BLACK IMAGINATION
Promenade. Masquerade. Be subversive. Give energy to joy and freedom. Opening August 6th, BLACK IMAGINATION: Ritual Objects, at Virago Gallery in Seattle.
“The Caribbean cultural eye has never relaxed,” she says, with a weary defiance and pride.
Principal Curator Natasha Marin, the youngest of two girls, was born in Port of Spain Trinidad, a little twin island nation off the coast of Venezuela.
For her mother, an educational specialist, the then brand-new NAFTA free trade agreement, created a way of escape from domestic violence. So, they left their home in the Caribbean, and started over in Canada where Marin was first naturalized. This was the first of many moves that Marin would eventually make.
Educational pursuits carried her from Vancouver to Colorado Springs to South Carolina to Boston to Austin, but she found that she was still too black, too young, and too female for anyone to take seriously.
Looking back, “I spent the first part of my life being quite afraid of a lot of things. In hindsight though, “[all] the moving that I did made me a practiced friend, a practiced ‘new person’. I practiced in real life to make myself accessible for survival, because community is totally a part of survival.”
In 2008, Marin, by this time a young mother, left Texas with her then 5-year old daughter, bound for Seattle. Now a three-hour drive away from her family, she was a Trinidadian-Canadian-American in what felt to her like solitude and detachment in Seattle — something familiar to most people of color newly arriving to the area. But Marin used her isolation for inspiration, co-founding the Seattle People of Color Salon, also known as SPOCs, a virtual community of “Artists, activists, academics, organizers [striving] to make space for their multivalent selves.”
Marin is also the mind behind the Reparations Project which has gained national media attention for its success in facilitating a type of redistribution of wealth through a virtual network of requests from PoCs and offerings, generally, from white people. Juggling several projects at once is her norm.
Part of what it means to be Trinidadian is taking time out in a ritualized way to promenade, she says — to masquerade, to be subversive, and give energy to joy and freedom. BLACK IMAGINATION is all of those things, and an invitation to trust what we do not see in the natural.
Somewhere between mothering her now 14-year old daughter and 7-year old son, and the next iteration of BLACK IMAGINATION opening at Virago Gallery on August 6th, Marin sat down to talk with us. We discussed the project, a perspective voyage of the mind’s eye that peels back the everyday white territorial façade, and reveals new and precious black space and time.
The concept of Black Imagination existed well before it took shape in the form of this collaborative work of four black women — you, Imani Sims, Amber Flame, and Rachel Ferguson. Tell us how it came together?
A Seattle Times piece led to an interview between me, Imani, my friend and co-collaborator, and Bill Radke at KUOW. While Imani and I were in the green room, they were interviewing a bunch of white cops about the then recent murder of a black woman, Charleena Lyles. [The cops] were all trying to make themselves look good, of course.
Imagining, in our own private black minds, what true justice, an eye for an eye, would actually look like in response to the atrocities that descendants of enslaved people in this country have endured, we scared ourselves. To such a degree that we actually decided to take a different direction. At the same time, my Reparations Project had left me personally depleted, and still does. We had to put something back in to be joyful. That’s Black Imagination.
Is Black Imagination an installation or an exhibit? Which description is more accurate, and why?
Black Imagination is very much about putting an art context around social justice initiatives, reparative actions, community actions, and centering black joy. An exhibit that you cannot see is a conceptual project. Conceptual art is very ephemeral.
I like when this work is described as an exhibition. You come, and you think you’re going to get to look at some things. In Black Imagination, those things are inside of yourself.
For those who missed the first iteration, BLACK IMAGINATION: The States of Matter, recap for us. What was that like?
The first iteration, States of Matter, held at CORE Gallery (Seattle) in January of 2018, explored our spiritual and corporeal gravitas by seeking out the voices of incarcerated black women, children, LGBTQIA+ folks, youth, unsheltered folks, black folks living abroad, locally, or around the country and presenting that soundscape as a journey.
The most pivotal aspect of that exhibition was undoubtedly our docent, Ayanna Hobson, a nationally recorded vocalist, who led the audience through these voices with her own exquisitely beautiful one.
States of Matter has also been the only one of this exhibition triptych to receive the full energy of all four co-curators — something extra where black womxn are already doing too much, but here, for their own hearts and healing. That’s truly special.
And the second iteration, BLACK IMAGINATION: The (g)LISTENING?
The triptych is site specific. At CORE, in the first iteration, we were on a journey. At Feast, in the second iteration, we’re lingering, and we’re processing in the intimacy of the smaller gallery. (g)LISTENING is as much about sharing as it is about deep listening. Similar to our experience in States of Matter, in (g)LISTENING our bodies begin to “see” by using the other senses, by appealing to all five senses, including sight through “a series of experimental dialogues centering black bodies, black minds, and black expression”.
(g)LISTENING was also set apart by the incredible edible opening ritual facilitated by Chef Tarik.
In a piece of writing published last fall, you describe BLACK IMAGINATION as “a live ‘storybanking’ project” comprised of “real or not-yet-realized territory of ‘The Black Imagination.’” Will you talk more about that?
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of human technology. Storybanking is a collection of stories. A bank conveys values, expertise, and resources. What’s relatively new is ascribing value to the stories — the deposits and lived experiences — of PoC, in the way that a bank holds and values deposits.
In light of Trinidad and Tobago’s colonization by French, Spanish, and Dutch, I imagine that color and class are still powerful societal operators. What does this look like in Trinidad and Tobago as compared to the PNW?
When we’re talking about Trinidad and Tobago, for the most part we’re talking about a country full of brown people, and the kind of colorism that exists among people who are already clearly brown on the color wheel. At the same time, there are white-passing people in Trinidad who are actually Trinidadian. In Trinidad, a drop of white could make you white.
In the PNW, folks spend a lot of energy focused on how mixed they are as an identity. People here will say to you — “I’m mixed” like it’s a thing to talk about. This isn’t something you’d hear in Trinidad, even though Trinidadians are so much more fascinatingly mixed, in general. In a place, like Trinidad, actually mixed people could be made up of eight parts — French, Indian, Japanese, Pakistani, etc. Most of society is mixed to such a degree that it’s not even a subject of conversation.
My own family spans all shades, ethnicities, and nationalities — thirty aunts and uncles, and cousins who look like they’re completely Indian, Japanese, or Ghanaian. A common mix in Trinidad is Afro-Tobagonian, south Asian and African together. This is a norm amongst Trinidadians, something you see all the time, but here in Seattle this would be dinner party conversation.
I don’t really see the American fascination with hybrid identities, because all identities are hybrid. It’s easy for me to know that as a Trinidadian. And what these “mixed” people are really saying is they’re not comfortable being Black.
This type of conversation provides proxy privilege away from Blackness — to distance oneself from the “big bad black” that nobody wants to be, and anyway, if the components of your mix include black, at least in this country, then you are black. So, it’s just a bizarre addendum to an old conversation, and it still doesn’t change the conversation.
The purpose of BLACK IMAGINATION, you wrote, is “to showcase the beauty, incredible diversity, and resilience of those whose lives are often complicated rather than enriched by their blackness.” What are your thoughts on the idea of resilience in black people?
I feel like the idea of the black person as resilient is a very contemplated and dangerous one. I don’t think we should call ourselves resilient where white people can hear, because they’re already pretty convinced that we are.
Medical studies show medical professionals don’t think that black people experience pain. We’re often mistreated in the health industry. Shit is crazy. What we’re fighting for is the ability to be vulnerable and nuanced, and complex and fully human like the rest of the people in society.
Yes, obviously, black people are resilient. We’re still here despite concerted efforts to destroy us over a sustained period of time. However, we should not be tasked with resilience. We have done that. We should be tasked with the freedom to make mistake. Should we come to the point where little black teenage girls, overwhelmed by the babies they’re pushing out in bathrooms, kill them and bury them in the back yard and not get jail time because they’re just deeply misunderstood troubled teenagers, then we would have made it.
Can we be as mediocre as Sarah Palin? Can we have that freedom? Because that’s what true freedom is. It’s not the freedom to be perfectionists or freedom to be martyrs. It’s freedom to be mediocre stock, like your average white guy. That’s freedom.
We should not be tasked with resilience. We have done that.
How do you distinguish between the concepts of white power, white privilege, and white supremacy?
For the most part, the terms we’re using these days are not terms that PoC have come up with. These are terms that white-identified people have come up with to describe their own disfunction. This makes each of them problematic terms.
Implicit bias and white fragility — these words themselves mollify the insidiousness of what they’re describing. Implicit bias sounds like a cologne by Calvin Klein. It doesn’t sound like racism. It doesn’t hit your ear that way, and so it has a different effect on people. When people use the terms white power and white privilege, I think what they’re actually describing the much more primordial white supremacy and racism.
The idea of being racist is so objectionable to people that we can’t even talk about racism. Once racism is introduced, suddenly the conversation is too charged because nobody wants to actually be the racist. Everyone is doing ‘not it’ to racism so that nothing can ever be discussed. So, apparently, it was never cracker vs. nigger, it was nigger vs. racist.
Racist. That’s like the N-word to white-identified people.
What can we look forward to in the third and final iteration, BLACK IMAGINATION: Ritual Objects?
Opening at Virago Gallery in Seattle on August 6th, BLACK IMAGINATION: Ritual Objects is the culmination of three explorations of the BLACK IMAGINATION.
This exhibition is distinctly different from those prior, which have relied heavily upon accessing the black Imagination through immersive sound installation.
Can we collectively imagine a place where we can go and get some black joy? Will people co-create that with me?
As a conceptual artist, this foray into “things” — actual, concrete objects, is very new to me. I’m comfortable selling an experience, which visitors to Virago are certain to have, but how does one first quantify, then bottle, an ephemeral concept like black joy? There’s only one way to find out.
Ritual Objects will give folks the opportunity to actually purchase bottles of Black Joy.
Perhaps if you’re black you can come to Ritual Objects and just, by virtue of your blackness, entitle yourself to Black Joy, but if you’re not black, there’s a great chance you’ll have to ascribe a value to Black Joy before you can experience it.
And I have taken pains to let black folks know that [BLACK IMAGINATION] is for us, that we should feel that we can claim it. I am not doing this work for a white audience. I do understand that any audience in the Pacific Northwest, and perhaps in the rest of America, is going to include mostly white people, unless it’s engineered not to. The harsh economic reality is it’s difficult to pull these things off without taking white-identified people into consideration.
Previous event admissions had been scaled based on identity — free for blacks, $5 for other PoCs, and $20 for whites. This model continues for Ritual Objects.
Save the Date — BLACK IMAGINATION: Ritual Objects at Virago Gallery in Seattle opens August 6th. www.black-imagination.com
