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| I once wrote a silent song.[4] The song was the result of gathering black feminist texts, and its composition emerged as part of a peer-reviewed artistic-research process centering citations as a relational, collective and spatial practice. The gathering of texts involved viewing ‘texts’ broadly, including music, art, literature, poetry, and other creative practices — as opposed to exclusively academic texts in the traditional sense. Seeking to give material form to opacities and erasures, I was reminded by my peer, the ways in which objects indeed resist.[5] The ‘song’ therefore, inspired a method for a reimagined spatial practice, informed by black feminist thought: the gathering and sharing of knowledge as intimately connected to the practice of making space, the cultivation of the social forms and processes for sharing liberatory practices for survival and livable futures in the present. As such, this experimental process led to the formulation of rethinking spaces for learning and sharing. Bringing together an interdisciplinary cohort annually to reimagine a spatial practice beyond architecture at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, for the reflective and process-oriented reconstructions towards black feminist spatial futures.[6]
Black feminist theorizing is a liberatory practice. It demands for the necessity for sharing knowledge with the capacity to transcend the bounds of traditional academic and scholarly form. It tends to scale; to the invisible, mundane, intimate, and sensory; to the hyper-visible, the spectacle, the explicit and expressive; with attention to how all scales despite seemingly separated by distance are intimately, and always already in relation and interconnected. It is material, while simultaneously embracing the immaterial. It embraces other cosmologies. It considers temporalities. It refuses linearity. Critically, black feminist thought attends to slow violence; the gradual, often invisible, and insidious forms of harm that disproportionately affect those are forced navigating layers of systemic, and anti-black global architectures and the affective labour of transformation. Therefore, “black feminist thought is also necessarily an art of survival.”[7]
Attending the gathering and sharing of knowledge of survival, as well as its forms. I find songs useful in their capacity to touch, hold and express complex emotions, not always safe to express, but can be felt through fleeting, poetic and fugitive forms in navigating the precarity of black lives.[8] “The song” writes theorist and writer Kathrine McKittrick, invites the ability to “feel-with.” Songs reverberate, and I learn from her, what she has learned from others; how songs “helps us think consciousness, without being distracted by the demand for clarity.”[9] Neither rational nor linear, songs offer the ability to provoke reverie, thought, understanding and knowing through an embodied and sensorial sensibility.
Spatially, the gathering of knowledge of survival shape, nourishes and maintains transient, informal, and ephemeral spaces. It is a practice of refuge, both symbolically and materially, but it is also a practice for radical transformation which allows for the evading of co-optation, appropriation and distortion. The term "fugitive" often refers to someone who is in flight, fleeing oppression and seeking freedom. Drawing from black study the concept of ‘fugitivity’ or ‘taking flight’ emphasizes acts of resistance, refusal, and escape from systems of control, surveillance, and dehumanization. It emerges as a signature idiom of black diasporic culture and pathway for realizing the aspirations of other possible futures, in the present. ‘Taking flight’, therefore, evokes the idea of anti-capture; the escape from structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialist grammars and frameworks that have historically sought to control through capture, domination and confinement. While at the same time, also signaling practices of building and maintaining structures of care, vitality and support.
Critically, themes of escape and refuge speak to the ways in which individuals, groups and communities have been forced to adapt to navigate and attend to vulnerabilities within systems of oppression. Much like the hidden messages in songs passed between enslaved people of African descent; it is sharing of knowledge that demands opacity. Not restricted to literal flight from capture, the concept of ‘fugitivity’ therefore, transcends binary understandings of oppression, and opens towards a space irregularity and possibility in which freedom and unfreedom perpetually coexist in acts of refusal to be captured, or reduced within frameworks of oppressive logics. As such, it spatially, and conceptually flows like an undercurrent, reconstructing the grounds in spaces where escaping harm has meant being forced to hide in plain sight, navigating silences, coded language, and creative expression, as quiet resistance. Which involves forging ‘refuge’ from external circumstances and to forge an interior space within a real or imagined orbit in everyday, low-key situations cultivated for mutual care and support. Through songs and other messaging systems and support-networks, abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman constructed a fugitive ‘map’ beyond the physical, leading a path towards freedom famously known as the Underground railroad. Its transient, informal, ephemeral spatiality and illegibility was key. Fugitivity is therefore, not strictly a historical phenomenon or theory, but a practice—a method—for apprehending, imagining and practicing the world otherwise.
Songs, Kathrine McKittrick argues, offer knowledge outside and across disciplinary bounds, and black knowledge traditions have “always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world”. Critically, black methodologies do not seek to “capture something or someone”, but to question the analytical work of capturing, and the desire to capture things and beings.[10] From a relational perspective, thinking radically across disciplinary bounds, is therefore also theorizing “from a black sense of place”, and more importantly, from a sense of place that changes the kinds of questions we ask. “It is not just about reading outside our discipline,” it is at the sametime also about “sharing ideas comprehensively and moving these ideas into new contexts and places.” McKittrick suggests we read creative texts as theoretical texts,.Thinking, writing and imagining across texts, disciplines, histories, and genres have the ability to unsettles colonial logics. “What happens” she asks, “if the groove or the song gives insight to the theoretical frame?”[11]
In this respect, the experimentation forms for sharing ideas and theorizing, is part of a long tradition which resists easy definition, and is characterized by its multi-dimensional approach to liberation. It involves innovations and interventions of scholarly forms that disrupts and reconstructs academic norms, which playfully and rigorously employs creative and non-traditional formats, as well as pop cultural and other creative texts — all of which are embraced as valid scholarly expressions. In Dear Science and Other Stories, McKittrick draws connections between theorizing and black expressive practices such as music, poetry, and storytelling. The table of content is structured accordingly, framing it in part as a playlist to emphasize the interconnectedness of black cultural expressions, storytelling, and theory. While the book itself doesn't explicitly label its table of contents as a "playlist," the thematic chapters and essays flow like tracks on a mixtape, with each section contributing to a larger conceptual and emotional experience. Each chapter resonates as a track with its rhythm, tempo, and message, contributing to an overarching narrative. Like a playlist, the book invites readers to engage with its parts and whole, revisiting chapters (or tracks) in different orders or contexts to uncover new meanings. It invites that the reader listens to the text, it engages all the senses.
Notably, theorist and writer Tina Campt's poetic use of verses in A Black Gaze, structures her argument for how black visuality is not just about seeing, but also listening. It demands moving beyond passive observations, towards receptive and embodied engagements. Which requires an receptive, accountable and participatory form of witnessing that is attuned to the complexities and nuances of black existence. The verse-structure disrupts linear narration, and slows down the reader, encouraging contemplation and engagement with the text on a more visceral level. The structure and poetic language, also disrupts conventional academic prose by emphasizing the rhythm, emotion, and embodiment of black experiences in visual culture. The form allows her to move beyond rigid academic analysis and instead evoke the deep emotional and sensorial impact of black visual art. The poetic nature of her writing is deeply connected to black oral traditions, emphasizing the sonic and vibrational qualities of black life. Furthermore, her use of verses echoes the fugitive aesthetics she examines. By shifting between prose and poetic fragments, she enacts a form of refusal against dominant conventions, much like the artists she discusses refuse dominant visual regimes. Critically, by applying the verse structure to her writing, Campt transforms the reading experience, making it more immersive and aligned with the radical aesthetics of the artists she studies.
Similarly, but differing in structure and method, theorist and writer Saidyia Hartman evokes the ‘chorus’ employing lyrical form informed by improvisational and black oral traditions. In "Wayward Lives” the chorus becomes the protagonist in her narrative reconstruction of the “beautiful experiments” of the “wayward”. Her method of “close narration” insists on the imaginative work necessary to honor lives erased by the archive, by “inhabit the intimate dimensions” for the recreation of the voices and intimate lives of the young, black queer women at the turn of the twentieth, who have largely been erased from official archives. In this way, the chorus not only functions as a literary device, but a deeply political and ethical method of writing history. In its structure Hartman’s chorus is deeply influenced by black oral traditions, particularly the call-and-response form of storytelling. It highlights the experiences of a group showing how their lives are interwoven. As a “dance within an enclosure,” different voices respond to each other, creating an ongoing dialogue that resists closure and fixed meaning. Critically for Hartman the “intimate realm is an extension of the social world… to create other networks of love and affiliation is to be involved in the work of challenging and remaking the terms of sociality”.[12]
These interventions and innovations of scholarly form do work beyond academic writing, they perform an action. Theorist and writer Barbara Christian insists we must understand black feminist ‘theorizing’ as a verb rather than a noun –– shared in “narrative forms in the stories we create, in the “play with language”. She describes how “the articulation of a theory is a gathering place”. It gathers, and it is a gathering that sometimes provides “a point of rest as the process rushes on, insisting that you follow.” It is not prescriptive, but offers an important opening towards imaginary potential, lessons, affirmation or support “How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness?” Christian asks, “the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?”[13]. The poetical is ethical. As such, following Christian attention to form, performs what artist, theorist and writer Denise Ferriera da Silva refers to as a ‘black feminist poethics’ as a radical framework, which seeks to abolish Enlightenment thought and practice.[14]
Theorizing as a verb, demands another ethics in which aesthetic or creative forms of knowledge are always already underpinned by a liberatory praxis. Critically, theorizing as a verb reconstructs the idea of pedagogy, and pedagogical spaces. This is the foundation of Reconstructions at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Despite its formulations as an advanced course, it is not a course in the traditional sense. Instead, it brings together an interdisciplinary cohort annually, for an reflective and process-oriented reconstructions of black feminist spatial futures. What does this look like?
It takes many shapes. Informed the gathering and sharing of knowledge of survival, as well as its forms, the approaches that we employ are relational; embodied and poetic and includes experimental approaches that center emotional and affective labor, forms of sharing knowledge and care, both in terms of envisioning future practice as well as future ways of living. It signals a collective practice of fugitive movement and gatherings where spaces of collectivity are untethered from the enclosures of ‘truth’ category and purpose. Informed by mutual sharing, care and support with an emphasis on challenging and remaking the terms of sociality. Reconstructions is perhaps, then, best understood as a social practice, which seeks to transcend institutional boundaries with the ambition of transforming knowledge from something to be consumed, into something that is shared, experienced, lived and enacted in community.
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