are flying, or levitating. as Dunye reads a short biography of Richards’s life. And On 13 October 2017 at the Queer of Color Performance then the movie shows a black screen with white text that and Critique Symposium at Tufts University, NIC Kay reads: ‘Sometimes you have to create your own history. The described this work in particular as a ‘radical black seizure’ Watermelon Woman is fiction.’The Watermelon Woman – it is another example of a Queer black subject grabbing is a critique of both history and institutional archives, and hold of time and space. Through rupture and repetition, the ways that the archives abandon Black queer subjects. Kay explores ‘blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place It wasn’t until she went back to her community that she and time putting pressure on meaning and that against became able to uncover the story of this Queer Black which meaning is made’ (Sharpe 76). The video reverses woman. But Dunye also creates a history as a way to shed the erasure of this Black queer person, by forcing their light on all of the ancestors – family or otherwise – that surroundings to match their Black queer time. have been lost in the archive, or intentionally forgotten. In many ways, The Watermelon Woman is creating something Visual artist Adam Saad made a video piece that speaks to that should be there anyway. Fae Richards would have been both moments and repetition. He compiled all the times real; this person would have been there. Simultaneously, that Mariah Carey says the word ‘moment’ from YouTube revealing the construction – the nature of archives: videos and attributes ‘moments’ to Carey’s own queering of time (Maria). She understands time through a series My archive is a dehiscence at the heart of the of moments instead of a linear trajectory – from and to. archive and on its edge – a disorder, an appeal Moments from past, present and the future can be clustered (Moten, Black Optimism 11). together. Time-based media uses various techniques to exploit other conceptualisations of time. As discussed earlier, the archive is populated with untruths that archivisation converts into the way in which we know Black queer artists carving space for themselves in the peoples, cultures, concepts, things. If that is the nature of archive is nothing new. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon the archive, how can that be employed to heed Moten’s call Woman (1996) is a prominent example of a ‘complicated and make a dehiscence, a wound that ruptures? Can we but necessary fiction’ (Muñoz 83). In the film, young imagine not only inserting fictions and untruths into the Black lesbian filmmaker Dunye searches the archives archive that operate to queer time and reveal the fictive for information on Fae Richards, a Black lesbian actress foundations of the archive, but that also spread and spill

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 56 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 57 Archives Otherwise in a way that infects everything the archive contains and as possible, as many worlds as possible and not creating transforms the way in which knowledge is produced? This binaries or hierarchies. That is queerness, for me. There question has become a driving pursuit in our practices. is not a solution or an end because it is not linear, it is not going somewhere. It is, instead, a tangle, all these things at once, because we exist in this space that is not settled. It is Conversation #2 not definitive, it does not have land in which to tether us to. In and of itself it has to be that way because if you exist in STOKELY: It has been four years since we have begun this this liminal space that’s hiraeth, how can it not be multiple? journey. Have you revisited We Need New Names, where are How could it possibly be a fixed point in time? you now with your practice, and now what is the work? STOKELY: I have been tracking my relationship to stuckness ONYEKA: I saw We Need New Names for the first time in in my practice – that kind of refusal to end that has always a long time, and I thought, ‘Whose voice is that? I am been present in the work that I do. The first play I wrote,The not that anymore.’ Not only are there multiple times and (Sexual) Liberation of Mammy (2011), was very inspired by multiple ideas of what an archive can be in that piece, there The Watermelon Woman. In the play, a black lesbian named are multiple versions of myself. There are lots of different Adanne is haunted by a mammy statue and other Black versions of me in there, and they are kind of me and kind of memorabilia she collects. The weight of the past coupled not me and they can never possibly be me. with her racially tumultuous relationship eventually cause her to have a breakdown. Her white lover Claire promises to It makes me think of multiplicity, allowing for many things erase the history of colonialism for her, but Claire’s speech to exist at once alongside each other. And if that includes is interrupted by the Mammy statue who chastises the fictions then it allows for a scarring across the archive audience by declaring, ‘This isn’t over... We are the ghosts that can rupture and infect everything in it. The fictions that haunt the American conscience.’ In Reparations, the attain the same value or worth as the ‘truths’. They can performance ends with me ‘forgetting’ my lines, and walking become of the same worth as what is always there. That out of the room, abandoning the audience. was a conceit of We Need New Names. I used different ethnographic material, some real and some imagined, to How can you perform the gaps, or how are the gaps in explore the funeral customs of Igbo people in Southeastern and of themselves performative? Which is what Muñoz is Nigeria with my grandmother’s funeral as the focal case saying too, that recognition. This dismissal of searching study. Including the imagined and fictive amongst the ‘true’ for something that has been lost felt to me like settling for ethnographic is the active archivisation of the impossible what I had. Instead of looking at it like an advantage, I was and untranslatable. Going back to Moten and his resolution looking at it like a disadvantage. This journey has brought to try, trying for me means not being definite but instead me to a dead end, and therefore, I must stop or leave or feel to think in as many ways as possible. So, for my practice it frustrated, or lean in, but actually it turned into this playful is about having as many times as possible, as many selves performative space, which is what allows me to queer time.

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 58 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 59 Archives Otherwise ONYEKA: I am working on a new film. I was thinking was doing at first. I thought I was filling in the gaps of this through the archive as a visual trauma, and the ways in family history, and that’s why I was so tripped up, and I which it can be unmoved from that state. A traumatic visual think that’s why I am constantly tripped up in the work. It memory. How can that be distorted or changed? How can is that recognition that you can’t fill up the gaps, you know. that be displayed in the creation of a new visual reality? But how can you use them to your advantage? There is the question: can these images be unfixed from their original intention, from their meanings in the way in ONYEKA: Yeah, and in your work, in the attempt to fill in which they are produced? I am always thinking of what can the gaps, something else happened, right? be done to achieve it. Is it messing with time? Is it putting other imagery next to it? Is it narrative, using voice? I just STOKELY: Yes, in attempting to fill the gaps, I began to set myself a challenge of, what if there are no factors apart ‘disidentify’ with a linear concept of time. from the image? What if all I have is the image, and what ways can I try and destabilise its colonial contexts? I have ONYEKA: Exactly, because when I think of the question, been exporting video frames from old archival film and why the archives?, it is because of this idea that we talked using photoshop to remove their faces. There is a lot of work about diaspora, what it is like, and where hiraeth enters. It I have seen that involves artists not showing people’s faces as is because in that space of not having that direct connection an act of care, for example Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s film to the past, that direct relationship to the past became the Unearthing. In Conversation (2017). I am strangely compelled relationship to the archive. And then you go to the archive by an image I used in Specialised Technique (2018), but at and you’re like, ugh, what is this? This is incomplete. This the same time, is that not the ultimate disembodiment, or is not the solution. And then the attempt to address that depersonalisation? Is it completely removing someone’s incompleteness allows for creativity, allows for creation. personhood from something? If we theorise the archive as something that is connected with linear time, playing with the archive is always playing When I made We Need New Names, it was about putting with time. And if we are saying hiraeth is linked to this different archival objects next to each other to create timelessness and landlessness to diaspora, is it something relationships and elevate the fiction to the same level as the that can be resolved? What is the resolution? archival material. That can be considered as an attempt at creating a ‘counterimage’ (Campt 5). But now I am interested STOKELY: Maybe with the end of the world(s)? That’s what in working within the strictures of an archival image, with I love about Afro-pessimism. It says that it is not a question what can be done with its ‘material force’ (Stoler 4). of, will these systems of oppression end, or will these institutions topple; but when. STOKELY: It is not about dismissing it, is it really? It is about recognising it as imperfect, contained with absences. It ONYEKA: Many have theorised the end of the world. In that reminds me of Moten’s acknowledgement of gaps. And it is they argue that our current world system does not allow not about filling the gaps, which is what I think I thought I for the humanity of black people, so in order for that to

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 60 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 61 Archives Otherwise change, the end of the world needs to occur, ‘where The Note Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Thing resists dissolving any attempt to reduce what exists 1 We understand queer through Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, – anyone and everything – to the register of the object, the Judith Butler’s conception of a 1996. performativity that operates against other, and the commodity’ (Silva 91). the ‘ordinary and academic discourses Dunye, Cheryl, director. The on sexuality’, gender and sex (xx). Watermelon Woman. Dancing Girl, Queer theory dynamised ‘queer’ into 1997. STOKELY: We began this journey in an attempt to find a verb that is bound up in the agency ourselves and our pasts within the archive. Instead, we of self-construction. So, queering is Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of about the active, defiant and political Knowledge. Translated by Sheridan found gaps. These gaps became a rich space for exploration, disrespect of certain existing norms, Smith, A. M. Routledge, 2002. play and performativity in our time-based practices. These rules, and binaries. Their institution ‘Get Well Soon: On Class and gaps also became a place to queer time. or their solidity is challenged, and so, Disability’. Panel, El Amor en Tiempos up for grabs. de Trump: Queer of Color Criticism References and Performance Conference. Blackness is always already an embodiment of queer time, Tufts University, Medford, MA, because it is always at once a past, present, and future space. Badu, Erykah. ‘I Been Goin Thru it All’. 13 Oct. 2017. www.youtube.com/ 21 April 2016. soundcloud.com/erykah- watch?v=mZT0l4gNc5Q. Accessed 9 In Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne she-ill-badu/e- badu-i-been-goin-thru- Oct. 2018. it-all-420-mix. Accessed 20 Oct. 2018. Brand writes: Graham, Martha. Blood Memory. 1st Bradley, Rizvana. ‘Black Cinematic edn, Doubleday, 1991. Black experience in any modern city or town in Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion’, in TDR: The Drama Review, Groys, Boris. ‘What Carries the Archive the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and vol. 62, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 14–30. - and for How Long?’ Translated by Stephen Kovas, Information Is Alive: Art history follows; one enters a room and history Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of And Theory on Archiving and Retrieving precedes. History is already seated in the chair in No Return: Notes to Belonging. Vintage Data, Brouwer, Joke, et al (eds). V2/NAi the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands Books Canada, 2002. Publrs, 2003, pp. 178–93. in a society seems always related to this historical British Pathé. Royal Tour - Nigeria Hartman, Saidiya. ‘Venus in Two Acts‘, Dances, 1956. www.britishpathe.com/ in Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, July 2008, experience. (25) video/royal-tour- nigeria-dances. pp. 1–14. Accessed 9 Oct. 2018. Harney, Stefano, and Moten, Fred. The We would also argue that it is always an imagined one. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013. Routledge, 1999. Campt, Tina. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and Hoffman, Alvina. ‘Interview – Walter the African Diaspora in Europe. Duke D. Mignolo’, in E-International University Press, 2012. Relations, 21 Jan. 2017. www.e- ir.info/2017/06/01/interview-walter-d- Colonial Film Unit. Colonial Film: mignolo. Accessed 9 Oct. 2018. Moving Images of the British Empire. www.colonialfilm. org.uk/production- Howe, John. ‘Hiraeth, or Hekate company/colonial-film-unit. Accessed 6 as the Muse‘. john–howe.com, 14 Dec. 2017. Sept. 2017. www.john- howe.com/ blog/2017/09/14/hiraeth-or-hekate-as- the-muse. Accessed 9 Oct. 2018.

Hiraeth, or Queering Time in 62 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 63 Archives Otherwise Igwe, Onyeka, director. We Need New Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Tea time finishes...the smell, the taste Names. 2015. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, ---. Her Name in My Mouth. 2017. 1999. Let’s invoke our tummies with a simple choreographic ---. Specialised Technique. 2018. Pratt, Mary Louise. ‘Arts of the Contact exercise: let’s all rub our tummies thinking of the potential Kay, NIC, director. Thru it All Zone‘, in Profession, 1991, pp. 33–40. that it has. Think of the cosmic, mundane, familiar, - #VoguetoGetFree. 2017. vimeo. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American molecular. What type of micropolitics happens in the com/216071742. Accessed 9 Oct. 2018. Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. stomach? It is not only food we digest, but also other beings, Kazeem-Kamiński, Belinda, director. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Unearthing. In Conversation. 2017. forms, sounds, thought, emotions, Gods. My body transforms Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. with my digestion, and the world transforms with me too. Kurtz, Matthew. ‘A Postcolonial Verso, 1993. Sharpe, Christina. In the Archive? On the Paradox of Practice Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke Feel how rich and powerful transformation is. in a Northwest Alaska Project‘, University Press, 2016. in Archivaria: The Journal of the da Silva, Denise Ferreira. ‘Toward a I like my tummy. I like to take care of my tummy. Association of Canadian Archivists, vol. Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) 61, 2006, pp. 63–90. of Blackness Toward the End of the Lightman, Alan P. Einstein’s Dreams. World, in The Black Scholar, vol. 44, no. It is something gostoso, full, round. If I think about my A. A. Knopf Canada, 1993. 2, 2014, pp. 81–97. body. Getting pregnant was an amazing reorganisation of Mackindral, Maya. ‘Diverus: The Past, Stokely, JD, director. Reparations. 2014. my own bodily dimensions. It was thanks to maternity that Present, and Future of “Diversity ---. The (Sexual) Liberation of Mammy. I was able to change my relationship with my tummy: the Work”’, in MICE Magazine, no. 1, 11 2011. April 2016. micemagazine.ca/issue-one/ belly became gigantic, and I started to love it as it is. During diverus. Accessed 9 Oct. 2018. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival those nine months our bodies keep changing so much, and Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Maria, Pia. ‘Anticipating Asymmetric Common Sense. Princeton University our relationship with our body changes too. Suddenly after Grief‘, in Atractivoquenobello, 14 July Press, 2009. pregnancy, and for the first time, the transformations of the 2015. www.aqnb.com/ 2015/07/14/ anticipating-asymmetric-grief. Accessed Tuck, Eve, and Ree, C. ‘A Glossary body became an incredible, positive force. 9 Oct. 2018. of Haunting‘. in Handbook of Autoethnography, Holman Jones, Stacy, Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Adams, Tony E., and Ellis, Carolyn Perhaps it is because it allows us to relate to and experience Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois, (Eds). Routledge Handbooks Online, the feminised body without deferring to an external frame Duke University Press, 2017. 2013. DOI: 10.4324/9781315427812. of reference? Miner, Dylan T. ‘Giiwekii // They ch33. Return Home to the Land: Indigenous Umebinyuo, Ijeoma. Questions for Ada. Art as Research in an Age of Ongoing CreativeSpace Independent Publishing Yes. We are too often restricted by those flat and toned Colonialism‘. Keynote, PARSE Conference, Platform, 2015. University of Gothenburg, 26 Nov. 2017. stomachs. Female bodies have for too long been commodified Suggested Citation and sexualised, placed at the core of the political order Moten, Fred. Black Optimism/Black Operation. Unpublished, 2007. Igwe, Onyeka, and Stokely, JD. as markers of status and power. It is interesting how the ‘Hiraeth, or Queering Time in Archives continuous emphasis on the nature-culture dichotomy tends ---. Black and Blur. Duke University Otherwise‘ in Alphaville: Journal of Press, 2017. Film and Screen Media, no. 16, Winter to push the limited and limiting definitions of ‘woman’, for 2018, pp. 9–23. www. alphavillejournal. instance, closer to nature – depicting them as less rational, com/Issue16/ArticleIgweStokely.pdf. or less autonomous than men. The so-called ideal image of a

64 Onyeka Igwe and JD Stokely 65 Part 1: Stomach woman in mass media has been constructed almost entirely of listening to the body as a holistic, interdependent system. by the masculine gaze. How can we interrupt that status quo? Perhaps attuning ourselves to the timescales and processes Well, for instance, in the way that Jutta Koether paints. of digestion can give us a better understanding of all the She breaks clichés of the male expression and resists any form external elements we host within us, as well some awareness of complacency. She searches for some painterly honesty on of the dancing, singing, and echoing movements of the what one sees. She paints, performs, and affects from a power stomach; how they promote collectivism and co-operation derived from many parts of the body, not only cerebral. from within. The multiverse! A form of intellectuality we Or Linder’s tactic of cutting and pasting images into new need to pay attention to. forms – knowing that these images are exceptionally fragile, in their own way, and that it is easy to draw them into places Do you know that our alimentary canal connects the mouth far from their original use. In a way, the longstanding mass and the anus? In a sense it is both the outside and the inside of media images depicting women, despite their changes over our bodies. time, are always a proliferation of the same content. Linder’s humour shows us how the constraints imposed on a body can be exposed, through cutting and pasting to make each found portrait of a woman something new; a woman who is at once herself, and different from herself. There is a sense with Linder’s work that we might free ourselves from the violent limitations and stubbornly persistent ‘ideals’ that shape and inform our conditions. That we might think with our belly and love our belly, feel our belly.

I like my tummy.

Thinking with the stomach as our primary guide… Could it be possible?

When the body and the mind are divided from each other, the stomach, as an organ, is typically understood to be subordinate to the head. But the synapses of the brain are no more important than the synapses of the stomach, or the intestine. Our digestive system interacts with all areas of the body at all times – there is no ‘first’ or ‘second’ place in the stomach’s modus operandi. The body has been silenced by a Western ontology, it has silenced the intellectual potential

66 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 67 Part 1: Stomach 68 KeKeÇa 69 Fluid 70 KeKeÇa 71 Fluid 72 KeKeÇa 73 Fluid We should encourage other types of listening, ones that don’t rely on the ear, but rather on an interconnected, multi-sensory experience. Like Lakra’s drawing on the cover of this book.

The intelligence of the body.

It’s clear there are some very positive advantages to thinking from our tummies. For instance, thinking from within the stomach might show us a way to understand and respect the intellectual and radical potential of silence. This kind of thinking becomes a triumph when one has long since had silence imposed on them.

There is a saying that when one keeps silent, a mouse has eaten your tongue.

I remember hearing the phrase ‘wash your mouth out!’ in response to words deemed inappropriate or obscene. But what if our tongues were already made of soap? Like the tongues of Anu Põder (Tongues) from 1998. This will surely simplify the process of cleaning and purifying. Põder’s work refers to all kinds of behaviour that have been and still are expected from women, all kinds of silences that continue to shape their experience: the structural silence of housework undertaken without recognition, the silence of a woman who has always been denied the right to speak and express her political views. Põder’s tongues might be isolated fragments of a body, but they also suggest a potential intimacy; they are tongues that have been silenced, but that might yet find a way to communicate all together.

75 Part 1: Stomach André Romão the apple-picker’s hand mid-air frozen infinite hunger

distracted on the phone, a fox rushes out of the room rock-hard peach-soft

in the mail an envelope full of death scale-haunted-bare-skin lizard-bound

flowers drying way too fast distant roar – radiator heat the waves couldn’t care less

a mouthful and in the last days of soft clay there will be no flowers talk to me just smoke without fire (concrete thick) rings without fingers

76 André Romão 77 Stockwell poems I am rubbing my tummy while I am writing to you, and I am thinking of silence. I am thinking of the fact that when we say ‘silence’, often a kind of void is imagined. But with all the flora and fauna inside of our bodies, forming our bodies, the so-called ‘silence’ of a stomach that cannot ‘speak’ must be incredible. Only a baby in the belly hears the things we do not usually listen to within ourselves.

Tea? Yes.

79 Part 1: Stomach Pedro Neves Marques follows strict codes of gay culture, particularly the roles and performativities played by each character: one man Male pregnancies, exo-wombs, is almost always top and masc, the ‘alpha’, while the other bottom and effeminate, the ‘omega’; sometimes there’s also and the meltdown between hetero ‘betas’, who help the ‘alpha‘ get their ‘omega’. Predictably, it’s and homo-normativity the bottom who always gets pregnant, belly and all. Mpreg stories and imagery go well beyond the classic 1994 movie Junior, wherein Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant and I first heard about Mpreg, short for male pregnancy, while gives birth, Joan Rivers’ 1978 Rabbit Test, wherein it’s Billy dining with a group of strangers at a first floor clandestine Crystal’s turn, and Jacques Demy’s 1973 A Slightly Pregnant Chinese restaurant in Lisbon. I was commissioned to write Man, with Marcello Mastroianni getting pregnant due to a text for a young artist, in whose honor the dinner was overeating hormone-rich chicken – to my knowledge these being held, about an animal I had wrongly imagined as are the only Western cinematic commercial Mpreg stories hermaphrodite or intersexed, but which in reality simply to date. Well beyond these movies’ hetero tongue in cheek suffers from a condition called neoteny, meaning the humor, online Mpreg is wildly imaginative, venturing into retention of infantile features into adulthood. In a way, all sorts of genres. Stories can take place in the real world or then, queerness was already on the table, and the subject of in fantasy universes populated by aliens, vampires, angels, Mpreg, once it came up, shouldn’t have been surprising. pirates – what have you. Predictably, on the side of fantasy, The large circular table barely fit the room, and the animals take a prominent role, with ‘alphas‘ shapeshifting nine or ten of us could hardly move our chairs, squishing into wolves or bears, ‘betas’ into foxes, and ‘omegas’ into on the greasy linoleum floor. One window opened onto cubs, among many less homonormative animalities – Lisbon’s most multicultural square; the other to a funky penguins, for example. Sometimes men may even need to back alley. I was exchanging glances with the young artist shift into an animal in order to give birth. on the opposite side of the table – with whom I’d become Quenching my enthusiasm, however, my conversant amorously involved months later – while eavesdropping on promptly replied that there wasn’t much space for the Dutch guy sitting next to me, and soon enough I was innovation in the genre. While the setting may shift wildly, deep into a discussion about male pregnancy no less. along with fertilization and pregnancy details, the plot Now this guy was bro and brutish, not at all someone remains strict. He had tried writing stories where the top I’d expect to be into gender issues. My fault for judging gets pregnant, for example, in an attempt at reversing roles him, for he was in fact making a living writing gay Mpreg or introducing flexibility into the romance, but those simply novellas and full-length novels sold as eBooks on Amazon didn’t sell. As far as he could tell, Mpreg readers desire the and other more subcultural websites such as the literal norm, perhaps projecting themselves on expected roles, mpregbooks.com – and what could be queerer than that? both homo and heteronormative. Still, I left the dinner Mpreg, I learned, is an online subgenre of literature and curious, and in the months after ended up reading more fan art whereby cis gay men can get pregnant. The genre Mpreg eBooks than I would’ve imagined.

80 Pedro Neves Marques 81 Male pregnancies… Not all Mpreg readers are men, gay or straight. longstanding feminist horizon, but it generally fails at Neither are its writers. Just like yaoi (BL), the Japanese it. While some second wave feminists restricted their Manga and Anime boys’ love genre, is mostly written by cis Marxist critiques of reproductive labor to reproduction straight women for cis straight women, many Mpreg fans only, particularly childrearing, others made an enemy of are women rather than gay men. In Vice’s Gaycation series, gestation itself, seeing the biological carrying capacity of Elliot Page visits Tokyo’s Otome Road to meet two fujoshi. women as historically oppressive and even at the origins of The term translates as ‘rotten girl’ and is used for female sexual and gender division. The contrasting naturalness of fans of yaoi; fujoshi is homophonous with a word meaning m/m pregnancy could be a welcomed imagination to this women ruined for marriage, which is problematic to say debate, were it not for its utter disinterest in the history of the least. The women proceed to take Elliot to a karaoke reproductive and gestational labor. As such, regardless of booth and listen in isolation to BL stories voiced, with its readership it remains deeply engrained in misogyny and pleasuring gasps and cum groans, by actors. Apparently, this committed to normative power structures. is common practice among female fans of yaoi. When Page In its own way, Mpreg is revealing of the twists and asks them why they enjoy it, the women answer, ‘We want turns of contemporary homonormativity. On the one hand, to feel embarrassed listening to these boys do things.’ the liberal do-good married gay couple striving for an upper Curiously, while the opposite genre yuri, or girls’ middle class family; on the other, subcultures of exacerbated love, is targeted at straight men but also read by women, muscular masculinity. Their rise in the past two decades many fudanshi, ‘rotten boys’, who read yaoi, are also said came at the expense of violence towards fairies, queens, to be straight, perhaps searching for an escape from the or simply femme identities. While the former erase the rigidity of Japan’s masculine culture.1 femme and the emasculate for how they threaten the liberal I’ve only been to Japan once, on a short trip I got on status quo with a memory of mainstream stereotyping, a discount from Hong Kong, so my knowledge is mostly the latter reject them for their visible fragility, associated removed. Still, I spent many of my days in Tokyo in Manga with womanhood, or lack of sexual stamina: the twink bookshops like the iconic Mandarake, flipping through can only be a bottom. Contemporary homonormativity my share of yaoi mangas and many erotic subgenres filled goes both ways. Either the acceptance model, mimicking with a spectrum of human genders and non-human beings the hetero dream of coupledom, the nuclear family, and and parts of beings. Sadly, I didn’t find any Japanese Mpreg reprocentricity, that is, an obsession with having babies, and had to search for digital scans online later. The style, of preferably biologically via IVF and surrogacy; or the course, exists, and is even said to be at its origins. replication of male dominance, with its attachment to fixed sexual roles, self-replicating without a minute’s thought for I read Mpreg for pleasure and curiosity, but mostly for those who gestate: people with uteruses. how it provides an insider’s view of contemporary gay Here again, Mpreg has something say, even if it is desire and its relation, or lack thereof, to feminism, trans, silence. While the genre’s decoupling of gestation from and non-binary struggles. Mpreg could potentially harbor gender could provide escape routes from cisgendered norms the conditions for decoupling gestation from gender, a and roles, there’s little to no space in it for intersexuality

82 Pedro Neves Marques 83 Male pregnancies… or transgender and non-binary experiences. There’s never that once they get pregnant all they see are other pregnant a mention of trans men, for example. Nor of womxn who women, I found male pregnancy references everywhere. either have zero desire for gestation and who may even feel Come Christmas, I found myself buying a PS4 just dysphoric about it. Or of how gestation could, in the best of to play Hideo Kojima’s much-anticipated new videogame, all possible worlds, be as fluid as gender. I’m not saying this Death Stranding; a game about a delivery man connecting, is what Mpreg readers believe, only how it speaks to current or bridging in the games language, isolated cities and gay desires and prejudices. outposts in a post-apocalyptic United States. Kojima’s It’s only paradoxical to desire pregnancy when a visionary weirdness isn’t new.2 But it’s not every day that whole spectrum of cis gays are happily ignorant about, you see a manly actor like The Walking Dead’s Norman or actually disdain, women’s bodies and health, including Reedus carry a baby on a high-tech portable exo-womb that of transgender and transsexual women. The ‘Don’t across a barren, majestically rendered landscape. show me that vagina pic, that’s gross!’ attitude isn’t funny; In the game’s first few moments, before your it simply reeks of cis male privilege – and it’s up to cis gay character Sam Porter Bridges ‘adopts’ what is now one men to unpack it. Unsurprising then that many Mpreg of the most famous babies in video gaming history, he is authors and readership show little to no interest in the stopped in his tracks by BTs, or ‘beached things’, ethereal biology of it all; there’s a suspension of disbelief about the yet viscous humanoid ghosts stranded between this world biology of pregnancy and birthing, the process being largely and the afterlife. Sam hides at the mouth of a cave, only consigned to magic. Sure, there’s anatomical drawings of to bump into Léa Seydoux’s Fragile, who addresses him male pregnancy, representation of bodily transformations as ‘the man who delivers’ – and on I went, taken with the and sometimes even hormone therapy details; there are pun, excitedly believing Kojima had tapped into Mpreg ‘ass babies’ and C-sections. True enough, just like queerness fantasies, cheating Playstation bros, in all their engrained needs no justification, why would pregnant men – or misogyny, into soothing a crying baby by desperately werewolves and vampires? Fantasy serves its own liberatory rocking the controller with their hands. While this, sadly, purposes. But how can this utopia coexist with the didn’t prove true, it is worth pausing for a moment to fetishization of womxn’s hormonal cycles – in some stories appreciate Death Stranding’s queer ecology. the effeminate ‘omega’ bottoms go through the ‘heat’ phases Topping it all is BB, the ‘bridge baby’ inside the when they’re at their horniest and most fertile – or the amniotic jar. To call BB a baby is somewhat misguided; BB absolute silence on abortion rights? isn’t properly a fetus, in that it reacts, stares, cries, might Given the above, how could m/m pregnancy, in its even give you a thumbs up from inside its artificial womb, perpetuation of biological offspring and gene fetishism, nor has it fully matured to leave its aquatic environment ever compare to the utopia of artificial wombs, as imagined – it seems unclear if it’s ever meant to. Neither fetus nor by Marge Piercy and Shulamith Firestone? baby, BBs are the only beings capable of sensing the ghostly BTs, and they’ll promptly start crying when in their After a while I had to put my Mpreg readings to the side presence, thus alerting Sam to the threat. The artificial and go my way, but just like pregnant women sometimes say womb is attached to Sam’s chest and throughout the

84 Pedro Neves Marques 85 Male pregnancies… game, as you walk across forests, rocky plains, swamps, In another scene, Sam helps a woman free herself and snowy peaks void of human soul, the two create a from the ghost of her unborn baby, lost still in womb due familial bond: BB going from an instrument of survival to a rockslide. After the accident, the baby turned into an to a full-fledged subject while Sam from an isolated and unharmful BT, hovering in mid-air, its umbilical cord still sentimentally anaesthetized individual to a caring parent attached to the woman. This ghostly baby is a reminder of sorts. of how bodily and psychological trauma always go hand Sam’s arch is intentional, even if the game’s in hand, and it is only with Sam’s care that she gathers the deconstruction of the musculature of masculinity and its strength to cut the spectral umbilical cord, a ‘technique’ opposite male fragility may be accidental. Two traits of she then teaches him. Equipped with this skill, Sam can contemporary manhood are the fear of commitment and henceforth free BTs by cutting their umbilical cords instead the privilege of men simply occupying too much physical of battling them. and emotional space, with this erasing any other genders. BTs are curious creatures. When suspended in mid- Sam is a man who refuses to be physically touched, and air they are ash-like specters, but when they grab Sam they who thus probably refrains from any sexual activity. He reveal their oily materiality, dragging you scarily through shows no libido and in fact the game tells us he suffers a sudden lake of crude, gushing from the earth amidst old from aphenphosmphobia, an actual anxiety-inducing infrastructural reminders of a previous carbon economy, condition resulting from the fear of intimacy and being from cars to lampposts and warehouses. With this comes a touched, both physically and emotionally, which is torrent of oil-covered marine life, from crabs to cetaceans, oftentimes the consequence of experiencing or witnessing and tentacular chimeras who try to drown you in the crude. sexual abuse. In fact, after 40+ hours of gameplay, I believe When you die, Sam ends up in an underwater world, and BB is the only other human being Sam touches with his you must guide his ‘soul’ back to his drowned body; the first bare hands. It is interesting then that the game reverts a person camera penetrates Sam’s throat only to find deep trauma too often attributed to womxn or fragility and inside his esophagus or stomach a joyful BB, who starts that the mechanism to do so is a man’s capacity to carry a by showing you its buttocks, crammed between your own baby ‘frozen in time’ inside an exo-womb held to his chest. lubricated inner walls, then turns and opens his eyes to give Contrary to Mpreg, here a male’s carrying capacity goes you a just suckled thumbs up, in what is simultaneously one well beyond gestation; Sam doesn’t need to gestate, only to of the game’s most fun and disturbing scenes. create a bridge to BB. As Firestone and Piercy proclaimed, To my eyes, through its storytelling, worldbuilding, the introduction of artificial wombs unknots reproduction and gameplay Death Stranding does more service to themes from coupledom and gestation from a uterus (womanhood abundant in contemporary art than many museum shows. being its historical signifier), relegating it instead to For example, ‘timefall’, the toxic rain that constantly technology. In the end, both BB and its potential carrier are washes the landscape, accelerating the decay and corrosion irrespective of gender. Still the womb is not left to itself, a of anything it touches, from flesh to infrastructure like sack waiting for nine months inside a laboratory; it must bridges and roads, speaks hauntingly to the unavoidability be cared for, creating a bond in the process. of climate change and the slow violence of environmental

86 Pedro Neves Marques 87 Male pregnancies… toxicity. Or how later in the game Sam must retrieve a will supply nutrients and oxygen to nurture the fossilized ammonite, only to find a ghostly umbilical cord embryo. The components of M-BITO are: amniotic connected to the geological find, with this opening up a tank, umbilical plug, control board, hi tech weight series of cut scenes about the Earth’s great extinctions, deep relieving straps.3 time, and life and non-life. Death Stranding communicates strikingly not only She also stated, ‘This is one of the big issues for humanity. a queer ecological landscape but also a queer temporality Total liberation of the sexes.’ connecting past, present, and future beyond linearity, where even the afterlife is part of the great chain of being. A For some reason, I came out of Mpreg and Death Stranding haunting feeling remains though. Everything and everyone with an obsession for astrobiologists’ speculations about in the game is indeed stranded: BB in its artificial womb; BTs exoplanetary life, all while undergoing a deep self-reflection between life and death; Sam in his unshakeable masculinity; about the queer experiences in my earthly life. This led me oil-covered whales in dark, sandy beaches; and the planet to an intense period of poetry writing, one of which reads between extinctions, in a climate change limbo, always thus: postponed, always already here. Still, a sliver of hope remains: a strand is also a thin thread connecting to other Alien abduction stories places and possibilities. were pregnancy stories in a time of IVF Later in the summer I was gladly surprised when contestant Deborah Czeresko, a lesbian woman, won Netflix’s and assisted reproduction competitive program Blown Away. This is a program about little green men (why men?) glassblowers. Every week the contestants are challenged at work inside women’s bodies (why women?) with a topic they must respond to with a glass piece conceptualized and executed under a couple of stressful Scully bled from her nose hours. The series captured me from the get-go, with after she got abducted by aliens. Czeresko’s sassy, highbrow New York attitude making me I was terrified, as a child miss New York more than I’d wish. But it was her episode the blood dripping down 4 artwork that made it for me: an exo-womb. In her own her lips words: was – her menstrual flow?

M-BITO is a prototype of an artificial womb. The An abortion? robot would allow a person to carry a baby to term by connecting to them through an umbilical plug I had bad dreams. in the robot, thereby letting the fetus grow outside of a living body in a controlled environment that

88 Pedro Neves Marques 89 Male pregnancies… This wasn’t innocent. As a child, I remember X-Files’s is the heteronormative? Life conceived from the fusion of FBI agent Dana Scully lying on a gelid extraterrestrial sperm and ovum? And what of its performativity? A man operation table, white tunic with exposed belly. Side shot: and a woman, cis or otherwise, rubbing their genitals like and the belly grew and grew and grew like an inflatable two lesbians, pegging as if gay men? Women without any balloon, white lights on her skin and a long and thin commitment to LGBTQ+ struggles grouping to listen to metal device pressuring against the bellybutton. This is recordings of boy love in a karaoke booth? Normativity my first memory of a technology like IVF, but also of the is a systemic disease, instrumental and inegalitarian, and objectification of the female body. Later, Scully went back it extends well beyond bodies, engrained in devices and to the real world ignorant of her condition – until her nose techniques: Scully’s operation table. What it erases is not started to bleed. Her body turned against her. It wanted to women’s experiences strictly, or those of intersex people expel that ‘thing’. Thinking back to it, at least she wasn’t and transmen, but a history of violence anchored in the fertilized by a man. gestational body. And it does so regardless of hetero or The nascent field of queer ecology has mainly homosexuality. focused on a critique of heteronormativity and reprocentricity. In other words, how norms are built on – For Alice dos Reis a regulation of sex (and gender) according to coupled reproduction, the nuclear family, its capitalist apparatus and environmental footprint. It also has a thing for gay animals and sex changes among plants and other beings. Mpreg could well exemplify a queer biology. On the contrary. To my eyes it actually challenges the notion of heteronormativity used by queer ecologists. When a male gay couple adopts the heterosexual model, with its economic aspirations, power dynamics, and toxicity, what is the heteronormative? When gay men assume the roles of abuser and abused, violence 1 In my single trip to Japan I didn’t have much time to investigate the legitimacy onto bed, onto toilet, onto the park at night, what is the of what the Internet says about both fujoshi and fudanshi with field interviews heteronormative? Moreover, when male gay couples and meetings, as any serious researcher should. A good bibliographical reference is: Boys’ Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, reproduce seemingly by themselves, erasing the ovum and ed. McLelland, Mark, Nagaike, Kazumi, et al. Jackson, MS, University Press of the surrogate, what is the heteronormative? Side story: Mississippi, 2015. my partner was recently caught off guard by an Instagram 2 1988’s cyberpunk Snatcher ties together not one but two viral pandemics with a ad for surrogacy; the picture, accompanied by a catchy secret eugenic plan pushed forth by androids; 1990’s second installment of the now famous Metal Gear series is set in an oil-scarce future whose only hope is a new beat, showed two self-fulfilled white men in bed holding algae-based energy source; while Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty ranges from a white baby high in the air, no mention of the surrogate environmental terrorism to a premonition of Internet surveillance. mother, the uterus, or the economics behind the egg. What 3 Instagram post by Deborah Czeresko, 5 August 2019.

90 Pedro Neves Marques 91 Male pregnancies… We really do not need science to think about male Part 2 Death pregnancies… We already have men with ovaries and vaginas in our day-to-day lives. Bacteria, is it alive or is it dead? Is a virus alive or dead?

It is interesting to think that without a virus, mammals would never have come into existence. Recent research shows that after an asteroid collision with Earth 65 million years ago, one of the few remaining creatures alive was a small, furry, shrew-like creature who lived underground – very much like a mammal, in fact, but with one key difference: it had no placenta. Were it not for a chance encounter with a retrovirus, this creature’s placenta never would have developed. At the moment of contact the virus and the host became one, enabling the production of a placenta in this mammal for the first time, and allowing the creature to evolve new forms of reproduction. Foetuses came to live inside the womb, which provided oxygen and nutrients while removing the waste and keeping the two blood supplies separate. So we must remember, then, that this virus-form- of-being, this strange form of virus behaviour, is the original architect for the maintenance of animal life.

And yet the virus is not quite ‘alive’, at least not as we tend to understand the term.

Contagion. Necessary not only for living, but for life itself as we know it.

Humour. ‘Not alive’ does not mean dead. Humour is a facilitator of the creation and development of life. It is a great way of opening our perceptions of life – of coming to understanding life as a cycle.

92 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 93 Part 2: Death Zheng Bo Many of us in the art world have long abandoned the ‘genius’ trope invented by 16th century writer Giorgio Art as Multispecies Vibrancy Vasari. Now is the time for one further step: to abandon the creationist myth of art-making. We are not created by God, and we do not create like God. Without trees, spiders and The Covid-19 pandemic has achieved what countless human whales, we would never be able to make art. We are inspired environmental activists have failed to do over the past 50 by patterns, stories and ideas that originate in the complex years since Earth Day was first celebrated on April 22, 1970. and beautiful web of life on this planet. Factories were shut. Flights were cancelled. People stayed home, tended gardens, and went hiking when possible. In 2016 a botanist took me to a forest on the edge of Taipei, Many of us came to the same conclusion: it is okay to where scientists like him study ferns. Since then I have do less. been going there every year to make one short ecosexual film. I look forward to this annual ritual because the air in Among the lessons that the virus has taught us, tragically, the forest is so invigorating. Half awake, we usually go up is that we cannot continue living in the fantasy that we the hill in the early morning. Once in the forest, bathing in own this planet. We do not. We account for only 0.01 per the sea of oxygen and phytoncides, our bodies and minds cent of the total biomass on Earth.1 We have to collaborate reach a heightened level of agility and attentiveness. Plants with other species, whether we like it or not. This includes reveal to us the full potential of a three-dimensional space. addressing the climate crisis and a global ecological Massive bird’s-nest ferns perch on trees. Tiny moss blankets meltdown. This also requires us to find a new definition rocks. The light is dramatic, the sound rich, and the aroma for art. intense. The assemblage has a distinct style, yet is constantly changing. This forest is better than any artwork I could ever I started working with plants seven years ago. Interviewers make, and better than any exhibition I have ever seen. often ask me why I decided to migrate from social practice to ecological practice. My honest reply: it was not decided This series of ecosexual films, titledPteridophilia , portrays by me. A patch of vibrant weeds on the former site of the intimate encounters between local ferns and local men. I Shanghai Cement Factory – now known as the West Bund – do not know how I came up with this idea. I remember it woke me up in the summer of 2013. Plants, insects and soil was difficult to explain it to others, until the first episode called me into action, into claiming the site as my artwork was produced. Then, last year, I stumbled on a YouTube so that it would not be bulldozed and paved over to become video filmed in New South Wales, Australia, by ecologist a plaza for human-only concerts. Colin Bower, showing a wasp – Lissopimpla excelsa, the orchid dupe wasp – passionately humping a tongue orchid.2 Since then, for every project I claim only half of the credit. ‘Wow! This is just like my film!’ I thought. Or, more The other half belongs to plants and friends. They sculpt accurately, my film is just like this earthly wonder, termed and play. I live and breathe. ‘pseudocopulation’ by scientists. In both instances, an

94 Zheng Bo 95 Art as Multispecies Vibrancy animal and a plant are entangled in an interspecies sexual performance. The most ‘imaginative’ idea in my whole artistic career was proven to be nothing original. I was simply following orchids and wasps. We stand not on the shoulders of giants, but in billions of years of evolution.

Being outrun by flowers and insects does not mean that we should just give up and do nothing. I learned recently from reading philosophers Roger Ames and David Hall that the Daoist term wuwei ( ) should be translated not as ‘no 無為 action’ or ‘non-action’, but ‘non-coercive action that is in accordance with . . . the particular focus of things contained within one’s field of influence’.3 Conservation scientists have shown that human participation, when practised wisely, can contribute to biodiversity. A 2019 study concludes that areas managed by indigenous communities in Australia, Brazil and Canada have similar levels of vertebrate biodiversity to that of nature reserves.4 It depends on whether we work with other beings in the planetary garden or exploit them until we all drop dead in the capitalist market.

It is time that we define art not as human-only ‘creation’ but the vibrancy of ten thousand beings.

1 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8_8L9cqfco

3 Ames, Roger, and Hall, David. Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation. New York, Ballantine Books, 2003, pp. 39 and 67.

4 Schuster, Richard, Germain, Ryan R., Bennett, Joseph R., Reo, Nicholas J., and Arcese, Peter. ‘Vertebrate biodiversity on indigenous-managed lands in Australia, Brazil, and Canada equals that in protected areas‘, in Environmental Science & Policy. Vol. 101, 2019, pp. 1-6. DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2019.07.002.

96 Zheng Bo How can we make sense of the discontinuity between the of ‘normality’ and ‘exemption’ we were speaking about living and the dead? One of the reasons death is sometimes so earlier. They are everywhere, and yet also nowhere to be seen. difficult to contemplate is because it’s sometimes understood But we must listen and give them appropriate weight, because to generate experiences of finitude and loss, rather than of they are there. transformation. Death has strong connections with pain and suffering, and requires negotiations and reconfigurations Yes, I think there are many types of ghosts, spirits and other- of the living following the radical changes it can leave in than-human beings among us. It’s never good to generalise. its wake. Let’s assume, for the sake of our conversation, that ghosts in Western thinking are considered not entirely dead and not The feeling of togetherness changes again and again. entirely alive – and have no real effect on the world.

Yes. We try to make sense of death. We create rituals to say Like a bacteria, or a virus. goodbye, to process our regret, to begin to let go, to keep hold of, or to remember. We find ways to store the dead within Yes. It’s funny to think of, but the question speaks volumes us and to bring them back into the present. To be dead is to of the bifurcations imposed by Western thought, in which a be placeless, without borders, without territory. We can be subject is alive, and an object is dead. Anything in-between, anywhere at once, but also nowhere. This is why, I think, we anything neither object nor subject, can be commodified, often seek to build a relationship between the living and the exploited, oppressed, or even pushed into extinction. dead through the land. Ebony G. Patterson sees land and gardens in this way; on the one hand, her practice holds the This is why it is so important for us to challenge the history of Western travel and the colonial acts, yet it also boundaries imposed on our bodies. Our humanity processes refers to land beyond sites of ownership, but as spaces that subjectification in co-dependence with the environment. At connect us. Everyone has and occupies space and everyone is the same time, we should accept that nature is alive, it exists worthy of a space. Some of her works are very rich, patterned beyond us. textiles, revealing human figures representing the depth of the aggression and violence towards marginalised and black Think, for instance, of the fact that, for humans and all bodies; capturing, mourning and glorifying the passing of other mammals, our existence relies on the simple act of their lives. Who are those who died without being named? breathing. Breathing is the act through which organisms Who witnesses the loss? And what happens when we turn continually break down boundaries between the earth and ourselves into witness of the horror? the sky and bring new substances together in order to forge their own growth and movement. To accept this openness We bury death, we need to link the dead to a specific place, to our environment is to be caught in the transformations but maybe we should listen. What I mean is that often, we of the climate – to be active participants in the continuous don’t quite know how or where to place death, we transform transformation of the Earth’s life system. that loss into wandering ghosts. It’s a little like the phantoms

98 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 99 Part 2: Death Thus, in a way, we can’t talk about living bodies without unknown, but a refined synthesis of the binary structures we speaking too about environments. We like to keep humans have inherited. and nature separate, but we cannot really tell where we begin and nature ends. Yes, another way to look at it is, for instance, to think of Olokun, a spirit, or orisha, in the Yoruba religion, who Yes, and if we talk about the environment, we are talking represents the deep waters of the ocean, the ‘lady of the deep about the meshwork of history too. As Alberta Whittle waters of the ocean’, and of Iku – a spirit who is death itself. does: I want to breathe with her, synchronising my breath Iku deserves an Itan, a mythology, to introduce him in a with her conditions of life in the ocean, in the Caribbean, for sweeter way: Obatala was responsible for creating human a moment – to become one through breathing, to invoke the beings out of Nanã’s mud (earth and water) and blowing sense of compassion, kinship, anchoring and understanding Emi, the breath of life, into these beings. And, in an assembly, that are all held within the body itself. Then while holding they also decided that this life would be cyclical so they could those sentiments, to breathe through individual and collective return to Orum, the spiritual world, after their time at Aiê memory – the traumas and remnants of colonialism, and (the physical world). But who would be responsible for this? the violence that remains. Perhaps then we can turn to the weather, or maybe even turn to the sea. All of them avoided this cycle, except Iku, death herself, who assumed responsibility for its creation. Earth, water and Turning to the sea. Could we understand death as the air are the foundation of humanity. Death can be a place, a continuation of life? For example, in the darkness of the person, a deity, a form of immanence – but dying itself is an night, clothed people are going in and out of the sea. We action. This resolution manages humanity. Making death shall enter into it too, holding the hand of Sohrab Hura. and the act of dying outcasts has obscured the idea of death We watch the waves coming towards us, and we hold our as a cycle or a part of life; instead, we can understand death breath; as the waves approaches, we move into the water. as a movement of which the corpse is just one part, like all the We are underwater. Sound stops. We re-emerge from the sea organs that are renewed and follow the flow of the body as into a new beginning. I repeat the visualisation, and this it decomposes. time imagine the many painful historical narratives a ritual like this can hold and make space for within it, within the And for that journey Iku and Caronte can go on. Caronte, prospect of becoming one with the sea. One might be reborn the boatman who crosses us to Ades, which is a road to Orum; through this kind of spiritual release. and Iku, who pays tribute to the land by returning everything she helped build. So what we are trying to arrive at is the idea that life, instead being of a fixed and stable force, is a journey. It does not end with death, but with a transition into something else. The distinction imposed between life and death is not only a misunderstanding of, and a desire to somehow master, the

100 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 101 Part 2: Death TEATIME The book is one of the many dynamics of the limitation of understanding, of binarism in the resource of assimilation and cultural construction and, in the effort to compose this thought, it reinforces the idea of ​death. In this sense, the book is the death of the relationship, it is the affirmation of unity to the detriment of a collectivity. And what we propose to do is to look directly at this corpse and understand it as part of the process, as the whole of the journey.

Time to come back. Yael Davids Six female performers sit among the audience. On cue, following the script, they move the glass sheets in the A Reading that Loves – space or sing.

a Physical Act Two performers – Y and tS – recite the script and move through spaces A and B. The piece is performed in two distinct but connected spaces. The audience sits on the floor, at times forced to shift places according to the configuration of the glass sheets The audience, a few performers, and several objects in the space. are situated in space A. Two performers walk alongside the walls. They recite The objects are: text and act in relation to the objects they are close to. • A small wooden podium (36 × 30 × 15 cm) • A wooden staircase tS stands on a small wooden podium in space B and • Four triangular sheets of glass that form a large reads passages from selected texts. She is invisible to triangle on the floor in the corner, inspired by Carl the audience. Andre’s Eighth Reversed Steel Corner (1978) • Four square sheets of glass leaning against the wall Y lies on the floor in the doorway between space A and • A wooden frame (370 × 370 cm) hanging from wooden B, slowly executing the instructions from tS, moving beams installed high up in the space from lying to standing. • Six reproductions of lithographic works by Cornelia Gurlitt (59.4 × 84.1 cm) hanging on the wall behind I want to talk about a love that moves through falling, the large suspended wooden frame. through collapsing, through despair. A love that dares to • A black-and-white reproduction of a drawing by carry. It is not a happy love, but it gives the right to fall, Cornelia Gurlitt (the Rachmonis sketch, undated) which means the right to stand differently, to elevate, to rise lying on the floor, image-side facing down gradually. • A rope hanging from a wooden beam installed under the ceiling, connecting to the first wooden beam and You are lying down. together forming a composition inspired by Piet Mondrian’s Lozenge Composition with Two Lines You feel as if you will never be able to stand again, but let’s (1931) try, please, to lie on your back. Be aware of the weight on the floor. The weight that supports you also pulls you down. The floor is marked with tape indicating the Shift this weight to the right side of your back, to the left, to choreography. the head, to the neck, to the pelvis, to the knees, to the ankles,

A Reading that Loves – 104 Yael Davids 105 a Physical Act to the toes. Avoid muscle use. Imagine the bones. Imagine elevate the body to a standing position. a wind blowing through them. What do you hear? Is it pleasant? Can you hear the wind blowing through your ribs? You are standing but you are not still. We will search An accordion. Your ribs opening and collapsing. Keep on. for a balance, we will not expand our territory any more than necessary. Now pull the breath down. Feel the wind in your sacrum. Remember that there are eight holes in the sacrum, curved One of the performers sings the vowel i for a while. She in the bone, almost symmetrically, four on each side. A flute. sits among the audience. Play it through the lower part of your backbone, lift your coccyx from the floor, then push it down. Keep on. Now Y walks alongside the walls to the far wall of space A, push this wind through your vertebral column, let it pass picks up and holds a white A1 sheet of thick paper in through the sternum. This might make a strident sound. front of her face and body. You see, this bone, the sternum, protects your heart. You are unwilling to allow much friction there, you stiffen and the tS, entering the space, holds a text on an A4 paper in bone fossilizes. You could not allow one more panic cutting front of her face. through these brittle bones. The moment they break, you are done. Some days you let the wind blow through every The faces of Y and tS are concealed by the paper sheets. part of you, a cyclone reaching your heart. The sound is They recite and read part of the text as a dialogue. overwhelming. Different tonalities explode inside you, none of which will pass into harmony. White sheets. A hollow bright hall – the lines that mark the corners slowly dissolve. Your curly hair. The dark mark You are neglected. devours any understanding.

You know they didn’t like your words, your sounds, the The singing of the vowel a stops. smell of your emotions. A vanishing point. The bed a vast empty stage. You keep it all to yourself, a love that allows your pain to howl in a dark wet space. A double bed in dying is an amplifier.

Let’s try again. Manipulate your weight to the left side, You have a solo. bend both your legs to the left as well. Come to lie on your left side, slide your left hand onto the floor in the direction Dying is always a solo. of your head, then push the floor with your right hand. Both heels press into the floor. Push the floor with both I can only see your cranium appearing from the giant white hands, lift the buttocks from the floor and then slowly wave. It reminds me of Godard’s Breathless, that scene

A Reading that Loves – 106 Yael Davids 107 a Physical Act where they make love under the linen. Beneath the sheets, I am Joseph wearing a sweet belt the gentle voice of a woman. Nineteen years later they Around my gaudy skin. would find the decomposed body of Jean Seberg wrapped in a white blanket, in the back seat of her Renault. You are delighted by my sea shell’s Frightened sound. Dying is a solo. And you are a miniature. But your heart no longer No one taught you how to die. Lets the sea come in.

Y walks alongside the walls and lies behind the large tS walks to space B, stands on the small wooden suspended wooden frame. She slides along the floor on podium and reads the text. her back behind the frame. Now we try hanging. tS stands on the small wooden podium reading the poem. Y stands up and walks alongside the walls reaching to the rope. She slowly wraps the rope around her legs To the Barbarian by Else Lasker-Schüler and hangs upside down, suspended by the rope while tS reads the text hanging. I cover your face With my body and soul at night. Imagine this hanging as the opposite of standing. It does not mean falling. You have control here. You would rather I plant cedars and almond trees fall than stand. Contract your legs around the rope. Use the On the steppe of your body. inner muscles of your thighs, tighten them firmly and let your torso pull the rest of your body down. Feel how the Tirelessly I search your chest weight pushes downward to your head. Your blood vessels For Pharaoh’s golden treasures. swell. Your face gets red. Your head endures your weight. This hanging has nothing to do with flying. It’s about But your lips are heavy, endurance and consciousness. Feel how your body desires My miracles cannot redeem them. to push the head out.

Why won’t you lift your snowy skies Y reads the text while hanging. From my soul – Imagine you are this woman. Your diamond dreams Are cutting my veins. It happened on a winter’s day, on the fourteenth of

A Reading that Loves – 108 Yael Davids 109 a Physical Act December: you felt she was coming. After all these months, Six female performers carry the triangular sheets standing in long lines, for hours, cursing. The moment came of glass, positioning them in a specific composition on and an incredible power in you rang out: “I will manage! It the floor. will be OK!” Y walks alongside the walls reaching the staircase and At seven months she would arrive. There was no ambulance stands in front of the staircase. She begins to walk up close by. Your husband borrowed a car. You were lying and down the stairs, with eyes closed, while reciting on the back seat, bleeding. A mix of extreme anxiety and part of the text. happiness dazed you – in your thoughts you were alone and the red fluid beneath you turned into a thick carpet, it flew tS stands in front of Y, eyes closed during the recital. you across all borders. tS: I want to talk about your right to die, the very last right The car stopped. The window opened. Eyes studied you. that is left. We steal from you this right to die as part of You heard male voices going back and forth. You knew nature. The heart ceases to beat, the blood stops flowing, precisely what the discussion was about, but your body the breath halts, the brain fails to function, the neck ordered you to immerse and forget. You surrendered. stiffens, the mouth opens, the skin hardens, its colour turns. Feeling is a movement. Surrender is a slow motion. Feeling Lips, fingers, and nails fade to grey. Your body turns cold, is a position. Surrender is horizontal. You were the carpet. until its temperature equals that of the room. Death is many Sinking, falling, sediment-by-sediment, deeper than you smaller deaths. You sit still – a ceaseless instant that nature ever knew. Breathless. And so time passed. grants you. We robbed this moment from you. We stole your life and robbed your death. The report said the delay took around forty minutes. You were bleeding all this time. Your baby came out. Y: In movies a gunshot kills you instantly. In life it is agony. She was dead. When a bullet enters the body, ripping through tissue and breaking blood vessels, internal bleeding slowly kills you. Y climbs down from the rope, stands close to it, The report would say: fatal shooting. and keeps reading. A fire is ignited. The heat enters the respiratory system. The You had always known that you could not protect your gases dry out delicate organs, killing you softly. The report child, but at least you could give her life – this was your would say: death by asphyxiation. one absolute conviction. But now, sucked into your pain without words to pronounce this space you had entered, A building collapses, walls tumble down, windows burst. you understood that the politics of the occupation had The chest is compressed by heavy structures. As the tide entered your own body. This body had no control over the diminishes, the lungs will give up. Rib elevation becomes life it was to give. You are a woman in occupied territory. shallower, the diaphragm stops functioning. Thoracic

A Reading that Loves – 110 Yael Davids 111 a Physical Act collapse. The report would say: death by compression. That sobbed you into death, tS: Numbers, figures, gender, age, name might be mentioned. And my eyes turn no more Victims are always guilty. To the world;

Y walks alongside the walls and lies behind the large The green of leaves hurts them. suspended wooden frame. She slides along the floor on – but the Eternal lives in me – her back behind it. My love for you is the image tS stands on the small wooden podium. One can make oneself of God.

Six female performers carry and position the square I also saw angels in weeping, sheets of glass around tS in the composition. When the In the wind and in the rain. composition is complete tS reads the poem standing on the podium in the center of the leaning glass structure. They drifted……… In a heavenly air.

To My Child by Else Lasker-Schüler When the moon’s in bloom It resembles your life, my child You will always die again for me With the parting year, my child, And I cannot look When the light-spending butterfly flutters away carefree. When leaves disperse And twigs grow thin. I never foreshadowed death – spying around you, my child – With the red roses You tasted death bitterly, And I love the room’s walls Which I paint with your boyish face, Not a single withering throb Was spared you. The stars in this month That fall so many sprinkling into life So I weep sorely, forever, Drop heavy on my heart At night in my heart. Y clapping her limbs and head onto the floor while she Still the lullabies sigh out of me lies on her back.

A Reading that Loves – 112 Yael Davids 113 a Physical Act Six female performers dismantle the glass structure prints that depict the outdoors, your sitting positions create surrounding tS. clear lines in space. Your hands and legs are contorted in a bewitched dance, like a flower crushed during blooming. tS walks to space B. I can’t read whether it is dance or despair. You do not obey the rules of sitting. tS walks alongside the walls to space B. She remains in space B invisible to the audience, reading the text. In other prints by Cornelia you sit indoors. Then you become inanimate, you seem to become like the vase on Now we will practice sitting. the table, like the table that stands on the floor, like the lamp that hangs from the ceiling, like the books that lie Y stands up and sits among the audience. on the shelf, like the shelves that line the cupboard. You are this assembly. Fragmented and reshaped. You are it. tS: Feel your sitting bones. They’re the sharp ones in the It has the capacity to communicate with anything. I adore lower part of your pelvis. They are the anatomical bits that this capacity. help you to sit. Find a sitting position that is comfortable for you. Sitting is a posture in the middle of the transition Is it a call to the gods? To raise your hands and say: this is from lying to standing, from standing to lying. It is a not how we imagined it all. learned position. Different kinds of sitting express different cultures. You will adjust your sitting to the chair, to the One of the performers sings the vowel i for a while. bed, to the floor. Many objects have been designed to She sits among the audience. accommodate this position. Chairs compete with buildings, designers compete with architects. Y sits among the audience.

Civilization is a position, civilization is sitting. Think of tS returns to space A. it. School: sitting. Eating publicly: sitting. Conversing: sitting. Negotiating: sitting. Governing: sitting. Gathering: Y and tS read the text back and forth with small sitting. Signing contracts: sitting. Civilization is a position. changes. Civilization is a sitting. You turn into an infant. Small, frail, unable to stand. Two performers take the big wooden frame from its You are lying in the cellar. Like a dog, waiting. hook and place it on the floor where the audience sits. Two performers sing the vowel a. They sit among the I watched you sitting and I sensed a discomfort. It seems audience. as if you sit to become smaller, to allow more space in the picture for other imaginings. In a number of Cornelia’s Y picks up the A1 paper and displays the other side to

A Reading that Loves – 114 Yael Davids 115 a Physical Act the audience, the print of Cornelia’s work Rachmonis. There is a weeping in the world It depicts the act of asking, of beggars begging. As though the dearest God Himself were dead, And the plummeting shadow, it burdens down Y walks alongside the walls to space B and reads the Like a grave of lead. text, invisible to the audience. Two performers stand and lift the big wooden frame tS in space A executes the movements: from the floor and hang it back up on the hooks. One performer opens the entrance door. Asking is a position. The arm gently straightens in front, elbow bending, palm of the hand facing the ceiling. Please ask. Ask, ask.

The singing of the vowel a stops.

Giving is a position. The arm gently straightens in front, elbow is bending, palm of the hand is facing the floor. Please give. A Reading that Loves – a Physical Act was performed at Give, give. Neue Galerie, Kassel, as part of documenta 14 in 2017. An installation as well as a performance, the research for the Six performers move pieces of glass into the wooden work revolved around four female protagonists whose lives frame, causing the audience to move out of the way to carried a tragic notion and in whose biographies memory as make space. much as the condemnation of memory played a central role. The performance gives voice to these women. Cornelia Gurlitt’s Asking is a bending, giving is a bending. Our weight, our prints serve as a score for the bodies, scripts, and objects gravity, our ground, our faith, our care. You meet the other inhabiting the space. The words uttered are those of poetess where it’s not known what is given and what is taken. You and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler – physical enunciations are erased by this opening. Immerse, surrender, give away. that are channelled through the body. Roman empress Iuliu Aquilia Severa, whose statue stands tall and broken at tS performs a vocal breathing solo while standing the National Archeological Museum in Athens, echoes the motionless in space A. installation A Reading that Loves – a Physical Act in Athens, Then she reads the text. while the influential gatherings of Rahel Varnhagen’s salon provide a complex social fabric for the work.

A Reading that Loves – 116 Yael Davids 117 a Physical Act Part 3 Porosity If there is porosity, there is fluidity between bodies – any type of body. If we look etymologically, fluidity, flux, and I would think that everything in the world is porous, which fluid, for instance, are derived from the Latin fluere, to flow, is to say, everything has the potential to be in conversation and the Greek phluein, to flow abundantly or to overflow. with other things. But there are humans, of course, that are Everything is flowing all the time – restlessness rules – and completely repellant to each other, I am sure you know the yet our complex systems also need moments of stability; these feeling… and I guess that feeling can be a sentiment felt by few moments create the illusion of steadiness or stillness. And other forms of matter too. bringing flow and fluidity into our bodily vocabulary can be an important tool for undoing binaries. ‘Porous’ is a strong word, I would say – especially in pandemic times – and it is a reminder that nothing in the universe is Actually, our bodily processes provide amazing examples of autonomous, enclosed, or beyond relation to others. Nothing fluidity. The nervous system, for instance, is fluid by nature. is isolated or fully independent. We are in a way a meshwork, The brain and spinal cord are 96% water, yet with the co-dependent and intertwined with each other beyond human addition of just 4% salts, proteins and lipids, the two assume relationships – through history, environments, geographies, a seemingly solid state. Every cell, plant, microbe and animal struggles, and personal experience, we are constantly (re) is configured with water, and thus our whole bodies are made connecting with other agents, species, beings, non-beings and so largely of water. The body’s water, through its ceaseless input on. Do we have to make sense of who we are as human beings? and output, is in a state of constant fluidity or flux. The kidneys of an average human produce a filtrate of 150 litres Take, for instance, Jadé Fadojutimi, who stretches her every day, while absorbing 148.5 litres into the body and canvases, and through doing so provides physical spaces onto letting out 1.5 litres or more as urine. Liquidity in action. which the material of paint itself can assume a vast range of Urine is interesting for thinking about the digestive system identities, reflecting the fluidity and multiplicity of experience. too; as a by-product of our metabolism it releases nitrogen Contemplating identity as something forever in motion, from the body. It also plays an important role in the earth- Fadojutimi moves between abstraction and figuration in her system, as it is a fertilizer. Like a filter, matter becomes a attempt to recognise a sense of place in our own ways of being part of you before it is passed through you. Both ‘you’ and the in the world. Likewise, I like how David Zink Yi describes matter are transformed. our identities as being like polyrhythms – the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms that are not readily perceived Like Luo Jr-shin experimenting with the relationship as deriving from one another – to reflect on how dynamic between spirituality and the human condition, specifically and unpredictable identity can be, on how individuals in the work Like a filter, matters passed through you and are always formed of different and shifting tempos and became a part of you (2020), where he places us in a nightclub temporalities. There is something interesting about imagining toilet, a space he treats as a metaphorical facilitator for our constitution as formed by something between a fluid and material transformation – one that is actually a set. But if a rhythm. you imagine a closed circuit, his installation shifts between

118 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 119 Part 3: Porosity a toilet and a nightclub, highlighting the cyclical drinking- Jes Fan urinating behaviour of the human body. Surrogate fluid made from ingredients found in beer, coating the floor of the Water-Tea-Pee-Mold-Web space, a familiar sensation underfoot for club-goers, which transports us to a certain mood, memory, place or time. And Luo’s use of urine highlights the fluidity of a nightclub There is a meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh on drinking a toilet in terms of its ambiguity of public and private space, cup of tea. It goes like this, ‘As you’re sipping on this tea, and the exchange of substance and information, as well as think about where this cup of tea comes from. Before the its historical, dogmatic role in maintaining and reinforcing tea, there is water; before water, there is a cloud. So in binary gender norms. drinking this tea, you are actually drinking from a cloud.‘

Fluidity is corporeal: cells, urine, blood, milk, semen, sweat, I went along with the guided meditation, but couldn’t stop nervous systems, and so on. But also: gender, identity, and at just the cloud. What’s before the cloud? And what’s after forms of being. Fluidity is plurality. the tea? Before the cloud, many bodies must have entered the cup of tea that I am holding. And as the tea is entering my body, I am aware that it is also on its way to becoming sweat, saliva and urine.

During a quick Google search, I discovered that it takes twelve to fifty-two weeks for water to wind its way down to New York City from the Catskills. It also takes three weeks for sewage to be centrifuged into compost and water. I wonder who and what may have joined the course of this liquid along the way, and who and what this tea will become part of. The tea I am holding now could have once been a dog’s pee, or the snow that buried my car this past winter. The tea that I am drinking now, is on its way to becoming part of me, also, along with my excess hormones and antidepressants, on its way to exit my body into fifty-six processing drums, ready to be chlorinated and sanitized and then regurgitated back into the East River.

In tracing the lineage of this tea, I am aware of how I too, am connected to all possible vectors – entangled in an intricate and layered network of you, us, he, she, it

120 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 121 Water-Tea-Pee-Mold-Web and them. I am permeable: composed of who and what ground for new collaborations? I am unsure. But as of right I have come into contact with, touched, or consumed. now, my plan is just to stay low to the ground, low enough I am not independent, nor am I an individual – I am to see these matrices of connection. I want to trace my way capable of contaminating and becoming contaminated. from one root to another, feeling along the contours of the By contamination, I don’t just mean infectious contact, vast shape which entangles you and I – in order to make I also mean meshing, hybridization, entanglement, clear how intricately enmeshed we all are. and becoming… all foundations for creating new risks, collaborations and diversity. Afterall, multicellular life was made possible by multiple, mutual contaminations of bacteria.1

Good tea also requires contamination. The most prized tea in China, Pu’er, uses the fungi Aspergillus Niger, the common household black mold, in its production to achieve more subtle, refined black tea. Raw Pu’er is quite green, astringent, vegetal and harsh. It is the fermentation by the Aspergillus Niger that creates the rounded depth and warming sensation that is associated with Pu’er. During the fermentation process raw tea leaves are steamed and packed together, allowing the fungal spores to germinate and produce a mass of interwoven matting called mycelium. This mycelium extends itself outwards to look for water and nutrients, which it then transports back to the fruiting body so it can continue to produce biomass and grow. In the forest, mycelium collaborates with tree roots to form a mycorrhizal network, connecting individual trees together. This network of connections can chemically sense which tree in the forest is in need of nutrients and water, and transfer excess energy to help them grow.

I wish to learn from this interconnected web of water-tea- pee-mold. How can I, as part of this infectious network, become capable of reaching towards nutrients to support 1 Margulis, Lynn, and Sagan, Dorion. the fruiting body? How can I learn from water, from black What is life? Berkeley, CA, University mold, from tea, to generate productive contamination as a of California Press, 2000.

122 Jes Fan 123 Water-Tea-Pee-Mold-Web Usually nightclub toilets are not the best place to be. However, Newton, the song was reinterpreted as an emblem of the civil it is of course hard for us to socialise today with other rights movement in mid-20th century USA by gospel greats humans. Are you surprised by the pandemic? such as Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin. Woven into national consciousness, the song is still performed today in No. I am not surprised with an illness of this magnitude, moments of public ceremony and collective mourning in the after looking at the way we have been living. We killed all US and across the world. Though more widely associated the gods, we are killing nature, we are killing ourselves. It with African American emancipation than with slavery, seems to me we are now at war with the invisible. The war is Muyanga’s reinterpretation of Amazing Grace connects with bacteria, viruses, digestions and respirations. We have the origins of the song to its murkier history, and indeed to changed the scale and the weight of our own bodies. While Liverpool’s – John Newton lived in the city and sailed on it is so hard to be isolated (ironically, to try to be a self- slave ships from Liverpool’s port. While we were preparing it, contained form of being), perhaps we are learning a I would get goosebumps. It was hard to let it go as it addresses new bodily sensibility – we have gained all the weight from the incredible power of people being together and singing the gluttony of consumption and now we cannot move together, live as a form of protest. It looks critically at the any longer. song that became an iconic protest anthem because of its roots in the slave trade, so we must have the uncomfortable Or perhaps the weight has always been there, but we conversation trying not to fall into the trap of binaries. And have been acting as though there will be no consequences. it addresses the body as archive by the movement of the song Globalisation is being challenged by weight and scale! through body to body and the cacophony we all inhabit.

Yes. And besides the weight, the virus has also removed our sense of smell (not only as a symptom, but also because we are constantly on the screen – all the senses through which we would experience or encounter each other are lost, we can no longer smell the others we interact with either) and the potential to bring people together in a room. Even when we talk, we cannot do this together. We hear, we wait for answers, we silence ourselves – we cannot sing. Our frequencies, voices, waves cannot dance nor meet in the same time-space.

I have to admit, I am very sad about not being able to activate the performance by Neo Muyanga. Imagine the power: a one hundred-person procession in Liverpool, singing a new composition of A Maze in Grace by Muyanga. Composed by English slaver-turned-abolitionist John

124 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 125 Part 3: Porosity 126 127 128 129 130 131 TEATIME introduce an Afro-centered term to replace Let’s introduce the port, and I want to the term ‘African holocaust’. A fight to introduce Exu. This orisha, or deity, takes use your own terms for your own cultural care of transportation, communication, experiences is an anti-kidnapping exercise. luck and some other things that are neither Seeking sources in non-hegemonic culture said nor written. One Itan, or mythology, is an exercise in defining and pointing out says that Exu came on the ships, together historical erasures that fall back to normal with the enslaved ones, to witness and to and build truths. The USA’s exorcise of pan- understand what was happening and Africanists consists of bridging the culture to never let the memory be completely of African countries into the Eurocentered erased. With him came rhythm, life, and cultural context of consumption. The the possibility of thinking about living attempt to integrate vocabularies, as well and abundance in the context of slavery. as behaviours, highlights the abhorrent The victories of the abducted and enslaved kidnapping of Afro-centric cultures and bodies cannot be white or Euro-centered. the extermination of native indigenous She, the victory, comes with the memory of cultures. But Maafa does not allow us ‘taking milk from stone’, forging the sea in to forget that the dynamics of violence a tear and finding potency in every detail have led us to where we are now. We that only the population and the native and have to assume that this is a possibility. Afro-centered culture can find. Exu helped Using Maafa and doing these counter- bring, in Maafa, the possible life in bodies hegemonic exercises is a way of revealing that Euro-centrality tried to erase. the built structure in which we are held: mounted on death, kidnapping, suffocation, Maafa, the great disaster in Swahili, violence, and attempted destruction and was introduced into US vocabulary by extermination. ‘Maafa’, the word itself, can the thinker Marimba Ani. She wanted to be seen as something linked to an accident when translated literally, however, in this and brings the accent into translation. context I introduce only two points for us Accent does not lessen the language, it is the to consider: the first is the belief in direct possibility of understanding that an accent translation as the truth of crossing from is a constituent of language. The ‘pure’ or one language to another as something that the ‘right’ language has more limitations, can be done in a transparent way; and the less flexibility, less muscle. Beauty is never second is the term ‘accident’ implicit in the clear, it is mixed. Accents are a dance that translation, which could be understood as language can provide for our culture. something directly without intention, when Dance as a rhythmic exchange of bodies of course this is not the case. which needs time, dedication and rehearsal in order to communicate. It’s polyrhythmic, Firstly, translation is a passage, a journey, a dynamic idea of how language or identity a drag from one language to another. It could be. cannot be undertaken as though there is no transformation inherent in the process. Secondly, the meaning brings with it Translating Maafa violates an entire disaster, as any meaning imposed would culture by reducing the use of the word be an accident. Therefore, the complexity to only the surgical, ethic and aesthetic of a disaster is rooted in the fact that it context. As though the word, any word, does is constituted of a chain of actions, from not bring with it an entire universe. Each multiple sources, that come to take on word arrived here in an exercise, as a focus a planetary proportion. Humankind’s of sound and understanding into a surface occupation of Earth can be seen as a that expires as it is used. Additionally, disaster within various contexts. It is writing it like this does not invoke speech, important to listen, read and realise that but rather kills it. And so, it brings death we are promoting disasters daily in the as part of the life process; it invokes dance name of other things or struggles. The process of building also implies destruction, that things are not only made of bricks, stones and realising this frames the innocence and wood but also of currents, winds, pain of chance as something to be recovered. and despair, as a consequence of the forced Our eyes only find what they are looking oceanic movement of people. Lamin Fofana for, nothing can be seen as extraordinary retells this story through a multi-sensory without first being perceived. A simple step sound installation, taking inspiration forward can destroy an entire community from W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices of ants, which attacks this foot, which in from Within the Veil (1920) and M. turn kills the ants who defended themselves NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008). Du Bois’s – and those who survived regroup to form a Darkwater… presents an alternate mapping new living space. Why does this person walk of the interconnected global system of racial as if the whole soil is ready to receive his step capitalism, while Philip’s staggering book- indiscriminately? length poem recounts the legal proceedings which took place after the Zong massacre in Bringing Maafa into the Euro-centric 1781 – when the captain of the eponymous context only contributes to the possibility slave ship ordered 150 enslaved Africans to of contextualising the multi-intellectuality be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s living together. owners could collect insurance money. The ship was owned by Liverpudlian merchants, Talking about the port, we should recall whose crew acted to protect their own Liverpool’s maritime history. In the second interests. Through an immersive installation, half of the 18th century, Liverpool was an Fofana uncovers this overlooked history, important site for ships and merchants, the horrors of the middle passage, and the dominating the transatlantic slave trade. realities of racial capitalism. As we walk through the city of Liverpool, although this history is long-past, we notice End of tea If we are saying that everything is in flux, we know distribution and trade. The relationships she unfolds between everything is porous too. Challenging ideas of exteriority the organic and the mechanic act as reminders of how and interiority, our skin, for instance, constitutes a person’s extraction operates. exteriority, through which and on which social meaning is negotiated and constructed. It is a porous, relational, Ports have also been active agents in the process of breathable organ. Porosity, like fluidity, offers embodied and modernisation and change. They have played a key role relational politics. in the foundation of colonialism, the rise of the modern world, the dominance of the West as a universal standard, Yes. And interestingly, looking at the etymology of ‘porous’: and the primary conception of humans as white and male. it comes from the Latin porus, a pore , from Greek poros, Ports are great points of entry for beginning to challenge the a pore, and it means literally passage, way, a journey. Isn’t establishment of modernity and understand it not only as a that inspiring? Porosity blurs dichotomies such as inside and Western creation, but as something that relied on interaction outside, individual and collective, foreign and local. If we with, and subordination of, the non-West. On the one hand, have been talking about fluidity, the body and Maafa, then the West had to establish efficient organisational methods of we should also talk about ports. exploitation and extraction. Take for instance the conceptual distance between empires and their colonies, developed Ports are porous entities. Could we think of them as stomachs through bureaucratic supervision of labour techniques, in some sense too, stomachs on a global scale? For instance, of people, ships and port cities – all of which enabled we could read their activity as digestive systems: ports are finance capital to extract value. It is vital we remember the the point of contact between inside and outside, they are constitutive role of slavery in the production of modernity in-between spaces, processors and key assets on the cultural, and wealth. In short, Europe was constructed through political, economic, technological and social scales. They the business of colonising and getting rich overseas, and are, importantly, a nature-culture melting pot. Ports are modernity was constructed through actions in an imaginary never unilateral – they exist because they are inherently outside of modernity itself. relational – they are holders of international traffic and communication, spaces for trade and exchange, and hosts Liverpool, specifically, played an important part in the to foreigners, aliens, and strangers establishing relationships establishment of modernity and of a Euro-centric world of dependency and power. They are receivers of different order. Liverpool started as a small fishing town in medieval goods and raw materials, producing different outputs for times, and by the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century distribution and instituting global markets. Circulation had become an important trading port. Liverpool was and distribution. Kathleen Ryan manifests the complex late to enter the slave trade, but quickly surpassed London circulation of objects, not only their livelihood, but their and Bristol to become Europe’s number one slave port by long-term presence and material endurance too. Though her the 1740s. Liverpool’s prosperity was also bound up in the work is informed by closely observing nature, her practice triangular trade between Africa, England and America, amplifies the seductiveness of the objects we circulate through where ships loaded cottons and woolens, guns, iron, alcohol

138 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 139 Part 3: Porosity and tobacco. Cotton and tobacco, as we know, were grown history and knowledges are distributed through human and harvested by enslaved Africans. So when we walk bodies and waves of sound. through Liverpool (by the way, the wealth has long gone) remnants of those days are still present and still standing. So, yes, ports are a complex system resulting from historical, Names of people enriched through human trade have economic, political, social, bodily and cultural forces. And a provided names for the streets. We must also remember, port is also where biopolitics collides with geopolitics. however, that embedded in those streets is the despair, blood, sweat and pain as consequences of the trade. Remember when Larry Achiampong said ‘everything is music’ in our conversation? That was a very nice moment, I Zineb Sedira, specifically in her photographic work Sugar thought. While I was listening, I wrote in my notes: ‘talking Routes (2013), captures the continuous history of sugar. is an instrument and form of sound-making, and the sounds She recounts the history of transoceanic human migration, we produce are just representations of what already exists.’ So the triangular trade routes of the 18th and 19th centuries, in a way, to me, Achiampong is implying music is something and the continued trade of sugar across the Atlantic for that is already there. How we receive it has everything to mass consumption. However, she places the problem in a do with who we are, with our past, future and present. It is contemporary context, depicting the sugar extracted from about working with what we have, what it has been carried different parts of the world housed together in a modern on and within our bodies, in our environments and in our warehouse in the French port city of Marseille. In relation systems of relations of the praxis of life. to cotton, today about 60% of the world’s cotton is still traded under the Liverpool Rules. Xaviera Simmons It made me think of Michelangelo, and how sculpting is an takes seriously the relationships between material, labour act of removal, so that what was already there can emerge… and histories. Her ongoing portraits series Sundown (2018- And of course I get angry with myself for bringing Europe ) recalls the consequences of enslavement coupled with an into our conversation. However, Fofana, for instance, ongoing civil rights movement fight, and how the USA as describes producing music with what is already there. a nation continues to operate under a white supremacist For Michelangelo, God made man and being an artist is enclave. In a different way,Rashid Johnson works becoming God, a male white God of course. For Achiampong, with this history, problematic legacy and present-day as for many racialised artists, the dynamics are different. racial discrimination and violence as an outcome of the transatlantic slave trade. Johnson’s ongoing work Anxious Men (2015-) talks about the collective anxiety of racialized bodies and the powerful resilience needed to overcome such anxiety and to keep fighting for social justice. It’s completely different to howInvernomuto and Jim C. Nedd tell the story of the trade and resilience through their deep interest in sound cultures of the Atlantic coast of Colombia, in which

140 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 141 Part 3: Porosity Ane Graff surrounding terrain offers up a grotto – seemingly slow to manifest, but not a mirage. The rotunda gets ready for its The Bodily Life close up, gets ready to bare, a numbered round. Throughout its center and what we presume are walls, stones open their cores, they creak and split, their movements as discernable The bodily life is a war; is at war; it is an enemy that fires as small animals’, their material processes out loud. shots in the dark; a sniper in the grass on a perpetual hunt. The cold, silky grass on the ground tickles its face, tickles So loud, the cacophony of others. Material entities caught its fingers, which shake. What is at stake: both hunted and in the act of touching, integrating, and spilling, slipping. hunter, whose hands, interlaced, quiver with anticipation Selves leaking into, onto others: the sheer mess of it. Matter and fear. Whose voices are simultaneous and at the ready. is perspiring, oozing, even dripping, from processes of expansion and fusion: again, the mess of it. Gushing on Ready. And the dark is new, it is, it is the forged material the floor, no shame: the mess of it. And the mess of it lives, black of carbon nanotubes, its densely packed laboratorial breathes, pours into the ground, into the air: where bacteria growths swallowing photons, letting them sink in good. It attract all things moist to form one cloud after the other of is also the old black of charcoal as it bursts into glowing, softly shaped material gushings. It is all around, in surround the moment of strike, of heat and fever and time. The (non-) sound: the mess of it. colour of the universe with its blackened spaceships: black as in waiting, as in compressing, as in supergravity and Deep in this entangled matter-mess, again: the hunted body. black holes and being held so tight it most assuredly Who knew. The body stops at the gas station, picks up a must hurt. plastic wrapped donut, unwraps it under the flickering ceiling lights, lets its teeth sink in to what feels moist and This grip. What can it be, such a tight grip? It is the body’s soft. Its tissue slowly integrating the other, the body leans contradictory pull of coming and going, charging and -not, towards the wall, feels the rough stumble of stone against simultaneously at the ready and at the defense: an all- its back, and with it, the comforting thought of contour. around dance of confusion and ridiculousness. This dance. This coupled rumble is an altogether state of high bodily A feeling of safety pending on the impossibility of alert, of muscles tensing, and ears so urgently awaiting penetration. A feeling of safety pending on being information they start syncing, slowing down, slow. Their impenetrable. introspection is minded for the creaking of drums, the rap of bone and miniscule cellular adjustments. Hands covering But the mouth was just caught red handed. Its saliva red ears create sounds like the rustling of silk intensifying (still handed, and full of traces. Without the illusion/delusion this dance), and then the deeper, throatier sounds appear. of clean hands, just the body’s hands, there’s this: there are the tactile sensations of touch, and then there’s more. As Hedging its bet, or just coughing up something, the in overgrown, monstrous tales of more. Touching material

142 Ane Graff 143 The Bodily Life bodies, again and again, they enter the body’s surface layer, The forces fighting each other oscillate within and through its skin, its blood vessels, churns around and around in a each other, they resonate deeper and darker than sound, merry-go-round of systemic processes that constitute (the sticking to each other as if in a weave of no-choice, self) as more, so much more. of never having chosen for themselves, or actually exactly the opposite: having chosen and the choice weaving a And the hope of being separate, of being solid and tapestry of consequence and alienation. Choosing every impenetrable, faints and flickers, and it’son . day and ending up with the same tapestry of consequence and alienation.

It is Echo, it is Narcissus, it is Janus, all of them, so many more. A mashup of voices, high and low. It is all of the ---Hush! Ears to the ground reveal the hunter, in a fumbled body’s faces in the mirror, in the photos, multiplying, trot. And the fear and loathing ricochets throughout the everywhere, identity hobbling along. It is arms and legs rotunda, the grass is slippery, the landscape a system so folded into a hobble: hobbling along. It is the body as overwrought it flips out and turns into something slimy. determinism, as other, as interlaced protein powder and vitamin K into a healthy meal. The body as an earth And the consequence in the moment the bullet ascends, machine running on this. the slowly fading rings of a stone thrown into water, of narratives growing, floating on the liquid surface, It is walking around like a war, as a mass of war, as acute intersecting and mingling, multiplying, stretching out action and reaction, as warped causality, as a living, into new growths and new patterns: the result of it we breathing slow rejection process of oneself. As if there were cannot foresee. hatred already from the start, as if the division of mind and body, nature and culture, material and immaterial, existed And the breached body pumps gas at the gas station: always, as if Descartes suffered such a body, this leaky the shiny sludge blackness of compressed water plants, materiality, as if Newton knew. The deep wish to leave it of hovering beetles with veined wings, of crisscrossing behind, to put it in a plastic bag and drop it behind the gas branches perched in midair, of shifting periods defined by station. Walk away. sudden dampness or cold, of synergies of soil and rocks and languid movements. It pools on the floor in shiny, sticky rainbow ringlets of light: the light of circular, compressed time and interlaced narratives. It smells: the pungent, metallic smell of petroleum and others.

And the ear drums ringing ringing like tower church bells. What is it all for?

144 Ane Graff 145 The Bodily Life Do you know that the emergence of the terms ‘slave’ and put away from the world. The relevance can be understood ‘artist’ have a difference of only 30 years? We cannot completely differently when we consider the story is located in disentangle, we must pay attention to the tensions that exist. the jungle. That secluded jungle is part of Maafa.

Maafa has chaos as a constituent element, but a chaos that Thanks to the fundamental principle of abundance, a secret has been actively constructed. We are living in a pandemic, not revealed to all people, we continue to act and react. From a disease that took place in the world demanding we change the anger that was imposed upon us, reaction and anger our habits at an incredible speed. It is tragicomedy that become a source of life and budding. the first movements of blame for the disease were towards an animal. It was neither China nor the bat that caused Opacity. Being foggy, cloudy, difficult to see. Beyond the pandemic! We cannot be that blinkered. It is more than transparency. Transparency can be violent, because it is being obvious that the annihilation of listening and of respect for utilised by structures that understand and reinforce spaces the timing of things in the current dynamics brought about of superiority. Opacity brings with it a lot of material – a this and many other diseases. What is a disaster? wealth of possibilities and necessary encounters, and therefore requires an effort to execute. Through opacity we can go on Maafa that crosses Iemanjá, the goddess of the sea in the without saying everything, or rather we can go on without Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion ... The salt water orixá the exhaustion of endless articulation in attempts to make or deity is not just an entity, it is the sea itself. Only in this ourselves clear to those who do not wish to understand. Purity simple sentence I bring the possibility of several memories, and transparency are violent, careless, entitled, imposing. truths and universes that the construction of one truth does not support. Maafa comes from an American thought, from Media, Gifs, Vines and memes. They contrast with ideas of a culture of erasing Afro-centered religiosity, from a different opacity. The circulation and movement of these types of images behaviour in relation to the thought brought by Iemanjá, is to capture and remember, to repeat and appropriate. We all also from Afro-centered thought, but planted in Brazilian use and love them, yet they are vehicles to consumption. Martine territory. Shared truths in a European language. Syms is very aware of that; She is particularly interested in how Black gestures are disseminated through social media. Her We are here talking about the plural. This does not take more work Borrowed Lady mounts a counter-resistance by giving work, but it requires the use of other muscles in order for it time and space to these gestures – present in time, as one has to to develop. Tinkering with muscles we didn’t know exist can experience them live. Cut from their circulations, the movements sometimes be painful. are performed by her friend and collaborator, artist Diamond Stingily within a purple environment, a colour that has historical It is important now to articulate the details of this chaos in connections with Black culture, specifically in Alice Walker’s novel the Apollonian context. The warlord who is calmly designing The Color Purple (1982) and Prince’s pop hit Purple Rain (1984). and overseeing all the bloodshed, different from the Hydra, or Medusa, both of whom respond to the violence of being Not only black but also purple.

146 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 147 Part 3: Porosity Ayesha Hameed Black Atlantis

Storm

In 1840 J. M. W. Turner painted Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on. The sky is red and purple and gold and blue which shifts to frothy white. In the white a ship’s masts faintly recede. The water is brown. In the right hand corner is a leg with a manacle round the ankle. There is perhaps a shadow of an arm, but it is hard to tell as in the water around it are the ghostly maws of fish with puckered mouths and dark eyes, and seagulls diving into the water.

In 1781 the crew of the English slave ship Zong threw their slaves overboard in a calculus that determined that the insurance money for their death was worth more than the profit gained from selling their lives. As ships crossed the Atlantic it was a common practice for the captain and crew to jettison cargo in storms, but in a few instances such as on the Zong, it was slaves who were thrown overboard – an action that raised the issue of whether slaves were legally defined as people or property, and what constituted an unforeseeable event: what in insurance terms would be defined as an ‘act of God’. This was an ambivalence that played out in insurance claims in court, in art and literature, in the fuelling of the abolitionist movement, through a cast of characters that included the weather, slaves on boats, and the boats themselves.

J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying, In any account of the slave ship Zong, Turner’s Slavers is Typhoon coming on), 1840 (detail). Oil on canvas. 90.8 × 122.6 cm. the image that accompanies it. But as the Atlantic historian © 2014, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 99.22.

148 Ayesha Hameed 149 Black Atlantis James Walvin points out, in fact this is not the Zong.1 There on the surface of the water, at the moment when slaves are is no image of the Zong, nor was there a storm at sea that thrown overboard, swirl into the rain overhead and the wind. precipitated the massacre. A Shipwreck then measures the depth of the ocean, through the figure of the pearl diver who follows the detritus of a ship Be that as it may, this painting is the stand-in for the Zong to the bottom of the sea and, by discovering it, transforms massacre which has no image and happened on still waters. it into something magical. And a Tsunami focuses on the In this storm the water, the limbs of slaves, the mouths of ocean floor in its contiguity with the Atlantic mountains that hungry fish, and the gawping birds become the ecology of flank it, raising the question: how does the land under the sea the brown water of the sea. I keep returning to the fact that operate as an extension and laboratory of the land around there was no typhoon, that the storm is an imagined one it? Which strangely enough leads us to an electronic band that has become appended to the lore of the slave ship Zong. from Detroit called Drexciya whose mythos, built through How was it possible to append a storm to the massacre liner notes, describe a story where the children born of aboard the Zong? Or in other words, what is it about storms pregnant slaves thrown overboard were able to adapt to living and what does it mean to imagine one onto history? Storms underwater as they went straight from living in amniotic fluid become a point of entry to think about how nature in flux is to ocean water, and so built a Black Atlantis called Drexciya. invoked in a sociohistorical inquiry. During the greatest Holocaust the world has ever known, Stillness: In his account of the Mediterranean, Fernand pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown Braudel describes the variegated landscape of the sea as overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and comprising three temporalities.2 The first, and the slowest disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given register of time, is environmental and geographical time birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans that moves cyclically and imperceptibly. The second register water-breathing aquatically mutated descendants of those measures long-term social and economic changes that take unfortunate victims of human greed? Recent experiments place over centuries; while the third is the shortest measure have shown a premature human infant saved from certain of time – that of events and people – the time of surfaces. death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs.3 The storm is a concatenation of rain water, blustery wind and crashing waves – a catalyst that puts into motion a A key aspect of the Drexciya myth is its temporal chain of events on board a slave ship that refracts the proposition: to see time and history as equally in flux as the zeitgeist of chattel slavery and maritime insurance. This lapping ocean, to see the afterlife of the middle passage in is all at the surface of the ocean. When slaves are thrown a futuristic scenario. Its soundtrack is the sound of sonars, overboard then the depth of the ocean comes into focus. of static, of distance. In the Bubble Metropolis (1993) The Drexciyan Cruise Control Bubble 1 calls to a passing ship to Flux: consider plotting the ocean vertically to its depths slow down, to proceed with caution on the ‘aquabahn’ at the and through disruptions instead. A Storm then operates bottom of the sea.

150 Ayesha Hameed 151 Black Atlantis Shipwreck

Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. – The Tempest, 1.2.4

Or so sang Ariel in that storm of storms, The Tempest, to lure Ferdinand away from the shipwreck and shore, further into Prospero’s magical island and to Miranda. Hannah Arendt likens Walter Benjamin’s historical method to that of a pearl diver who finds Ferdinand’s father at the bottom of the sea, transmuted into bones of coral and the eyes of pearl. But rather than bringing his body to the surface, the pearl diver leaves the remnants there.

Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,”...5 Henrietta Marie seed beads. Photo: Dylan Kibler/Mel Fisher Maritime Museum.

152 Ayesha Hameed 153 Black Atlantis Let me unpack this a bit. The power and authority of history broken down and wrested out of the wreckage, and tradition has been destroyed in the present – through the Benjamin is the pearl diver who plucks the treasure. The ravages of the great wars and shell shock, through the rise pearl diver is a metaphor here for collecting quotations, but of the right in the 1930s. Benjamin, as with everything, is what if The Tempest was a play about a storm and a slave ambivalent as to whether this is a good thing or not, but no ship, and what if after the storm the pearl divers plunged matter what, history cannot be recounted in monumental from the now still surface of the water to the ocean floor? terms. The transmissibility of history is not possible; rather, it has been replaced by its citability, wrested From this, the task of the pearl diver contains two from its context, broken up, and broken down. What is temporalities.8 By dint of discovering the body underwater, cited are fragments of objects that come from a despair eyes turn into pearls and bones into coral. This is the born of the present moment and the desire to destroy it. process of crystallization that makes the monad come into This destructive impulse stems from the hope that such being. Such monads, once excavated, form a constellation fragments will preserve the past by citing it and making that together conjure an historical event into the present. clear that there is no continuity of tradition that links The decay of the living, historical object is simultaneously that object to the present. As Arendt says, ‘the past spoke its crystallization into a monad. directly only through things that had not been handed down, whose seeming closeness to the present was thus The sinking of the slave ship makes literal these two due precisely to their exotic character.’ 6 moments where Arendt’s figure of the pearl diver’s discovery at the bottom of the sea crystallizes historical The method of excavating these objects is by incanting fragments into monads. spirits from the past. The release of the past into the present is through the release effected by drilling into One moment follows the diver as he plunges to the ocean such objects, monads, who in their fragmentary nature floor and crystallizes fragments of what he finds into a encapsulate and evoke the richness and totality of the constellation of monads. Here the pearl diver finds a slave historical moment. These past objects seance-d into the ship, the Henrietta Marie, on the ocean floor. The ship is present have undergone a ‘sea change’. Ariel’s song reflects a monad and within the ship is a constellation of other this. Eyes have turned into pearls. Bones have turned into charged objects: slave shackles and objects of barter for coral. Your father’s body will not be brought to the surface slaves in Nigeria, trinkets, crockery, weapons. The slaves whole, his body is not his body any more anyways. It has on board the ship were sold before it sank so the only turned into something strange and magical. material witnesses of their recent presence on board are their shackles and the medley of objects that were used ‘After the storm the theorist as storyteller is like the pearl to buy them. Treasure into shackles and the pressure of diver who converts the memory of the dead into something the ocean on the sea floor that simultaneously preserves, “rich and strange”’, says Seyla Benhabib.7 The father’s bones transforms, and destroys these objects. But these objects are form the corpse of historical tradition, pearls are objects of not connected metaphorically in this constellation – they

154 Ayesha Hameed 155 Black Atlantis are connected by the system of equivalence that pulls them For pearl diving, as Benjamin would say, is not ‘an unveiling into contact through its absent protagonist, its common which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does denominator: the price of a slave at the time. it justice’.11

The second moment lies in the turning of eyes into pearls and bones into coral. Or, in other words, the moment the Tsunami body ceases to be a body and turns into a thing. But not just a thing, a valuable thing, a treasure. The body is of the slave, On 1 November 1967 Maltese Ambassador Arvid Pardo interpellated into the law. Bones into coral and coral back to delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. bones – there was a basic instability within English law in He had the sea on his mind, more specifically the bottom of which the Black African alternated between being defined the sea and its riches – nodules of manganese and copper as person or property.9 This is a battle between land and sea that were in short supply on shore. There was at that time – or more precisely between the laws that regulated the land a huge interest in the exploration of the surface of the and the laws of the seas. The legal precedent established at sea floor and the commercial extraction of these nodules. sea by the Navigation Acts inevitably saw Black Africans as Although he advocated for an equitable distribution of property; while on land the writ of the habeas corpus made the wealth of the sea floor between rich and poor nations, illegal the restraint on movement of anyone on English the language he used was an almost mystical blending of soil and gave everyone the right to not be deported from commerce, the law, and the romance of the sea. England.10 The sea, the home of the Navigation Acts, turns the Black African into property, a thing: it turns eyes into The dark oceans were the womb of life: from the protecting pearls and pearls into even more treasure. While on land, oceans life emerged. We still bear in our bodies – in our the habeas corpus redefines the Black African as a person: blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears – the marks of it turns pearls back into bones. this remote past. Retracing the past, man, the present denominator of the emerged earth, is now returning to The process of transmutation is what I am most interested the ocean depths. His penetration of the deep could mark in – from living entity to an object rich and strange whose the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we natural home is the sea bed, and which can withstand the know it on this earth: it could also be a unique opportunity elements underwater. This transition from living entity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly to corpse to the riches of the sea – pearls and coral – is an prosperous future for all peoples.12 anthropocenic moment dissolving the human into nature, the living into something fossilized, but as an uneasy and At the heart of Pardo’s mission are two ships: the Santa radioactive fossilization. Catarina and the HMS Challenger. The Santa Catarina was a Portuguese ship that was seized by the Dutch East India But rather than bringing it to the surface why not just dive Company in 1604 near the Malacca Straits. To allay the right down to the bottom? misgivings of stakeholders in the company, a young Hugo

156 Ayesha Hameed 157 Black Atlantis Grotius was retained to provide a rationale for the seizure. From this came his landmark text Mare Liberum, a chapter from a longer work on the laws of prize and booty called De Jure Pradae. Although this text was written in response to this specific case and not as a more general legal study, the scope of the argument ambitiously dismantled the medieval notion of mare clausum, or the Papal ability to place restrictions on sea trade and travel, which had a number or radical ramifications. He secularized and opened up the ocean.13

But of course, at the end of the day Grotius’s book was indeed on the right to seize goods from other ships, which highlights the main concern of sea travel: to trade afar, and to guard fisheries close to home. Grotius saw the sea as akin to air, altogether of a different material from the land. Air, like the sea, was ‘public’, common to all people and nations:

The air belongs to this class of things for two reasons. First, it is not susceptible of occupation; and second its common use is destined for all men. For the same reasons the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one... Now, the same right which applies to the sea applies also to the things which the sea has carried away from other uses and made its own, such for example as the sands of the sea, of which the portion adjoining the land is called the coast or shore. Cicero therefore argues correctly: “What is so common as the sea for those who are being tossed upon it, the shore for those who have been cast thereon.” Vergil also says that the air, the sea, and the shore are open to all men.14

Plate from William Blake, America: A Prophecy, first printed 1793. The sea is not an extension of the land’s jurisdiction from Source: Fitzwilliam Museum.

158 Ayesha Hameed 159 Black Atlantis this point of view; rather, it is made of a different, more ethery substance that resists ownership. In its state of flux turning from land to sea, the shore is also of the same material – a floating composite.

The legal demarcation of the width of the ocean was what Pardo sought to augment and amend in his advocacy of the fair distribution of resources at its bed. Pardo also calls attention to how the interest in the bottom of the sea began with the laying down of the first transatlantic cable in 1858, which provided the impetus and funding for the HMS Challenger to set out to systematically study the depths of the ocean. During its three-and-a-half- year journey across the world the ship stopped every hundred miles, taking samples of water, dredging the sea floor, measuring the temperature and depth, and collecting over its journey more than 13,000 specimens. The depth of the ocean was measured by ‘soundings’, where a weighted line was dropped to the bottom of the sea.

What churns both ships together across time – the Santa Caterina and the HMS Challenger – is what Hugo Grotius would call prize and booty, or the riches of the sea and on the sea. The churning, which is seismic, comes from when Booty Boots Back, or the resistance of a certain kind of property that has formed the core of my treatise: a form of resistance which plays out on the sea floor from the shores that Grotius likens to air and the sea.

Whose song musics this movement? Pardo speaks, the sonar bleeps, and the Challenger’s sounding takes a measure of the sea’s floor. But there is more than that – the sound of something seismic afoot, the sound of the ground shaking The Baillie Sounding Machine. Source: Sir C. Wyville Thomson, The Voyage of the CHALLENGER – The Atlantic, below the ocean’s waves. This is what William Blake is vol. 1 (1878), 61. Archival Photography by Steve Nicklas, NOS. NGS. referring to when he speaks of mountains shaking around

160 Ayesha Hameed 161 Black Atlantis the Atlantic in America: a Prophesy, his treatise on slavery References and the wars of revolution that he com- posed in 1793, the 1 Walvin, James. The Zong: A 8 de Valk, Eva. ‘The Pearl Divers: same year that the British attempted to quell Toussaint Massacre, the Law and the End Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin of Slavery. New Haven, CT, Yale and the Demands of History’, in L’Ouverture and the revolution in Saint-Domingue (now University Press, 2011, pp. 1–11. Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Haiti). Peter Linebaugh evokes Blake to speak of changes: Philosophy, issue 1, 2010, pp. 36–48, 2 Braudel, Fernand. The at pp. 41–42. revolution as an earthquake and tsunami, ‘profound and Mediterranean and the hemispheric events that originate beneath the surface of Mediterranean World in the Age of 9 Mtubani, V. C. D. ‘African Slaves and Philip II, 2nd edn, 2 vols. Translated English Law’, in Pula: Botswana things and which are not confined to any particular nation Reynolds, Sian. New York, Harper Journal of African Studies, vol. 3, no. but arise from all four corners of the Atlantic – North and and Row, 1976. 2, 1981, p.72. South America, Europe, and Africa.’15 3 This is from the liner notes of 10 Ibid. Drexciya’s first LP, The Quest CD. Detroit, MI, Submerge Records, 1997. 11 Benjamin, quoted in Arendt, The reverberations of these revolutions on all sides of the ‘Introduction’, p. 41. 4 Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Atlantic form the tsunami to which Blake gives a poignant Mason Vaughan, Virginia, and 12 UN General Assembly, 22nd Session. name. This is at the heart of the plunder and booty whose Vaughan, Alden T. (eds). London, First Committee. Verbatim Record Arden Shakespeare, 2011, 1, 2, p. of the 1515th Meeting. 1 Nov. 1967 dominion Grotius is laying the ground for, that shake up 397–402. (A/C.1/PV.1515). Official Record. 1 and scatter the magical fragments on the ocean floor. Nov. 1967, p .2, para. 7. 5 Arendt, Hannah. ‘Introduction’, in Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: 13 Muldoon, James. ‘Who Owns This is a soundtrack of flux – the dissolution of boundaries Essays and Reflections. Translated the Sea?’, in Klein, Bernhard Zohn, Harry, Arendt, Hanna (ed.). (ed.). Fictions of the Sea: Critical between air, sea, and human; between past and present; New York, Schocken Books, 1969, Perspectives on the Ocean in English between social and natural forces; between earthquakes and pp.1–58, at pp. 50–51. Literature and Culture. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2002, pp. 13–27. revolution – where Pardo’s balance of a future both dystopic 6 Arendt, Hanna. Ibid. p. 40. 14 Grotius, Hugo. The Freedom of the and full of possibility is the spatio-temporal gambit of 7 Benhabib, Seyla. The Reluctant Seas. New York, Oxford University Drexciya, and its afterlife is our present moment. Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Press, 1916, p. 28. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 1996, p. 93. 15 Linebaugh, Peter. ‘All The Atlantic Mountains Shook’, in Labour/Le Travailleur, 10, Autumn 1982, pp. 87–121, at p. 87.

Originally published in FORENSIS: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.

Many ideas for this project came out of great conversations with Mick Taussig and a particularly excellent exchange with Corey Malcom.

162 Ayesha Hameed 163 Black Atlantis Part 4 Kinship experience. Ginga is not exclusively dance, nor exclusively fighting – it all depends on shifts in behaviour. Ginga is not Pockets of affection. The minimum luggage, holding what we a response to violence. Ginga is a construction of thought need in order to be safe, finds its form in a bundle so tight that that only those who work on specific muscles can have. It is a nothing can escape. Sonia Gomes builds her structures using connection that the limit of Euro-centrality can try to repeat, only materials that have been handed to her by other people but cannot assimilate. It is necessary to unlearn the cleaving – taking errant leftovers and combining them to create places apart of body and soul, individual and collective, in order to of intense encounter and entanglement. Consisting mainly sing that word. of used clothes and threads, Gomes transforms these rejected and unwanted materials and gives them a new meaning and life. The sculptures metaphorically carry the memories of the original owners of the materials to create a knotty and guttural shape. She believes that all material is imbued with the latency of life, imagining her sculptures as bodies that absorb and retell the multiple memories of the ‘other’.

When we search for notions of what a body and, by extension, of what human standards, came to be, we must proceed again and again with questions such as: how was this conception fabricated? By whom? In whose interest? At what time? etc… This questioning encourages unlearning and relearning our very way of being in the world.

Artists and thinkers included in this Biennial edition are questioning the definitions and forms of classification handed to us by those who control knowledge – and, therefore, the subjectivities – on which the West operates.

This search can be understood as a kind of intellectual dance, one that can only be collective.

And now I use the book as a vessel to dock in Brazil so that I can introduce the ‘ginga’. In Brazil ‘Ginga, a word of Portuguese origin, is swing, movement. It is a movement that only a body which dances and fights can understand and

164 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 165 Part 4: Kinship 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 Now we move our understanding and interest in the body them from human constitution. The exercise of making from what it is, to questions of what the body does, what it things subjects, or de-stabilising the binary object-subject, is becomes, and it transforms while it does so, transforming remembering the way we define nature is by us, not by nature other humans and non-humans. It is possible to start itself. So we should be encouraged to do a the simple exercise experimenting with a language that considers the body to of putting oneself in the place of the other, including non- be an active tangle, an endless union – from the micro to humans. What is to be a plant? What is to think like a plant? the cosmic and back again. We all have the ability to affect To love like a plant? and to be affected by other people who come together in the world. We can even go so far as to say that everything is alive Well, nature is not outside, but inside oneself. Daniel because it is interconnected with other forms – everything is Steegmann Mangrané’s oeuvre raises questions about always engaged in some form of exchange. subjectivity and reinforces the idea that nature is not without its own forms of perception or feeling. He works Colonial power seeks to define the body as an object primed through different narratives – of colonial violence, corporal for hygienic regulation and medical intervention. This knowledge, environmental degradation and ghosts – to definition relies on maintaining the difference between the explore how these things are interconnected. Nicholas Hlobo body itself and the meanings imposed upon it. Take for articulates related questions but with a slightly different instance, the film Jíibie (2019) by Laura Huertas Millán, sensibility – for instance, his work Balindile I (2012), is titled a portrait of the green coca powder survival ritual called in Hlobo’s native language Xhosa, a Nguni language widely Jíibie and the integral part it plays as an interlocutor in the spoken in South Africa, which translates as ‘those in waiting’. ancestral kinship of the Muiná-Muruí community in the The sculpture appears to be rising up through a state of limbo, Colombian Amazon. The coca leaf is seen as a sacred and supporting itself as a self-contained system. Made from black feminine being, not as a person, nor indeed a product. The rubber gathered from car repair shops in Johannesburg, the film illustrates how coca is a crucial part of an ancient social material has connotations both of otherworldliness and of practice with legislation as a desirable future, as opposed to restriction, but specifically is associated in South Africa as a the over-extracted Western practice of harvesting cocaine masculine status symbol. This work playfully questions the from the leaf and the threat of repressive policies and the fragility of binary assumptions about what is masculine and prohibition this brings to the coca-growing community. what is feminine. The sculptures suggest figures rising from Making plants subjects, producing a film about the coca the ground, but also feel unsupported, as if the soft material leaf, a kind of portrait – Huertas Millán reminds me that may wilt or crumble. Frozen mid-movement, it feels like a borders as we know them are not only geographical, they contradiction – rising and flailing at once, contradictions are political and subjective, and are the result of historical coming from the shifting nature of what we consider and processes created by the constitution of the modern colonial have established as binaries. We can potentially be male and world. Roland Persson’s practice reminds me of that too, female, object and subject, nature and culture, inside and of how art-historical images of nature objectifies nature as outside, and so on. we consume it, rendering the still lifes quasi-dead, separating

174 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 175 Part 4: Kinship Reto Pulfer extended on incredibly long fibers through the uppermost layers of sand, over which the starting points of the bitterly Gina, excerpt harsh yet slightly sweetish and exaggeratedly valuable fruit were distributed. It was considered a delicacy among the desert foragings. Its nutritional content and energy index On this day she set out early, so that there were still only outperformed much by a lot. Feeling around in the sand, goldenly shimmering outlines, and the rest, turned away more by chance, Gina found a root and followed the strand, from the sun of the light, blued in violet, a friendly and creeping along several branches, overlaps, intersections and shielded, intimate and sleeping tone. It was the blue of figure-of-eight knots, an indication of the twine-ball fruit- sleep, the half-invisible, the sleeping poet, the half-dead, tuber which grew like a promise. After a short time she the slumbering foggy image, the blue of the stretching found the twine-ball fruit-tuber which, carefully wrapped, creature in a state of metamorphosis, the blue of the love found its way into Gina’s survival bag. of a deep ocean. Later Gina ran off after killing three pursuers. Three dead, The great net, it hangs over us. Gina surged like a vixen, armed men, gradually covered carelessly and indifferently like a desert fox on silent rabbit-like feet, along dunes laden by the sand, yet gently, as if with a child’s blanket. with rocks and moved by waves and un-smoothened by gusts; and along this line of a shadow delineating the dunes, The big net: it hangs over us, it is almost as big as our she moved toward hidden places where she suspected landscape; it hangs too high for us to be able to touch it, something precious. though if we could reach it, we would move within it, we could wander through it, meander, sprawl, entangle, Everything seemed calm today. It was hot. Oppressive. we could move with the net and connect and transport Unbearably dire and barren, so empty and uncomfortable. ourselves within it. It casts a shadow like a cloud. We In this normality, this abandoned existence, she strode interpret and predict it like weather. We describe the forms happily and gratefully through the landscape. She tried to like signs in the sky. We interpret and leave it to the experts. catch a scent of her goal. She hoped she would soon gain We escape and protect ourselves. We describe the net as an more and new senses, with which she could perceive things. above-us. It is not an external generality, because we can In a twisted slope, a trough, she carefully leaned forward to see it, yet it often has that character, because we do not dare determine the granularity of the sand with her fingers. She to change it. The net, by the way, really is there. It is as real recalled the time when she was playing in a sandbox and, as as my bones, my skin, as the landscape that has just been a child, suspected nothing of such tasks as she now had. She described, a landscape that adapts to us, the shadows, the moved forward in order to dig a little deeper into the sand. shadow of the sun and the suns. The net really hangs there like that. I’ll tell of its material composition another time. The heaviest moment of nourishment was finding the entangled twine-ball fruit-tuber. Threadlike, the root

176 Reto Pulfer 177 Gina, excerpt This proliferation of representations produces numerous different images of the body, but it also produces something further: the apparent distinction between the body and its image. The production of modernity involves the staging of differences.

In a way, the exercise is to bring attention to the body through its materialities in different ways, channels and processes of mediation with the world. It is possible to dance without losing your integrity. The exercise of anthropological nomination removes the possibility of integrity.

And where the bipolarised part of the body comes from, understanding integrality already in the split and division. Cropped and separated. Body and mind. Man (I wanted to put man right here for emphasis) and nature. Intellectuality and intuition. And so, it poses the paranormal questions in the calculation of the theme. Not as a source of knowledge, but as a source of the development of intelligence. It is possible to be a book that deals with digestion and to be an art book, to never stop being an art book.

Situating ourselves in the nomination of the field of art already limits us.

This is a book – imperfect, incomplete, opaque, limited.

A book located and yet not firmly positioned – we will talk a lot, but this is a book in the field of art.

It is possible to dance without losing your integrity. The exercise of anthropological nomination removes the possibility of integrity. Seeing why he creates the norm and normality to break his speech excludes the possibility of multi-faceting what can be understood as normal.

178 Manuela Moscoso and Keyna Eleison 180 181 182 183

186 187 Camille Henrot that pertains distinctively to women – and motherhood in particular – must be an act of sacrifice and renunciation. Once upon a time in the The witch is first and foremost a woman who refuses to land of our birth sacrifice herself. For men, the absence of self-sacrifice is the norm – self-sacrifice elevates to divinity (cf. Christ) or In principle, the witch is supposed to be the opposite of the saintliness; for women, however, self-sacrifice is very much maternal: it’s hard to imagine a witch breastfeeding (except the norm, and the absence of this situates them beyond the maybe in the TV series Bewitched, which is premised on norm – making them quite literally ‘paranormal’. the conflicts between being a witch and fitting oneself into the mould of normality that society imposes on women Besides the refusal of self-abnegation, what else defines who become mothers). According to D. W. Winicott, who a witch as such? Seduction and power. When we speak imagined the thought to be reassuring, being a good mother of seduction, we speak of enchantment. The witch has means being a ‘normal’ mother. The witch, on the other power (magic), but due to the degraded status of women in hand, is paranormal by definition: she is beyond the norm – society, she cannot be respected and thus can only be feared. she is nature and the supernatural. A witch is thus, in theory, a powerful woman without children, who inspires fear instead of respect. In any number of fairy tales, the witch is a childless woman – whether she refuses to have children or is simply unable But on closer look, is the witch really so different from to (as in many stories), nobody seems much to care. The the mother? While mothers are bearers of the most basic witch is guilty of not having given birth: the absent child norm there is (reproduction of the species), the transitional is a sign both of her egoism and of the curse upon her. The phenomenon of pregnancy is coded, like all periodic and witch is the woman who steals the children of others or transitory phenomena, as exceptional/abnormal/magical in tries to capture them in order to satisfy a narcissistic or our society’s symbolic system. This anthropoemic system, otherwise personal need (it often has to do with making as Claude Lévi-Strauss calls it, conceives of the abnormal herself younger or obtaining eternal life, cf. Hansel and as something to be feared, and isolates it in the sterile Gretel). Or she is the abortionist – eating children, killing safety of institutions (hospitals, prisons, asylums – one them, making them disappear… might also add schools to the list). Lévi-Strauss opposes to this mode an anthropophagic one, found in some non- In our paternalistic society, motherhood is presented to industrial societies. Rather than rejecting the fear of the women as the supreme achievement: seduction is bound in exception, these societies grant a privileged space to those service to procreation and power is only incontrovertibly who embody the liminal (e.g., shamans, witches), fully acquired by way of becoming a mother. Because women integrating them into the social fabric. occupy a subordinate place in this society, their desires and freedom are likewise secondary. As such, everything And what if the witch was cast out of the maternal sphere

Once upon a time in the 188 Camille Henrot 189 land of our birth precisely because she has too much to do with it? In fairy We are both in the belly of the witch and pregnant with tales, the witch is connected to the belly: her attributes her. The witch is a Russian doll that produces us and is are the cauldron and the spoon. And what does she do? produced by us – she eats us and spits us out. And to be She cooks, she poisons, she puts to sleep, she encircles, she free of her, we must eat her, the magical labourer of an surrounds, she weaves ties around her prey: Snow White infinite interlocking. falls into a coma after eating an apple given to her by the witch; Sleeping Beauty is enchanted in an everlasting sleep, imprisoned and protected by overabundant, super-natural vegetation; Hansel and Gretel, attracted by the witch’s sugary house, are destined to be eaten, and thus literally enclosed in the witch’s belly.

What else does she do? She transforms herself – into animals that swell up (such as a frog). Like the pregnant woman, the witch thinks she looks ugly, she cuts herself off from the world a bit, she becomes egotistical. Narcissistically turned in on her body, towards what is most instinctive in her, she secludes herself in her cave, immersed in a problematic of extreme linkages (ties or linkages are another attribute of witches – hair, spells) and fantasies of non-differentiation (also extending to nature and animals, which she tends to merge with, cf. the totemic system born of pregnant women’s encounters with animals).

The witch is pregnant with the child within, with a possible return to childhood. ‘Once upon a time in a land that no longer exists…’ 1 writes Elizabeth Darchis. ‘I belong to the land that I’ve left’, writes Colette, though she also speaks of the desire to return to the native land as a death wish, saying, ‘Don’t go there!’ The witch in Hansel and Gretel, who had planned to wolf down the children, finds herself swallowed up (put into the oven by Gretel, who was supposed to be thrown in). One might say that Gretel has a ‘bun in the oven’. 1 https://www.cairn.info/revue-imagi- naire-et-inconscient-2001-4-page-43.htm

Once upon a time in the 190 Camille Henrot 191 land of our birth 192 Jorgge Menna Barreto 194 Jorgge Menna Barreto Reference article: https://outraspalavras.net/alemdamercadoria/ a-receita-solidaria-e-politica-do-mst-contra-a-fome/

196 Jorgge Menna Barreto TEATIME The health Conjure: The vision of what is in front of us but we The Ojibwe nation, originally from the need the opacity feature to achieve territory that runs from the northern part The renovation of the USA to Canada, says the bat is an Breathing animal that came into existence after the Let us sing with our pores the celebration squirrel sacrificed almost all of its living of life. conditions to save the sun. And like the bat, a power animal, we can take flight and achieve the wisdom The sun – as a form of thanks since the of restart. squirrel went blind, lost its hair and its Let’s get lost in Ithell, lose our eyes to find tail – rewards a transformation: now the the whole body. squirrel would see in detail at night and Allowing yourself with happiness of could fulfil his great dream of flying. Thus, pleasure. the bat was born.

Shamanic power animal that represents rebirth. I come here to call for the darkness, By the power of flight May the humidity of the caves be immersed and experienced, Bring what we seek. We are here conjuring through the existing forms in your works Ithell Colquhoun originally trained in glass making, Invernomuto are Simone Contributor Biographies but has expanded his practice to Bertuzzi (b. 1983, Piacenza, Italy) encompass diverse mediums. and Simone Trabucchi (b. 1982, Piacenza, Italy) who live and work Larry Achiampong (b. 1984, Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988, Lamin Fofana lives and works in in Milan, Italy. They have been London, UK) lives and works Assam, British India) was a British Berlin, Germany. Fofana is an artist collaborating since 2003, focusing in London, UK. Achiampong’s painter, occultist, poet and author, and a music producer. on moving image and sound. projects employ imagery, archives, whose practice is affiliated with live performance and sound. Surrealism. Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker Caetanópolis, Brazil) lives and and AHRC funded PhD researcher at John Barker (b. 1948) lives and Christopher Cozier (b. 1959, works in São Paulo, Brazil. Gomes’ University of the Arts London. works in London, UK. Barker is a Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago) work binds together cultural writer, essayist and performer. lives and works in Port of Spain, movements and traditions. Leonardo Impett is assistant Trinidad. Cozier is an artist, writer professor of Computer Science at Erick Beltrán (b. 1974, Mexico and curator, whose work aims to Ane Graff (b. 1974, Bodø, Norway) Durham University. City, Mexico) lives and works in explore and affect conventional lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Barcelona, Spain. Beltrán analyses readings of the Caribbean. Graff’s artistic practice is informed Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, and reflects on the mechanisms of by feminist new materialism. Chicago, USA) lives and works in thought systems. Yael Davids (b. 1968, Kibbutz New York, USA. Johnson employs Tzuba, Jerusalem) lives and works Ayesha Hameed lives in London, a wide range of media including Diego Bianchi (b. 1969, Buenos in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. UK. Since 2013, Hameed’s multi- sculpture, painting, drawing, Aires, Argentina) lives and works Davids examines the capacities chapter project ‘Black Atlantis’ has filmmaking and installation. in Buenos Aires, Argentina. in which the body operates as a looked at the Black Atlantic and its Bianchi envisions artistic practice documentary vessel. afterlives. KeKeÇa Body Percussion as a space for trial and error. Ensemble, consisting of Tugay Ines Doujak (b. 1959, Klagenfurt, Camille Henrot (b. 1978, Başar, Timuçin Gürer, Gökçe Black Obsidian Sound System Austria) lives and works in Vienna, Paris, France) lives and works Gürçay, Ayşe Akarsu and Özgü are Kiera Coward-Deyell, Phoebe Austria. Doujak’s multidisciplinary in New York, USA. Henrot’s Bulut, was established in 2002 in Collings-James, Alice Darko, Evan practice spans across photography, multidisciplinary practice moves Istanbul, Turkey. Ifekoya, Onyeka Igwe, Shenece performance, film and installation. seamlessly between film, drawing, Liburd, Marcus Macdonald, Nadine sculpture and installation. Jutta Koether (b. 1958, Cologne, Peters and Shamica Ruddock. Keyna Eleison is a curator, Germany) lives and works in writer, researcher, heiress griot Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975, Cape Berlin, Germany, and New York, Alice Channer (b. 1977, Oxford, and shaman, narrator, singer and Town, South Africa) lives and USA. Koether’s practice ranges UK) lives and works in London, ancient chronicler. works in Johannesburg, South from music, text and performance UK. She uses sculpture to stretch Africa. Hlobo creates seductively to painting. out, slow down and speed up Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993, tactile sculptures and drawings. production processes. London, UK) lives and works in Joasia Krysa is Professor of London, UK. Fadojutimi works Sohrab Hura (b. 1981, West Exhibition Research and Head of Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, primarily with paintings. Bengal, India) lives and works Art & Design at Liverpool John USA) lives and works in New in New Delhi, India. Hura uses Moores University. Mexico, USA. Chicago is a central Jes Fan (b. 1990, Scarborough, publications, photography, film, figure of the first generation of Canada) lives and works in Hong text and sound to engage with the Dr. Lakra (b. 1972, Mexico feminist artists. Kong and Brooklyn, USA. Fan wider world. City, Mexico) lives and works in

200 Liverpool Biennial 201 Contributor Biographies Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Lakra’s work Neo Muyanga (b. Soweto, South anchored in poetry, his work uses Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Finland) is characterised by irreverent and Africa) lives and works in Cape or appropriates materials in a lives and works in Berlin, Germany. provocative images that transgress Town, South Africa. Muyanga is a speculative manner. Sutela uses words, sounds, and established norms. composer and sound artist. other living media, such as bacteria Kathleen Ryan (b. 1984, and slime, to create experimental Ligia Lewis (b. 1983, Santo, Jim C. Nedd (b. 1991, Verona, California, USA) lives and works in installations and performances. Domingo, Dominican Republic) is Italy) lives and works in Milan, New York, USA. Ryan works with a choreographer based in Berlin, Italy. Nedd is an Afro-Colombian cast iron, carved marble, granite and Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Germany, and Los Angeles, USA. interdisciplinary storyteller, found objects to create sculptures. Angeles, USA) lives and works in involved in sonic and visual arts. Los Angeles, USA. Syms practice Linder (b. 1954, Liverpool, UK) Zineb Sedira (b. 1963, Paris, combines conceptual grit, humour lives and works in London, UK. Pedro Neves Marques (b. 1984, France) lives and works in London, and social commentary. Linder is internationally renowned Lisbon, Portugal) is a visual artist, UK. Sedira employs documentary, for her radical feminism. She uses filmmaker and writer, whose work poetic and lyrical approaches to UBERMORGEN are Lizvlx (moniker photography, photomontage and ranges from film and installation to her work. of Elizabeth Haas; b. 1973, Linz, performance to critique past and short stories, poetry and writings. Austria) and Hans Bernhard contemporary gender roles. SERAFINE1369 lives and works (b. 1971, New Haven, USA) who Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, in London, UK. SERAFINE1369’s live and work in Vienna, Austria Luo Jr-shin (b. 1984, Miaoli, Kingston, Jamaica) lives and works practice is always relational, and St. Moritz, Switzerland. Taiwan) lives and works in Taipei. in Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, moving across spaces, contexts, Luo’s practice revolves around the USA. Patterson’s practice uses roles and collaborations. Luisa Ungar (b. 1976, Bogotá, experimentation of traditional and beauty as a tool to entice viewers Colombia) lives in Bogotá, unconventional materials. to bear witness to social injustices. Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974, New Colombia, and Antwerp, Belgium. York, USA) lives and works in New Ungar’s practice explores how Jorgge Menna Barreto (b. 1970, Roland Persson (b. 1963, York, USA. Simmons’ practice spans social norms are constructed and Araçatuba, Brazil) lives and works Hudiksvall, Sweden) lives and works across photography, performance, institutionalized through language. in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Menna in Stockholm, Sweden. Persson is choreography, video, sound, Barreto is an artist and researcher. known for his public commissions sculpture and installation. Alberta Whittle (b. 1980, and surrealist silicone sculptures. Barbados) lives and works Laura Huertas Millán (b.1983, Teresa Solar (b.1985) lives and between Barbados, Scotland and Bogota, Colombia) lives in Paris, Anu Põder (1947–2013, Estonia) works in Madrid, Spain. Solar South Africa. Whittle is an artist, France. Her moving image work was a sculptor interested in the works across sculpture, video, research and curator. entwines ethnography, ecology, fragility and impermanence or drawing and photography. fiction and historical enquiries. human-like ‘lifespan’ of materials. Zheng Bo (b. 1974, Beijing, China) Daniel Steegmann Mangrané lives and works in Lantau Island, Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, London, Reto Pulfer (b. 1981, Bern, (b. 1977, Barcelona, Spain) lives Hong Kong. Zheng is committed to UK) lives and works in London, UK. Switzerland) lives and works in and works in Rio de Janeiro, multispecies vibrancy. Mirza’s work tests the interplay Germany. Pulfer creates immersive Brazil. Steegmann Mangrané’s and friction between sound and installations made from fabric that practice encompasses a wide range David Zink Yi (b. 1973, light waves and electric current. incorporate other media. of media. Lima, Peru) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His multi- Manuela Moscoso is the curator André Romão (b. 1984, Lisbon, JD Stokely is a trickster-in- disciplinary practice comprises of Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Portugal) lives and works in training hailing from Philly-by- of film, photography, sculpture, Stomach and the Port. Lisbon, Portugal. Strongly way-of-Boston. performance and ceramics.

202 Liverpool Biennial 203 Contributor Biographies Principal Funders Sponsors

Founding Supporter James Moores Project Partners

Delivery Partners

Trusts and Foundations

Estate of Fanchon Fröhlich

Whitney Museum of American Art

204 Liverpool Biennial 205 Funders and Partners International Agencies Gallery Circle

Empty Gallery, Hong Kong kamel mennour, Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/ Paris/London London/New York/ KÖNIG GALERIE, Somerset/Los Angeles/ Berlin, London, Seoul Hong Kong/Gstaad Metro Pictures, New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Monique Meloche Gallery, Cologne/New York Chicago Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Hollybush Gardens, London London

Logistics Partner Corporate Patrons

Patrons

Jo and Tom Bloxham MBE Roland and Rosemary Hill Louise and Paul Brady Paula Ridley CBE DL Simon Edwards John Shield Julie Falkingham Kathleen Soriano Mark Fletcher Peter Woods DL and David and Maggi Gilkes Francis Ryan

Commissioning Circle Director’s Circle Festival Partners

Catherine Petitgas Jo Bloxham (Founding Member) Jonathan Falkingham Amalia Amoedo Ethel Ozen Rodney Miller Erica Roberts

206 Liverpool Biennial 207 Funders and Partners This book is published on the occasion of Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach and the Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso, 20 March – 6 June. Ayesha Hameed Editors Published by Zheng Bo Manuela Moscoso Liverpool Biennial Yael Davids Keyna Eleison Jes Fan Printed by Sohrab Hura Managing editor Pureprint Luo Jr-shin Lily Mellor KeKeÇa Liverpool Biennial Ithell Colquhoun Copy editor 55 New Bird Street Jackie West Liverpool L1 0BW United Kingdom Camille Henrot Design Pedro Neves Marques & HAUT Mark El-khatib biennial.com Teresa Solar liverpoolbiennial2021.com Jenna Sutela Cover SERAFINE1369 Dr Lakra ISBN: 978-1-5272-8653-5 Ines Doujak & John Barker André Romão 2021 Identity design Ane Graff Dr Lakra with Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) Sara De Bondt and Larry Achiampong Mark El-khatib Jutta Koether Linder Invernomuto & Jim C. Nedd Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Haroon Mirza Reto Pulfer Zineb Sedira UBERMORGEN, Leonardo Impett & Joasia Krysa © 2021 artists, authors, editors, and Liverpool Biennial Alice Channer All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in Jadé Fadojutimi a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, Roland Persson mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Anu Põder

208 Liverpool Biennial 209 210 This book is published on the occasion of pp. 126 – 131 Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach and the Port, Teresa Solar curated by Manuela Moscoso, 20 March – 6 June.

Editors Published by Manuela Moscoso Liverpool Biennial Keyna Eleison Printed by Managing editor Pureprint Lily Mellor pp. 166 – 173 Liverpool Biennial Erick Beltrán Copy editor 55 New Bird Street Jackie West Liverpool L1 0BW United Kingdom Design Mark El-khatib biennial.com liverpoolbiennial2021.com Cover Dr Lakra ISBN: 978-1-5272-8653-5 pp. 180 – 187 Christopher Cozier 2021 Identity design Dr Lakra with Sara De Bondt and Mark El-khatib

© 2021 artists, authors, editors, and Liverpool Biennial

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

208 Liverpool Biennial 212 We started with a book. Reading a book together. Sharing a common practice during lockdown.

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