Statement of Aesthetic Purpose
My purpose and practice search for answers to June Jordan’s eternal questions:
“What shall we do, we who did not die? What shall we do now? How shall we grieve, and cry out loud, and face down despair? Is there an honourable […] means towards mourning and remembering who and what we loved?”
My work is about tracing and transforming conditions for belonging and the collective inheritance of our freedom dreams. I work towards the impossible production of an ungainly and delicious “we.” I thirst and strive to be among an otherwise chorus of futuresong. I promiscuously gather materials necessary for living a life that quenches me and we, as that impossibility is realised.
I compose…
I compose life, study, and rememory with poetic valences btwn the written word (incl. librettos, poetry, essays, scholarly writing); ritual performance; sound (e.g., film/media scores, soundscapes and design); and multimedia installation to imagine/recall prisms of kinship and affinity.
I listen…
I listen with the echoes of Indigenous and Afro-diasporic memory beyond the reverberations of dispossession, and with the submerged histories of migrant and Black trans nonbinary thrival. My work attunes to breaths between words, glitches in the archive, slippages between proof and yearning.
I wield…
I wield a dynamic practice of refusal and productive (nonbinary) negation: against fixity and alienation, against all borders that separate the living from the dead, against the human from the more-than-human, against the possible from the foreclosed. I dwell within the neither and the nether thing.
I am ancestrally and communally rooted through the maroon giants of Xaymaca; the Garinagu Black Caribs and Afro-Costa Ricans between Limón and the Cordillera of the Bribri Talamanca; the Welsh working class; once and future descendants of transatlantic enslavement and colonial subjugation across the Mediterranean. I exist in full antagonism of U.S., British, European empires that failed to shape me in their inverse image or to assimilate me & my relations into their zones of nonbeing. The Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas and the Black Atlantic are lifelong sites of research, rupture, and embodied relation that flow through all I do and aspire to become.
Water—its tides, its depths, its crossings, its medicine, and its violence—permeates my work. It floods it with a purpose that acknowledges the Lakota saying, Mni Wiconi—”Water is Life”—as I seek to build a home in a Black, trans, and migrant presence that refuses to settle, in every sense of the word. I now reside in Tkaronto, “the place in the water where the trees stand.” I am a newcomer to these lands and remain committed to honouring the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant and sovereign calls for LandBack from every river to every sea.
Materials
Hydrophone recordings, found objects, interactive motion-processing and light sculptures, layered vocal compositions, and text-based scores are part of my collaborative practice of attunement—to commune with the disappeared and the dispossessed, with the we who did and did not die, and with our waterways. I cast out the sonic residues of migration and mourning, toward livity, toward otherwise possibilities for all life. My transmedia work, whether in the register of scholarship or aesthetic practice, unfolds as both elegy and invitation, a way to tarry with what has been lost while making space for collective and ongoing intramural witness.
Values & Study
I am the first in my family to complete university and to earn a PhD. I have not attended an institutional art school as I have honed my aesthetic sensibilities through higher cosmologies and an embodied process of autopoiesis (or self-making) that my ancestors know. My formative histories—alongside formal training in modern languages and literatures (Italian, Russian, and others), semiotics, and social philosophy—have shaped most of my scholarship, aesthetic interventions, and pedagogy. My intellectual ecology includes Black British Cultural Studies, Third World feminist historical and dialectical materialisms, Indigenous cosmologies, postcolonial and anticolonial thought, Négritude, and critical theory, as well as years of social movement organising for refugee and migrant justice, abolition, trans liberation, and antifascism.
BASE Milano, 2023 Open Studio
…Approaches
I approach language as both a vessel and a limit to be exceeded—something capable of carrying history, grief, and possibility, even as it is wielded as a weapon of dispossession by structures of colonialisms, racial capitalism, and border imperialism. I am interested in Sankofa archival logics and what/who resists capture—how black poiēsis and trans embodiment evade the logics of colonial documentation and state recognition. In my work and study I seek to disrupt linear narratives of progress and belonging, embracing instead the circular, the recursive, the fugitive, the sickened, the lost, the too-much in the not enough. Working across mediums, geographies, languages, and other traditions helps “we” take root. Each one sharpens the machete that clears the routes through the jungle sometimes known as freedom, where aesthetic experimentation is both a means of critique and as a mode of survival.
SA Smythe, PhD 