"We become with each other or not at all"
Artist talk by Davinia-Ann Robinson and Giulia Astesani,
Moderated by co-curator Francesca Astesani
Audre Lorde - Eye to Eye: Black Women and Anger
Sriwhana Spong, ‘Castle-Crystal’ 2019
(3.16 - 4.22)
Davinia-Ann Robinson - Damp Atmosphere
two movements, sinking and needing this for that shapes it, another movement of moving away or refusing it.
Bodies
Skin
Flesh
Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman speaking in 2014 at Arika (49:24-50:34)
To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch, Hortense Spillers. (2018) at STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE
Quote taken from Marge Piercy's, Feminist Science Fiction Novel, Women On The Edge of Time
Matter
Quote taken from: A Billion Black
Anthropocenes or None,
Kathryn Yusoff
To differentiate between the familiar and the strange is to mark out the inside and outside of bodily space (to establish the skin as a boundary line). What is required is, not only an analysis of body images or representations of bodily difference, but also an analysis of how bodily habits and gestures serve to constitute bodily matter and form. Judith Butler’s consideration of ‘bodies that matter’ defines ‘materialisation’, as the production of an ‘effect of boundary, fixity and surface’ (1993: 9). To examine the function of cultural difference and social antagonism in the constitution of bodily matters is not to read differences on the surface of the body (the body as text), but to account for the very effect
of the surface, and to account for how bodies come to take certain shapes over others, and in relation to others.
Sara Ahmed- Embodying Stangers
Earth, Body. 2020- Davinia-Ann Robinson
In December 2019 I began to revisit sites where I had encountered disruptions in presencing throughout my childhood and in recent adult years, these included my old school grounds in Wolverhampton a city in the West- Midlands, England and areas which I frequent everyday living in Southeast London, and began the act of collecting earth or as Kathyryn Yusoff in A Billion Black Anthropocenes would call it geologic materials. From these materials I continued an investigation into my connection to these environments as a female body of colour, the residue of societal colonial emotions I encountered and the consideration of what I had considered to be my body, instead residing and being read within a colonial framework as organic matter.
Experimenting using collected earth as raw material in sculptural pieces, I have started making pigments out of the earth/matter and using them to cast my thumbs.
Astrida Neimanis - Bodies of Water
Hortense J.Spillers - Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
'Comfort itself is often invoked as though it were a right of the powerful...Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware, the right to have no twinges of one's conscience, no reminders of suffering, the right to be a 'we' whose benefits are not limited by the rights and need on any 'them'. (R.Solnit)
A.Lorde
A couple in St.Louis points firearms at BLM protesters passing nearby their house (2020)
(59.00 - 1:03:25)
Trump signing an anti-abortion executive order (2017)
'Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places'(D.Haraway)
Thousands of people gathering in support of Black Trans Lives Matter, New York (2020)
Chilean women protesting and performing "Un violador en tu camino" (2019)
Various acts of iconoclasm linked to the BLM movement, USA, UK, Italy (2020)
Artwork by Loreana Toledo
The subject who can act and move in the
world with ease - the white, masculine, heterosexual, subject - does so through expelling those others beings from this zone of the living (although the expulsion always leaves its trace). One does not then live in abjection: abject bodies are precisely the bodies that are not inhabited, are not livable as such, are not at home.(S.Ahmed)
Collecting earth from sights, where I have experienced colonial violences
Davinia-Ann Robinson