[Vasundhara Mathur] So, I’m going to give the bios of the next two speakers who are going to be in conversation with one another. Ajamu X. Ajamu is an artist, scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist best known for his imagery that challenges dominant ideas about Black masculinity, gender, sexuality and representation of Black LGBTQ+ people in the United Kingdom. He is the co-founder of the rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer Plus Archive. In 2022, he was canonised by the Trans Pennine Travelling Sisters as The Patron Saint of Darkrooms and received an honorary fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. He has been published in a wide variety of publications and critical journals. His second monograph, Ajamu: Archive, was published in 2021. His work has been exhibited in many prestigious museums, galleries and alternative spaces around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Ajamu: Patron Saint of Darkrooms, 2023 at Autograph and Archival Sensoria at Cubitt Gallery in 2021. His work is held in the collections of Tate, the Rose Art Museum, Gallery of Modern Art, Autograph, Arts Council England, Leslie-Lohman Lesbian and Gay Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Topher Campbell. Topher is a filmmaker, artist and writer who has created a range of works in broadcasting, film, theatre, television and performance. His work focuses on issues of sexuality, masculinity and the city, particularly in relation to race, human rights and climate change. He is the co-founder of rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer Plus Archive. As a performer he has appeared in Campbell X’s Stud Life, Ian Poitier’s Oh Happy Day and Isaac Julian’s Trussed. In 2018 he collaborated with the Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers on Fetish, which premiered at the Barbican Centre in London and was official selection for the Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Scottish Queer International Film Festival and Sheffield Doc Fest. In 2022 he co-directed Una Marson: Our Lost Caribbean Voice and the documentary Moments That Shaped Queer Black Britain, which explores the UK’s Black queer history and culture for BET Paramount. In 2024 he was appointed as the new director and CEO of Homotopia, the UK’s longest-running LGBTQIA arts and culture festival. Topher has commission by Tate to produce a new work titled My rukus! Heart. The commission will open to the public on 23 September 2024. So please give them a warm welcome.
We’re going to start with a vid – sorry, I have to say one thing before you can clap. We’re going to start with a video and there are images of a sexual nature in the presentation that will appear on screen. There will be looping images. So I have to let you know that. Welcome, welcome both of you.
[Topher Campbell] Hi Ajamu.
[Ajamu X] Hello Toph. How you doing?
[Topher Campbell] How you doing? I’m fine.
[Ajamu X] How you doing? I’m fine. What are we going to talk about?
[Topher Campbell] I don’t know, actually. Well, this is an amazing, because we’ve not talked like this for ages, have we?
[Ajamu X] No we haven’t.
[Topher Campbell] No, it’s been a minute.
[Ajamu X] And we are not talking anyway, so there you go.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah, very rarely. So, yeah. So, rukus!
[Ajamu X] rukus! Yeah. Go on.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah. What’s it about?
[Ajamu X] What’s it about? So we had a conversation in 1919, so sorry, 1919? I was 1919.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Ajamu X] In 1999, in 1999. And it was a Saturday at my house. Yeah?
[Topher Campbell] Yeah, in Brixton, London, for the recording.
[Ajamu X] And we were talking, we also watched Star Trek, and Star Trek is very key if, because there is a reason why we’re called rukus! Federation. It’s because of time. Federation then brings in this business of time and space and adventure.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah.
[Ajamu X] And the, so for me, we were talking, I was bitching, and a part of it was around a frustration around where I felt Black queer politics was at the moment. In you know, the context of the, in terms of the UK. And so lots of the dialogues I felt was, like, coming from a place of lack and I’m not…
[Topher Campbell] Yeah, it was all about trauma. It was all about kind of alienation and marginalisation.
[Ajamu X] Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] And activism.
[Ajamu X] Yeah. And for me it’s kind of not to dismiss people’s lived experiences, but I felt that there had to be another conversation around aspiration and celebration and...
[Topher Campbell] And artists’ practice as well.
[Ajamu X] Yes so rukus! is like, an artistic endeavour. But also rukus! also like comes out of a long friendship. And the reason why we then chose the name rukus! was to try and capture the kind of energy that we felt kind of rukus! was at the particular moment. And so rukus! comes out of the word raucous.
[Topher Campbell] Raucous!
[Ajamu X] Which means the...
[Topher Campbell] Thank you my Jamaican sister.
[Ajamu X] That’s for you.
[Topher Campbell] Bun Babylon, but yeah.
[Ajamu X] So basically rukus! then, that comes from the word raucous. Then to create fun and mischief. But also Ruckus is the name of an African American porn star.
[Topher Campbell] From Black Inches magazine.
[Ajamu X] From Black Inches magazine.
[Topher Campbell] A seminal 1980s publication, Black porn.
[Ajamu X] Yes, yes. So kind of, straight away, the kind of the sexual or pleasure was kind of there and the kind of like gesturing towards something else or something different.
[Topher Campbell] Definitely, and also kind of making a noise and the idea of like, you know, James Baldwin, artists should disrupt the space, just disrupt the peace. And Federation, yeah, was the idea like, I was a student, I did like, I was a very pretentious student. I did something called Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. And I learned all about how European thought was shaping Europe and excluding us, of course, all the time. And I saw it’s usually like a couple of white cis men, a few cis women. Bloomsbury Set, the vorticists, the futurists and all this lot who were defining culture in the nineteen, in the twentieth century. And so, I thought, we’re just two guys, let’s call ourselves something bigger than we appear to be and we’re going to be the Federation. So that’s what it came from. And then also, it’s the Trek, if you’re a Trekkie, live long and prosper, then, you know, the Federation is also a colonial project. But that’s another thing.
[Ajamu X] And then also we went to Holland to see a group called Strange Fruit, a Black LGBT group. And then we had a conversation with Marlon Rayner[?] and Anna Crew[?] who’ve done amazing work around a Dutch experience. And the dialogue we had with them was, you know, how did you create this thing called Strange Fruit, exactly? rukus! then want to try and get a sense of how we create a group that’s like more around a cultural production and artistry.
[Topher Campbell] Definitely. And also there was a thing around the ways in which Blackness, queerness and LGBTQIA+ identity was being rooted in places which were really about representation and around kind of, and also kind of defined by financially, by organisations who would put us on posters or talk about us as otherness in magazines or newspapers, both from the white, queer and LGBTQ communities and also from the Black communities and the mainstream communities. We kind of wanted to say something different in terms of our experience as young men then and where we were coming from. And, you know, going back to Bun Babylon, we, there’s a, Stuart Hall gave us a kind of a tagline.
[Ajamu X] ‘Make difference work.’
[Topher Campbell] Yeah. ‘Making difference work’ was one of our taglines from Stuart Hall. But we also had another tagline, which is ‘You can all fuck off’, which is basically, you know, a kind, a comes from an energy. The boys and girls and all the brothers and sisters were punks and were part of the kind of anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s. So we kind of, you know, we probably kind of absorbed some of that energy. Yeah. And we wanted to say something different about taking up the spaces as queer young men, as we were then. And also we’re both artists, we were, you know, makers, cultural producers.
[Ajamu X] So and then the archive then came out of an exhibition called Queen’s Jewels.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah.
[Ajamu X] But previously, that was 2005. There was a flyer that we made called ‘Family Treasures’.
[Topher Campbell] Family Treasures.
[Ajamu X] Informed by the amazing work by Steven G. Fullwood, who created the In the Life Archive in New York. And so he is like my…
[Topher Campbell] Schomburg Center.
[Ajamu X] Schomburg Center... and he is like my archival angel, basically. And so we made this flyer, mailed it out, and nobody responded.
[Topher Campbell] And why do you think that was? What was the...?
[Ajamu X] Well, the question at that moment was what Black queer history? Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah. What value did I as a culture producer, as an activist, as a community organiser who’s Black and queer. What value does anything I possess have?
[Ajamu X] Yeah. And then also then, what was happening at that moment was then your Black social and cultural history excluded a Black LGBT experience, and then your wider white LGBTQ clue. Clue?
[Topher Campbell] Yeah. Well, clues are good.
[Ajamu X] Yeah, they need clues, don’t they?
[Topher Campbell] They didn’t have a clue.
[Ajamu X] They didn’t have a clue, basically. That’s what I’m saying.
[Topher Campbell] And we wanted to be...
[Ajamu X] Yeah, yeah. And so they then excluded Black experience. And then, there was then a group of amazing young Black queers who were then were not aware of the past fifty years around the Black British experience. And then also, when we went for funding, yeah, right, your funders kind of said, we fund the Black cultural sector, we fund the LGBT, you have to fit into one of those.
[Topher Campbell] And we’re talking about the, just like, you know, twenty years ago, we’re talking about the noughties, you know, this isn’t ancient history.
[Ajamu X] Noughties, yeah, and so then the dialogue then that we had was well actually we’re part of the Black, we’re part of LGBT, and then we’re also separate from at the same time as well. So then actually we have to rethink this thing called the archive.
[Topher Campbell] Definitely.
[Ajamu X] Just because it was still locked within this binary framework and actually rukus! is all about stepping outside of those either/ors to a place of both/and. So then actually things then become a lot more nuanced or more complex, and that was kind of the backdrop to how then the archival, then the archive then that came out of Queen’s Jewels. And then key to rukus!’s naming, so queen, queen was a word that was used to dismiss your queers that was more feminine. So then actually, rukus! then took back the word queen. Yeah. And then jewels also is a reference to the private parts. Yeah. So then actually Queen’s Jewels was then how we had played around with that because actually, if you understand British seaside humour, which a lot of us grew up from Carry On movies and so on, so forth. And there’s always this double entendre happening in terms of lots of British humour. So then actually, for me anyway, it’s drawing upon that moment and that also then when folks then googled Queen’s Jewels it then went to book house. So then there was something about that I found funny anyway, but there you go.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah. But also, it’s also about, I think it’s about just that, the kind of looking back and thinking about the work we’re doing now in a separate discipline. And it’s also about the kind of ways in which, I was talking to Campbell X, the filmmaker, about this, around what Black queer is. And Black queer is a different kind of space, really. It’s not the space of Blackness only or the space of queerness only. It’s actually a different kind of space, and it’s a kind of an emerging space. And the reason why it is such is because it often falls between the cracks, if you like. And it falls between the cracks because it’s, in a sense, you know, the ways in which it’s kind of valued, the viewpoints, the life experiences, outside of a commercialisation, it’s not valued in the sense of it being a space which offers cultural value for all of us. I think what we wanted to do, what I wanted to do anyway, as a maker of culture when I was coming up, was I wanted to, to add value to the work I did and my queerness and my Blackness was very much part of that.
And also what was happening with some of that in sort of commercial spaces, as in Black or Black queer representation, it was often kind of sanitised, there were sanitisations of it in many different ways. So we were very, kind of, what we call it, it’s a phrase we call, that’s kind of common now, but ‘sex positivity’, we were very sex positive in the sense that sexual bodies were part of the archives and bodies were part of memoir, you know, so it’s just about, as much about what isn’t in the archive as what is.
Because what’s interesting now is that when you look at the connectivity, like, for example, David McAlmont is a friend, but there’s also other histories there that aren’t, can’t be articulated in papers and pamphlets, that have to be articulated in an oral kind of dialogue. And we were actually talking the other day and you said, you commented on a text message to me. Oh, it’s interesting, going into the archive, how many of my ex-lovers are in the archive. So I think it’s just interesting. So there’s kind of ways in which the centring that we feel of what historicity is, of what kind of memories, of what archive is, is always going to be in contention, in opposition, in dialogue with sort of mainstream ideas of our histories.
[Ajamu X] I also think it’s a challenge to, also to Black and queer histories to think then, once again, I think, like far too often and we get locked into the institution over there somewhere. But also there’s still these gaps within our Black queer networks as well. So then actually rukus! is there to kind of play with and disrupt all of that as well. So then, so one thing for me is very key around the archive, it’s not the archive but it is a archive. Yeah, because, it’s because there’s very few archive dedicated to a Black British LGBT experience. Now then, I am not saying that people don’t have archives. But I think, like, rukus!, kind of, I think it was more about the systemic, about building this, this thing called the archive. And so part of it...
[Topher Campbell] And also because we were in dialogue with so many different, well, North Americans and obviously we talk about Amsterdam. But there was a real sense in which my father’s African American, but there’s a real sense in which our stories, in terms, I mean you’re from Huddersfield, I was born in Coventry. There’s a real sense in which the histories that we kind of have in terms of the generations that are here were kind of always being subsumed by other Black histories or other queer histories, Black queer histories, don’t you think?
[Ajamu X] Yes. So, for me, I think during the 1980s, 1990s, a lot of us were drawn towards the North American experience because they had the books and films or whatever. But then culturally it was still Caribbean, Jamaican, actually, that’s why I’m hearing you speak actually.
[Topher Campbell] Sorry to everybody else from the other islands, but.
[Ajamu X] Yeah, well, you know, they’re just provinces of Jamaica, but there you go. I’m just saying. That’s for the archive.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah, that’s for the archive. Yeah.
[Ajamu X] So basically, for me, there’s something about also my parents coming from Jamaica, right, yeah? Being raised on Garvey and blah, blah, blah. So when actually there’s just this particular kind of energy that we also bring to the work of rukus! that draws upon that Jamaicanness that we also have.
[Topher Campbell] And also draws upon a kind of a post-colonial Britishness in terms of, like, in terms of the fact that our education is British and that I was brought up by learning about T.S. Eliot and, you know, Virginia Woolf and eventually had to discover or rediscover my queer icons, African American writers like Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin, of course. And of course, our African writers as well. So it’s kind of this mash-up, but the lens is very much around where we were situated as Black British people born in this country.
[Ajamu X] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Topher Campbell] And I think that was something that we wanted to kind of make a quite clear statement about. And in a sense, it’s something that is still very absent, really, because there is not really the kind of, if you like the links aren’t being made into the kinds of experiences that Black queer people had over the last few decades. You can talk about the, you know, the Black British music. You talk about Black British literature, you can talk about Black British, you know, theatre or Black British non-fiction, fiction writing. But where we sit is always going to be disruptive because I think the Black queer body in itself is a disruptive thing in any space you have it.
[Ajamu X] Which then leads me to then the Black queer body. Yeah,
[Topher Campbell] Yeah.
[Ajamu X] Because I think kind of rukus! for me is not just about what we’ve collected, but it’s how we’ve, like, tried to rethink this thing called the archive or to have other kinds of dialogues. So for me, over the last few years, I’ve been thinking more about how we talk about pleasure and the archive, so then actually archive, for me, if we’re talking about the archive, that’s like made of paper, analogue, it’s been touched and touching. So then actually, straight away we come back to the body. So if we agree in principle that the archive holds memories in some shape or some form, we could then say that, actually, that the Black queer body is also the archive, is because our bodies hold all kinds of memories, not just trauma. But even all, also things around pleasure and kissing and fucking and doing all kinds of things as well so then actually, I think that for me then the archive now has to be seen more as something more fleshy. It’s doing something else, because for me, a lot of the wonderful work around the archive still sidestep what is archive doing for me.
So when actually I touch the flyer from the first Black gay men’s conference it also touches me back, right, yeah? Thousands of Black queers might have touched that flyer, so then, once again, these flyers around us are not clean and tidy, and they might be soiled with bits of sweat and blah, blah, blah. So then actually there’s something else happening. And then for me, a reason why I then wanted that track played is because then lots of the conversations around the queer archive is still very much visual. So actually what would a Black queer archive sound like if it was purely sonic. David would be there, right, yeah? What, then, if it was like a taste? If we could taste the archive? And then actually if you go into kind of older, mouldy archives with red rot, actually that dust does get into your body. So then I think there has to be another engagement with the body, and the archive as body, and the archive as flesh, just to make it more sensuousness, because the thing is we feel the archive, right, yeah, we feel the archive in all kinds of ways. And then sometimes that feeling is with those intimate archives with those that we love as well.
So then actually I think there is a question around what again, the point you made, not what the archive includes, but what does the archive exclude? And then more importantly, what can’t the archive hold, but yet how do we try to have that dialogue as well? So actually, we’ve seen flyers from clubs here, right, yeah? So yes, you can archive the music, you can archive the fashion. But then you cannot archive the pleasure that went in there, the sweat that went in there, people that we fancied in there. That’s the kind of...
[Topher Campbell] The looks we had.
[Ajamu X] The looks, the gaze, so then actually those can’t be archived in the traditional sense. Or even in a queer sense. And, but somehow we still need to have the language or to invent the language to try and articulate those things that cannot be pinned down within all kinds of archives.
[Topher Campbell] 100%. And also, I think, not to deviate from that because I want to come back to that, but also for me the sort of thing around feeling is really important because I think, you know, there’s this, there’s the embodiment. So I kind of, you know, like rather like, you know, its cliché but, you know, a tree and its kind of rings, you know, whatever’s happening is embodied in terms of the experience you’ve had on that dance floor, of the experience you felt when you’ve seen him or her or them across the room. The feeling, you know, in terms of whatever dialogue you’re having with your parents or the people you love when you have to enter into this space, that kind of has a physical, real conversation. Going from London back to your small town to speak to your parents, or coming from your small town to London to find your space and to actually be in those spaces.
And I’m, you know, the archive of the, for men who have sex with men, the archive of the cruising ground. The archive of the clothing that you wear. So what, kind of, the feelings that are around, what you see and feel as you go through your life, and the value of that, as opposed to what you’re supposed to be. You know, what you’re supposed to, because we live in a consumptive world. So, you know, we’re told, and told what to feel, what to wear, what to, you know, advertise it, just in the most subtle and most aggressive ways. I think there is a disruptive conversation, I just, I mean, I very clearly know there’s a disruptive conversation that the Black body and the Black queer body most intensely has with all of those things when it enters into any kind of space.
I think one of the things which, I’m just trying to find an appropriate... that’s the logo, by the way. One of the things that...
[Ajamu X] And the logo is by James Belasco.
[Topher Campbell] James Belasco.
[Ajamu X] But so I think for me, it’s always important that we can cite where our work referencing and who we’ve been in dialogue with as well.
[Topher Campbell] And what Ajamu’s talking about, because that’s something that I’m fascinated about in terms of the practice that kind of you have around not just your relationship to archive and archiving, but also your own work, your own creative practice. But also I’m interested in the ways in which the stakes are quite high with this as well, because I remember when I made the film The Homecoming in 1996, which is about your first exhibition in Huddersfield, and how that was received in the public, and by institutions who wanted to silence the work. And so the stakes are quite high within the conversation of Black queer archiving and the Black body.
And it kind of, not that it needs to be reduced to this space, or it’s not a reduction should I say, but the kind of, one of the kind of tributaries of conversation goes towards the ways in which we can or cannot walk down a street safely, or enter a shop safely, or be in our workspaces safely. It comes from the same kind of places and there are ways in which we kind of interact with that, and the memories that we have and the feelings that we have in those kind of contexts are often diminished.
And there are ways in which then when we come together and we have a Black gay men’s conference in 1987, or we, or Queenie creates a lesbian beauty contest, they’re in dialogue with those things too.
[Ajamu X] Yeah, I think that the reason why rukus! does the thing is because I like the idea of unruly queers. I like the idea of those queers who choose not to fit in, yeah? And because it actually, for me, the more that LGBT history mainstreams itself and then appears in institutions, the more that it then becomes cleaned up and made palatable. So then the question for me always is around who is it then for? So then actually, if you then ignore sex and pleasure, what you’re gonna get is a sexless history of LGBTQ. And that means then particular kind of queers are excluded. Your ..., your sex workers, your bathhouses, your cruising grounds, your strippers, your stripper bars, that this whole section of us gets excluded so that actually for me, rukus! is about taking a position, yeah, right? And then once again I’m from the school, if you kind of like what we do, fantastic, great. If you don’t, that’s okay too. So then once again it’s not about, like, currying favour, yeah.
[Topher Campbell] Absolutely.
[Ajamu X] Just because we’ve had these challenges with funders and blah, blah, blah, blah. So actually rukus! have two logos. Do you remember the thing about two logos? Because the first logo has got the guy with the boots and the dick in the middle by James Belasco. There was a queer event around 2001, 2002, and they basically says, your logo is too sexual, right? Yeah, right. And we kind of says, well, actually, you have the logo or you don’t have us. So actually we have two logos just because then once again, the minute that you centre pleasure and erotic and joy as central to one’s activist work, right, yeah? People go ‘ooo, ooo’, because people is around lots of political, queer ideas is around ‘we are like you’. And well, actually, I’m saying actually, it’s about a difference. Yeah. And then the thing is what makes us different and then just because we are different and vice versa, we don’t have to fall out or whatever, so then, actually, I don’t think that our queer politic, Black politic and Black queer politic actually, truly yet accept this thing called difference.
[Topher Campbell] 100. And I think that’s since we were insistent and continue insistent. And I know we had, I mean, it’s interesting that this little introduction, and this is not a criticism of the event, that it was rukus! Black LGBTQ Archive. That was never, we’ve never called this, the rukus! Federation for the reasons we mentioned. And it’s the rukus! Archive. And this, again because there’s this thing around, well, no, we don’t represent. We are artists and what we’re doing is we’re kind of playing with this. We’re playing with ideas around who we are, where we are, and with memoir, with sexualities and with pleasure, with sensualities, with feelings, with notions of being present. And so the idea of being representative is something we really kind of baulk against, but also, not even baulk against, we just don’t, we don’t inhabit as a...
[Ajamu X] I baulk against it. I do.
[Topher Campbell] But in a sense, we don’t centre it, and it’s that, or lead with it. But the thing is also important, therefore, it’s a political kind of space that is inhabited by the intention, in the sense that it’s kind of aware of, rukus! is aware of the context in which it is playing. And it cannot and will not claim to be everything and be all and everything. It can only claim to be where it is, what it is and why it is. And so it kind of, that energy is in itself very interesting because it’s yes, you know, it’s framed and we frame it and then we can talk about it today and it’s fantastic. But I also want to say it all doesn’t really mean any of that, it means a lot of those things but we’re not going to be contained with that meaning either. We’ll decide what we want to do, where we want. And I think when we were, the rukus! project was kind of at its most active in the noughties, and we often got invited into representational spaces or asked to do certain things, and we would say no, because that’s not, that’s not what we’re in dialogue with. We’re not in dialogue with the representation. We’re not in dialogue with giving you the organisation or the institution a tick box.
[Ajamu X] And then that’s all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Topher Campbell] So it was kind of...
[Ajamu X] And then for me, a lot of those places that we got invited to, a lot of the conversation just wasn’t sex.
[Topher Campbell] They weren’t interesting.
[Ajamu X] And then...
[Topher Campbell] There weren’t many...
[Ajamu X] The thing was, I’ve always been this way actually, I’ve got to be seduced, so then, actually, your institutions or your Black queer spaces, you’ve got to do that thing that seduces me. Yeah. To say yes. Just because I would be doing my politic a disservice.
[Topher Campbell] Yeah, I need to be paid. But I mean that’s...
[Ajamu X] We’ve only got a few minutes Topher. Leave the coin business alone, honey.
[Topher Campbell] But also, I think yeah, I think part of it’s to do with, it’s interesting because rukus! and rukus! Federation and us individually, I mean, part of it was just the energy of living really. It’s about kind of having an interest, doing some interesting things in life and kind of having a real interesting conversation, like, so rukus! kind of sits as a kind of a focal point. And we’re doing very different things in our lives now. But when, at the time that it came together, it was, we were still doing lots of different things.
[Ajamu X] Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] So it’s kind of like, yeah. Is it interesting, is it seductive? Is it, does it kind of have a really good invitation, you know.
[Ajamu X] Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] It’s, because one of the things I loved about what you were saying when we were talking a few weeks back was that rukus! was always about an invitation, an invitation into a different kind of way of kind of expressing whatever it is you need to do. But within the lens of this messiness, this disruptiveness. It’s kind of like this need to kind of bring in a different kind of conversation.
[Ajamu X] Yeah. And I think for me, rukus! for me is about both of us inviting people into our conversation that we make public. So then actually, it’s part of a long conversation going over decades now and then just inviting people in through the archive, through events, blah, blah, blah, because actually that’s what it is. Also, it’s us talking about all kinds of things as well.
[Topher Campbell] And it was interesting because a speaker earlier talked about questioning what is his particular to share, what is important to share for a particular community. And we both looked at each other. Yeah, that’s kind of what it is as well, because it’s like there are things around the rukus! archive and where it sits and it’s, you know, it still hasn’t evolved out of that. Part of it’s resources and part of it’s kind of, I’m kind of comfortable with that. We’re doing a, we’re doing a sort of a celebration exhibition at Somerset House, well I am curating a celebration exhibition at Somerset House. I’m doing stuff in, something around feeling inspired by the rukus! Archive as an installation here at Tate Modern. But the actual physical archive, as it stands now, sits at London Metropolitan Archives. And there’s something about, I’ve always thought about, you know, we want to digitise it and stuff. There’s no hurry. But the thing around, you know, I’ve always kind of resisted the commodification and the selling of it, because I feel that once we put our images out there, they get used in all sorts of kinds of ways that help organisations, institutions and endeavours which are not kind of, they don’t kind of connect with the work, the ways, why the work is in the world in the first place. Because we live in such a kind of, you know, clickbait world now that things can just be consumed, thrown away, and people can own them in ways that, that aren’t necessarily right, in the same way they owned us centuries ago.
So there’s a kind of a real kind of respect both to our collaborators and the people we’ve invited into the work, but also for the histories and herstories that rukus! archive has within it. And I think I want to continue, while I’m alive, to continue to curate the archive in that way, because it’s really important, because at the end of the day, you know, there are certain kind of things that have been practiced around whose story, who’s telling the story, who owns the story, and who kind of curates and kind of, you know, allows or, kind of, builds on the story and who does that. And of course, we’re not, we don’t have a big institution, we don’t have... So that conversation is always alive, just like the archive is alive.
[Ajamu X] Yeah. And I think for me, kind of, the archive is for those Black queers yet to come, and so I see the physical archive as breadcrumbs. People can go back to this particular historical moment, right, yeah? And that’s what the archive is trying to capture and still being aware that it can’t do all the work that we want it to do, or all the work that people expect it should be doing also as well. Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] And I’ve been sort of coming in and out of the archive over the last fifteen years or so and obviously recently because of the projects I’m doing now and I’m stunned by how much there is. I didn’t know there was so much, but then it’s kind of, it doesn’t have any walls, of course there’s like, the stuff at the LMA but there’s also stuff you’ve got, that I’ve got.
[Ajamu X] Yeah. Us have got.
[Topher Campbell] And other people have got and it’s sort of, you know, it’s not really something that kind of, it sits as a kind of a monolith.
[Ajamu X] Yeah. Well we haven’t even scratched the surface of a Black British queer experience yet, so that’s why I also think that what is needed is multiple Black queer archives across the UK. So that then a) rukus! is not seen as central, right, yeah?
[Topher Campbell] Yeah.
[Ajamu X] I don’t think that histories should be centralised. So then actually, I think that to have, you know, multiple Black queer archives across the UK, hopefully in dialogue with each other. If not, then that’s okay too. And just then you are getting into the nuances of what it means to be born and raised in the context of the UK.
[Topher Campbell] While having pleasure doing it, of course.
[Ajamu X] While having pleasure doing it, because I’m very quickly, I think that when I talk about the archive, I hear identity, representation, blah, blah, blah. But I’m thinking, but surely it’s doing something for you first, then hopefully it’s pleasure. Hopefully it’s doing something first then you want, you want then attach all that stuff afterwards, because I think far too often we get caught up in what’s done to Black and Brown and queer bodies, and we should never lose sight of that. And also, what is it that we want done through our own Black bodies, including when we engage with this thing called the archive? I still believe that the material body, the fleshy body, still has to be front and centre of all of that work. So then we feel histories, yeah, we have not come into histories because we’re already in the middle of those histories through all the senses. So once again, I feel like we should not lose sight of the sensorial when we engage with this beautiful and troubling thing called the archive.
[Topher Campbell] And I love what you were saying about the oral as well. I think there’s something about that sensorial, but also it really is about what we hear and feel as much as what we see and preserve and I think, you know, always alive to that kind of sense that, you know, rukus! is about taking the space. And by taking the space, it becomes undeniable, you know, and that undeniability comes from very personal experience of being denied.
[Ajamu X] Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] So, you know, there’s always kind of a way in which...
[Ajamu X] I love the fact that you talk about taking space, because actually, trying to take space has this, it has a negative connotation to it. And so we talk about creating space and making space. And that sounds kind of beautiful. Fantastic, great. But…
[Topher Campbell] Take space!
[Ajamu X] …taking space then does a different kind of a move.
[Topher Campbell] 100. Yeah.
[Ajamu X] Yeah.
[Topher Campbell] So yeah. Thank you, Ajamu.
[Ajamu X] Thank you, Topher.
Ajamu X is an artist, scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist. His fine art photography explores same-sex desire and the Black male body.
Topher Campbell is a filmmaker, artist and writer who works across broadcasting, film, theatre, television and performance. His works focus on issues of sexuality, masculinity and the city, particularly in relation to race, human rights and climate change.
Ajamu X and Topher Campbell are the co-founders of rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer + Archive.