Co–curated by Goldsmiths MFA Curating students Fiona Irene Graf, Yurika Imaseki, Edward Longville and Ankita Mukherji.
Regroundings presents a week-long conversation between artists Asuf Ishaq, Onyeka Igwe, Peter Spanjer, and Gal Leshem, centred on their respective films, Mother (2020), the names have changed, including mine and truths have been altered (2019), Make Me Safe (2020), and Akirot (uprootings) (2020). Released periodically through the chat, the films are slowly unpacked through an intimate discussion between the artists and curators, revealing explorations of colonial legacies, ongoing racial and socio-cultural inequality, and diasporic identities. Scroll down to view!
With thanks to Spike Island, Bristol and Zinzi Minott whose online conversation Tides of Propagation: Zinzi Minott and Gail Lewis inspired this project
Thu 17 June 2021
hello all and welcome to the regroundings chat ? we’re really excited to get this going:) thank you so much for joining us last week, it was so lovely to meet you:)
oh this is ankita by the way!
This is Ed ?
This is Yurika?
Asuf here, thanks ?? looking forward to starting the chats
it’s Onyeka
Peter here!
hi to everyone! This is Fiona:)
Hi ??
This is Gal
It was super nice to go see Mohamed Borouissa’s exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA with most of you! @artists What thoughts do you have on the show?
Fri 18 June 2021
Morning everyone ?
I can start with thoughts about Mohammad’s show, though I actually find it quite hard to kinda gather my thoughts around cause it was such a varied exhibition… But looking back on it now the main thing that stuck with me is the amount of ppl and voices he managed to bring into the space by just placing a camera around. I guess I’m interested in that- the way filming can become a form of collecting experiences -yours and others. A lot of the time for me that’s where the work starts- filming something without knowing how (and if) it’ll be used and then letting everything else build up around it. What did you guys make of the show?
Morning Gal and everyone, My initial thoughts on the whole exhibition, I really found it interesting to unpacking his work, although I understood the themes he was tackling straight away. For me as POC as a young person growing up in Birmingham, I related and empathised with the struggles of Black communities in the US or the French North African communities in Paris. Back in 1995 my favourite film was ‘La Haine’ film by Mathieu Kassovitz, a story of an Algerian and Jewish friend who live in the council estates in the suburb of Paris, with the backdrop of riots with the police, sad 25 years on recent riots in Paris depicted in ‘Peripheries’ photographs series.
Sat 19 June 2021
Hi all! This is my messy kitchen this morning ?? I was on my way to the studio and then I saw there’s no northern line so I came back home and started baking (which is a big mistake in this heat! ?) Lately baking became something me and my sister do “together”. We live in different continents, both away from home and sharing recipes became a massive link to each other and to feeling together apart. This dough is usually made on Friday for Shabbat (Saturday (for us in a totally non religious way)) but part of my diasporic experience is the fluidity of translating your culture into life in another place and messing up the times of both ? Hope everyone has some nice good today ????
Btw @Asuf Ishaq I just found La Haine, might watch it tonight!
#food
Have you seen Les Miserables?
@Onyeka Igwe, This is a really good contemporary example, mine was 25 years old ?, I know of Les Miserables the film but I have been meaning to see it, I saw the trailer and it looks good, state violence is deeply shocking. Mohamed’s two works Periphery and ALL-IN capture the poverty themes of capitalism, colonialism, state-power, racism and marginalisation.
@Gal Leshem It was a very hot day today, and I was working! would love to taste your bread does it have herbs in it? or is it plain, I mean bread like. Yes it’s great when you can connect time, people and place in cooking and sharing. I too connect with my culture though food, in my kitchen usually at the weekends, I enjoy the fragrant smells of coriander and mint and spices.
??
Sun 20 June 2021
It’s just plain bread, no herbs I’m afraid.. but I totally relate to your experience of the smells of spices and herbs. These could be so significant to our sense of culture and memory as well. What would you usually cook with them?
I was just dyeing with some rhubarb leaves from family’s garden in deptford and the smell is just horrible!!
@Gal Leshem I normally cook Paneer & pea curry, spinach and potato or Okra curry ?
Hi everyone,
It is exciting to see and hear about your thoughts, observations and personal experiences, and the inspiration you take from them in your work and your daily lives.
We just wanted to announce that we will be posting each of your films in the chat over the next week, beginning today with Asuf’s film ‘Mother’.
Have a good one! Fiona ?
Here’s a description for the film:
Fostering a new understanding of a shared familial history, Asuf Ishaq addresses the experience of displacement, reconciling memories and artefacts from lost times and places. In Mother (2020), he digitally restores a personal photograph of his mother while delving into its history with her. Moving through physical and virtual spaces and gathering up histories that are lost over time, he begins to produce new knowledge, combining personal narratives, memory, and objects to create an archive of experience.
This video is no longer available.
Mon 21 June 2021
Hey @Asuf!
It’s great to hear more about the context of Mother and the links you have found between Bourourissa’s work and your own!
I’m really intrigued by the idea of the real vs. the manipulated image that you reference. How do you feel this happens within your work (e.g. Mother)? Is it through the regeneration of the photograph by altering its aged quality, or within the discussions you have with your Mother, by ascribing new memories to its history?
Thanks for sharing!
Ed?
lovely to hear about how the process of remembering and restoring differed for you and your mother, and also how this very personal starting point uncovered broader politics & colonial histories..
actually, it made me think about how this process of archiving/documenting and then revisiting/transforming is a strong thread through all of your work.. wondering what the process was like for each of you?
Sorry, I find voice notes hard to keep up with! Feels like I need to sit down and find time to listen which maybe is a good thing but means the responses are slow in coming
@Asuf Ishaq I love the idea of you caressing, the word caressing seems incongrous with something inanimate. But apt for the way you describe the photograph How did it feel?
Tacitility and materiality reveals itself in a broken image. Sometimes I have quite visceral responses to images because of what they trigger or the way I might want to touch them
@Onyeka @Gal, amazing questions, many thanks ?? , I’ll answer them this evening, I’m travelling the moment.
@Onyeka, just as I scan across my mothers hands and very close up view, of her skin creases and lines in the palm of her hands, I do the same with the fifty year old photograph, looking at the skin of the photograph and eventually film. Where the paper fibres and bits of dust, hair have been caught in the previous attempts to keep the pieces together with crude sellotape. I was moving between the materiality of the photograph and the virtual representation. Photograph embodies my mother, it becomes her, my mothers body is carrying experiences and memories.
It felt good to feel and touch a fifty year old photograph and explore it in detail, front and back, zooming in and out. On the back where children have drawn on it with colourful markers, with the aid of a computer, I can zooming in to see the marks.
Wed 23 June 2021
It sounds like it was a very meaningful process for both of you. Thanks for sharing
??
Hey everyone! Sorry for being late to the gathering ? I came back from a long hike last night but I’ve just caught up with everything and rewatching your video @Asuf Ishaq , I was really thinking about the ‘body remembering’ and how physical objects might not spark immediate or clear visualisations of a specific event but rather a feeling around it… So I was wondering how your mother’s memory or lack of memory (of her wedding day for example) has affected how you archive moments in your life?
@Peter, there is transmission of intergenerational migration experience from my parents, I personally recall experiences and feelings of events and places in Pakistan, some memories are of my own and other experiences of trauma of migration are transmitted to me, my body archives this without knowing. We shared the same house in Pakistan in the film, we shared all the good and bad things that happened there, my body and muscles remember these memories, and trigger a physical response. Unfortunately photographs of my mother and father’s wedding day are absent, so I use this surviving photograph, as an expanded archiving experience for myself and for my mother, I create a new archive, it’s closest visual representation of her wedding day as possible, I feel good about that.
Hi all, thank you so much for this fascinating conversation, and for continuing to share your thoughts and ask questions. I was really interested in this idea of our bodies as vessels of our experiences and recollections, which then nearly become transitory archives of sensory memories in themselves. Simultaneously, photographs seem to have the capacity to almost act as an extension of the body, as extra limbs evoking – as @Onyeka mentioned – the urge for tactility. This feels like a suitable moment to introduce Onyeka’s film ‘the names have been changed, including my own and truths have been altered’ (2019). Please keep on sharing and exchanging any observations, thoughts and questions:) Fiona?
Description:
the names have been changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) tells the story of Onyeka Igwe’s grandfather in four different ways, disrupting ideas of knowledge production and documentation. The truth is hard to pinpoint, and subject to change. Trudging through personal, colonial, and televisual collections in Nigeria, the tales Igwe encounters are complicated, but she finds her own rhythm in recounting them.
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@Onyeka, your trip to your family’s hometown, I can see your search for the truth and making sure the story is told in many ways to avoid erasure. The rich material you found to tell the story. Can you expand on your narrative weaving ideas? Your story told in four different ways, the choices you made? the magic of folktale, you managed to find archive footage that worked really well. You combine traditional story telling with your film making, can you give more insight to your ideas? I enjoyed the slide projector, film, VHS and Umatic, 16 mm film, the film rhythms, sounds and embellishes that make material come alive but transport you to a different time.
Wed 23 June 2021
I was trying to use a few different narrative styles and devices: colonial film archives, folktale, soundscapes, diary entries, nollywood film, a movement chorus, family remembrances. My aim was to tell the story in as many ways as possible as a way of challenging the orthodoxy of the truth of the archive. If all of these ways of understanding history could sit alongside each other what would that mean for the multiple ways in which we know
Hi @Onyeka! I saw this text where you ask yourself “What does it mean to go looking for yourself in the archive?”, which I found really interesting. Could you tell us a bit about the process of going through these archives? How have your archival explorations influenced your perception of identity?
http://www.mfj-online.org/wordpress_new/assets/VanBiema_Igwe.pdf
First of all, really amazing film @Onyeka! I really enjoyed the different textures that you used in terms of the visual language but also sonically – there was a real mix of contemporary and traditional sounds which both felt very familiar to me. So I was wondering about your relationship with sound, particularly in this film and how sound informed your story telling?
Thurs 24 June 2021
I think, for me looking at colonial archives produces pleasure and anger. It affirms notions I have about the racist ideology embedded and reproduced by coloniality but also is a connection to past, history and ancestry that I was not able to experience and in my life at some points have known at a distance or a remove. In terms of identity, I’d say that my work is often about working through a question or a problem with the hope that it prompts generative conversation with others. I am not sure my identity was at stake here but I was trying think through what masculinity meant to me, what a relationship to men (my father and paternal line which are mysteries to me!) meant and I think I figured something of that out
thanks! ? I think about sound as mood or vibe or atmosphere and as a way of going beyond the mistaken clarity of an image. In the first part of the film I was really influenced by Christopher Harris, he said in a talk https://opencitylondon.com/news/focus-in-conversation-christopher-harris-karen-alexander/ that he thinks of the beginning of the film as preparing the audience to see the film. So I wanted to create a mood that replicated my feeling/being/knowing. I collect a lot of sounds and so I tried to pick the ones that touched me or were meaningful or provoked memories related to the themes of the work. It’s nice you picked up on the sound as it was the first time I worked on design myself and that had been an ambition and challenge at the time as I always worked with us. So I taught myself a little how to work with DAWs etc, I’m still in learning mode.
I enjoyed the texture of sounds through out the film too
@Onyeka Igwe that’s amazing! i think it worked really well, and am excited to see what you might do next with sound design??
this also feels like a good moment to talk about @Peter Spanjer ‘s film.. the ideas of collecting and collaging sounds to create specific textures/moods or provoke certain memories really reminded me of Make Me Safe
Description:
Through a dismantling of established narratives, Peter Spanjer’s video work Make Me Safe (2020) unpicks cliched notions of Blackness and questions internalised belief systems. Engendering moments of intimacy and softness, he harnesses elements of sensuality and sexuality to resist stereotyped ideas of the male body that restrain the lives of Black men.
wondering what everyone’s thoughts are, and also what your own experience was like working with sound? @Peter Spanjer
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Hey Peter, I was struck with your emotionally charged work, it was heavy and light at the same time. I wanted to know more about your process to achieve feeling or an emotion in film. Hues of colour blue is peaceful but is also sadness. How the role of text, visuals, and sound, begin to work together?
Fri 25 June 2021
Morning everyone!
For me working with film and sound is like building a house – the sound is the foundation and gives the house/my thoughts structure so I work on that first. Once I’ve built the space I want to inhabit, I decorate it with my interior/personal experiences and this is where I start to see and connect things which I would say have a lot more to do with intuition than intention.
To answer your question @Asuf Ishaq, I’m really interested in juxtaposition when I put sound, visual and text together. When I started putting together the footage for Make Me Safe, I knew I didn’t want to directly translate what I felt hearing the sound. I was much more interested in the idea of re-arranging or re-imagining which has a lot to do with the disturbing imagery that was circulating during and after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s death.
The softness in the film is a response to the collective tiredness black people felt having to see themselves within the images represented by the media. It was a way to take control of my narrative and my anger and my pain but turn it into something I didn’t think at the time was possible.
Thanks Peter!
It’s such a beautiful work Peter. And I think that the softness you’re talking about really comes across. There’s a specific kind of treatment of your footage that come across- very tactile and sensitive. Like Asuf, I was wondering about the use of colour (which is so rich!) And also about the flowers which make me think about grief and vulnerability..
Thank you ???? !
So before ‘Make Me Safe’, I worked on a set of prints titled ‘Eros’ which are made up of stills from gay black pornographic films. Throughout the process I started to again think about re-imagining these images and the connotations around the sexualisation of black men.
I had this idea of destroying the stills to the point of no recognition; to a point where they started to look like paintings and colour played a HUGE part in creating a new space for these images.
Here some of the Eros prints for reference:
So I think following on from that, colour has continued to seep through my work. I find a lot of comfort in colour and at the same time I find that it can articulate feelings I sometimes can’t
In terms of the flowers, the entire film was shot during the first lockdown so going out to Burgess Park and finding these beautiful flowers and documenting became my form of meditation. To me they truly had healing qualities, especially during a time where there was so much grief and no one to physically/collectively share that with. So consciously (or subconsciously) they became quite a focal point visually ?
I love that! It feels like they operate as healing agents and also as vessels/holders for all these difficult emotions, almost like archival place holders for that specific time ?
I think its super interesting you work with sound first, think is hynoptic almost like a lullably or some kind of chanting. It reminds me of incense holders swaying back and forth in churches. It’s really transformative and sets the tone, i imagine people have many other connections in their imagination
Friday 25 June 2021
Thank you, @Peter, for sharing your experiences and telling us about your fascinating way of collecting, assembling, distorting and creating. I think the idea of plants’ potential to stimulate positive physical and mental responses resonates with many of us who had the chance to experience the nature around us in a different light and intensity during lockdown. @Gal, I think what you say about plants as archival placeholders/vessels for difficult emotions is very interesting. As working with plants seems an important part of your practice, I wonder how you relate this idea to your own work?
This seems like a good moment to release Gal’s film Akirot (Uprootings (2020), the final part of the programme. Please continue to share your ideas and questions ?
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Plants are many things for me, @ed. They hold memories, histories and stories. They are ways of connecting me to places and people. They are a source of comfort but at the same time a source guilt and anger and displacement. Akirot is very much an exploration of that discomfort- coming to terms with the political conditions through which my own upbringing was shaped. it’s an attempt to place myself in this ambivalence, and acknowledge the fact that the emotional connections to plants I was raised with have very problematic national intentions and histories to them
@Gal, your film is thought provoking, and your exploration and working out comes across. Botanicals just as people have a shared history, through colonialism, slavery and now capitalism, both displaced and moved around the Earth for profit. Local knowledge of plants naming practices began to break down, the science and taxonomy of plants, which excluded local botanical narratives, histories and systems of knowledge. Planting and sowing the soil is a strong symbolism of nationhood and belonging, rooted perceived better than uprooted.
I found your stories of your plants intriguing, in my opinion they merge folklore, religion and mythology, just as Freud and Oedipus. I suppose my questions is the weaving of these stories in plants problematic for you because it was in the context of nationalism? Or would you like to find more authentic local botanical knowledge and naming practices? I really enjoyed your film, the narration, pace, folklore and insight to Hebrew language and names. If you get the time read text by Ros Gray & Shela Sheikh (2018) ‘The Wretched Earth’, Third Text, 32:2-3.
Thanks @asuf ?
I think you’re pointing at all the things I’m interested in! I read ‘The wretched earth’, not sure if it was before or after I made the film, but it was very significant for me. To answer your question- the tricky relationship to the plants In the video is the fact that what I grew up believing was “authentic” plant lore, myth and knowledge turned out to be a tool for eraser of other knowledges that existed on the same land before. Naming practices were a massive zionists project for claiming ownership of land and creating a national identity thought language. Having said that, using folk stories is one way for me to think beyond these devisions as so many of them aren’t bound to a specific religion or ethnicity and many variations of them exist across cultures.
In terms of the video, I was trying to mark or perform a certain (futile) ‘undoing’. Uprooting what was planted, physically and symbolically. But also thinking about ‘roots’ in relation to a sense of home/displacements..
Thanks Gal for sharing your insightful work
Your film is such a wonderful end to the programme, @Gal. It is fascinating to consider this idea of process/symbolism in relation the act of uprooting, especially when taking note of the surrounding legalities in doing so, with it oftentimes being considered a crime to uproot a plant within certain national territories. I wanted to pass on a publication that draws some parallels with your work here: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Have you read this before? I’m almost sure you must have! It was of great inspiration for us in deciding on the title of the Film Programme;
“Uprootings and regroundings emerge […] as simultaneously affective, embodied, cultural and political processes whose effects are not simply given. For example, regroundings – of identity, culture, nation, diaspora – can both resist and reproduce hegemonic forms of home and belonging… The notion of diaspora opens up ‘a historical and experiential rift between the locations of residence and the locations of belonging’ (Gilroy 2000: 124), and compels us to rethink the problematic of ‘home’ and ‘home- land’, and migrants’ relations to them.”
I’ve not read that @Ed but it sounds really good! I’ll get on it straight away ?
I’m now looking in more detail into the politics of picking and uprooting. At the time it was something that just crossed my mind in a sense of realising that I’m picking out someone’s crops. But now the legalities of it are taking a more central role for me.
I just finished this new print. It’s made from the same botanical illustrations I used in the video and printed with natural inks that will at some point fade out and disappear. All the plants here are ones I found foraging around. In Akirot the screen in the field was a planned shoot and the other was just going around to look for this dye plant. I was thinking a lot today about the fact that so much of what makes up the process (and the outcome) for me is that kind of haptic experience of touching these materials -soil, leaves- as a way to touch/engage/speak to their histories. I think that these ideas of touch were present in different ways in everyone’s films and it was interesting to see that
are u going to expose it to the sun or let it fade naturally
I think for now just let it fade naturally.. I’ll see how long that takes and maybe expose it at some point
I guess that’s so much dependent on where it’s exposed/ what sun it’s getting. Here it could take quite a while 😉
@Gal I can really relate to the significance of haptic feel during the working process. And as you already mentioned, this importance of physicality seems not only very present in your film, it also seems one of the elements bringing all four films together. Thank you so much for sharing!
This, sadly, brings us to the end of this conversation. @everyone Thank you all so much for having been/being part of this programme and for investing so much time to read, observe and respond. Reading and listening to your ideas, thoughts, stories and interpretations, and finding out more about the artistic processes and investigatory tools you employ in your respective practices has been a truly inspiring and insightful experience for all four of us. Unfolding and embedding your works into the context of this group conversation has brought us even closer to them and to understanding their multifaceted meanings. It has been such a pleasure working with every single one of you, and we hope that also you were able to take something away from working on this project. Maybe our next collaboration can happen IRL!
Wishing you all the best, Ankita, Yurika, Ed, and Fiona
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