Curating in Public
Federica Zambeletti:
Hi there, and welcome to the second season of the Architectures of Planetary Well-Being podcast. The Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast exploring the interconnection of our social and ecological systems. Season two of the podcast is curated under the heading Between Us, presented by the re:arc institute and KoozArch. Between Us is a series of intimate conversations shared between two critical practitioners operating across architecture, art, curation, illustration, design, and literature. Across generational and geographical space, their discussions will move through shared aspects of practice to reach infinitely larger and more pressing issues on and around the roles of cultural practice for planetary well-being. The conversations are intended to provoke still more responses and further discussions, from micro to macro, with and led by emerging and further underrepresented communities. The guests chosen for these conversations are innovative thinkers and practitioners who we believe remain committed to the critical reframing of their disciplines and their attendant discourse.
These intimate yet wide-reaching exchanges aim to reflect the need for interdisciplinary conversation and unsiloed imagination in order to attempt the realization of a more just, caring, and restorative world.
Today we're going to hear from the critic, curator, and writer, Ekow Eshun, together with the artist Danielle Dean. You'll also hear from me. My name is Federica Zambeletti. I'm the founding editor of KoozArch. And I joined Danielle and Ekow on this exchange, to introduce them both. Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Drawing from the aesthetics and history of advertising and from her multinational background, her work explores the ideological function of technology, architecture, marketing, and media as tools of subjection, oppression, and resistance.
Ekow Eshun is chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art program in the UK, and the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the curator of exhibitions, including the ongoing exhibition The Time Is Always Now at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, also in London, [and] an author of books including Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.
Thank you very much, Danielle and Ekow, for joining us today for this recording of Architectures of Planetary Well-Being, season two. I would like to start our conversation from two projects which you're currently working on, and which include the all-new video work about the town of Hemel where you grew up, Danielle, and Ekow, your upcoming book, The Strangers. Both projects are explorations into identities and otherness. Has the time arrived to reconsider identities beyond national racial and ethnic divides and switch to the scale of the planetary? And if so, are we indeed ready for it?
Ekow Eshun:
That's a good question. I don't know if I have an answer in that. My book, The Strangers, which comes out in September—it's a work of creative non-fiction—takes the lives of five different Black men at different points in history, from the early 19th century to the present day. It's planetary in the scope that it explores the lives of these figures in different places and at different times around the world. There's a chapter on Malcolm X in Ghana in the 1960s, Frantz Fanon in Algeria in the 1950s, various other figures. I'm interested less in the… Potentially less in the overarching sweep of the planetary, and more in the highly individual, in the subjective. I try and tell the stories of these figures from their interior position, from their subjective position. I'm less interested in what they do, more interested in how they are, how they feel, how they encounter a world that is often hostile and antagonistic to their presence.
I guess my feeling overall is that, potentially, to think in planetary ways, to think in wide-sweep ways, you also have to be able to speak from the highly particular, from the individual, from the interior, from the subjective—that this, perhaps, certainly in my reading in the context of the book that I've just written, is how one potentially engages with empathy. How we form connection is through an understanding of both our difference and potentially the similarities that come from understanding of who we are beneath the surface.
Danielle Dean:
I also have been struggling with this question a little, partly because it is a really interesting or important suggestion that we should perhaps strive for a planetary way of being. And in the piece that I am currently working on, which is shot in my hometown, I suppose there was an attempt at connecting this very particular location—which I grew up in in England—to something more global or also even planetary, in the sense that there is this sci-fi narrative of meteorites coming into this very local small town from outer space. And the premise of the piece is to consider this sci-fi narrative in relation to real, lived lives of people that live in Hemel and in relation to my experience of growing up in this place: a connection between those two things and considering how we aren't ready for this position of the planetary yet—we are nowhere near it—but I think that it is important to consider it because we do live in one planet that we are destroying, but there is a particular context of how that is happening to different racial, ethnic groups around the world in different ways.
I suppose to consider it from a universal is not possible, I don't think, right now. The attempt is interesting and the attempt of the particular connection of like… Well, for example, if a factory is being placed into a particular community and that has environmental effects, that factory has a global-capitalist connection. To fight that power, maybe we need to connect class, race, and different struggles, but from the space of knowing that those things are different, from the specificity of those differences.
EE:
I would suggest that to get to a planetary, you almost have to dismantle some of the notions of the universal that we already live with, in that one of the things that I think, anyway—as a person of color—come up against quite often are these notions formed during the Enlightenment of universal truths around liberty, democracy, justice, all of these things. All of these things which are perfectly valid, which are perfectly important, but which historically were also used as another means to oppress people of color—Enlightenment values of tolerance, progress, knowledge, openness, promulgated in the 18th century, simultaneous to the era of scientific racism, simultaneous to the era when Black people are defined scientifically as less than human. It's not wholly human. We still live in the shadow of those ideas. And I guess the thing that I find interesting when you're talking about your film, Danielle, is it feels important to imagine ourselves into other futures, other worlds, other ways of seeing, other possibilities.
It's interesting, I was just talking about my book and, yeah, the central aspect of it around a particular number of Black men—but also interwoven through it, figures like Sun Ra arrive and beam down. And I find it really interesting how much inspiration I personally draw from a Sun Ra or from an Alice Coltrane, or from these figures who try to radiate and find their way to a frequency of consciousness that one can, if you want, dismiss as purely speculative or imaginary or whimsical or hippyish, even. But what I like is their concerted attempts to think into utopia, to think out of the everyday—to think out and beyond of the racialized every day, and to construct their own way of seeing and their own way of walking. And in a way, I think this is one of the challenges, struggles, opportunities also, that people of color have. We can see some of the limitations and constraints and contradictions of the apparently universal, which leaves us potentially free then to say, “Okay. Well, look, we will imagine our own ways of being.” And Sun Ra famously said, "There are other worlds." Octavia Butler said, "There's nothing new under the sun, but there are other suns." And I love this idea that we may not be able to travel somewhere, but we can at least conceptualize what that could mean, and what that could mean for us and how we could live and how we could communicate and how we could be under circumstances where we don't live within constraint the entire time.
FZ:
I think it would be fantastic if you could give us a little bit of an insight into Hemel and the kind of imaginaries and other suns and other worlds that Hemel seeks to construct.
DD:
So basically, Hemel Hempstead—it's in a suburb of Hertfordshire, and I grew up there. I think I left when I was 19 or something like that. And so, at one point, one of my friends that I went to school with, he shared a film with me called Quatermass 2 that is a sci-fi film that was shot in Hemel Hempstead—I think in the '50s, 1957. And in the film, you could kind of see Hemel Hempstead in its new built context. So, Hemel is a new built town that was built after the war, so it's a post-war town. And you can see it being developed in the film. I was really interested in the documentary aspect of this fictional film. It's a narrative where meteorites enter into Hemel Hempstead, and these are cultivated by workers who live in the town and they're possessed by these meteorites. And they take it to a factory, and they cultivate it into a big, black mass that eventually takes over and threatens to destroy the planet—both Hemel and the planet.
And so I was really interested in this fiction because, to me, it really reflected a hysteria or a fear that Hemel—many places in the UK—have towards race. It was no coincidence that it was like, [a] black, unexplained mass that was entering from elsewhere into this small British town. And so I decided to work with this narrative and to think it through, through my experiences of growing up as a biracial person in Hemel—and then also thinking about how Hemel now is much more diverse than it was when I was growing up, and the reactions that that has from a kind of nationalistic point of view within the town. And so, it essentially charts both the fiction coming from the sci-fi and the realities of lived people who live there now, both my family and a few other people who happen to work for Amazon, also. Because in the fiction, there's this factory the black mass is being cultivated in and possesses the workers, and so I wanted to connect that to the reality of how there is this connection to industry and the town that was built.
EE:
I love that idea. I love this thing of these... When was Quatermass made?
DD:
1957.
EE:
Post-war Britain, first years of mass immigration, this fear of the other surfacing.
DD:
Yeah!
EE:
While you were talking, I was reminded of John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids. There's a way of reading this as an analogy for race.
DD:
Wow.
EE:
In a very similar way, the Triffids are described as ugly brutes, as these things that come from the jungle and are threatening the sanctity of Britain, which I'd never realized before, but it's in there. These things shamble over from the jungle and start to lay siege to British ordinariness, to British normality. I suspect the anxieties aren't necessarily even fully voiced, so your version of these things... Yeah, I love the idea of this. Also because, as you say, aspects of this become real. And contemporary Hemel becomes colonized anyway by Amazon, by this alien force, by this other force—colonized and then left behind, all sorts of things. Yeah, that's fantastic.
DD:
Yeah. It was a piece that I was thinking about for many years, ever since my friend gave me this reference for this film, and it just sort of became something I was obsessed with for some time. I'm finishing off editing it right now. And it's quite a personal work, too, because I grew up in Hemel with a white family. Hemel was seen as this beautiful place that a lot of people, after the war… Like my grandma, she was in the war and moved from London to Hemel. And it was this amazing utopian place where you had working toilets that were not in sheds and you could select your home from a catalog. So, it was really interesting because my mum, she was like, "Oh, you know, Hemel was a great place for you to grow up in. You had a really great childhood." And I was like, "Yeah, but also, there was this other part of it." And it's been quite emotional to hear this conversation between us in the edit over and over again. Every time I can't get through it without crying, just because it's that double consciousness thing.
EE:
It always comes down to double consciousness. [W.E.B.] Du Bois defines double consciousness in the early 20th century; he talks about this peculiar sensation of living physically within and psychologically outside white society as a Black person. This is, for Du Bois, the defining characteristic of Blackness. I would suggest it's a really salient, defining way to think about these things. And I guess what I've thought about, somewhat, is that in as much as double consciousness often feels like and is often defined as a burden—for Du Bois, it was absolutely this kind of curse, this kind of weightless consciousness, overconsiousness—it's also potentially a kind of superpower in its own right, because it allows us to think beyond the everyday, and also to be able to look at and see the racialized every day.
Toni Morrison talked about how the experience of living within whiteness, for a person of color, is often like being a fish inside a bowl, inside a clear bowl. You swim around, everyone swims around, everyone's in there, everyone feels that this represents reality, until at some point you come up against the sides of this thing—until at some point, you recognize that this is a construct. That this is a structure disguised as everything. Disguised as the universal. Described as “everyday,” when it's simply a version of, a story of, a narrative of a power structure. The realization of that is both further oppressive but also potentially liberatory, because it means you get to tell stories about these things and you get to use these things that otherwise confine us as the subject matter for how we might conceptualize ourselves within this. So, this is what I think about. This is why.
One last thing, then I’ll stop talking because... But one last thing. Have you read the short story, The Comet, by Du Bois, in fact?
FZ:
Oh, no. Oh, I need to. I need to.
EE:
You’ve got to read that. It's a short story about a comet that hits the earth…
FZ:
Oh, wow. Okay.
EE:
...and potentially ushers in the post-racial utopia on the planet amongst its survivors. It's worth taking a look at.
FZ:
Oh my God, absolutely.
EE:
Yeah.
FZ:
I think when you brought up stories, Ekow, I wanted to ponder on that a little bit. Because for example, the other day we had a conversation with Sabba Khan on her memoir, The Roles We Play, which is her memoir, her experience. Of course, that is her personal voice. In both your practices, there is a multiplicity of voices—whether in the films that you create, in the books that you write, or in the shows that you also bring together. So I was wondering if you would want to talk… Share a little bit about the power of the collective and the idea of bringing subjective voices into conversation and into exchange.
DD:
I'm not sure how to answer it without sort of making a grand gesture, but—
EE:
That's good. Do the grand gesture. Got to do the grand gesture. It's a planetary podcast. Do the grand gesture.
DD:
Yeah, okay! Collective action can only happen with people working together, right? So, that's one thing that I'm interested in, but I suppose I'm interested in it in a subjective position as in… I'm so curious about people and interested in how the nuance of actually being engaged with talking to certain people, it allows for me, for the work, to go beyond just my assumptions about a situation. So, for example, I have been making a few works for the past few years in relation to thinking about Amazon and what it's like to work there. It's not the only work I do, but it has been a big part of the practice so far. And I made a project that was shown at the Tate Britain a few years ago about Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. So, it's a company owned by Amazon, but basically it's like a global network of workers online, and their personal data or things about them being human is being extracted for AI technology. So it's a data-collecting site. It's quite sci-fi in its reality. Reality often is way more fictional than you can even make up.
The point about that was that you have a collective. There's a mass of workers working, but they're isolated from each other. and they're not necessarily connected because that’s the way that the website operates. And so I was interested in working with some of the AMT—Amazon Mechanical Turk workers—outside of the logic of the site, and really engaging in their subjectivities, actually, because that was something that the site tries to deny. Even though it's about extracting human data, they don't really want to care for your humanness. They want to see you as a machine or a cog. Anything excessive and human and messy, they don't want anything to do with.
And so for me, it was interesting to connect some of the workers together through the work and through the storytelling, in a way, so that it did the opposite of the logic of the site. It allowed for connections and human connections beyond what the working conditions want to allow for these workers. I really am interested in people and people meeting each other and working together.
EE:
I think how you surface those empathies is really interesting. And I think the role of an artist in there can be really important, that way, in terms of trying to bring us closer. I think about this in terms of the texture of the lives we lead, which are very strange, sometimes, in all sorts of ways. I curated an exhibition a couple of years ago at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2022, called In the Black Fantastic. And it was a group exhibition that brought together a number of leading Black contemporary artists—Wangechi Mutu, Chris Ofili, Nick Cave, Ellen Gallagher, Kara Walker, a number of artists—all of whom were exploring in this show, and are exploring in general, myth and fable and speculative fiction in their work as a way to interrogate the racialized every day and propose other ways of seeing and being.
It was an extraordinary experience to put that show together and see the response that people had to that show. The response was overwhelming. People were very enthusiastic about it as a show. And partly, this is really because the aim that we set out for as a show was to think about the in of that, which is that as soon as you walked into the space, you walked into these other worlds, other potentialities. Each artist had some room inside the gallery to stage and present their work. So, you walked from one environment, one world, into another world, one way of seeing into another way of seeing—all of which, from different places and different perspectives, were thinking about the racialized every day, thinking about Black modes of liberation and resistance and dreaming and possibility in relation to that. And doing that through artworks that were dazzling and beautiful and inspiring and strange and mesmerizing and compelling. All of these things.
And this is the thing that really excites me, because I think artists can do the extraordinary thing of holding more than one proposition or possibility or perspective at once. Beauty can also be a root way into contemplation of terror, of alienation, of loneliness, as well as love, desire, and displacement, disequilibrium, as much as discovery and exploration. All of these things can exist at once within a successful artwork. And I spend a lot of my time curating shows. And really, the goal for me is—can we create spaces within which we get to explore the nature of being? And that sounds large and existential, but it's really just a root into those artists' work. But it's also then a conduit back to the world we're already living in—which is supposed to be the normal, ordinary, everyday world that goes without questioning, but which is also insane in all sorts of ways. And we feel that when there's war and so on.
But actually, I think about this just in terms of the nature of the racialized everyday. Or in fact, it's so fascinating listening to you talk about Amazon. Because even these ways that our working lives are so demarcated, are kind of severed around what we're supposed to do, how we're supposed to act—versus how we feel, versus our encounter with each other—all of these things I think are really, really fascinating. It turns out, A, we're already living in the future. B, it's kind of a dystopia very often. C, it's really much, much stranger than we ever give it credence for. So, I'm just always fascinated and inspired to listen to someone like you. But more than that, to think about how we can think further about where we are and also what we might have in common. Because I think, very often, it feels like a lonely existence walking through this world. It feels so lonely, so odd. I want to see this Hemel film, amongst other things.
DD:
If you're not careful, I'll send it to you.
EE:
Yeah, yeah. That would not be a bad thing. Yeah. Because basically, you want to be in concert, you know? You want to be in communion. You want to have a sense that: Where are we? How are we feeling? What are we doing? And so art, I feel, is a very useful and powerful means... I mean, this is what the human race is. The human race tells stories. The human race creates pictures. We don't stop ourselves doing that. And it turns out this is one of the things that, yeah, we have in common. This is what we are.
DD:
Yeah. I also respect how the show that you did at the Haywood—it connected to so many audiences. That's really difficult to do and an amazing achievement. And I think that to be able to allow for art to connect across communities and with people… It's what we all kind of want, I think, from our work.
EE:
I'm stalling an exhibition right now at the National Portrait Gallery, which opens in a couple weeks’ time. And I've spent five years working on the show. It's a show on Black figuration, 20-odd artists—Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Noah Davis, Henry Taylor, Chris Ofili—lots of artists who have been working throughout their careers with real grace and beauty and ambition to think about, again, Black aliveness through the forms that they depict, through the Black people that they depict in their work. But all this time, none of this means anything until the doors are open on a show. None of this means anything until you get to share the project. So, anything I do with it—that's the prelude to the moment that you have an audience in there. That's when things get interesting: When people respond to what you are doing. When people are in a space to think aloud or to talk or to look. I feel that's what you do it for. You do it for the possibility of engaging with other people.
DD:
Yeah. And I think that also, as you say, it doesn't necessarily have to have the answer. It's in conversation with the audience. And I love what you said about being able to hold the complexity. We live such complex lives. We live in so many layers of complex ideas and situations and histories, and so to have work that can sit in that… And then also be shared with other people in a way that maybe they'll have a different view of what you're sharing, or ideally maybe it will challenge their view. That's really the ideal—that the work could somehow allow for consideration of one's every day or lived experience or whatever. So, that's something I often hope. Because I do feel like when you're making work that does have a set of real conditions or is considering something like, for example, Amazon, it might be easy to make a work that's just about being critical of that situation—because it's very easy to be critical of Amazon. It's not so great. But then, when I talk to people who actually do the work, their position is, "Well, we actually want to have this job. We want the working conditions to improve, but we don't want you, as an artist, to come along and say it shouldn't exist."
And so for me, that is also, again, that process of collaboration or process of listening and working with others, because we all have to challenge our assumptions, and art can really do that. It exists outside of us. That's the other beauty, is that it exists outside of us. Although it's a part of us, it also is a separate thing. And that is great, because then you get to look at it and analyze it and think of it outside of yourself.
EE:
Yeah, I think that's a really great way to think about this thing. I mean, I tend to feel, successful artists... Basically, there're two professions in the world that have, at their heart, some form of liberty still in the world, I would suggest. You can be a philosopher—you have space to think. You be an artist—a space to create, a space to make, without agenda, without explanation, without apology. I think successful artists… Interesting proposition, in that you get to be the visual poet. You get to speak without language. You get to speak in analogy or metaphor or in pure lyricism. You get to speak against. And so, I'm always admiring and jealous of the challenge, really, that artists face, which is to look into nothingness, to think about something—and then to come back from a journey, not necessarily with the answers, like you say, but just with the opportunity to create space. The opportunity to bring things together, which potentially allow people to come together. This seems to be a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.
FZ:
I think it's super interesting, and what I really cherished was, Ekow, when you mentioned In the Black Fantastic as this kind of set of 11 worlds which each of the artists created within a bigger world, which is the cultural institution. And Danielle, you mentioned that it was widely received from different publics. And of course, it attracted different publics, but it was somehow always bound to the space of the museum. And we know that, as an institution, already kind of closes the borders to certain kind of people who are maybe not engaged or couldn't have access. So in this sense, I'm also very much interested… Ekow, you're chairman of the Fourth Plinth, which is the foremost public art program in the UK, which is obviously public. It sits in Trafalgar Square. So, what are the opportunities which can arise by breaking down the conventional ideal of what a museum should be, and rather opening that world to public perception, so that whether you're on the bus, whether you're just walking to work, I mean, you maybe, not even… You engage with it, but maybe even not without pondering—but what opportunities can arise from this kind of relationship?
EE:
It's so interesting, I think, because yeah, we don't have a museum. We don't have walls. We have a plinth, which is a certain set of dimensions, and we have a public square. We have Trafalgar Square that we sit in. A tremendously popular project. But the two guiding principles, I suppose, that we work with are one—each sculpture that goes on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is temporary. It lasts for two years, and then we have another piece that goes in there. So, it's a commissioning program. So it's a statue. And at a time when lots of energy and time is being spent thinking about monuments and statues, should we take them down, and so on—well, we're already doing that. We're not interested in the monument as permanence. We're interested in a sculpture work that can speak to our world and our society in this moment in time. And so that's a very different proposition to trying to hold space against time, which is what most statues do. They're erected in one moment, and they struggle to keep up with the times as they go around them, as they go past them. So our work is really about being in this moment, and offering audiences a reflection back on how we might be living or what we might be thinking about.
Again, art is quite clever. We commission two to four years in advance. So actually, we're looking for works that can speak to a moment potentially four years from now—which is interesting, and which actually often works to a surprising capability. We did a project with an artist called Heather Phillipson a couple of years ago, who did a fantastic piece called “The End,” which was this very large sculpture work which looked like an ice cream... It looked like a cone of ice cream which had a fly on it and a cherry on top of it and a drone. It was a whole range of elements. But when it was unveiled in 2016—this is at the time of Brexit, the time of Trump, it's commissioned four years beforehand—but by the time it comes out, it seems to speak to the irrationality and instability and slippages of the time itself. So, this is one of the things we can do.
The other thing, really, is that we try and hold onto absolute... It's a popular project, but it's also one which is really serious in that we ask artists to think seriously about their position in a public square, about work that can speak back to a public, that can therefore be clear in its intentions, that can therefore be enjoyed aesthetically even as it remains a critical project or critical set of inquiries into who we are and how we live—which is what every successful artwork should be able to do. It should be able to offer some reflection and some way into what we might call our condition, our shared condition. So, the artworks do that. At the same time as that, they are entertaining. They're intriguing. They're puzzling. They're inviting. They can do all of these things. And so the goal is to try and do all of that, to create something that people like—even as it may be, yes, challenging, it may be a route to further inquiry. Again, doing all of these things seems, to me, a good thing, seems to me one of the things that a public art project can do. It can take us somewhere within ourselves, even as we're standing in one place. It's just that place is also then a shared place that you're sharing with 2000 people an hour, who are walking through the square. So, I really love working on that project, on the Fourth Plinth, because the whole thing is about this conversation with the public—the public and the square, with London, with Britain—and then the possibilities that art can have to engage people in a looking and a thinking and a being.
DD:
It's also interesting because, like you said, it's a plinth or a monument, which has historically been used to help formulate national identities, right? And particularly in the UK, there's so many... I don't know. Monuments are everywhere.
EE:
The other three plinths have got long-gone-by generals on them. There's Nelson, Nelson's Column, in the middle of the square. To use contemporary language, it's a militarized zone, to some extent. So to invite contemporary artists in there—the crucial thing is, it's a really popular program. People really like it. It gives something back to the texture of the city and the texture of that square, and that turns out to be kind of important, I think.
DD:
Actually it reminds me of… I think it was last year, I was asked to show a work in Times Square in New York on all of the screens. Midnight Moments, it's called. And it was so interesting to do that, because I am an artist that…I do often show in museums in art contexts, but because I wasn't born into art, it was like something that I stumbled across, and we didn't always go to museums and we weren't necessarily the audience for that. But we would be the audience for adverts. I had never went to New York when I was young, but if we did, we would've gone straight to Times Square. And I remember at one point, I used to work in advertising for a couple of years, and my mum was like, "Oh, I'm so proud of you." Sometimes I enjoy the adverts more than the program in between. And so, I don't know, for me it was like, wow, this is—
EE:
What was the piece?
DD:
It was a piece called “Long Low Line (Fordland).” And it was actually a piece that was to do with advertising. So, it's a animation that essentially draws from a long history of Ford advertising cars, but using landscapes to do that. And so, I was interested in the relationship between the representation of land and place in relation to a commodity and how those things have become part of our consciousness. The way that we inhabit land has a lot to do with how it's been represented to us. So anyway, that's the conceptual background, but essentially it's just a long assembly line of Ford adverts that have been redrawn. So it's like this empty spaces of landscape; there's no cars in them anymore. And it kind of is very slow and eerie, because it's a lot of eerie, almost apocalyptic lands. And so it was the opposite pace to Times Square. I don't know; it was remarkable. And I don't know how many people even saw it. Because that's the thing—sometimes when you do these really public things, you don't actually know how the audience responds unless someone writes a review. But generally speaking, you don't get so much of a sense of people on the ground, what they think. But it was just really interesting to see that space slow down. That was the thing that I thought was the most remarkable.
EE:
I've seen that piece of yours—not on a screen—but just this is hand-drawn?
DD:
Yeah.
EE:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s this kind of long vista of landscape that shifts as you look at the landscape. It's sort of the anti-car advert, in that the dream is the vehicle that's moving through, that's bisecting this landscape. And it's always this promise of the open frontier and so on. Sorry, question: You chose to draw this?
DD:
Yeah.
EE:
Why drawing as a way to describe the landscape?
DD:
Well, because when I was looking at this, it was basically a really long archive of these Ford adverts. And the early ones were all hand-drawn, usually painted in watercolor or gouache. So that's the technique that I have been using to redraw adverts that are from any time period. So some of them, originally, are the same—like copying the watercolor effect of these early adverts. But then I usually also paint an advert from 2019, or whatever, in the same technique to kind of collapse them into this history, because we began with hand-drawn adverts. We didn’t necessarily… Advertising didn't start with photography. It started with people drawing. And to me that's so much more closer to the imaginary.
EE:
So I think rendering it through hand, it's both kind of deconstructing that illusion, but it's also then reminding us that they're founded on this idea anywhere—an ideal or a dream or a promise.
DD:
Yeah, absolutely. Because, particularly now, with how much deepfakes and all of the things that technology can do, it can be so much more real but fake—with the illusion that it's real, but it also is fake. And I think that it has always been a bit like that, and it's been connected to the fact that it began with connecting to what we imagine. Why should advertising be the only thing? It's so sad that... I know that art exists, and there's so much art. But I do feel like a lot of people, their imaginations or their creativity—because we all have that—it gets harnessed by advertising or things that exist like that, rather than something that's not about selling a product. I mean, art is a product. I'm not saying it's not. But I always have, still, that utopian idea of someone stumbling into a museum and seeing a work and resonating with it beyond the complex capitalist market conditions that are happening. And I know it's not true, but I still feel that the museum connects to people.
EE:
I think you have to hold onto that hope. The way I try and work with that is that if I do an exhibition—it's in a gallery, it's in a museum; like I said, I'm installing a museum show now at the National Portrait Gallery—the goal for me is how can you create... And often I do group shows, it's about a proposition and it's about bringing together a range of artists. I think about how can you create an environment in which the work can be contextualized and seen and engaged with. And that, for me, often doesn't have that much to do with the institution itself, because I'm less interested in people within the physical context of the show that I'm doing, less interested in them engaging with the history and the heritage of the museum and all of the things that come with that. I'm interested in, okay, how can we create a space? How can we create an environment of encounter where you can see one work and see another work and think about the connections between those two? But it means that I think a lot about the color of the walls, the texture of the space, obviously the layout of the works. But everything that happens as soon as you walk across the threshold into that space, it's not just about... I feel you do a work a disservice, in fact, if you just put it up against a white wall, because already there's quite a lot of freightedness, even with that notion of that this is the marker of the—
DD:
The neutral wall. As if it's neutral.
EE:
Exactly, exactly. All of these things. So I'm interested in, okay, well, what can this space be then? And how can I work with those artists to create an environment that's sympathetic to all of those works? So the space, perhaps, moves or mutates across or evolves across the course of a show, different spaces of different textures or different tonalities to them. But overall, the goal is in service of the artists and in service of the audience. It's about trying to think about, yeah, okay, how can we create a world? A perspective? How can we create a liberated space, if you want to use those terms? How can you get to some form of freedom in the moment? The work will always speak. My role as a curator is to create the circumstances in which it can be best heard.
DD:
Yeah. And making catalogs is always good, as well, because you can share it beyond being actually in London. You don't have to be in the place to be able to experience something about the show. I think catalogs are really great for that.
EE:
Yeah, you've got to do the book. The book, also, I'd like to think of as a site of possibility in its own right. Again, I get very confused. I get very confused with the idea that you do a catalog, and it's very regimented or something in its order. It's about the information—and it's not! It's a textural work. It's a work that hopefully expands upon the sensibility or the perspectives on show in that work. It's a piece of work in its own right, I tend to think. And I actually read a catalog. You buy a thing, you look at the pictures. I actually read the text, because I find it interesting. So I'm all in. And then I'm trying to find the ways to think more expansively around these things and to think about—okay, look, yeah, really, how can you tell these stories? Secretly, I'm a thwarted filmmaker, really. I think everyone is, actually. I don't think there's anyone who's not. But you're making films, and you get to tell a story visually, aesthetically, sonically; get to speak of emotion, all of these things. I love that. And yeah, that's the thing, really, I admire. Someone who can bring together all of these things and then lead people through it.
FZ:
You mentioned the catalog, and that's kind of what we do with KoozArch when we engage with institutions. So we recognize that there's so much research, so much work, which is presented within cultural institutions. But somehow, if you don't have access to those institutions, if you're not lucky enough to live in the same city or to be traveling there, somehow you miss it. And with that, you're missing the worlds that were being constructed, the conversations which were being had. And the catalog, I think, does a good job, somehow, at packaging it. There's some which are more extensive than others in reading. And in that, I'm exactly like you. I buy catalogs and I read them and my husband sometimes, like, "You're a freak. You're bringing a coffee table book in the bed. What are you doing?" And I'm like, "Well, I need to read this." And mind you, I hate catalogs which are coffee-table-size because you're like, "People read these things and they need to be comfortable." But what we try to do… And obviously a catalog has a price, and depending on the institution, they're more or less accessible.
So with us, with KoozArch, it's always important to try to host those conversations on the platform, and somehow also expand beyond the curator. We have a lot of respect for the curators, but as a platform which—and even here, I'm so happy to be bringing both of you in conversation— as a platform which really wants to engage with the voice of the practitioner… So, we don't paraphrase. We seldomly write reviews, but we really use the format of the interview, of the conversation, to let the first-person narrative speak. When we also cover shows and there's more than one voice, we're like, "Okay. Sure. Let's engage with the curator." But then, let's engage with the voice who are actually there in the show. Let's find ways in which we can nurture and host their voices, and maybe that can be an opportunity to look at the show in a different perspective, bring different conversations. So it's also very much important how, from a show, from an artwork, then you can build other worlds or connect that world to an exterior. And of course, the catalog is one way. But somehow, I think, today, there is a million other ways in which institutions can expand their reach when they find themselves localized. I think, for example, within the architectural discipline, there's the CCA. And at the time, they had the director, which was called Mirko Zardini. And he wrote this wonderful essay, which talks about the institution having two sites—a physical and a digital one. And somehow, I find it absurd that our institutions, most of them don't have these two sites. There is a very physical presence, but there isn't a digital presence.
And really, if you want to have impact, somehow you need to be able to speak also beyond the limits of your physical institution, and beyond the kind of geographical sites where you're located. So, there is a beauty in somehow finding different ways of mediating beyond the restraints of the physicality. And of course, the moment that you also have, let's say, Trafalgar Square, and that's already an urban space that does the job already. But then, beyond London, are there other ways in which those stories can be narrated? Yeah, maybe that was a little bit of less of a question, but more of an observation and a rant. I decided to rant, myself, for a little bit.
EE:
I was enjoying it. Yeah.
FZ:
Curating and making art brings with it a whole set of responsibilities towards the community and towards future generations. What are the dialogues or resonances that you would hope to see growing in future generations, or that you would leave behind from your own practice as an artist and as a curator?
EE:
The thing I find interesting is that history is yet to be written. The art world, museums, in a way—they rest on the canon, they rest on a lineage, they rest on a history, they rest on a narrative. I think what's interesting is that it turns out those lineages and canons and stuff are not set in stone. A museum might be a building, but there's still histories to be written. There's still histories to be rewritten. And I think keeping in mind that process, that the thing we pass on to generations is that both the future and the past remain unwritten. What is it we treasure? Which voices do we want to hear? Who gets overlooked? Who gets remembered? Who gets seen? These are some of the things that I find interesting. Because you think you've got a story. You think you know what the past looks like. Turns out, it's always more complicated. It's always more contradictory. And actually, the pleasure and really, I think, the power that we have in the present is to be able to look back and say, "Let's look at it this way. Let's think about that. Let's think about this person who was here, who we haven't seen before in their fullness."
And in a way, that's one of the things that artists can work in the present. But a museum or a curator can think about where they stand, both now and where they have stood before. I think the stories or the investigations that pedagogy can open up are a constant process of scrutiny and interrogation. Just the process of opening, of keeping space, holding space, exploring that space—all of these things I think are interesting. I used to be the director of an institution. I used to be the director of the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. One of the things I came to after five years of doing that is that walls can really be an enemy. Because walls tend to be the thing that… You tend to work within those walls, tend to work into the idea that your role is to maintain the institution. But it's never that. The role of any of us, if we're inside an institution or outside that, is to keep the thin fluid and moving, is to undermine the foundations of that the entire time, such that you get whatever, insert metaphor, new flourishings, new things, new weeds growing between the cracks, all of these things.
And that's what seems interesting to me, that we can remake the future out of the past. We can keep thinking about where we are, about how we look back, about what we treasure. And that's a constant negotiation. Sometimes that can go in strange directions. But the promise of that is that we get to treasure people, places, moments that can be really meaningful in the present moment. That seems, yeah... And I think the role of any museum or institution can be just to keep reminding us about the constant possibility and the constant offer that human endeavor in the past and in the present has. You can shape that in different ways. We can continue to tell stories about that.
DD:
I think that's so interesting because, also, the idea that history is always being retold or remade—it's also in relation to the fact that history comes to us through stuff. Through documents, media, archives.
EE:
Yeah!
DD:
And museums hold those archives or show elements of them. And so, it is really fundamental to the purpose of a museum, is to be engaged in reconsidering those ways that history has been told to us or formulated. And it just reminds me of the term from Saidiya Hartman, “critical fabulation.” Artists love that. I mean, I love it, but I suppose you have to be a little bit careful of not misusing that. But it is true that there's so many gaps and omissions and top-down ideas that certain people lived a certain way because they were depicted by the photography or the writing and the social analysis that occurs in these archives. And that's one thing that I really am interested in—so, so strongly interested in—the way that the representations, the materials, the things that surround us, they so much formulate our present and the potential of our past through so many different things: our consciousness, our collective ideas, our language, all of this stuff that we can then remake in a different way. Remake different ideas or speculate on—well, maybe this person in this archive doesn't have a voice, but what could that be based on my subjectivity or my connection to this archive or my connection to this thing that exists?
And so, yeah, I don't know. I'm just really fascinated by that. And I encourage my students. I'm actually teaching a class on archives right now, and it's so surprising how they're so interested in it and they get so excited, but they're like, "Oh, we've never even been to an archive. We've never stepped foot into an archive." And I'm like, "But you have. You've probably been to a museum."
EE:
Everything is an archive, it turns out. All of history is the existence of every single person that's lived before. There are many ways to pass and to think about and to record and to capture and to save and tell stories about the past.
FZ:
Well, thank you both really, Danielle and Ekow, for sharing your way of seeing and the worlds that you seek to construct, whether in space or through movies. Ekow, I was really surprised by the kind of spatial narrative that is really part of your practice. And at the same time, I was thinking, wow, maybe then when he operates within the Fourth Plinth, it's like schizophrenic, because you can't control that. It's like the city is there, and it's continuously changing and there's no color to match that and how does one feel like that? But then, that's the beauty of putting art into the real world and what happens there, happens. So, thank you to the both of you. It was a pleasure hearing you speak and hosting your voice. So thank you for joining us for this episode. We're very grateful.
EE:
Thank you so much for inviting us.
DD:
Thank you.
EE:
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
FZ:
Yeah, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you.