10 things to consider (re-member) if you are a b/Black artist making your artist statement public (for the first time):

[a cento/zuihitsu]

  1. This is public, and this is personal (and so are you). At some point, you will feel compelled to separate, dissociate, and compartmentalise. At some point, you will need to - as protection, as armour.

  2. You will be tempted to increase your affinity to white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (aka, the death-making empire, an artificial hell) because you are tired, poor, rent is due, tired… In those moments, turn to face the empire (and empires within) as myth, as fictions. Decide which myths you want to retell, which fictions you want to recreate, and which futures you want to be devoted to.

  3. “Remember you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything.” - Diane Di Prima, Revolutionary Letters.

  4. You and I know that b/Black Radical Creative Tradition is a cosmology that cannot always be explained through spoken or written language, or described through western & eurocentric signifiers. Trust in your ability to access those cosmologies anyway. Trust in your ability to listen to who and what you need to listen to.

  5. Resist chronology. Insist on a personal dramaturgy as rejection of tabula rasa, of neutrality.

  6. Your name is a vessel, a prayer and was once a dream now manifested; insist on its complexities.

  7. You are allowed to rest. If you are a migrantized body, or a body living far away from the soil you grew up with, make sure to surround yourself with people who remind you to soften and breathe and orient. This is a lifeline.

  8. “ My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival…“ - Audre Lorde. Be mad and stay mad.

  9. The unknown can become the place where the magic lives and the work catalyzes, should you let it. “stay knowing that if they get this dance, there might be something wrong. stay knowing that if something is only to be gotten, we might all be doing something wrong.” - taisha pagett

  10. “If it haunts you, I say haunt it back.” - Thato Toeba

inspired by multidisciplinary artist Maipelo Gabang’s 10 Things to Consider if You are an Artist of Colour Entering an Academic Research Institution: https://nivel.teak.fi/adie/10-things-to-consider/

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Artist Statement

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this care rider is inspired and influenced by the work and guidance of friends, collaborators, artists, and b/Black feminist literature