Artists' Film: Jarman Award Touring Programme 2022 - In Conversation with Rosa-Johan Uddoh
Hi everyone. Thank you all for coming, and thanks to Nottingham contemporary for hosting us. My name is Nathan. I'm part of the team at the Film London Artists Moving Image Network, or FLAMIN for short. We support artists, filmmakers in various ways. We
do development programmes for early career artists, production grants, and of course the Film London Jarman Award, which is why you're all here today. So the Jarman award has been running for 15 years. And it celebrates innovation and experimentation in artists' moving image in the UK. Each year, a group of nominators curators, film programmes, artists nominate one artist each and then from those nominations, a jury selects six artists in the shortlist and then there'll be meeting again this week to choose the winner. It will be announced on the 22nd of November at the Barbican Centre.
So the award is named after the iconic filmmaker, activist, gardener Derek Jarman. Just aims to continue his legacy of exciting and kind of path-breaking, radical filmmaking. And anyway, I will finish and hand over to Canan who will introduce this evening's screenings.
Thank you so much, Nathan, for that introduction. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this year's Jarman Award Touring Programme, with Rosa-Johan Uddoh. My name is Canan Batur and I'm the curator of Live Programmes here at Nottingham Contemporary. As Nathan briefly explained, we're in great company with the Jarman Award's selection this year. Some of you
might remember Grace Ndiritu, Black Beauty, that was screened here within our exhibition, Our Silver City last year. Onyeka Igwe's so called archive, Alberta Whittle's llogara And of course Rosa-Johan Uddoh's Black Poirot and Morgan Quaintance's Surviving You Always and Jamie Crewe's, False Wife. Today we welcome Rosa-Johan Uddoh for the screening of our works, Brown Paper Envelope Test, Black Poirot and Cultural Field which will be a 10 minute extract only so you won't get the full film unfortunately, but hopefully it will be you will have the chance to experience the full length film soon. Once the screening is over Rosa I will have a quick conversation just to open up some of the themes that her work encompasses and touches on and then we will open the floor to you so you will have the chance to pose your questions. Before introducing Rosa I would like to
share some brief housekeeping notes. Our live programmes open up different interventions and propositions within archetypal research across the organisation. Although we will keep an informal atmosphere throughout the evening, our talks performances and screening seek to create challenging environments where open mindedness and respect for each other's approaches and perspectives can foster growth. So please be mindful and respectful of each other's opinions and views. I would like to take this opportunity to show
gratitude to the University of Nottingham Nottingham Trent University and FLAMIN and Jarman, of course, I mean, I won't be giving the whole length of the of the name but for generously and graciously supporting today's event, as well as acknowledging my colleagues, Philippa Douglas, Jim Brouwer, Tom Chamberlin, Catherine Masters, and Lachlan Hui for making this event possible today. So without further delay, I'm delighted to introduce Rosa-Johan Uddoh. Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist inspired by black feminist practice and writing. Solo exhibitions include Stuart Hall library in London, Blue Coat gallery in Liverpool focal point gallery in Southend on sea, and Destiny's atelier in Oslo. Group shows include workplace Gallery in London, Pioneer works in New York 68 Institute in Copenhagen, and exile in Vienna. Her work is in collections including the
Arts Council collection, she won the Art Quest pure form award at Camden Art Centre, received the saraband Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation Scholarship and selected by which was selected by Nick Knight and is a new contemporaries artists. So many thanks for joining in today's event. Thank you. So how are you? First of all? Thank you so much for this generous and compelling films. I mean, what I find very fascinating is the humour that you employ that makes the work so memorable and receive this emotional immediacy. And, and I very much
appreciate how accessible it becomes and I mean we will talk a bit about it's like later on, but I guess like I'm aware that how accessibility is so important for Your work. So I guess I just want to kind of like start from the beginning, at least for me, because of course, there's a kind of, you know, moderator, I can only just talk about my experiences and try to find a way to make them more accessible for our wider audiences. So my journey with your work started in 2018, through new contemporaries, and I remember witnessing your work and looking at kind of looking into you know, how you describe who you are, and so on. I remember what I found so
fascinating is the way you define your work as a way to kind of achieve maximum self love. And I guess I'm quite interested in the way you describe how using performance could be a medium to kind of medium to kind of come closer to how using performance can be confirmative, to establishing one's identity. So I was just wondering, I mean, in terms of how, with these three films with Black Poirot with Brown Envelope Test. Sorry Brown Paper, Envelope Tests, apologies, as I said, I'm slightly also my mind is slightly hazy. And somehow I don't know why names are the most difficult. Exactly, Brown
Paper Envelope Test and also Cultural Field. I mean, we can see that how these work, I'm in kind of you know, how performance kind of takes shape and how you perform and how you empower that performance to take place through the work as well. So I was just wondering, this intersection that you create, I mean, with, you know, this kind of achieving some radical self love, and also this conscientious attempts to shift the narrative through performance. So could you talk a
bit about that? Because I know it's very present in your wider work as well. Yeah, sure. Can you hear me okay, is the microphone Yeah. All right. Yeah, thanks for that question. It's really nice to see the works on the big screen. Yeah. So in terms of the maximum self esteem, and making performance in order to reach maximum self esteem, one of the reasons I became interested in performance in the first place was because I was really interested in performances that already existed in popular culture. So how they say how, like what we watch on TV, you'll see this, there's a lot of TV references in my work, for example, or what celebrities do, or what politicians do, or what, you know, people who are very visible do and the way that they move how that provides, like a template or a Yeah, a kind of a guide for you to follow, and how the way that the way that I behave had been shaped by by the people that I'd seen on TV growing up. So then when it came to, so I started to really think
about that, at the moment when I like just, you know, decided to begin my artistic career, which is relatively late. And then I thought about performance, making performance myself for the first time is a way that I could both speak to this idea and think through and act out how these performances had affected who I had become at that point, when I'm about 21 22. But also then to slightly adjust that and provides potentially alternative models and ways of being for myself and other people like me. So that was that's one reason why I kind of set out, it was very much. It was quite a selfish impulse to think about how I could learn more about myself, and about the performances that I do and the performances that I repeat, and think about how to become more authentically myself through performance and through through practice, as opposed to through to writing or through something else that was disconnected. So
really, to kind of tackle it at the at the heart of things. Maybe it's helpful for us to kind of open up some of those influences that you were talking about. I mean, I know your work. I mean, as the generation who was born, you know, like in the 90s as me as I and I know I mean maybe this question slightly for me as well because I was born and raised in England. So for me
these kind of understanding of the of these references of pop culture might not be exactly as accessible. So I know for example, a Brown Envelope Brown Paper Envelope Test there's I'll get there and it's not like it's the first time you kind of you know, with the with the first film with the second film, so Black Poirot do you give references to Edouard Glissant Saidiya Hartman Franz Fannon and so many others. Of course, Agatha Christie is the main one. And then with Brown Paper,Envelope Test the references slightly more embodied and kind of hidden, and lived. And so each reference someone opens up a certain kind of history of certain kind of British black history. So you imagine, by imaginative and
creative interviewing, so you somehow opened up a different potentiality. And almost as a kind of a more in the methodology, it's almost homage to Saidiya Hartman, you kind of, you know, create this wavered in the experimental and kind of narrative where it feels like you shift directions you rewrite the cannons and so on. So how does these influences kind of play a part in plotting, plotting, you know, the work and sketching out the work? Or I mean, I guess to be more specific, what certain moments in history that you find the influence from or what states you know, dynamic in your mind that is affecting the kind of work he creates right now. Just to kind of give a background history. I know in one of your
interviews, you did mention Serena Williams in Wimbledon. So I guess that's one of the moments that I'm aware that has influenced you dearly. So maybe it's beneficial to talk, I guess more what these influences are? Yeah. And then how you kind of,
you know, bring them into the work. Yeah, so. So I guess I should say about performance, I think that there's one way of thinking about it, which is what I kind of just described before, it is about how what what I personally am watching and engaging with in the media is affecting who I become and my own self formation. But there is a wider
social element to it, one where it's about how so you can take it to like a kind of more collective level, for example, something that I think about in all my work, and basically all of all of my pieces touch on is about what is what is what does it mean to be black? And how does this idea of blackness, how has it been created carefully and deliberately over hundreds and hundreds of years in this country. So there was a time when the term Black didn't exist. And that was before the transatlantic slave trade. And it was at that point of encounter when, when, when slave ships came to Africa, that they started to divide things into black and white before then we didn't think of race in that same way. So and this is
something that has continued. So then they were kind of, then then they defined race through conversations, and through through laws, for example, and I think, and then through and then, you know, through paintings and the media of the time, and this continues to this day. I've recently revisited watching, watching Luther, which is really interesting, because, you know, obviously like that made Idris Elba kind of really big in the UK, he previously did have like, quite a strong career in the US, but he is British and kind of had to go there in order to make that. But it's interesting even to look how in our very recent history between where we are now in terms of thinking about race and how we would depict a black man now, and how we depict to the black man just maybe like 10 years ago, how an idea of race and what is acceptable, and what performances we show has really shifted. And so I guess that's
what I'm looking at in all of my work. And I think that's in terms of when I look at something like Luther or I look at something like something that I talk about a lot in my Yeah, the first one of the first pieces of performance pieces I made was about was about Serena and Venus Williams and watching them play tennis on TV and growing up watching these black women, the very white elite space moving their bodies in really extreme and fantastic ways, was the was was that I was not only aware about how this shaped me and my understanding of blackness and my understanding of who I was, but how it's shaping other people who were black, but also other people who are white other people who age and other people of all different races and all different backgrounds, how it shaped their ideas of what it meant to be black meant to what it meant to be black, because this is something that is formed like on a very social level. So, when it comes to your question, which was there was a reason that I started saying, Maybe I was talking about like certain performances that informed you and inspired you and that you carried with yourself and yeah, kind of, you know, depositories of you know, knowledge is almost and then how they affected your work and how much Yeah, yeah, it was that basic. So when it came to understanding performance myself, my practice is a very personal study, I went through all of the different kinds of influences and programmes, and you kind of and different different things that I remember from my childhood, like a lot of my processes, really. It's really about thinking back into my childhood and unpacking it and thinking, what did I see in my formative years when I was 13 years old? How did that shape my ambitions? Okay, I didn't become a tennis star. I tried but, but you know, I definitely watching Venus and Venus, especially Venus, because for me, I was, I was the oldest sister and this and when I grew up, Venus Williams was really the star. And now again, makes
an easy shift. Obviously, Serena Williams is a huge celebrity in many ways. But I learned from Venus Williams, that it was a good thing to be the only black woman in the white space, that that was something that was not in terms of not politically, but it was it was, you know, she was given a lot of credit for that. And it was fantastic. It was amazing. Everyone admired her everyone thought was amazing what she was doing in terms of breaking boundaries and stuff. And, you know, growing up, I grew up in Croydon, and it was very racially diverse. And, you
know, surrounded by lots of black people, but then, you know, I went on to go into, like, as I pursued a career in academia, I went on to go into places that were predominantly white, predominantly, very elitist, very British places, in a way, like Wimbledon, like tennis, it's a very white, very, very white space, which has a very idea of a particular kind of girly femininity with like the white skirts, and the white dresses, and, and all of the etiquette that comes with that. And I didn't see so much of a problem with that actually, at first, because that was that was respectable, right, that was the path to excellence as a black woman that I had seen on the TV screen. So that's like one example. I guess in the works that I've shown today, though, just to talk, like really, practically speaking as an artist, Black Poirot is probably the work that you can see this most clearly in about how I use references. My first step when I wanted to make this and the reason that I chose Black Poirot was because Poirot is something that I used to watch all the time with my Grampy in Wales, when we go there, like half term school on days, we would just watch it just smash it out every day. And so I was like, well, this, this isn't really like something that would be necessarily considered black. In fact, it'd be considered a very, like white reference, or, or like the epitome of British establishment, but but I was like, let's tackle this. Let's
see what I got from it. Because after all, I was a black child. And like, there was something that was hypnotic about it to me. So I engaged with it. And what I did was I like very, basically, from my memory and extensive knowledge of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, I wrote down, like, I broke down the structure of every episode. So there's like a basic formula. So that's what you see kind of in these kind of swirly blaxploitation graphics, that, that kind of title cards that come up kind of in intervals during the film. And from from
working out that formal structure, which was which exists in the books and exists in the in the films and the and the TV series. I then kind of inserted into that my own experience. And I think, yeah, I guess I guess for me, that is my experience of making art is about thinking about how being a black woman in the diaspora as I am, for me, that experience is very much one of being a detective is one of being trying to find out like a detective of one's own life, but also a detective of, of Black History and other ways of being and other ways of performing.
Wow. Okay. I mean, I have many questions. But I guess one will be to just since we're not talking about Black Poirot is your collaboration with collective text, because I know Black Poirot is a book that you initially created in 2018. And then you continue went back to it, and then you continue developing the work and made it more accessible over the years. So can you talk about that process and how that happened? And yeah, I mean, what were the kind of intention came from? So yeah, this is, this is another great thing that I learned during this period of work, because when I, I guess, when I first started to make this and yeah, I think this was actually the first film that I ever made. I previously just been doing live performance. And it was really great for me to realise and to allow myself to come back to this film, again and again and like keep shifting it and keep tweaking it. And
there are multiple reasons that I did that but I'm basically in in 2020. So after I first made the first version, I made the first version of the film, which is great, because then I got like loads of great feedback. And then I decided, I put some more to do here. And in 2020, I think, yeah, in the pandemic, I
had the opposite, I had the opportunity to show it in New York. And as a result of that, there was a lot more money that came with it. And I decided that I wanted to represent the same film, but I really wanted to work hard on making it accessible because it accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, because at that point, it was this just the sound and the visuals. And it's very visually sparse, as you see, it's like mainly a black screen for for a lot of the work, or it was now there's a lot of captions. So I was recommended this Glasgow
based collective called collective text, who do what is called Creative captioning. So it's kind of a, like, like an, they take an artistic approach to the work of captioning. And the process was very, very intensive, I had no idea at the start, I just was like Oh, yeah, subtitles easily, they can just, you know, write them, you know, and it'll be fine. And that was like, quite ignorant. And it actually took months and several
meetings. And as you might see in the credits, you know, one of the, one of the great parts of the process. So first we did this transcript, which is simply writing down exactly what said, then you have the audio descriptions, which is thinking about how to describe sound in ways that are visual, or include other aspects of the senses. Because of course, some people that will, there's a really big spectrum of people who are deaf and hard of hearing, and some people can't hear anything. Some people can hear some things some people hear in different ways.
So it's really about thinking how, what is it about the sound that I'm trying to get across and thinking about how to write that down in words. So that was something really big that I learned from that. And then also, yeah, the animation, which really comes into its own by Daniel Hughes. And that was again about like getting across something of the tone and the playfulness of the vocal as well as, as well as literally what it's actually saying. And working with David Ellington as the consultant who he is a Deaf artist, himself, and excellent filmmaker. And we also had a BSL interpreter. So we would have zoom meetings where David was talking a BSL two, then we had a BSL interpreter, who would who would translate. And he watched
several drafts of the captions and would give critique on that, about how accessible that was for him. So it was a really integrated process. But I think it really made me aware of actually how much film often excludes, excludes, yeah, the deaf and hard of hearing and how even the basic captions that we sometimes get, are often really, still kind of relegating the experience of deaf and hard of hearing people to a much lesser level. And I think, for me, I someone who's whose primary
focus for a long time has been thinking about blackness, and how black people are treated in spaces, I think it's really important to think about how people who have other positionality is that place them as that society places as a disadvantage, because I think it's really telling how some, some lack of access is considered acceptable. And some is considered not like it is considered still quite acceptable amongst hearing populations to not have captions on films. Most, most events don't have that. And that's kind of seen as okay, like, Oh, we didn't have the budget or whatever. Like, it's kind of seem like, well, you know, it's
okay, if that doesn't happen. Whereas, you know, to think of an event where you don't allow black people to come in, that is now considered as unacceptable, but you know, have we haven't if you have an event where you actually invite black people, welcome black people make it you know, there is still a long way to go. But these are all levels of different levels of accessibility. So, I mean, it's really interesting to think about the wider community of people who are left out of gallery spaces. And this is something I learned, loads about
through through revisiting this one particular film and working with collective text. Thank you. I'm just conscious of time you'll only have 18 minutes left, so maybe it's a good moment. It's been helpful. So
maybe it's Time to open up the floor. And then just welcome your questions. Thank you. Thank you. Interesting work. Yeah, like it
seems to be an explosion of this black culture, pushing it against almost like pushing this ideology against white people's faces. Have you? Have you noticed any resistance towards the work involved in the blackness? This is almost resurrection of black identity, not to my face. How about no? How have I noticed any resistance? I think there's a big community, as you say, there's a big community of artists making work like this at the moment dealing with these themes. And I think that's really great. And I guess, you know, like, you were kind of touching on a bit about like, like, humour, like, I like to use a lot of humour in my work, I like to surround because I like to have fun while making my work. I want to feel good, even
though I'm like dealing with like difficult topics. I also surround myself with people who are interested in, in similar themes. And he Yeah, he would, because I want to move past that. That point of no, racism on doesn't exist or no, like, this isn't this history isn't real, or whatever. Like, I want to actually go deeper and beyond that. So I think that lately, I
haven't experienced that. But I don't think that's because it's not there. I think it's just because of how my practice is a lot of my practice that you see, even with the football, film, cultural field at the end, like it's all like all of the players, they're there. They're women, they're non binary people, they're trans people. There's a lot of black people involved in the production and mainly behind the camera in that one. So, you know, my work in itself is really, it's really gathering kind of a community of practice. And yeah, like I'm
Josephine Melville, who plays my mom in Brown Paper Envelope Test, she's, she was a fantastic black comedian, and set up like the first black female comedy troupe called the BB crew in the 90s, which actually used to include Janet Kay, who sang us out in Black Poirot. But like, you know, a black female comedy troupe. That's something I didn't have any idea about before I met Josephine Melville. And then I was like, Wow, this has been going on for a long time. And so that's very, you know, that's very much the space that I'm making my work in. But yeah, resistance and trying to think. Yeah, I think there's
always resistance, but it's just, I just find it quite boring. And I think that yeah, I feel like I have space. To me for them myself. Yeah, there's so many really amazing quotes in Black Poirot. But we're Glissant's talking about opacity. And certain things
about identity can't be known really strikes me in relation to Brown Paper Envelope Test. And some of the ideas about things, you know, pinning things down the DNA test, or the idea of passing is something is kind of misread you know, you think you know, who or what someone is, but then they're not. I wonder maybe if you could speak about, I don't know about that, about knowledge and things in those two works.
Yeah, thanks. Yeah. So I got brown hair, brown blood tests, deals with this idea of passing, which is an idea that you would, people would perceive you as a certain race that you're not, or it also could be a gender that you're not. So it this term in particular comes from, or is popularised by a book that Nella Larsen wrote in 1929, a black woman who lived in Harlem, and the book is called passing, and it's actually recently been made into a Netflix show as well, but the book is fantastic. But yeah,
so yeah. In in that in Brown Paper EnvelopeTest, I'm playing with an idea of racial passing, which is like about I guess, skin colour. Also about passing how you might pass academically, so I guess the idea of like your a level results, like coming in the post, and thinking about how that might be a way of like, yeah, gaining access into a community that perhaps people didn't think that you belong to. And then also, yeah, biological idea of race, which is like, yeah, I guess again, being popularised through this idea of taking, taking DNA tests to find your racial identity as if as if race is determined on biology, which is not as I said before, it's very much a social construct. Yeah, thinking about Black Poirot. Yeah. So that I
guess that's what I'm trying to critique there is that idea that you could ever really know. Like, there is no objective truth, to to anything but, but specifically to the idea of race. And so similarly, I think Edouard Glissant is talking about a way which is which, which allows us to live with that, like, how do we like do we have to constantly define ourselves, and what could be another way of being? And that's how I understand his his idea of being opacity, of not being opaque of not being completely known. But I think yeah, I think it just comes in a lot with like, this idea of like having to let things go. And having not to know comes in a lot in terms
of black experience, like, I can do loads and loads of research into black history. But there'll be stuff that that was never documented, there'll be stuff that was actively destroyed. There'll be propaganda that is made to tell alternative stories. As we're finding now with the story of Una Marson,
for example, you can look that up, I won't go into it, but like thinking about how perhaps crimes of the past are now being retold in different ways, in order to make different people look good and look better than things actually were at the time. And if you think about, you know, the criminal justice system, which I think is like a real underlying theme in Black Poirot, thinking about like, black people in relationship to police, although it's not like an overt theme. How am I you know, how, you know, often you deal with many bad people have to deal with inquests and deal with situations where they don't know that what why who who done it, you don't get that kind of like that that kind of like same tying up of a crime or understanding of a cause of death as he as he as you would in an ideal Agatha Christie murder mystery, or perhaps you words Yeah. In in another experience of life. So I think that not knowing is something that you have to come to terms with, in many ways, I think, as a black person. And yeah, I
think Edouard Glissant, it's not something I'm, you know, an expert on. But I think it was interesting for me to come across that that, that someone had started to theorise and write this out. If there are no questions, I have a question, actually. So you just touched upon this, you know, like, how you humour how you use humour and playfulness as a method to talk about complexities of our realities. And I did mention this to you
before, I didn't mind it. I mean, your practice and your general approach reminds me so much of this quote by Maya Angelou, people never remember what you said, or what you did, but they remember the feeling you leave behind and I feel like your work just gives such emotional immediacy that you directly it becomes so memorable. So I guess in terms of using humour within your work, I mean, I know that you have touched upon it. But I guess I mean, with your
performance work and your background, I guess like how, yeah, how much kind of consideration it is when you're actually working on a project or film or new work? Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think I'm naturally just quite funny person. So it's happened like, quite accidentally, but then I have obviously, like, it's all about a lot more on how to translate it. And I think, I think I think a film that is a really big reference for me, is Shrek the movie. Because I love the way that that works in terms of how, you know, you've got, you've got multiple you've got multiple layers, right? Like, you okay, yeah, I'll be hopefully you got multiple layers of meaning, like there's something for the kids to watch and love, but there's something for like adults to watch or laugh at. There's like that and most jokes that will like go over the children's heads and it can be enjoyable like that on multiple levels. And I think the way that it does that is humour
that that is through humour. That is how humour works. It can it can it's very complex. One sentence like a pun can have loads of different meanings. Right. And, for me, that was something that was interested in thinking about how to tell how to tell quite complicated, complex, quite dense stories. So
you see, like, really good examples, the football one where, you know, there's, there's, you know, there's football players called like colonialist and landlord. They're all played by women, trans people. not binary people. It's all in the shape of kind of match a day film. There's this like commentary of top, it's like so many layers to it. And there's, you know, Alexandra Burke's bad boys playing the background. I hope that on some level, it hits people. And I hope that also I think the thing that, that working with multiple layers as humour allows can do is also I think it like triggers people, existing experiences. And I think a big thing about
humour is like the reason one of the reasons you might laugh at something is in recognition. So I think, for me, in my work, I really want to, I really want people to identify with what they're seeing, I want people to recognise, I want people to think I yeah, I remember, I remember that, that reminds me of something that I've seen on TV when I was like, seven years old. And I think that means that you have a little bit more of a buy in from people, that means that it's more accessible to people, they'll feel more welcome to enjoy, but also to critique the work and to, you know, have like, their own opinions about what's been said. And that's really important to me, like that's, that's, I don't want to show work and like everyone be like silent and reverence towards the artist or the work or the space that we're in. I think laughter is a really great way to like break down barriers for which sounds quite corny, but I think it can, it can do really great political things. And yeah, to bring it back to accessibility, it means
that even if perhaps you don't understand or you don't have the same understanding of my work, as perhaps I do, when I was making it, you have some kind of like, embodied understanding, if you laugh at something, and in some states dynamic in your mind, and just leave something behind, and just, you know, the rest is always there. And I guess that's why it's so powerful watching. You know, Black Poirot, for example, also, Brown Paper Envelope Test. I
mean, we have time for one more question. I'm just wondering what sort of movie you're gonna make. Next, we're gonna make next session or something new? Well, cultural fields, which is what the end is actually 50 minutes long. So that was just a short extract you saw. And
that's my latest film, which you can see is going to be shown next at workplace Gallery in London, from the 24th of November to I think, the 14th of January. So if you have time, these come. And yeah, in terms of next, I don't know, like, I would quite like to, I would really like to kind of move into a more a more mainstream space with my film work, maybe like TV and thinking about how to like, make a kind of TV series. So I have a couple of ideas for that. And perhaps something about the life of Una Marson, who was like the first producer to work for the BBC, or Yeah, I have quite a few ideas. But I think in terms of format, I think it would be interesting to Yeah, I guess, move out of the gallery space, because I find just like, the more feedback I get, the more interesting it is for me to make the work. So I think that, you know, like I make work, you
know, predominantly with a black audience in mind. And I think that unfortunately, galleries are still quite unaccessible places for black people. So I think, yeah, I would I would like to move move towards other audiences. Yeah. Do I like Maya Angelou's work? Yeah, I do. I don't I don't know much of her
work to be honest. But I have I have read some Yeah. And I like it. Oh, that's a beautiful poem. Yeah. Maybe one more question. It kind of related to that. The not one question. But other any
other popular culture references that you're kind of dying to get in? I guess the thing that I was just like, really excited by what might come next. Yeah, I'm actually working on a on a pantomine at the moment. We that's a that's a live that's a live show for the Brighton CCA theatre. So that would be in 20 No, this Christmas. 2024 So yeah, I'm interested in pantomine Well, pantomine something that I went to like every Christmas still do, but like thinking about that something again, just like a Poirot episode, something that is very like entrenched in British culture, but also has like, you know, you know, Jamaican pantomime is a huge thing as well. And obviously, as
a former British colony, they've taken that but they made it their own. And so there's a lot of there's a lot of research for me to do there. But it's something that can be like kind of broken down quite easily into its tropes. Like, what is the
black feminist, pantomime horse? I don't know yet. But I want to kind of find out. Yeah, then that. Thanks. I guess that's it. Thank you so much. This has been so pleasurable and then for those of you who want to refer back to this conversation, the recording will be made available in the next few weeks. I mean, a round of applause for Rosa and hopefully fingers crossed for November 22.
2022-11-27 21:22
