Department of Xenogenesis Hostile Environment Environmental Hostility

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. So, good evening and welcome to the Department of Xenogenesis. Before we start, I am going to just do a little bit of housekeeping, or rather give you a

little bit of advice and information about the way we're going to conduct this session, specifically in relation to the questions. So we have turned off chat for obvious reasons. It's just a little bit distracting. And also the nature of what we're going to be discussing, some of the topics, you know, like some kind of trolling types. So we've decided to turn off chat. there are a number of people joining this evening thank you very much for joining a number of friends as well and lots of other people I think the it's a great pleasure to be here tonight and

thank you with all of our guests Kojo and I thank you very much for joining now in relation to the questions we would appreciate it if you could prepare your questions as we speak and you can either send them or you can I think the Q&A option is open you can either put them in a Q&A or you can also wave your hand. You will see that there's a hand-waving option at the bottom. There's a digital hand-waving option at the bottom of the screen.

So we are going to be basically based on requests that we received after the event yesterday. I think it would be nice to hear people's voices. I don't think there will be necessary, because some people don't necessarily have questions, they have kind of responses. Now, given the volume, we might not be able to address directly your questions, so it might be part of a co-hearing bundle. I'm going to try and, if you could tell me the nature of your question in the Q&A, tell me you want to ask a question tell me if you want to speak the question or um for me to say your name and I can say the question on your behalf um that's um is that's what we will do

so um good evening and welcome good again good evening and welcome to the department of xenogenesis or dxg I'm Anjali Kasaga and Kojo Eshin is there on the screen as well and we are the Ocelith Group and Ocelith Collective. DXG, Department of Xenogenesis, is the name of and for the project that subtends the meanings and methods entailed by Xenogenesis, which is the title of the International Exhibition of Works by the Ocelith Group, curated by Annie Fletcher in 2019. Xenogenesis is on an international tour that started in Eindhoven, Melbourne and Richmond in 2019 and continues to Ljubljana, Alberta, Dublin, Manchester

and Sharjah until 2021 in various forms due to Covid. You can find more details about this on the Otelift Group website. DXG is a pedagogical experiment drawing from Black Feminist Study that will continue and develop through to 2021 and beyond. DXG emerges from the research practice of the Ocelot Group that extends from filmmaking to installation to curation to publication. DXG departs from an engagement with the speculative thought of Octavia Butler in which the narrative vehicle of science fiction provides an inquiry for dramatizing the denaturalization of the human,

the extinction of the earth, and the necropolitics of fascism. And now I hand to Kojo. Thanks, Anjali. Six months into the year 2020, well, seven months now, today is the seventh month of 2020, it's clear that the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the eugenic calculations of the Conservative government of the UK has disproportionately exposed Afro-Diasporic, Caribbean, Asian and Latin peoples to the risk of infection and premature death.

At the same time, the global uprisings against the lethal policing of black and brown peoples and the destruction of imperialist monuments challenges the disregard for black lives that characterizes what Sadir Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This seriousness that has no precedence so far in centuries. The question that concerns us tonight can be summarized as follows. What happens if we redirect Sadia Hartman's account of the racial calculus that devalues black existence towards the specific context of the United Kingdom?

To think about the afterlife of slavery in a British context requires us to confront the implications of the policy of the hostile environment announced in 2014 by Theresa May. It entails thinking the distress inflicted by the British state on the so-called Windrush Generation in terms of an expanded and ongoing practice of hostile environmentality and environmental hostility, hostility which accumulates around the times and spaces of 1833, 2030, 1610, 1948 and beyond.

When we made Infinity Minus Infinity in 2019, we were aware of the ongoing unawareness of racial injustice occurring within movements such as Extinction Rebellion. We were aware that communities of colour in the global south and in the global north have lived with the results of extraction and climate change for a long time. At the time of making infinity minus infinity, this awareness of the indivisibility of racial capitalism and climate crisis, of breath and pollution, was hidden in plain sight. now there's a great desire in Britain today for a discourse that reckons with the implications

of these questions in a vocabulary that exceeds reportage department of xenogenesis is designed to speak to and from this desire to articulate the afterlives of slavery in Britain today to discuss these ideas we are pleased to welcome more than pleased to welcome the multidisciplinary artist and researcher S.C. Eschen, the artist and composer Elaine Michener, and the equally great poet and scholar Dante Michaud, each of whom collaborated in the research, development, production and performances of Infinus Infinity.

So let's begin by asking our guests, C, Dante and Elaine, if they would be kind enough to look back on the making of Infinity Minus Infinity in the autumn of 2019, in order to look forward to life under the conditions of Corona capitalism in the UK in July 2020. let's use the microcosm of infinity minus infinity as a lens through which to interpret time and life under lockdown in london in 2020 and i think what we'd like to ask you is what strikes you um as have now having taken this journey with us when you look back on 2019

from 2020 and look forward to 2020 from 2019. Essie, if you wouldn't mind starting and then we would like to move to Elaine and then it would be great to hear from you Dante as well. Thank you. Okay, well, the 2019, one of the things that we were trying to do with the film was to examine the relationships between these different time zones, between the experiences of Black people in relation to the capitalist system within these different time zones. And one of the themes that kept coming up was obviously about containment,

about curtailment of expectations, about extraction, expropriation of bodies, of property etc um and it strikes me that in this current age in 2020 uh in what seems like a lifetime's leap you know within this kind of compacted time frame all those um themes those thematics we are working with have crystallized and coalesced in our in our view in our sort of purview and there is a greater focus on the things that we were talking about among uh why did you know more people more people now kind of are in the space that we are at at that time uh watching

it now uh i think i recognize um many things kind of uh stand out to me in a way that at the time were part and parcel of a wider project now they kind of leap out from the the surface of the film so one of the things obviously that a lot of people picked up on then but would pick up on even more now is that sequence um which my character performs where she says i can't breathe I can't breathe I can't breathe now I wrote this thing not with any kind of sense of

desire to represent what black people specifically underwent in relation to the carceral system in the UK the US or wherever I wrote it partly for for several reasons one was to try and gain a sense of the compression of time between um the present moment and the future moment in relation to the anthropocene and how the anthropocene was affecting uh people's kind of breathing apparatus and relating that to the experience of slaves in the slave the ship the hold of the ship and relating that also to I guess you know black people's incarceration

across the world to the colonial project etc and when I was performing it I remember when we were performing it and filming it the first reaction that was given as I said those lines was the crew immediately said are you talking about um eric garner is that what you're doing and eric garner was one of the people who was uh murdered by police in america a few years ago and his response to uh being um choked by the police was i can't breathe i can't breathe i can't breathe Now, clearly, 2020, we have an expanded notion of that term, of that phrase, expanded simply in the sense that we understand it in relation to this particular reference now to George Floyd.

but there is now such a focus on it in relation to rothfroid and in relation to the repercussions that have emerged as a response of that event that we look at those words differently but we also recognize that there is a a correlation between those words and those uh and treatment of black people within these kind of uh racialized states and the treatment of them in relation to the climate crisis if you know what I mean there is some kind of correlation but it's not explicit as such it wasn't written to be explicit it was written to be felt rather than analyzed even though you can analyze it very very clearly so yeah just looking back at 2019

is just many things that were in the ether that existed as structures of feeling have now become very explicit um so we picked up on all of these things but now they are out they are out clear in focus in a way that wasn't necessarily as much the case before um continuing on from what i see has has been saying it's it struck me that when we came together and did what this film would be about and the different themes that we were covering and how we could approach it that we were all bringing to the table experiences that

have been lived and carried within and as a musician who works with embodied in an embodied practice that's very important to me to live through give give voice to text to use the breath to do that to completely embody it um as a living experience so it's not just dry fats on a page And that was one of the really special moments of this film in that we were dealing with facts, but we were giving a voice to those facts. It became a living entity in itself, which makes it so much more of a direct experience. and I was thinking about Windrush in 2018, the outcry from that, the anger, the exhaustion,

the heaviness, the continued fact that people in the UK thought they were citizens, were being asked to prove their citizenship. These were elderly people. People died because they were denied benefits health care and it's 21st century Britain it made people of my mother's generation and older re-question well it reaffirmed something that they'd always felt that they did not belong and why why did they feel that they belonged and it's this constant pressure from higher forces so this is the thing when your essay

was talking about i can't breathe i can't breathe these are these are reasons for feeling gagged because who do you speak to how do you how do you speak to how do you how do you give voice to to all this oppression and so i was also thinking at the time when we were doing it there was um There was a lot of unrest in Hong Kong. A lot of the emphasis in the press was about what was going on in Hong Kong and the fight for the freedom of Hong Kongese people. There was a thing called coronavirus later on in the year, towards the end of 2019. It seemed very far away because it's happening in China and nobody seemed to believe that it would affect the rest of us.

And we move forward into 2020 and the whole world has changed. And we've all had our breaths taken from us. And we've all been gagged. We've all been forced to stop and to be silent, which is why the events of the recent events have been so dramatic and so forceful that it's allowed people to collectively speak loudly and request change, demand change. And so the film is addressing all these things. It's so many times that we, there are some texts that Dante and I quote from some poems. Una Marson in the 1940s, living as a black woman in 1940s London, one of very few, and feeling that she was completely on her own.

and a lot of us feel that we're working in isolation to bring change but what are the things that have happened in recent events in recent weeks shows that there's this galvanizing force there's a growing movement and it's dangerous and it's exciting and it's affecting change and the world cannot be the same again and that's exciting for me and I love the way how the film is examining this unfolding and changing and also showing that the world isn't what we thought it was. And this is a different future that we are creating for ourselves. I think it was a sort of surreal experience

thinking back to the film and the making of the film, when we gathered inside this sort of black box space and, you know, offered our performances, read our texts, dancers did their dancing and other, you know, perspectives bear down on the film, we went back out into sort of the cold, London Autumn and went back to, you know, all of the things that we were doing, not realizing that we had experienced a sort of premonition. The experience of making the film was a premonition that in just a few short months after the film was finished, certainly Elaine and I, who worked

closely together in the film as sort of these atemporal characters who were in different time periods commenting on something that had happened before that we would be experiencing the sort of end the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene so I think of us dealing with the equation our characters dealing with the equation and we're talking about um this equation results from everything that is taking place in the human before it inside the film and we're commenting on something that's happened in the past fast forward to you know the beginning of uh the

coronavirus lockdown across the globe and that's exactly what we were seeing we were seeing um the beginning of the end you know it's like a it was like a uh you know the the the first days of the apocalypse right i'm not i'm not saying that you know you're going to wake up in a few years and we're going to be in Armageddon. But I think by all indicators, we as a species have demonstrated that we are not interested in saving ourselves from a destruction of our own making. And so, you know, the fictions are that there are going to be these massive wars that are going to outbreak of resources. And that is what's going to wipe us off the face of the planet. But in reality,

The coronavirus, I think, is a very good premonition for what might actually happen, that something in nature is going to trigger and it's going to start causing massive amounts of death. And we won't be able to do anything about it but comment on it and watch it slowly until you're, you know, you're at the end. And so only now when I think about the experience, I think about how now it feels like what I was doing then was a premonition. It was a sort of preparation. So I find that really, really interesting. even in even in these these most recent days where we're getting the news of things slowly opening back up and you know all of these different parameters that will be in place as they ease

local restrictions national restrictions international restrictions we'll be able to travel again and when we go to the cities with which we are familiar what are they going to look Like, how are they going to be different? And watching the film now feels very much like that experience. If I'm looking at the film from the point of view of my character in the film, I see that character looking back on what we as a species have caused. and I think that's sort of one of the, for me that's the really interesting aspect of the film.

It's sort of a future, it feels like a future. It felt like a future when we were making it and now that it's finished it feels very much like a present. You know. Thank you for your thoughts. Let me try to gather some thoughts and then move with your thoughts into the next point. So Dante's point about the atemporal and Elaine's point about performance and embodiment. I think there was this effort to embody these characters that exist outside of chronological time in order to comment on it.

So we tried to create and imagine characters who are not subject to time and space, but who can somehow point to it and analyze it. and that was the kind of poetic way of crystallizing what Essie points to as a structure of feeling which was there but it was inchoate and diffused and dispersed and we were trying to crystallize that we were trying to condense it condense large forces into this block of time and space and color and light so let me hold on to those

thoughts from each of you and thank you for those thoughts and move on to my next uh question so i think we could say that you know um i think we can venture a kind of hypothesis It's a hypothesis based on the conversation we had in preparation for this conversation, in which Essie made a point, which I also heard Paul Gilroy talk about in a conversation with Gary Young. so both se and gilroy had made a similar point which was that living with the pandemic over the last three months or so has sensitized people to the presence of death that's one of the effects

of living with a pandemic it's focused people on the prospect of mortality their mortality and other people's mortality. Within this general prospect, we now know statistically that African, Caribbeans and Asian, British, diasporic British working peoples are disproportionately confronted with and exposed to this proximity to death. But this process of enforced sensitization, a kind of disproportionate sensitization, then is then sharpened when we come face to face with the spectacle of George Floyd's torture and murder by a white policeman in Minneapolis.

And so one of the reasons why this footage has elicited a response across the UK and across the globe might be that it's provoked a response which is existential. Existential in its intensity. so that when we look at the demonstrations throughout the UK, throughout the world, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, what we see is the way in which the crisis of policing in the United States provides a vehicle for crystallizing, condensing, and conducting

levels of frustration and anger and discontent that people feel in their own situations. So here in the UK, the frustration felt by Asian and Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, which was already amplified by the Grenfell fire, which was intensified by the hostile environment policy and the treatment of the windrush generation and then exaggerated by the revelation of the disproportionate mortality rates, those feelings then adopt this American crisis as a vehicle. So we could say that the images and sounds of these murders

in the United States have provided a vehicle for mobilizing a discontent within the UK, an ongoing discontent, and a discontent far beyond the UK. Look at what's happening in Brussels with the toppling of the statues of Leopold. So could we say that the toppling of the statue of the Royal African Company slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, could we say that what is apparent now is that there is a public and even a popular recognition of the afterlife of slavery in Britain? It's achieved a certain popular understanding.

if you've seen the footage so just my last point is could we say have we moved from the the denialism and the erasure of the afterlife of slavery in Britain to a confrontation with the afterlife of slavery in Britain so this is a question about the identification by the UK with these murders in the US, about the mobilisation that is made possible in the UK through this identification, and then what this mobilisation tells us about the UK itself.

So it's about going deeper into this present moment in a bit. So Essie, you're welcome to begin, and then maybe we could go to Dante, and then we could go to Elaine and we can keep going over to you then if if I can recall the the focus of that question it was a long question but one of the points I want to make about it is that I think one of the reasons why there's been there's been this intensification of identification with the fate of George Floyd is that what this moment exemplifies is the shift from analytics, from metrics in relation to the black population, in relation to also

slavery, the shift from metrics to something more human, more vivid, more embodied. What's happened with both the um the way that black people's presence in the uk is tends to be related tends to be in the form of statistics statistics related to crime statistics related to housing statistics related to immigration etc this has been um exacerbated compounded by the covid crisis where everything has been related to us in the form of statistics rarely do you get a story that excavates the, you know, the story, the history of the person who died.

Okay, so we get statistics about the number of black people who died, we get statistics about the number of people overall who've died. What happens with George Floyd is that that anonymization of death shifts and becomes something altogether different. So we're instantly kind of transported into a zone where we cannot disidentify anymore. We're forced to identify with this person's fate, this person's condition. And one of the reasons why we're forced to identify is that we've been living under a state of protection, so-called protection for a long time. During lockdown, during quarantine, whatever you want to call it. This is supposed to be the state's mechanism for protecting individuals from the threat out there, the virus.

And suddenly what we see with George Floyd is the perversion of that process of protection. We see a police officer abusing the power of protection over the state and over the state's citizens. We see that very, very clearly, profoundly, symbolically. and when you have that just juxtaposition of events and personally you understand i think emotionally and intellectually what the stakes are that you're dealing with so this is a dramatization of many many different frames at the same time frames of reference at the same time it's a dramatization of them in real time which uh we've all been uh humbled enough to to witness

and the impact of it is profound because it speaks to so many different aspects of the way that not only black people but people in every society in the world currently is having to experience. So obviously the impact of George Floyd isn't confined to the UK alone, it's confined, it's spread around the world. It's a massive global movement, massive recognition of what happened to this person as a perversion of what should have happened, which is the preservation of the sanctity of this person's life. I think all of us understand very, very clearly that something shouldn't have occurred at that moment.

and we identify with it because we saw it and experienced it in a way that we may not have felt capable of. If we hadn't been sensitised to the past three months and what we're experiencing, we wouldn't have felt so clearly and so intensely what this man was going through as he died. soon. Well, I mean, I think I'd like to extricate myself from that we, and I think what you're talking about, Esti, is the non-Black imagination, because we did not have to desensitize ourselves. We knew that the system, the mechanism of the government that was designed to protect us

has been perverted and has been perverted all along. Absolutely. I think what's happened now is because of technology and that coupled with the lockdown, people being forced inside and their stimuli is narrowing. So there isn't so much to focus on. They are, and when I say they, I do mean non-Black people who are now accessing this history that is, you know, they are accessing, what they're accessing is a continuity of something that we have been exposed to for a very long time.

And I also would like to say that there, as an American, there is a difference of me experiencing this here in England, watching what's happening in my own country and having conversations about it with Black British people who are accessing my own history now. And I think that is something that we've, you know, this group of people have had conversations around the dinner table about, you know, this distinction between the US and the UK and the ways in which the commodity of blackness gets utilised by the state, by corporatism, etc, etc.

And so I think what you're saying is true, but I do want to be very, very clear about the fact that it is something that non-Black people are grappling with for the first time. I know we've talked about all of the telephone calls and the text and the emails we've received from well-meaning non-Black people who may not have spoken to us in years, but who've been in our social circles, who are acquaintances, who now all of a sudden want to check in on us and want to know how we're doing, how we're feeling. and some of that is genuine I think but a large amount of it is

a desire to to tap into the zeitgeist of this now because it is the trend you know it's the trend and everybody always wants to be knowledgeable about the trend so they can have conversations about it and so that they appear to their peers as you know in the know you know this sort of it's what I like to think of it as sort of like a zombie wokeness you know there are people who are woke and then there are zombies who are just sort of mimicking what quote-unquote wokeness is And I think there's a lot of that going around.

And I think the film is very, very interesting, particularly in its opening. The first two or three minutes, you know, where you see the landscape of the city and you see these random people walking around in the park. That is a sort of visual of what I'm describing now. yeah i'm feeling desensitized because i never saw that footage um of george floyd's life being taken but i wondered about the other policemen who stood by and allowed it to happen

and how they could allow it to happen. Because they weren't all white policemen. And that is something that needs to be thought about. What is it about power that will be part of a system that gives you this level of power that desensitizes you to humanity, to doing the right thing which is to preserve life not to take it and you're both right about the access and those who are woke those who feel their work but not

really um i think that it's people want to be part of the movement and they don't want to be called out or found out um because there really is no excuse to be ignorant anymore about history and the toppling thinking about what happened in Bristol having visited Bristol on a number of occasions not couldn't understand why that statue was there why it was there I knew why it was there who put it there it you know was it public money was it private money it's it's opened the debate for why these statues are there and what they are saying to us and this is why the reactions are happening and the call for their remove their removal it's the right way forward in my opinion

but it was the people who tugged that statue down of colston and rolled it along the road and rolled it into the Avon and they weren't black they were white people which says to me that there's a generation and they have always been white people who have acknowledged the past Britain's past what Britain's systems are doing in terms of shoring up racial inequality but in terms of what happened on that weekend which for me was a joy to

see it was a joy to see white people taking action I remember waking up thinking I can't say anything they need to tell their own because they don't listen to us they don't listen to us it will take white people to educate white people about the conditions and what has been happening in order to affect change and this is not quite addressing what what you guys were talking about but it's something that i just felt i needed to say because it's it's momentous and it's being driven by a lot of young people who have been raised on American culture um more than you know they know more about American TV shows and

you know American music it's it's a young generation who feel an identity with American culture in terms of what they play how they what they listen to how they even so that's why what happened to george floyd is what i i think it's my theory that's why it was so real for them because this isn't this is something that they they identify with it they can see it and it's i i worry about social media and how images are shared around because there has been talk about that you know there's so many images of black people being killed at the hands of the so many negative things that's shared around whatever there's a death it's shared around millions of people watch it it is you know and we're the victims of this

in this case with George Floyd something it triggered something and it was the pandemic it was being locked away locked down for three months not able to really express how you feel terrified of going out the fear wanting protection i see as you said expecting protection from the law when you go out and to not be you know to not be a victim of the law and that's what people have been demonstrating against across the world and i think it's a great thing it's an embodiment of what they were feeling they're physicalizing it and that is what's really exciting and i think that's what disturbs the authorities because sometimes words only say so much then it has to

be a direct action and I'm not talking about breaking the law some people felt removing those statutes was breaking the law it was a direct action of people and people have to take responsibility and be accountable for for their society and what kind of life and what kind of society they want to live in if they think it's unfair make it fair and I ended up someone was telling me about a conversation they overheard recently of people that live near me talking about what happened in Bristol and they said oh well they shouldn't have pulled it down you know this person did a good thing it's not about race it's not about it wasn't

they just don't get it because they don't want to and I can't say anything to them sorry can I uh respond to you guys and then Essie maybe you'd like you can also um Thank you for all of your responses. I would like to actually just, I'm thinking a lot about this question of the multiple sites of enclosure, the awareness that we, like Dante was saying, we were sensitized to a series of multiple enclosures being enforced upon us,

not just those far away, but the sense that things were becoming enclosed. the covid lockdown gave you the sense that this is the ultimate enclosure if they have us enclosed like this that means they can do anything to us um i think um within within that moment the sites of struggle um against anti-blackness the potential for the sites of struggle against anti-blackness there is a potential for these sites of struggle to be to join right this is what the murder of um george floyd has um awoken maybe but i think it's important to talk about

the deaths in custody and by the hands of the british police 168 people in the last 10 years and I think it's important to talk about okay the police kill people kill black people what is it that gets the police to feel that they can do that you know in a British context I remember going from the 70s as a child which was extremely racist to the 80s where institutions because of the Brixton riots and the riots elsewhere in the United Kingdom took place and various other lobbies anti-racist groups were mobilizing to you know get space on television

and within education and you know black nurses movement black parents movement John LaRose there's so much a figurehead of that movement those movements suddenly it became very unfashionable to be racist um of course people were still racist um but it became unfashionable there was a sense that the the british um people in britain of color british asians as well let's not forget that they're not I mean sadly with Modi and you know a lot of the majority of British Asians now are and I might be generalizing our pro-Modi you know model minority you know

Preeti Patel types but and let's say Hindus let's not you know forget that there was a a big I won't say effort I would say um the struggles had effect um in terms of the way that institutions began to deal with the British race issues and it became exciting to talk about the conditions of what it meant to be black or Asian and British and one felt that one had a duty in our generation to turn these into stories and into dramas or um into music um there was a sense that the black the black british situation was an important and you know culturally central

to all of our certainly i can say the people here to our lives like as we were growing up i think we all experienced racism profoundly but it was being unraveled and you could also watch my beautiful laundrette on channel four um and see a racist punk um snogging um a Pakistani guy and spitting in his mouth after having you know after having hated him he now loved him so of course there is a problem in that as well but at least there was like this strange mirror as well I remember in the film um two-way mirror in this laundrette so there was series of kind of like in terms of art there

was and and in terms of music there was a kind of form of abstraction kind of going on in relation to thinking around um how this aesthetics how how these aesthetics were building um I have noticed since the advent of neoliberalism and internationalism within certainly in the art world, there has been a profound lack of interest in the Black British experience, a profound lack of interest since the YBA generation. They have let a few people in to sit at their tables and perform at their tables, but we have been told categorically that we are too complicated in our work.

which I find really bizarre, having been born in London, actually on the Strand in 1968. So I think if there's anything, we need more complexity. And, you know, there is a, of course, there's a new generation. Now there are multiple collectors of young Black, British and queer and people of colour and disabled groups who are extremely um who are brilliant and making all kinds of interesting work who don't have any money who are seriously underfunded and who need support but for me why hasn't race been why has race been removed from the center of thinking in this country um and i think the result is this uh kind of like looking towards america looking towards america all the time

and the commodity of the American art kind of produces, which is, you know, of course, we know a lot of the successful artists in America who are doing very well right now. We've known them for years. But, you know, what about, you know, why does everything have to be driven around a successful artist? Why not more work being done by institutions on a community level to expose and talk about and open the institutions to people who want to talk to each other now and let those conversations be with their friends and with the interested parties who'd like to

attend. I think this lack of interest in the complexities of blackness from a British perspective which is not about saying let's have a black british show uh that is the last thing one wants to do but one wants to talk about movements that are going on in this country kind of forms of practice that are going on in this country which are very specific you know um so i think i'm just going to leave it there in terms of that but i mean i think one of the other things that has gone amiss one of the other amnesias and urgencies that brought us together to make infinity minus infinity and ground it in the political situation and what and what brings us

here today as an urgency was the desire to articulate the british dimensions of the afterlife of slavery interpreted through the hostile environment and the ongoing windrush crisis of 2014. Sorry, Essie, I forgot to bring you in at the end, but we can do it after this, maybe. What we are arguing here is that the recent events actually highlight and draws attention to the extent to which the understanding of the UK as a historical entity continues to be defined by its ongoing erasure of the histories of slavery, the afterlives of slavery, of colonialism and imperialism that amounts to what Denise Ferreira de Silva has called the expropriation of total

value from native lands and African bodies. An expropriation whose irreparable evil, to quote David Scott, can neither be repaired nor restituted. To take one example, when you turn to a copy of Eric Williams' text Capitalism and Slavery, you will find that in 1944, Williams was writing on the so-called compensated emancipation advance by the Act for the Abolition of Slavery through the British colonies in 1833, in which 46,000 British slave owners received a compensation of 20 million pounds from the British state while the labour of 640,000 slaves tortured on the

killing fields of the Caribbean plantations received nothing. This means that abolition ended slavery by preserving the property established by slavery. Abolition rewarded slavery. When you turn to Walter Rodney's groundings with my brothers from 1969, 1969 you can find that Rodney also mentions so-called compensated emancipation. Why did it take until the fun-filled Friday fact of the British Treasury tweet of 2018 for us to discover that the repayment of the loans taken by the British government in 1833 to pay for the great bailout of 1833 were passed on to British taxpayers from 1833 until their final repayment

in 2015. What does this tell us about the specific form taken by the afterlife of slavery in the UK? What challenges do these kinds of erasures present for the making of a work that aims to speak to this condition of compounded denialism what kinds of work can articulate the enormity of this erasure this is a question of artistic methodology I think infinity minus infinity is just one response to the colonial racial foreclosure that shapes so much of life in Britain today the wider question is this what kind of artistic methods can be adopted to articulate the specific practice of injustice um and what forms of aesthetic justice can we forge and um i'd like

to start with ercy and then elaine and dante and i was thinking earlier when we were talking about the multiple sites of enclosure about the scalar levels that expose those enclosures um as a kind of methodology um so what kind of artistic um practices or processes methodologies can we use to express why um the afterlife of slavery persists in this day and age um i think one of the things I think that comes across very well in um infinity minus infinity is the way that it takes on board uh non-enlightenment epistemologies it's very good

in asserting the value of um either Hindu mythology or African mythologies etc African sort of I guess pantheistic ideas it just posits them it doesn't apologize it doesn't explain it just posits them and I think that's one of the things that makes Infinity Minus Infinity different from some of the films that might have tackled this particular subject it takes seriously the um the worldview of non-western subjects of non-western peoples it takes it seriously and it invites you in to observe and experience that kind of um i won't call it belief system

that's not the point that sort of knowledge system whereby there is no um differentiation there's no split between as you said subject object it's a it's a space of relation where every relation has every uh object and every subject has its place and each place is related to everything else um and that exists on a um spatial temporal dimension so within infinity minus infinity we're talking about numerous dimensions in space and time um all uh existing simultaneously which is not something that is tends to be taken seriously by um you know a

modern enlightenment position um so one of the things that um can happen when we're trying to to examine what the afterlife of slavery comprises is this refusal to take on board other systems of knowing. And when you don't take those on board, you devalue them. And when you devalue those other systems of knowledge, you devalue the people who hold them. And I think this is one of the sort of problems, problems one of the reasons why the art of life is slavery consists because if you refuse to take seriously other ways of thinking understanding the world and you refuse to take seriously the people

who come from you know um social historical cultural backgrounds that um that that um do um coalesce around these forms of thinking then you obviously you set up a hierarchy uh that privileges your way of thinking and refuses to you know to to provide a place other than a place of condescension towards other peoples i think uh infinity minus trinity does you know it does very well the the um uh not overturning but the the the recognition that you don't have to view

things from a specific narrow perspective of rationality so-called reason etc you know um so it does that very well um and rationality so-called reason implies linearity which again Infinity Minus Infinity refuses to take on board. So that's my response to that. I don't have much more to add to that, because what you've said is so comprehensive, but one of the things that struck me with the film is its democratic balance of using different

art forms to address these ideas and to present them so we haven't talked about the movement aspect the dance aspect how that's reinforcing these ideas how it's representing them in another way it's not something that's very that's done often or at all and it's it's an experience the very serious questions the very serious ideas that are being presented in a in a different format they're probably not even realizing what is being said through the movement but it's very direct it's very direct for me and it's an embodiment of all those ideas that's being presented and communicated outwards to the viewer and it's so strong it's this uh this balance of

of using the poet poetic the poetry and even the very dry facts ridiculing all these different governmental ideas of citizenship and what qualifies you we we turn the mirror onto it and we look at it and we laugh at it it sounds ridiculous when you pair it to what Una Marston saying or whistle it's just it put it put in its place and i love the way how we are allowed to use our voices to do that to stretch those words to really give them the attention that the kind of

attention that they deserve which is one of ridicule and it's not a nonsense um and it's part of what she's saying about devaluing that system and then representing the alternative which has nothing to do with what we have been formerly taught it's another uh another approach which is so rich with possibilities and helps to kind of define a possible future it's a another kind of enlightenment when we think of the the zenith of of the atlantic slave trade that happened it occurred during the so-called age of enlightenment

what was happening there the horror it you have to you have to question you have to ignore the classical idea of enlightenment because it wasn't enlightened at all it allowed it really wasn't and it's yeah we'll be kind of be raised on this thing of this is and think i'll handle it this was happening during this period it's not enlightenment so it's refreshing and and empowering infinity minus infinity provides this empowering platform of of true enlightenment which is based on non-western ideas and philosophies

and are age old and i just wanted to say something about actually movement aspect terms of history and something that baldwin says in that it's you know we carry it within us we carry our history within us and that keeps it alive as well it's not just a dry fact and that's something that is explored brilliantly in the film um i think with regards to possible artistic methods i'm of course biased as a poet um one of the things i mean my aesthetics are completely retrograde maybe 95 retrograde and i

And I'm always suspicious of the now because when someone approaches me with the now, I think of them as having a motive of trying to deflect me of something that's happened in the past. So all of this obsession with the now and the new and what's going to come doesn't really interest me intellectually. I think the firm does a great job in examining the historical record creatively. and I think that's what we need to do. I mean, we don't know a fraction, we only know a fraction of our history and what we think we know is so minuscule with regards to what actually went on.

I mean, to think if you are a white, British, progressive liberal someone whose parents perhaps were in solidarity with you know the workers movements that happened in this country pre-Thatcher unions someone who is engaged you know critically and you might be let's say you're you were I don't know 35 40 years old in 2015, yet had absolutely no idea that when, you know, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, I think that's what it's called, was removing money from your paycheck, that part of that money

was literally going to pay off the debt paid to enslavers, when all along you've been living this happy life thinking you know you're down with the struggle and you you you know you you've evolved from your from your the actions and activities of your ancestors you understand it when maybe a conservative counterpart says you know all of that stuff happened in the past and we're not like that and we would never think to do that anymore we've learned our mistakes you actually have been engaged in the activity of enslavement up until 2015. And if you look even closer, you will probably find that you've been engaged in the activity of enslavement even now as we are having

this conversation. So access to the historical record, analyzing it, synthesizing it in new creative ways, or not new creative ways, but in creative ways, continuing those activities. That's what my, you know, that's what my poetic interest is. That's why I think Blisson's presence in the film is so important, because you can pick up a Blisson book and you can read it. It's the time is all of time. You know, that's the brilliance in his work is you don't know what time period he's talking about um and there aren't these sort of um um chronological clues that everyone who uh is interested in the now um is obsessed with

putting in their work you know i don't care what street you grew up on you know that's not interesting to me what street you grew up on or or what um what the you know what the shops were or what you were watching on television, that doesn't help me understand your struggle. It clues me into a time period and I can read what I want into that. But what I'm interested in is how these pernicious phenomena are fed, how we continue to feed them. And the time period at which we're doing it is not important. It's similar to what Elaine is saying, that enlightenment wasn't very enlightened. after all and you know it's a tool of capitalism to try to get us to steer away from the causations

of the problems that we are dealing with today we just want solutions to them and I don't think we're ever going to find solutions to them if we don't know what if we don't know what the the causes of them are. And so I think, you know, my, my, my, the artists that I'm interested in the, the theories that I'm interested in are always rooted in a, in a deep examination of the historical record. I mean, we talked about Hartmann often and, you know, critical fabulation is exactly the kind of artistic method that we need, you know, in what we like to imagine is a very advanced moment. You know, we think of the

21st century as being a very advanced moment in the Anthropocene. And, you know, there's one thing I could say is that we are not as evolved as we like to think that we are, no matter the technology that we have, no matter the strides that we've made, all of the work that was done in the last 50 years, if we think about the United States and the United Kingdom's relationship to that and how it's been used to help struggles in this country, all of the work that was done in the last 50 years has been undone since 2016. and so it's not a surprise you know that we are seeing the spate of uh police murders

almost at the level that we were seeing them before um you know the 1950s and the the sort of the sort of early rebellions of what we now know uh as the civil civil rights movement it is it is absolutely no surprise and we don't even have to go back far in the historical record to see these these tropes you know and and and connecting the people who have been who've been working as hard as we think we're working against them they're also our counterparts who are working to feed them and to perpetuate them. And, you know, there's some of the same people

and some of the same families. You know, when that tweet came out in 2015, who started looking at the families? You know, what families benefited from those initial payments in the 18th and 19th century? Who are they now? What are they doing now? What companies do they own? You know, are they your neighbours? You know? Black British people whose ancestors were enslaved by these same people that received payments, were they themselves, with their own hard-earned money, paying back these enslavers? And so, you know, again, it's a creative, critical examination of the historical record, by any means necessary. Thank you, Dante. Thank you all. I think

you know you were talking about the um the I think one of the things that we are experiencing is this sense of uh how how do we act um together you know and Essie was talking about um different kind of cultural um relationships to thinking around acting together um and this leads me to this is leading me to this question on polyvocality which was a very important part of the film this relationship to embodiment of the polyvocal which you know actually is set up

to, you know, as a form of exclusive expression by signifying and operating through kind of univocality. And it is, and language, super linearity is not coherent within, which we cannot find its coordinates within a multidimensional body, within a multidimensional figure. Right. The poly vocal is is is is is more connected to a kind of rhizomic state of being and of politics and draws upon all of our draws upon the vocality for sure.

but then can also draw upon other languages of expression, be they the choreographed body, the dancing body, the singing body, the losing the ability to actually speak and improvise together with sounds, with the voice. the film was very much based on the senses five senses the breath being one of them which is supposed to take you into a higher state of nirvana where all life is there all life exists it's a powerful all of history all of time life energy as you know just exists and you feel it

embodied when you go with the breath that was also one of the senses in the film so the idea of being a good subject who you know responds I think by themselves is a kind of you know the corporeal coordinates have to extend into this multi-dimensional being which for me is the history if you like of struggle here in Britain and also in all the imperial ports which was multi-ethnic rebellions against capitalism um so the kind of let's say the polyvocal semiotics or the polyvocal aesthetics were also drawn from uh Sadia Hartman's um

writing which you can find more information about if you look at the Lux Twitter page they have given I mean I think most of you here know who Sadia Hartman is but it is there when in which she talks about the Greek etymology of the chorus of the word chorus which refers to a dance within the enclosure this leads Sadia Hartman to propose the chorus as a vehicle in which acts of collaboration and improvisation unfold within the space of enclosure infinity minus infinity adopts this idea of chorus by combining elaine's recitations of the poetry

of bruna marson in dialogue with dante's recitations of the poetry of edward glisson and with dante and elaine's recitations and improvisations of the 1948 british nationality Act with Essie's recitation of the narrative of Mary Prince, just to name four moments in Infinity Minus Infinity. What can we say about the improvisation of polyvocality and aesthetics of the chorus within, as I was saying before, this moment where we have to think from the multiple sites of anti-blackness um of struggle against anti-blackness as one could this possibly

be what we need if we ever get there in relation to a new international left not that Keir Starmer wants us to go there by the way but anyway um could you actually repeat the question the final question yes so what can we say um i drew upon all those moments in infinity minus infinity where you dante and elaine were doing these different recitations what can we say of the improvisation of polyvocality and aesthetics of the chorus within maybe the context of the sites of struggle against anti-blackness

how how does the improvisation of polyvocality work now and it doesn't necessarily have to be artistic does it really I mean I mean it can be but it can also be many things so hmm also take a question now if you want it would be nice before we start taking questions to finish the thread of thought that Kojo and I were moving through I mean I've got one response I don't know if it's it's directly related to to your uh question but my character in inverted commas

who I see as the manifestation or multiple manifestations of a deity of some kind. So my character speaks in slightly modulated, you know, with slightly modulated differences each time she speaks. This character I consider to act in a mediumistic way as a channel for both transmission and reception of information from different time zones and different spatial zones. one of the things that this character does is she speaks or the voice of Mary Prince

she speaks the voice of Mary Prince at one point in the film she isn't Mary Prince herself but she allows the words of Mary Prince to come through and I thought it was important to include some of the words of Mary Prince What you have is an extreme sort of condensation of some of the words of Mary Prince taken from the autobiography of Mary Prince. But I thought it was important to bring an actual historical element of slavery into the picture.

Mary Prince was a slave woman born in Antigua was taken to Bermuda in 1829 she was brought to the UK by her owner and she published she tried to seek her freedom and in 1831 her autobiography was published which runs basically consistent with the dates of the abolition of slavery um so i thought it was important to hear the testimony of someone at that time and then so that's one point and then later on you hear um a voice right at the end you

hear a voice speaking in an african uh accent and at no other point have you heard that and i wanted really to again to have that particular character speak she speaks with reference to fan or at that point and not just fan or but hartman you know many other people but i thought one of the interesting um propositions there in giving her an african accent was to position an african character as a voice of authority because so often that's not the case you know we're kind of in this country i thank you dante for pointing out that the problem with using we okay universalizing we

so i say that with full understanding of what i'm doing i'm talking about generally people in the uk But I think even someone like myself is used to not hearing the authority of African voices. Or, in fact, any black voices, to be honest, outside of particular very narrow channels of recognition. So that was kind of important to me as a way of ending this thing, because of course, one of the things that this film is also about is the Anthropocene and the relationship between

histories of black expropriation, extraction from native lands and the Anthropocene. So this character brings all those together. um so yeah so for me polyvocality was about finding different registers very subtle variations in register which would allow people to yeah sorry you want to say something carry on carry on oh well just allow people to position themselves in relation to blackness in slightly different ways so you had kind of yeah I mean you had like uh so I think often people are have an expectation that when you are um being addressed by a black person or be in the mode of the storyteller

you know the mode of the the um either to the traditional storyteller or the fabulist or even kind of currently the science fiction after a future storyteller all of which is hugely important all of which shouldn't be discounted but these other modes of address are also equally important because they tend to be excluded from our general frame of reference for no very good reason where we know the reasons but you know so it's kind of useful to hear you know um or to to explore um the possibility of receiving information in slightly modulated ways and see how people would pick up on that i think just thanks essie i think just to say that one of the things i wrote

down i wanted to say in relation to polyvocality was that the polyvocality was not only in the expression that happened in the film it was also in the dynamics that i think that we are sensitized to like Dante was saying we're already sensitized to many different forms of racism traumas cultural responses to them literary responses poetic responses and sonic responses and cinematic responses we are aware of all of it right in a way and together However, I think it was a very beautiful thing to be making this work with all of you guys, but also with our editor and others, in that they, and with Anna P, who did the dance and choreographed her sequences,

that there was this there was this collective sense of sensitivity you know of you know what how how to sound how to speak what to speak what to improvise like everything coalesced in some way and there was a kind of listening going on on a very um on a level that at some points I could just feel that everyone was very much together like as a kind of many-headed being in a way um coalescing the ideas and listening to each other speak um a lot is said about collectivity um you know uh and various collectives from other other decades um i would say

that as an existing collective uh we are still very much learning about how to be a collective and of course if times were different you know one has dreams of living in some kind of of constantly producing environment um you know that's what uh we should be able to do we should be able to live like that at this point in britain um you know us of our generation should be able to be doing this kind of work more and more and more and supporting um many other people younger people um so i just wanted to talk about the kind of sensitized nature of how the ideas came about

and how the responses dante and elaine's and yours um how you kind of quick very quickly understood what we were kind of talking about and we understood what you were talking about and that was a really beautiful experience to go through so I don't really have much to add to that because this was a beautiful experience to live through the one thing I wanted to say about the role of improvisation that it allows

that freedom and it's the opposite of the restrictions that were being imposed through the British Nationality Act which is why I enjoyed manipulating the words along with Dante in the way that it did because it allowed for a freedom that was being denied and has been denied to so many and also the feeling of moving through time each text took us to a different place take it forward as well so that we were I felt like a sentinel or kind of just Greek chorus at

one point and then also the individual where I was speaking Una Marson's text because she wrote that in the 1940s and I've experienced the same things with the to give the poem nigger and it I know that feeling and I know that anger and it's the same and I had to reflect on it It was very hard to say, to recite it, but it needed to happen because that experience is still being played out, as we know. Yes, that's all I really wanted to say. I would only add that I've been thinking recently about Carolyn Randall Williams's opinion piece in the New York Times a few days ago.

So it was in conversation with the monuments being pulled down. And she wrote very poetically about how she herself is a monument of that time period. And I think that also relates to polyvocality. Black people, people of the African diaspora, who are the product of the great enslavement, are monuments to that time period.

We are, you know, there's, we, our bodies are the enclosure, you know, it encloses not only genetically, you know, genetic material, which is, which is polyvocal, but linguistically, people in, you know, members of the African diaspora have had to learn the language of their oppressors. And I don't mean the specific languages, English, French, et cetera. We've had to learn their body languages. We've had to learn how to anticipate their thinking. We had to acquiesce to the mercurial natures of their emotions.

those things have been passed down to us from our ancient ancestors and also our immediate ancestors, emotionally and also in the form of lessons. And so I think what, Anjali, what you're describing when we all came together is that, you know, we, those things begin to blend when we're in a room and we're in a space with each other. And all of those enclosures begin to merge sort of through the process of osmosis. You know, we are present with one another and there's something inside of us.

There may be one facet of us that recognizes a similar facet in another person of the same diaspora. And you get all of that interweaving. And I think polyvocality is, you know, can't encompass all of the different layers of that. That word can't encompass it, perhaps polyphony, because it's more than just the voice, you know. It's more than just the voice. It's an attitude of the body. It's an attitude of the mind. And even more importantly, it's an attitude of the spirit. Thank you, Dante. That's a really good way of thinking. So I just want to add one more point to that kind of flow of thought and then we'll move into questions.

I mean, I think part of the project, and I think it's to do with this question of aesthetic justice, is the question of acting in concert. You know, the double meaning of concert. Concert in the sense that we know it, which has an aesthetic meaning, and then concert as a social meaning, i.e. gathering. So this kind of the specific aesthetic sociality of acting in concert. And I think what was particular to infinity minus infinity, and I think part of what an aesthetic of justice might entail

is a question of trans temporal concert. It's acting in concert across times. so not only in this time now 2020 2019 but acting in concert with different times and I think this effort to act in concert with different times whether those times are 1833 or 2030 or 1948 you know that that is the project how to do how to create a condition under which you act in concert with entities from different times before you and times yet to come and there

are different ways of doing that you know i think of edward brathwaite's uh analysis of limbo of limbo as a choreographic as a choreography of the hold limbo as a Caribbean aesthetic that emerges from the cramped conditions of the slave ship and I think of Brathwaite's notion of congregational kinesis, congregational movement you know and i think a congregational movement across time and i think you know with that being entirely without being entirely you know without being entirely conscious of all of this these are

the kinds of things we were grasping towards you know when i look back this is the kind of things we're trying to work out trying to work out a trans-historical trans-temporal congregational kinetics and a congregational kinesis this is what we were trying to do and uh exactly elaine has just sent me this quotation from brathwaite my ghost walks in your footsteps exactly these are the kind of things we're trying to sustain and create and i think these have a lot to do with the question of of an aesthetic justice um so so maybe now's a good moment for us to go to uh different questions if we have any questions now would be a moment to

put them to our guests um because of course as you can see we could talk among ourselves but if somebody has some questions maybe now's the time to go to those questions and would you like to unmute um um amy jackson and amy jackson can ask her question hi there can you hear me okay hello hi hi hi thank you so much this is an excellent talk and it's It's wonderful to have had the opportunity to join this. I have a question around this international left movement, which you mentioned earlier. You also talked a bit about polyvocality.

And one of the issues that I find is that when trying to have conversations through art, I'm an artist, I make art myself. And I also work in responsible investments, trying to help the investment industry learn how to actually be responsible for the first time and take these sorts of issues into consideration with large amounts of money. And one thing that I find incredibly difficult is communicating these complex issues to people who are essentially just ignorant. and I have a lot of conversations with very intellectual people like yourself people who already agree with me who have similar viewpoints and I spend a long time philosophizing about this

talking about it in an articulate way and feeling really happy at the end of that conversation that everyone's on the same page but in reality when trying to communicate these sorts of issues to people who really do not agree and come from the right it's very hard to really get to that level of conversation which these people really relate to and I know that's more of a statement than a question but I suppose what I'm trying to understand is how can art help with these sorts of feelings and emotions when a lot of the time art is almost too intellectualized for people who need to engage with it and need to understand its themes understand it and in conversation how can we also learn from that and find a way to communicate these things in in in language which

some people who only understand fear and hate know how to to speak in if that makes sense yeah um i um i think that i i can understand the frustration i mean i will answer first maybe um kojo you would also like to respond to that or se um i i agree that it is difficult to have conversations with people who just agree because uh as we are all agreeing while we're

all agreeing our rights are all being dismantled and um and the violence is increasing around us I would say it's it is important to talk to people who don't agree and why do they need what kind of language do they need in order to dismantle systemic racism that is not clear enough that is not already clear You know, I think it's a, I think it's, I think one is confronted with the fact that

one has to create, I mean, it is uncomfortable to talk about such things with people who and tell you that you are being over complicated that is a way of shutting you down um so that would be my initial response but i would welcome other responses by so any of my fellow panelists um i'm not 100 sure how to answer your question but i think one of the uh concerns that arise from this question is the recognition that groups of people with power

will not relinquish their power without the utmost struggle. I think possibly one of the things that this film does at least is to uncover the archive and a version of the archive of Great Britain which, hang on, hello can you hear me? Sorry I got cut out briefly. So one of the things that this film does is to uncover some of the archive of Britain's you know relationship to its black citizens or its disavowal of its black citizens and one of

the things it hints at but doesn't cover is the way that people who took power at a certain period of time, let's call it the birth of colonialism, which coincided with the birth of the banking system which coincided with the birth of let's say um paper money which coincided with the birth of the insurance system when you have all of these in place all of these kind of factors in place you have a very very powerful and stable set of institutions set of structures that are not

going to be destabilised any time soon. But perhaps one of the things that reinforces their power position is the disavowal of their role in violence, is the disavowal of their role in forms of behaviour that are considered ethically unacceptable. So one of the reasons why Britain has a refusal to accept its role in slavery is because at a certain point in time, it became ethically unacceptable to be a slaver.

So all the people who had a history, a past in slavery, a very recent past in slavery, chose not to make that a clear aspect of their a clear aspect of their identity instead it got transmuted into inarticulate forms such as monuments statues buildings architecture institutions okay and um the direct connection between individuals and that violent past became disavowed and perhaps there's a way in which the relationship between what is ethically unacceptable and structures of power can be made clearer to these people in visual form yeah um

I can't say what that visual form might take but there needs to be some kind of way in which that this juncture is kind of closed in which people can't just walk away and say that enough had nothing to do with us that was all a long time ago and we didn't know anything about it and look at our great you know building at lloyds of london it had nothing to do with us it does has everything to do with the structure of the establishment and the structure of power in this country has everything to do with colonialism slavery etc and that history that relationship is one that is uh you know it's occluded as Kejo says it's both consciously and unconsciously occluded from the general frame of reference in the UK that doesn't have to be the case within the past

three months there's been an acceleration of understanding of that relationship in a way that the past 200 years have not allowed for so it's quite possible that within the next three further three months or the next six months there'll be an even greater understanding of breaking apart somehow of these networks these reified networks of privilege possibly I don't know but that's the only way I can answer that which isn't very clear or very precise I'm afraid um I just want to jump in because to answer Amy's question, I don't think that you can help them. I think you might be able to enable them to help themselves. But as long as whomever you are trying to help

is comfortable, they're not going to change. And it is the discomfort that, you know, really is the catalyst for the change so you can help them develop critical thinking skills for themselves because that's the only way that they're going to then be able to understand some of the things that we've discussed and then want to make the change on their own but that's not likely to happen particularly if you're talking to adults who are living a very comfortable lifestyle and are caught up in that and trying to provide that same comfortable lifestyle or better for their children or for the generations that are proceeding. If you want to help the cause, as it were, or the global struggle for equality, then you have to do everything within your power to make it ethically

unacceptable to be rich. And that's really the answer. And it sounds to me like the profession you're in is the opposite of that so instead of you know uh working to figure out how we get people who are already wealthy to spend their money on good causes we need to work to figure out how we decrease the number of people who are that wealthy on the planet thank you dante i think precisely that is the correct response thank you sc as well and we had a question from somebody called Leandro Nerefu who I think and I hope

we have answered your question you did mention the anthropologist anthropologist Gloria Becker if you have a further question please ask it there is a question from which I'm going to take not next, but after the question from, by someone called Uwana Paraben, that's after Richard Cousins, who is going to ask the next question. Could we open up, could we unmute Richard Cousins, please, son? Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me? Great. Well, thank you for this discussion and for the film. I just wondered in terms of the process, you mentioned the word chorus, if you could say something

about working together as a chorus in making the film, if you could add anything more about that? I think, as I was saying before, but maybe I can elaborate on that a little bit more. When we were talking earlier, Richard, and I have to say Richard was our first collaborator. He came with us. We made this film called Otolith One in zero gravity. And he was there in the airplane going up and down in zero gravity with us back in 2000. and three so Richard is an old friend and ally so thank you for that question Richard

how can I talk about that I mean I think there is a spiritual bond which comes out of a political affinity between us all which I'm just keen to continue to explore but I also think there is something about filmmaking when you work with people over a period of time and you keep at it new things open up you learn about each other's politics about each other's limits about each other's affinities and I think when it comes to thinking around you know black aesthetics or

a tradition of the black avant-garde or you know histories of multi-ethnic rebellion or anti-racist struggle in this country or um and all that has come out of that culturally and you know i mean i would love to also hear from elaine in relation to her work with um as a vocalist in relation to working with other musicians and other people and her work on the avant-garde of female black female musicians and but I can say in this experience I think we are so highly sensitized when we gather

to the amnesias and the violences that are performed all the time we're highly sensitive to every step it wasn't like black lives matter protests happened here and it was like we all woke up not at all um you know we are not woke zombies we are highly um um sleep we're sleepless in fact We are, we cannot sleep, I think, with the sense of depression, but also with the sense of no desire to just make work about it and to come together and to think about it.

So I think the chorus developed very much out of a deep listening to each other and out of a sense of when to when to act, when to speak and when to participate. Elaine, would you like to maybe respond or Richard, do you have anything to add or Kourjo, Dante? When working in a collective in this way, trust is so important. Trusting the process, the person that's directing you, trusting yourself to be open to the process

and to be able to communicate ideas in a very succinct and direct way and a very honest way. And as a vocalist who works with words all the time, but also in dismantling words to bring new meaning and reinforce ideas, it was very interesting for me to be on this project. that was pushing me through time in itself, through words. And actually you asked about my work where I reference other vocalists,

black avant-garde vocalists, and someone like Jeannie Lee, who worked between jazz, but also contemporary music, avant-garde music, working with people like John Cage, Morton Feltman, and also with sound poets and people like Jackson Mackle. Her whole emphasis of the movement of words, the choreography of words, the embodiment of words through the voice, of gracious to me because it's something that I endeavor to do with my own work and and I'm called on for this project that's called on to do similarly um but there's this thing of the

release of the voice where words themselves can't express the deeper meanings of rage or joy exhaustion happiness sadness and it becomes sound and that is the universal aspect of working with the voice that you don't need to understand the language to learn a language through the body the way the body is the way the body moves it holds itself and also the vocalization and that's that is explored in some ways in infinity minus infinity but it was if it wasn't explicit it was something that I was thinking about in the way that I worked with text

and then further improvised on it um it's not often you have that opportunity to explore in that wave I'm not that experienced in working in film and it's a much slower process than in some ways it's a much slower process in situ when you're putting it together and you have no idea what the final outcome will be and whereas the way I work it's much more immediate with musicians having the concept, mining these different ideas, being open to being moved into a different direction from the one that you thought you were going in and seeing where that takes you. And it's that level of freedom is very exciting for me. What I'm happy about

with this project, with the Autolith Group, is that we were all able to be malleable as well within the piece and allow it to breathe allow the process the process and what we were feeling and what we were thinking and what we were doing it was very it was flexible even though there was depression it breathed it's this entity it was very it was so visceral it's tangible it was there could feel it it was in the air and I was thinking about what Dante said earlier about being boxed in we were boxed in because we were in a black black box but we weren't staying artistically or creatively. I would just add that, I mean, I said something about this earlier

when I spoke about how a facet in me would respond to something in Elaine and vice versa. And then we didn't work directly with Essie or some of the other performers, but when Anna, who is the dancer in the film, we would watch her dance and she would watch us do our, you know, recitations of the poetry. And we would talk to one another in between breaks. And so there's that kind of chorus. And then there's the individual. Well, not the individual, but then there's the smaller configuration of the chorus because you have the individual performer and their relationship with

the text so for me I feel very much in chorus with Glissant and I helped choose some of the Glissant texts that were in the film and and chose them for specific reasons because they spoke to something within me um but over that um well Richard you must know this because you've worked with uh Anjali and Kudjo but they're master improvisers and so um intellectually improvisers So when you are with them, a lot of things are being created out of the process of creation. So that is sort of, you know, that feels very much like a chorus. it doesn't feel like, I too am like Elaine and I don't have very much experience in film, but it

doesn't feel like the stereotype of having the director tell you to do something or a director feeling like there's this really finite thing that they want. It's more collaboratively generative than that. And that feels very much like a chorus. Having been a chorister when I was younger and thinking about you know maybe a person three people over from me singing a note that was sharp or flat or too loud or not loud enough and having to respond to that it feels much more like that um the process of working with them thank you dante i think you know for this project this kind of notion of the chorus was really enacted at every stage in the sense that everybody

brought material to the project so there was no single script there were several texts which people either wrote or presented which if and they performed and the performance was a kind of real-time editing um and then so and that was happening both in the research phase and in the performance phase and in fact of course in the editing phase but i would say the most profound way i would say is that the project was a a chorus between the living and the dead that's what i would say the chorus function is we were trying to make a chorus

between the living and the dead. Certain texts, the question was to, as Essie says, to create a certain mediumistic relation, whether that's Una Marson or Mary Prince or Edouard Glissant, these moments in which the dead spoke again not in their own voice but in another voice this I think is the kind of this relates this question of the trans temporal again this chorus between the living and the dead and you

know I think that was there were some special moments at every stage from research to performance to editing in which this question of the chorus between the living and the dead starts to starts to actually be operative it's actually working you know. Can I make a point here just in reference to um an expanded version of that which is that i remember coach one of the things that you said to me early on was that i want to explore the notion of the ice core the phenomenon of the ice core and for those who don't possibly don't know ice cores are

literally extracted cores of ice from the arctic or antarctic and use them to analyze kind of level of CO2 emissions and other particulates in the atmosphere over time, like a tree ring. So Kojo was interested in this notion of, I guess, animating what are known as inanimate objects, how to give a kind of geologic subjectivity to inanimate objects. So therefore, how to expand your frame of reference of what in the world matters. so I took this on board and kind of tried to grapple with with what an ice core would say

or what an ice core how an ice core would choose to vocalize what it would choose to vocalize and so there was a little sort of poetic bit which talks about being sliced open examining auguries of the future and you know and this kind of little scene came from you know the notion of of one nice core you know the geologic subjectivity of the nice core and how that would be related to the subjectivity of black people also over time because there was a strong correlation in terms of extraction in terms of kind of uh transportation of bodies in terms of historical records being visible within you know supposedly both opaque and transparent kind

of forms of matter so it's kind of like interesting that that was also part of the chorus you know how do you expand the frame of a chorus to objects which aren't supposed to be of an equivalent nature as human beings or various types of humans so we were looking at the non-human as a scale of reference as well as you know the hierarchies of humanity as well yeah no thanks that's a that's a really crucial element in the whole work um the uh the influence of Catherine Youssef as a thinker whose work we all we all engaged with precisely because she's

she's really done a lot to connect these questions of geological subjectivity to questions of racial capitalism she's really worked to bring together the question of the capitalist scene with the question of racial capitalist violence so that effectively they are one and the same this is one of the purposes one of the ambitions and aspirations of the work to say that um the capital scene and racial capitalism are one and the same they are indivisible um and then it becomes a question of um as we talked about a lot developing

an interscalar vehicle developing what the the the scholar gabrielle hecht calls an interscalar vehicle which can move across times and can move across entities so that it becomes clear that racial capitalism and the capitalisme are one and the same