My rukus! Heart: Live

‘My rukus! Heart: Live’ saw British artist Topher Campbell host a roundtable discussion with an array of Black Queer artists, whose creative practices embody the rukus! Federation’s work of moving beyond physical and textual archival material into metaphysical arenas of sensual feeling. The work of such a ‘living archive’ was a thread that guided the audience from appreciating the living histories presented by the panel of guests, to becoming enchanted by Black Queer artistic responses to the expansive matter of Black Queer living, and finally to being moved to disrupt the binary of reader/read by dancing within a collective transformed into the very archive we had come to experience and connect with.1

In the Tanks, Campbell’s work takes the shape of sounds, still and moving images, as well as a table bearing the weight of collaged histories. Upon stepping in, I am instantly immersed in the primacy of feeling. The images of soft white linen call to me from their suspended portal images; I am moved to recognise a few faces dancing on the walls, welcoming me into the colours of their ecstasy with swaying arms and hips, mouths brimming full of silent laughter. The audience sits in columns outlining the table as a centrepiece in the event’s artistic archival delineations, its jagged edges of a collectivised past reorienting us towards the futures of our dreams; a panel living and breathing Black Queer histories.

The unfolding discussions served as a retainer for the fluidity of archival practices as embodied by Ajamu X, photographer and co-founder of rukus! Federation; Kolade T. Ladipo, multidisciplinary creative and founder of the Noiregayze platform; award-winning author and public speaker Valerie Mason-John; visual artist and co-founder of Black Fly Zine, Ella Frost; dancer and filmmaker Zinzi Minott; and Campbell himself.2

To gather up and share in the stories of such expansive Black Queer lineages is to bear witness to a non-linearity moulded by time’s creatures and creations: a portal, if you will. I found myself comfortably settled in the time warps that danced before me, following the discursive threads on creative methods of resistance, survival and living to and through archive, as the conversation projected moments of laughter, knowledge and skill sharing, sensuality, movement, grief, love and hope for the thriving futurity of Black Queerness – projections not too dissimilar to the moving images that played on the walls behind the panellists. It would be impossible to fully render the depths of wisdom gleaned in the presence of such an artistic collaboration of thought, action and feeling; a truth spoken clearly by Campbell’s affirmative reminder that the archive functions as a portal to a memory and not to the actual event. In this light, I hope for my review to elicit a sensual recollection of events; a portal through which you might come close to bearing witness as I did.

So, from this portal of memory, I experience a sense of alignment when Minott acknowledges the significance of Black feminist material as foundations for her creative political praxis, over the orientation of her Queer identity. I am emboldened by the reflections of gender queerness in Ladipo’s explanation of how transitioning through different art forms requires surrender to the flow of self-determination. Campbell’s well-led discussions branched out to topics of collectivism, beauty, the fluidity of time and much more; themes that rang true through the panellists’ eager responses and audience members’ exhalations of understanding and agreement.

Of inherent importance to such a gathering was one attendee’s question about how to make these archival moments and materials accessible to those in need of the clarity that they enabled: a challenge for institutions like Tate and similar retainers of archival memory to reflect upon with guided intention. Amidst responses discussing the waiving of usage fees, as well as acknowledging and working to distribute the power levelled with the curation and display of archives, I am particularly inspired by Ajamu X’s advice for inclined individuals to move beyond the institutional in search for a communal archiving process. The audience is encouraged to make such a transition possible by engaging and preserving the memory of our living through soft- and hardware devices, publishing our creations using available platforms, and sharing work with our friends, family and local community.

Left with what felt like the bones of a manifesto for ‘living as archive’, the event’s intermission granted me time to meditate on how the experiences of Black Queerness, as represented by the artists in discussion, might be less about the static systems of the archive and more about the myriad ways in which we rearrange these bones of the past to enable our futurity. For me, such a futurity looks and feels as heterogeneous as the panellists, audience and even the eclectic mediums displayed all around us. How are we enabled by such discussions to access the stories of others in a manner that disrupts the power relations constructed by a subject/object binary? How do sensual orientations towards our ‘living as archives’ allow us to organise and mobilise matter away from colonialist traditions of treating our stories as dead and inert material for exploitation and sale?3 The discursive threads of fluidity, accessibility and memory work in the night’s artistic responses granted me the opportunity to reflect on these questions as bridges between my inspired curiosity and the ‘ongoing, never completed project’ of Black Queer futurity.

The first artistic response takes the form of a trinity poetic performance. Illuminated by warm bronze lights, Imani Mason Jordan and their cadre cast shadows of movement led by the harmonies of imbricated incantations bleeding out from the sound system and performers’ bodies to an audience stilled by anticipation. As the instrumental incantations fade away to a pause, we watch as the performers fill the gaps with their own overlapping recitations, each deeply in tune with the erotics of their personal storytelling. Pages are strewn all over the floor as the poetics reach climax before dissipating. Here, we are not witnessing an end but a continuum through which the performers trade places and the recorded incantations play once more to inspire new beginnings. I am amazed by the use of incantations and overlapping stories as archival launch pads. To me, this response accurately captures the feeling of queering the archive as it highlights the fugitivity of Black Queer narratives as evading capture by engaging in the affective realms of our being instead. It intentionally resists modernist urges of linearity, leaving the audience with parcels of poetics transcribing experiences of rage, consent, intimacy, mother(ing/hood) and all the inner folds of Black Queer living. With writing this review in my mind, I struggled to settle into the intended complexity of such a performance. How was I to explain its ineffable effects to those not present? Like magic, a singular phrase lands in my lap from the intermingling portals before me – ‘trans as unexpected, untraceable’.4

Like the roundtable discussion, it is clear this response was urging me to find a sense of home in simply encountering the unknown rather than attempting to dissect and uncover the origin and destination of every root and branch. In alignment with this sensual focus, the second artistic response by light and sound artist Rowdy SS attempted to move the crowd through a trance-like soundscape that I imagine mimicked the feeling of ecstasy, for some. Though earplug provisions enabled the audience to engage with the immense waves of sound used during performances, the flashing lights made it impossible for me and a few others to watch. This state of overwhelm instantly excluded some people from being able to engage fully with the promising possibilities this portal offered. By needing to excuse myself, I would also miss out on the movement response by Malik Nashad Sharpe. Although I was able to glean from others how this third performance translated feelings of grief and transformation into dance, I still found myself feeling disabled by the lack of consideration in curating such experiences. With aims aligned with the ‘generative capacity’ of the Black Queer body,5 I believe more could have been done to account for the differing capacities evident within the already expansive orientations of Black Queerness. Perhaps clear communication on the nature of the lighting would have enabled the agency of light-sensitive individuals to refrain from engaging with that performance rather than a replication of a well-known racially disabling experience of being pushed out from spaces that do not cater to the collective.

The final artistic response took on a form akin to the clubbing archival footage present in Campbell’s exhibition. Queer Bruk, a popular host for Black Queer club nights, presented the audience with an arena to immerse ourselves in movement animated by the musical mixings of DJs Talia A. Darling and Lexii. I was grateful to be welcomed back into the performance space as a Black Queer body whose feelings and movements felt important to the work of enabling a sense of ‘living as archive’. I felt immersed in a room of moving portals, each of our stories rubbing against one another without the pressure to superimpose our narratives as the one true reality of Black Queer living. Rather than experiencing the pressure to prove the validity of my experiences, I felt enabled to simply be.

I believe the focal shift of ‘My rukus! Heart: Live’ from examining curatorial power within institutional arenas towards affirming the localised potential and possibilities of ‘living as archive’ while on society’s margins can be read as a queering of the archive. Here, I am suggesting that by expanding beyond a static exhibition to include events that figured the audience as working threads of its own memory, this event series queerly engaged Stuart Hall’s notion of the ‘living archive’ as ever-unfolding memories and stories deeply situated in the realms of the sensual and affective, counterposing the traditional deification of the institutionalised archive.