Reflections from (Returning to) Black Frequencies by MAIA Fellows Pt.2
We formed our Radical Imagination Lab exploring: How frequencies invite us to move, shapeshift and restore connections with our ancestral and future kin. Our Fellows at MAIA, artists Daniel and Adéọlá, curated the Lab which explored a range of cultural focal points.
From returning to pirate radio and exploring carnival as a site for liberation, to DIY sound system building, mask-making, reading circles, and invitations to dance and heal.
Across the Lab we explored frequencies as portals to liberation and both Daniel and Adéọlá have reflected on their experience curating and facilitating this lab. This is part two of the Reflections blog post, platforming Daniel’s thoughts and ideas about his experience as a MAIA Fellow on this project.
Daniel’s Reflections:
Has anything shifted in your practice, thinking or work?
Dialling in on the concept of radical hospitality, I think back to all of the times within my personal and professional life that I’ve felt the presence of hospitality as well as hostility.
Most times, hospitality was in the framing of family, friends, sharing, and service-based actions. When thinking of hostility, it was the opposite — the stranger, the unknown, the target, etc. Attempts to create a sense of connection, friendship and sharing were more often than not met with an injustice rooted in biased hostile beliefs. Our beliefs don’t often exist in a silo; they need connection to others to pollinate, a transmitter will eventually need a receiver; and if that connection grows into a community, it often develops into a culture, embedding itself into our environments and our “everyday”. We occupy a time-space fabric, which in many ways is shaped by our beliefs; physically and conceptually, we navigate. For most of us when we feel certain spaces are hostile, we are presented with a dead end, the no-go zone, the glass ceiling, the barriers to entry, the aggression, be it macro or micro — these are all products of design based upon the concept of hostility; and so it becomes increasingly important what design-based methods can create connection.
What have you discovered by exploring this line of inquiry?
Exploring a part of the cultural media landscape of Birmingham helped me to not only see its rich and beautiful history, it’s struggles and dreams but how it’s possible to think out loud and learn alongside others such as artist, Adéolá. How ritual, ancestry and the eternal are vital if not central elements in shaping our physical and systemic structures. It allowed me to think about hospitality in the context of my experiences growing up in London; as well as those of my parents, both Nigerian migrants in the 1980s, attempting to build out lives and careers together but facing personal and systemic challenges. Which, I can’t help but think years on, that a section of my formidable development as a young person has been a counter to hostility. Like a child first becoming consciously aware of self-existence, I explored and began to ask questions of my own communication complex, “why am I”? Why this language and not that of my native tongue? Why am I not residing in the land of my parents? Hospitality within this space and time of diaspora history becomes an exercise in truth-seeking, in the face of empire, and navigation within a western reality. From being old enough to first play outside as a child and having children my own peerage asking where I’m from, and demanding as a slur that I should “go back to Africa”. Living in a city, and knowing my ancestral arrival is not too dissimilar to the “fruits of empire” or “the spoils of war”, attempting to find liberation, sanctuary, and hospitality becomes increasingly perplexing.
What do you want to do next?
We currently can’t avoid the changing winds that find us as a diaspora in the Western reality, disappearing spaces, frequencies and autonomy; will possibly have us asking questions, “has this phase come to a halt?” What transmissions will we create? What broadcasts will we send into space time now? Which frequencies will we tune in to? For myself I wish to consider not only how live transmission can live in my performance work but likewise spatially. Investigating the substitutes and supplemental culture we’ve cultivated within this sixty-plus year post-WW2 experiment.
I reflect on moments where a sense of hospitality is closest for me; which has been a blend between the home space and various Black third spaces, shaping a constant exchange of memories, ideas, cultivation, and media. To think of the family living room and the many third spaces I’ve inhabited as a sort of supplemented response to hostility but possibly a subconscious substitute for ancient life and non western architecture; I’m excited to investigate this further.
In ancient Yorubaland, the closest thing to a living room and third space would be the “ile aye” (Ilé — home; Ayé — life) or “agbo ile” (Ilé — home; Agbo — courtyard), a residential area that typically housed an extended family, comprising various structures, rooms, and open spaces for communal living. Within the compound, there would be designated areas for different activities, including sleeping quarters, cooking spaces, and a central courtyard. The central courtyard of the family compound often served as a multifunctional space, where family members would gather for socialising, discussions, and communal activities. It could be considered the heart of the household, akin to a modern living room, where family members spent time together, shared stories, and engaged in various daily interactions. Constructed in the agbo ile would also be the communal courtyard of the compound, where individuals often gathered for various social activities, including cultural celebrations, ceremonies, music, dances, and storytelling, and while not a direct parallel to a modern third space bar, club (possibly more in common with the “house party”), these communal spaces played a vital role in fostering social interactions, artistic expressions, and community cohesion in ancient Yoruba society; which could serve as an inspiration point for the build environment of today, as Wahab states…
“The methods of building and the planning and use of houses have changed in response to the demands of Westernization, modern technology, migration, urbanization, architects’ craze for complex designs and preference for non-local building materials, and the Christianization and Islamization of the society, and government’s planning and physical development policies. Agbo ile no longer appeals to the affluent and those already exposed to Western ideas, resulting in the decay, collapse, and complete ruin of the age” (Wahab, Waheed Bolanie, 1997).
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To watch the available recordings of the (Returning to) Black Frequencies Lab please click here.
