Embodied Knowledge was first held tenderly at 25 Arthur Street, Edinburgh. The project encompassed a series of workshops that were born from a strong desire to reconnect the somatic self through material activations.
Embodied Knowledge is a slow burn, a burning desire to create space for myself and for people from the African diaspora in Scotland. Embodied Knowledge explores food and clay as mediums through which to translate the complexity of existing in a Western colonial value system and hierarchy. Embodied Knowledge is a form of contemporary art at the fundamental level, a vessel for wayward conversations on ways of knowing.
This essay is structured around the process of firing clay in a kiln to make ceramics — the slow incremental temperature increases which form an adaptable document referred to as a firing programme — holding at some points and accelerating at others.
Starting with unpacking a bag of terracotta, inhaling soil-like plasticity, and feeling the wetness on the palm of the hand. Clay, like food, is a rich offering from the earth. Each fold in society, pre-historical and contemporary, has built on the knowledge of those that came before, cultivating a direct connection between body and land through a process of unearthing, shaping, firing clay — creative acts that confirm “the land knows you, even when you are lost.” [01] After years of unsettlement, both in status and in my body, on my 21st birthday I was given a bag of clay. I used it to make bowls and spoons with my young siblings. It was a way of holding my hand out, to ask to be held within nature and with others.
[01] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions: 2015), p. 35
Enriched further by rituals of cooking and eating together, food nurtures our bodies and allows us to share knowledge in more grounded settings, more felt than intellectualised. Along with the plasticity of clay, eating together and conversation — self-determined ways of being together — became important starting points for Embodied Knowledge.
What if knowledge can be transmitted through palm to soil and vice versa? What if we recognise new ways that are not new? Embodied Knowledge is about growing and returning waywardly to knowledge held and present within our bodies and shared relationships, reacknowledging the self in collective connectivity.
Sitting in the kiln, the clay body is held at 50° for ten hours; this long duration at low temperature is sometimes called ‘water smoking’. Before it has even really started, the firing process is slowed down to ensure any moisture still present after the drying stage evaporates. Holding, to give the vessel or object the best and last chance to prepare for the harsh temperatures that will follow.
In September 2020, in the magnitude of grief and disconnection, I invited friends, old-time and newer ones, to the Rhubaba studios on 25 Arthur Street, to journey inward. Across four workshops we explored ways to think and create together using sound and writing while communing over food. The framework for these workshops materialised from a feeling of loss, of separation from a sense of self, which had always been difficult to put into words. There was also the constant urge to disrupt ideas on subject / object dualism and traditional knowledge systems, the constant need to sound out, name and use the voice to begin to dismantle hierarchies of knowing; for me making sense requires inter-relationality.
At the time Rhubaba was operating at a lower capacity due to the ongoing global pandemic, a contrast to the last ten years when the project space had been regularly used for experimental workshops and discussions. It felt important to create a space for myself and the newly formed collective — initially made up of three friends — because even if the space we were in was temporary, we could imagine new stories and write new rules in that time.
Eating together was important; to talk about food as a tool to question, map, and write using sound, our voices, the noise of cooking. Drawing from the thinking of both Dr. Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh, who introduced the term ‘food autoethnography’ [02] to me, and curator Sepake Angiama, who has written about the “need to rethink our spaces of coming together and how we come together beyond the effects of global crisis,” [03] the four workshops saw the Rhubaba project space become a kitchen.
[02] Dr. Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh, Decolonising Anthropology (Goldsmiths University: 2020)
[03] Sepake Angiama, Voices (Towards Other Institutions) (Lenz.press: 2021), p. 26
The first workshop of the series started with reading a passage from Rehana Zaman’s Tongues, a publication that anchors the project and raises more questions than concrete answers. How can we question? What does questioning sound like? How can we use food as a way to question? The second workshop was on oral histories and stories; the transcripts of the conversation showed a voicing of that slow burn I felt and the dismantling of knowledge I was looking for.
She’s my sister because we’re both Black. That is something that ties us together that makes us feel as one and makes me feel good because I’m a Black woman.
I know there was something there psychologically, separation.
…It’s almost like I am here. There is a sense of empowerment.
...take it back, realise these are all these things that whiteness projected on me, projected on me and actually there’s nothing wrong with me.
...again, because you have to. We have to reclaim.
…I went through a very similar thing with becoming.
So that feeling, I think, I guess, missing out on some of that, but if they could even recognise that we have that. If they know that we’ve got all these different things that make us Black. [04]
[04] Rebecca Ayalew, Kadie Tarawally, Zohra Belhadj [speech transcript], 2020
The third workshop was a roundtable on Eurocentrism, displacing the subject and mapping what words came up during the discussion such as westernising, okra, therapeutic, disavowed, being seen, recognised, white statues, rage, shiro, realise, naming. The previous three exchanges created a channel inward and in the last workshop we wrote from a deeper place about ourselves, through recipes and food histories.
After the initial hold is complete, the heat rises steadily; organic materials are burned away and water continues to evaporate. Slow and long, the transformation of what is called greenware into a ceramic object occurs in the second stage of the firing.
In December 2020 we returned to Embodied Knowledge at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, a meeting ground for more research and development. This time we were thinking about clay as a material to embody the conversation and shape the direction of the project. Another invitation was sent to the same friends and two more, who slowly began self-defining as collaborators, to make vessels and objects, to tell stories using earthenware.
Thinking about clay as an adaptive and pluralistic material resonated with the malleability of how we used sound and eating together earlier in the project. The terracotta allowed for our hands to shape and be shaped by wayward conversations, leaving depressions and impressions. It set off an internal locus, which spoke to Audre Lorde’s writing on ‘deep places’: “each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” [05]
[05] Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury (Druck & Verlags Cooperative: 1993), p. 1
From the previous workshops it had become clear that in order to recognise knowledge in its multitude and possibility we must look inward to the reservoir of ways of knowing built over time — African time, [06] that is — by the body and the self. Ways that had been entrapped by Western value systems and the requirement of (presumed) legibility that denied its existence or credibility. The following text, part of a longer piece I wrote after a coil and pinch pot making session, felt like the collapsing of a lifetime of detrimental internalisation and a form of rebuilding from a place of learning.
[06] African time is “the perceived cultural tendency, in parts of Africa and the Caribbean toward a more relaxed attitude to time,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation
Wayward.
Hesitant touch, frustrating collapse.
Pulling words to the surface, like a pond covered in a blanket of weed.
Emerging.
Depressions and impressions take shape, I loosen up my touch and a vessel begins to take shape.
New ways, which in fact were not new, but were pulled from the subconscious, expressed through the fluidity and plasticity of clay, to dismantle the hierarchies and the silencing.
Going back to Lorde’s idea of “distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding”. [07] At this stage, the heat of the kiln is at a gradual incline, the clay body warms, the research and conversations continue.
[07] Lorde p. 1
The kiln interior is glowing red as the temperature advances by 100 – 200° per hour. Significant amounts of carbon and organic material have burned away from within the clay body; ventilation is essential as the heat rises within the kiln. The clay body’s molecular structure is preparing to bond together.
In June 2021, I was splitting my time between the workshops at ESW and reading extensively around Black Futurity, [08] which became a powerful framework / touchstone. I kept returning to this idea of the ‘wayward’ from Saidiya Hartman, who describes it as “the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion.” [09] She speaks of it in relation to defying the violence of value systems that (un)recognise the kind of knowledge I had formed.
[08] Tina Campt, Listening to Images. (Duke University Press: 2017), chapter Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity
[09] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (Serpent’s Tail: 2019), p. 270
I soon found camaraderie by building a library at Rhubaba which invited writers, artists and curators to recommend material on this subject. Working with the rest of the Rhubaba committee we started to create podcasts, reading lists and websites. This became the programme Library of Frequencies, a project that explores alternative knowledge(s) rooted in the traditions of oral histories, using the theory of hauntology as a critical lens.
Both these programmes ran concurrently, each informing the direction of the other. One of six artists involved in the Library of Frequencies project, Kitso Lynn Lelliot, who is based in Johannesburg, explored some of the ideas that surfaced in the first series of Embodied Knowledge, including “how bodies can evoke embodiments of knowledge through the voice.” Her practice “positions this as a way to present the hauntings of the past” and “harnesses the voice as a tool or a mode of tracing and mapping.” [10] These ideas bled into a relevant discussion about language, place and displacement.
[10] Notes from conversation with Kitso Lynn Lelliot, 2021
The closure of the Rhubaba studio and project complex in August 2021 came at a time when our programme was already in a transformative stage, however the loss was felt. The studio was an integral space for me; I first moved in as a researcher in residence in June 2019, meditating on the complexity of undocumented voices moving through spaces shaped by being othered, and looking at the repeated actions of denial, waiting and compression. At the end of two months of researching and documenting thoughts I decided to keep my studio and continue with ongoing projects.
With the established location and resources no longer available I shifted towards bringing people together for conversations. I reintroduced Embodied Knowledge to Rhubaba as part of the 2021 – 2022 programme, acknowledging the relationships that began in the project space, and adding to the ecology of the self-organised and artist-run initiative.
The partnership with Rhubaba gave space to grieve — the loss of the self, the loss of the space. We were beginning to consider what could be built in its place with a deep sense of what it was, with a desire to build from the ashes. We were still thinking with Hartman: “the acts of the wayward — the wild thoughts, reckless dreams, interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, riotous behavior, nonparticipation, willfulness, and bold-faced refusal — redistributed the balance of need and want and sought a line of escape from debt and duty in the attempt to create a path elsewhere.” [11]
[11] Hartman p. 281
The relationship between Rhubaba and Embodied Knowledge is one of building and rebuilding. Like the clay body in the kiln nearing 800 – 900° it reached the point where its molecular structure changed and its particles bonded together to make it stronger. At the start of 2022, Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika and Zoë Guthrie were commissioned to build a vessel. The invitation came after months of seeing their work in progress, seeing how they explore clay in a conversational way of thinking and imagining. Taking shape slowly, holding and evidencing a presence through finger pinching and texture, this vessel seemed to reflect and hold the beginnings of the project.
At around 1000° the clay becomes a hard ceramic object that is no longer soluble in water. The temperature stops rising and the object’s newfound strength ensures it is ready for the glaze firing that will follow.
Today the project launches with a collection of online resources from the Rhubaba programme relating to Embodied Knowledge, spanning the period 2020 – 2022. By no means is this the end of the conversation, or the process; instead, this is the setting up of a structure in which conversations can continue, held in a way that allows for wilful defying. This is a call to unearth and rise from within, a call for refusal in the face of denial, that draws on the vitality of finding pathways back into the body. The possibilities are endless; Embodied Knowledge is a commitment to keep a space open for more conversation, commissioning and workshops.
— Khadea, 10 August 2022
Kimmerer, R. W. (2015). Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Pestellini, I. & Petrillo, E. (Eds.) (2021). Voices (Towards Other Institutions). Milan: Lenz.press.
Zaman, R. (Ed.) (2019). Tongues. PSS.
Lorde, A. (1993). Poetry is Not a Luxury. Graz: Druck & Verlags Cooperative.
Campt, T. M. (2017). Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hartman, S. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Embodied Knowledge was first held tenderly at 25 Arthur Street, Edinburgh. The project encompassed a series of workshops that were born from a strong desire to reconnect the somatic self through material activations.
Embodied Knowledge is a slow burn, a burning desire to create space for myself and for people from the African diaspora in Scotland. Embodied Knowledge explores food and clay as mediums through which to translate the complexity of existing in a Western colonial value system and hierarchy. Embodied Knowledge is a form of contemporary art at the fundamental level, a vessel for wayward conversations on ways of knowing.
This essay is structured around the process of firing clay in a kiln to make ceramics — the slow incremental temperature increases which form an adaptable document referred to as a firing programme — holding at some points and accelerating at others.
Starting with unpacking a bag of terracotta, inhaling soil-like plasticity, and feeling the wetness on the palm of the hand. Clay, like food, is a rich offering from the earth. Each fold in society, pre-historical and contemporary, has built on the knowledge of those that came before, cultivating a direct connection between body and land through a process of unearthing, shaping, firing clay — creative acts that confirm “the land knows you, even when you are lost.” [01] After years of unsettlement, both in status and in my body, on my 21st birthday I was given a bag of clay. I used it to make bowls and spoons with my young siblings. It was a way of holding my hand out, to ask to be held within nature and with others.
[01] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions: 2015), p. 35
Enriched further by rituals of cooking and eating together, food nurtures our bodies and allows us to share knowledge in more grounded settings, more felt than intellectualised. Along with the plasticity of clay, eating together and conversation — self-determined ways of being together — became important starting points for Embodied Knowledge.
What if knowledge can be transmitted through palm to soil and vice versa? What if we recognise new ways that are not new? Embodied Knowledge is about growing and returning waywardly to knowledge held and present within our bodies and shared relationships, reacknowledging the self in collective connectivity.
Sitting in the kiln, the clay body is held at 50° for ten hours; this long duration at low temperature is sometimes called ‘water smoking’. Before it has even really started, the firing process is slowed down to ensure any moisture still present after the drying stage evaporates. Holding, to give the vessel or object the best and last chance to prepare for the harsh temperatures that will follow.
In September 2020, in the magnitude of grief and disconnection, I invited friends, old-time and newer ones, to the Rhubaba studios on 25 Arthur Street, to journey inward. Across four workshops we explored ways to think and create together using sound and writing while communing over food. The framework for these workshops materialised from a feeling of loss, of separation from a sense of self, which had always been difficult to put into words. There was also the constant urge to disrupt ideas on subject / object dualism and traditional knowledge systems, the constant need to sound out, name and use the voice to begin to dismantle hierarchies of knowing; for me making sense requires inter-relationality.
At the time Rhubaba was operating at a lower capacity due to the ongoing global pandemic, a contrast to the last ten years when the project space had been regularly used for experimental workshops and discussions. It felt important to create a space for myself and the newly formed collective — initially made up of three friends — because even if the space we were in was temporary, we could imagine new stories and write new rules in that time.
Eating together was important; to talk about food as a tool to question, map, and write using sound, our voices, the noise of cooking. Drawing from the thinking of both Dr. Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh, who introduced the term ‘food autoethnography’ [02] to me, and curator Sepake Angiama, who has written about the “need to rethink our spaces of coming together and how we come together beyond the effects of global crisis,” [03] the four workshops saw the Rhubaba project space become a kitchen.
[02] Dr. Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh, Decolonising Anthropology (Goldsmiths University: 2020)
[03] Sepake Angiama, Voices (Towards Other Institutions) (Lenz.press: 2021), p. 26
The first workshop of the series started with reading a passage from Rehana Zaman’s Tongues, a publication that anchors the project and raises more questions than concrete answers. How can we question? What does questioning sound like? How can we use food as a way to question? The second workshop was on oral histories and stories; the transcripts of the conversation showed a voicing of that slow burn I felt and the dismantling of knowledge I was looking for.
She’s my sister because we’re both Black. That is something that ties us together that makes us feel as one and makes me feel good because I’m a Black woman.
I know there was something there psychologically, separation.
…It’s almost like I am here. There is a sense of empowerment.
...take it back, realise these are all these things that whiteness projected on me, projected on me and actually there’s nothing wrong with me.
...again, because you have to. We have to reclaim.
…I went through a very similar thing with becoming.
So that feeling, I think, I guess, missing out on some of that, but if they could even recognise that we have that. If they know that we’ve got all these different things that make us Black. [04]
[04] Rebecca Ayalew, Kadie Tarawally, Zohra Belhadj [speech transcript], 2020
The third workshop was a roundtable on Eurocentrism, displacing the subject and mapping what words came up during the discussion such as westernising, okra, therapeutic, disavowed, being seen, recognised, white statues, rage, shiro, realise, naming. The previous three exchanges created a channel inward and in the last workshop we wrote from a deeper place about ourselves, through recipes and food histories.
After the initial hold is complete, the heat rises steadily; organic materials are burned away and water continues to evaporate. Slow and long, the transformation of what is called greenware into a ceramic object occurs in the second stage of the firing.
In December 2020 we returned to Embodied Knowledge at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, a meeting ground for more research and development. This time we were thinking about clay as a material to embody the conversation and shape the direction of the project. Another invitation was sent to the same friends and two more, who slowly began self-defining as collaborators, to make vessels and objects, to tell stories using earthenware.
Thinking about clay as an adaptive and pluralistic material resonated with the malleability of how we used sound and eating together earlier in the project. The terracotta allowed for our hands to shape and be shaped by wayward conversations, leaving depressions and impressions. It set off an internal locus, which spoke to Audre Lorde’s writing on ‘deep places’: “each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” [05]
[05] Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury (Druck & Verlags Cooperative: 1993), p. 1
From the previous workshops it had become clear that in order to recognise knowledge in its multitude and possibility we must look inward to the reservoir of ways of knowing built over time — African time, [06] that is — by the body and the self. Ways that had been entrapped by Western value systems and the requirement of (presumed) legibility that denied its existence or credibility. The following text, part of a longer piece I wrote after a coil and pinch pot making session, felt like the collapsing of a lifetime of detrimental internalisation and a form of rebuilding from a place of learning.
[06] African time is “the perceived cultural tendency, in parts of Africa and the Caribbean toward a more relaxed attitude to time,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation
Wayward.
Hesitant touch, frustrating collapse.
Pulling words to the surface, like a pond covered in a blanket of weed.
Emerging.
Depressions and impressions take shape, I loosen up my touch and a vessel begins to take shape.
New ways, which in fact were not new, but were pulled from the subconscious, expressed through the fluidity and plasticity of clay, to dismantle the hierarchies and the silencing.
Going back to Lorde’s idea of “distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding”. [07] At this stage, the heat of the kiln is at a gradual incline, the clay body warms, the research and conversations continue.
[07] Lorde p. 1
The kiln interior is glowing red as the temperature advances by 100 – 200° per hour. Significant amounts of carbon and organic material have burned away from within the clay body; ventilation is essential as the heat rises within the kiln. The clay body’s molecular structure is preparing to bond together.
In June 2021, I was splitting my time between the workshops at ESW and reading extensively around Black Futurity, [08] which became a powerful framework / touchstone. I kept returning to this idea of the ‘wayward’ from Saidiya Hartman, who describes it as “the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion.” [09] She speaks of it in relation to defying the violence of value systems that (un)recognise the kind of knowledge I had formed.
[08] Tina Campt, Listening to Images. (Duke University Press: 2017), chapter Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity
[09] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (Serpent’s Tail: 2019), p. 270
I soon found camaraderie by building a library at Rhubaba which invited writers, artists and curators to recommend material on this subject. Working with the rest of the Rhubaba committee we started to create podcasts, reading lists and websites. This became the programme Library of Frequencies, a project that explores alternative knowledge(s) rooted in the traditions of oral histories, using the theory of hauntology as a critical lens.
Both these programmes ran concurrently, each informing the direction of the other. One of six artists involved in the Library of Frequencies project, Kitso Lynn Lelliot, who is based in Johannesburg, explored some of the ideas that surfaced in the first series of Embodied Knowledge, including “how bodies can evoke embodiments of knowledge through the voice.” Her practice “positions this as a way to present the hauntings of the past” and “harnesses the voice as a tool or a mode of tracing and mapping.” [10] These ideas bled into a relevant discussion about language, place and displacement.
[10] Notes from conversation with Kitso Lynn Lelliot, 2021
The closure of the Rhubaba studio and project complex in August 2021 came at a time when our programme was already in a transformative stage, however the loss was felt. The studio was an integral space for me; I first moved in as a researcher in residence in June 2019, meditating on the complexity of undocumented voices moving through spaces shaped by being othered, and looking at the repeated actions of denial, waiting and compression. At the end of two months of researching and documenting thoughts I decided to keep my studio and continue with ongoing projects.
With the established location and resources no longer available I shifted towards bringing people together for conversations. I reintroduced Embodied Knowledge to Rhubaba as part of the 2021 – 2022 programme, acknowledging the relationships that began in the project space, and adding to the ecology of the self-organised and artist-run initiative.
The partnership with Rhubaba gave space to grieve — the loss of the self, the loss of the space. We were beginning to consider what could be built in its place with a deep sense of what it was, with a desire to build from the ashes. We were still thinking with Hartman: “the acts of the wayward — the wild thoughts, reckless dreams, interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, riotous behavior, nonparticipation, willfulness, and bold-faced refusal — redistributed the balance of need and want and sought a line of escape from debt and duty in the attempt to create a path elsewhere.” [11]
[11] Hartman p. 281
The relationship between Rhubaba and Embodied Knowledge is one of building and rebuilding. Like the clay body in the kiln nearing 800 – 900° it reached the point where its molecular structure changed and its particles bonded together to make it stronger. At the start of 2022, Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika and Zoë Guthrie were commissioned to build a vessel. The invitation came after months of seeing their work in progress, seeing how they explore clay in a conversational way of thinking and imagining. Taking shape slowly, holding and evidencing a presence through finger pinching and texture, this vessel seemed to reflect and hold the beginnings of the project.
At around 1000° the clay becomes a hard ceramic object that is no longer soluble in water. The temperature stops rising and the object’s newfound strength ensures it is ready for the glaze firing that will follow.
Today the project launches with a collection of online resources from the Rhubaba programme relating to Embodied Knowledge, spanning the period 2020 – 2022. By no means is this the end of the conversation, or the process; instead, this is the setting up of a structure in which conversations can continue, held in a way that allows for wilful defying. This is a call to unearth and rise from within, a call for refusal in the face of denial, that draws on the vitality of finding pathways back into the body. The possibilities are endless; Embodied Knowledge is a commitment to keep a space open for more conversation, commissioning and workshops.
— Khadea, 10 August 2022
Kimmerer, R. W. (2015). Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Pestellini, I. & Petrillo, E. (Eds.) (2021). Voices (Towards Other Institutions). Milan: Lenz.press.
Zaman, R. (Ed.) (2019). Tongues. PSS.
Lorde, A. (1993). Poetry is Not a Luxury. Graz: Druck & Verlags Cooperative.
Campt, T. M. (2017). Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hartman, S. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. London: Serpent’s Tail.
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