Race & Performance in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Helina Metaferia and Courtney Lau

[music]

You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Courtney Lau: Hello, I'm Courtney Lau, a PhD candidate in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies, and I’m speaking with Assistant Professor of Visual Art, Helina Metaferia, about the recent panel discussion on Race & Performance in America. Hi, Professor! I have some questions prepared, so I'll dive right in. During the panel, you talk about activating archival objects through performance; you also talk about objects for meeting after your performance. Can you talk a little about the process of going from object, to performance, back to objects? I'm also personally curious about the crowns in your work—the collage crowns; I was super moved by the crowning of your niece. I would love to hear a little bit about the crowns right now, as well, too.

Helina Metaferia: Well, thank you, Courtney for being in conversation with me, and thank you for your questions. I am very much interested in the intersection of performance and visual art, and I know that that probably stems from my background as an Ethiopian-American artist, having grown up with an awareness of African art traditions, where visual art often intersects with something that's ritualistic or theatrical, where objects are not meant to be precious and on a pedestal or in a secluded gallery space, but they're meant to be activated and touched and brought into public space, or into some sort of procession. So, I've been really interested in ways in which I can infuse experience into art objects, and I'm also interested in art artifacts of experiences, such as photography and archives and objects that have been repurposed, or everyday materials, et cetera; so, a lot of my work has to do with combining these archives with additional experiences, and some sort of juxtaposition that can bring new meaning to the work. So, this looks like collage art, this looks like video, this looks like appropriation of text.

And in my last project, which I talked about in the talk, “By Way of Revolution,” which is an ongoing project, this has also looked like making crowns out of collaged material archives of protest movements of the past—previous generations—and adorning contemporary activists, adorning everyday people, students, and communities, participants of my workshops. And sometimes, it looks like adorning, as you mentioned, my niece in a performance, or people that are of a younger generation, with the histories of previous generations, just to see how we can recognize that it took a lot for us to be here, to take up space within an institutional context; to have the freedoms that we have, and we have so much more to go. And so, this ritual of adorning, crowning, and positioning someone with a crown or a headdress is also a borrowed tradition from many cultures around the world, where headpieces are used to elevate one, one’s position in society. So I'm doing that with people, and I'm adorning people that identify as BIPOC, as Black Indigenous People of Color, that identify as women or femmes, and I'm interested in thinking about the everyday streetwear of the people in my collage, or just the unknown faces, as well as activating activists who are much more in the front lines through this process. And so there's a combination of looking for people who—because it takes so many to create a revolution: it takes people on the front lines, it takes people doing simple tasks in their communities, in their homes, in their jobs, and that's how change is made.

So the “By Way of Revolution” series is interdisciplinary; there's so many ways that I get at the content and the context, but for the most part, it's really about amplification of people in my life or people that I’ve come to know through community-building. And it's really about organizing and uplifting, as well as providing tools for people to harness performance in their bodies through private ritual and through public-facing imagemaking. I'm also really interested in reclaiming images in my work, and reclaiming history, and thinking about narratives in which women are often overlooked or undervalued; particularly within activist histories, the labor that a lot of us do is often invisible, whether that's the emotional labor or the administrative labor—and this is true in academic settings as well. And so, giving them prominence, and saying that yes, capitalism and yes, patriarchy and yes, racism does not always consider your labor valid, or your contributions to culture and intellectual community, et cetera, as important as other bodies; but you really are, and one day, hopefully, this narrative won’t be the one that we have to tell, we can tell some better narratives, we can tell some better stories. Because so much change has been made in our country, as well as globally, where a new reality could exist. And so I'm interested in co-imagining that new reality with people.

CL: So beautiful, so beautiful. Yes, totally, I really love the part of your work—I'm so struck by the part of your work where you tend and attend to the minor voices who don't often, like, make an appearance in, like, the mainstream news. There are so many people who—yeah, relation is important, family is important (chosen and biological). My next one is, another theme I noticed in your practice is the private and the public, especially in our time when race and racial violence are so visible, so prominent, every time I go on social media. Especially in this time, what's the role of invisibility and privacy in your work?

HM: Oh, I love that question; that's a really unique question that I haven't been asked before, so thank you for that. So my project, “By Way of Revolution,” is divided up into a few different aspects. One is something that's incredibly private, which is a “ritual,” it is the gathering of BIPOC women—those who identify as cis- or transwomen—in a space that is within, usually, the context of an institution or some other hosting facility, but it's only available to people who identify in this way, who are self-select, and we engage in somatic exercises and performance exercises that are about transmuting or transforming the stressors, and the traumas, and also the heaviness of being within these institutional contexts. And through engagement of many different exercises, we're interested in releasing, and story-sharing, and building a narrative with each other that really is about deepening and trust. For me, it's not—I'm not interested in a camera being there, I'm not interested in this being recorded in any capacity. People don't have to—they can show up anonymous, essentially, and there is much more deepening and trust because there isn't the presence of a camera. And then there's another, public-facing, component where we can think about representation, and we can—and then I offer, for certain people who would like to be volunteered, you know, voluntarily photographed, to be photographed on a separate date, in the attire that they want to be represented, and we talk a lot about—we use the performance gestures of what our power poses are, how we want to be seen in the world. They are photographed in that capacity and then, through an interview process, I think about what kind of research and archives I want to pair with them, based on how they identify. So it's a deepening process; and it takes about a year. And it's not very obvious in the collages that it's a yearlong process that I’ve done with people.

I think there's a, you know, there's the spectacular, there’s the optics of beauty in the work, and I want to draw people in through that, but if you want to know the process, the process is really about relationship building, it's about community building, it's about finding some sort of authenticity and voice, and offering my platform for those within a given community. And so I, to a degree that is entirely private because, yes, I talk about it, but you won't know what we've done unless you've participated. And I’ve had to think about how I want social engagement and social practice to be a part of my own practice, and I don't think I want it to be something where, usually, white funders, or people who don't identify in this particular community, can kind of gaze in and sort of have this voyeuristic look at, “ooh, look at what the Black and brown, you know, people are doing: these women, look at how they're so happy and smiling for the photograph.” I don't want—I deny that, I refuse that. So there's this sort of separation, and then I also know that the camera is also very instrumental: it's been used negatively, it's also been used positively. Negatively, it's been a tool for imperialism and colonization, historically; and then positively, or maybe not so positively, people have reclaimed images, and strategized around imagemaking. For example, the Black Panther Party were very much interested in being counter-media culture and reclaiming their aesthetic and doing that through their own documentation: through their newspapers, through how they framed themselves, how they dress. They used the exterior image and they flipped it as something at this, like, negative, terrorist, Black, you know, radical group; instead they made it very cool, very hip. So that's one way of strategizing on image. Black Lives Matter movement has also done that with social media and hashtags, in order to bring awareness towards their causes. And then, you know, again, the negative sides of image making is, like, the algorithms, and all these sort of things in which we self-feed and just give away our power. So there is a give and pull, but I really am interested in power and how to empower, and a lot of that is what we choose to give away, what we choose to let other people determine for us, particularly around imagemaking. and then how we choose to narrate ourselves and what we choose to withhold, right? So, as I said before, social media is a great example of ways in which we give up our power but also can reclaim. It’s just, it's always, these are all just tools and so it's how we use them.

CL: I'm super curious about what happens when, after you've been building a relationship with someone who’s in one of these collage portraits, after you've been creating with them and being in relationship with them and talking with them for over a year, what is it like? Do they see the portrait being made, or do they—is there, like, a reveal, like, what's that—I'm really curious about, like, how does one form, like, what does this do to one's, like, self-realization or self formation? Yeah, curious about that moment.

HM: Well, I love that question. Every project has been different; I've been doing this since 2018. My current project right now is with the RISD museum, so I've been working with Brown and RISD students in this capacity for the last year. It'll be unveiled summer 2022, and there’ll also be some programming fall 2022. And what I've realized, each iteration, is, it's so different. And, this iteration, one of the participants asked if she could put her family photographs within the collage: these are people who've been formerly incarcerated, or to some capacity, have helped with an activist community. And I loved that idea, she was so generous with her, like, you know, photographs of her grandparents and great-grandparents and parents, and so I asked the other participants if they'd be willing to do such a thing, whether their family members have been a part of social movements or not, in any, you know, conscious way. And so that's just, like, a nuanced touch that came into the work. So, in some ways this becomes very collaborative: yes, I have this idea, I have this structure, but I'm very flexible and open to it changing and shifting, and really meeting the needs of what that particular community is interested in. And all the participants have come to the unveilings, they've come to see the shows, and it's been incredibly positive. I feel, really, just so much gratitude for people trusting me with their images, their stories, their narratives, their experiences. And I also make a very, like, thorough bibliography of, you know, with each image, with all the archives, and all the photographers, and people who were, in those times, documenting social movements at that time. So, to me, this is like giving people their flowers while they're alive, and also, for those who are in the archives who are no longer alive, celebrating their labor that may have been forgotten had people not—like myself, who are artists, researchers—wanted to come in, to draw from that repository to make sense of our present moment, and to think about how we want to move forward together in the future.

CL: Great, thank you so much, Professor Metaferia!

HM: Thank you, thank you so much, Courtney, for having me!

[music]

Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu