LT:We have invited artist Ashanti Harris to have a chat with us about some of the research she undertook whilst creating works for Sonic Séance — a performance event organised by V/DA in Glasgow in 2019, where she used séance to give voices to women who would otherwise be silenced.

Can you maybe start by briefly explaining how these projects came about?

AH:Sonic Séance was commissioned by this organisation called V/DA which stands for Various Dance Artists. ^[01] The incentive of Various Dance Artists is exactly that, to bring different artists together and to explore collaborative practice. For this project, Mele Broomes, who is the director, acted as both the choreographer and director for this collaborative work. It brought together myself as a visual artist and a researcher with Patricia Panther as a composer, Leticia Pleiades, who is a DJ, an artist and produces music, to think about séance. We were thinking about the idea of a séance as a calling to an unknown and what that unknown might mean to each of us individually in the group.

[01] Sonic Séance is a performance by V/DA made collaboratively by Mele Broomes, Ashanti Harris, Patricia Panther and Letitia Pleiades, and was part of Take Me Somewhere, Tramway, Glasgow, 2019. Sonic Séance was followed by Sonic Séance: The Gathering, an exhibition bringing together the artistic practices of Mele Broomes, Ashanti Harris, Patricia Panther and Letitia Pleiades, in collaboration with film maker Jen Martin, as well as invited art­ists Nene Camara & Angel Ng, Shaheeda Sinckler, Divine Tasinda, Bea Webster, Claricia Parinussa, and Raman Mundair. Looking at the past, present and future, subverting elements used to shape and manipulate for the imperialist gaze, this exhibition is an expression of anger, solidarity and euphoria against the dominance of cultural imperialism. Encompassing live performance, audio, video and text works, Sonic Séance: The Gathering is an immer­sive, warm and inviting space, and a continuously moving experience. The video works perform as capsules of thought and imagination, channelling voices and spirit interlocutors. Live and pre-recorded music scores expand themes of spirituality, female empowerment, witchcraft, Afro-futurism, ancestral heritage, body work and ritual practices.

We started meeting maybe a year before the project happened and were thinking about what it meant to be calling and who you were calling to, what different forms that calling might take and how you might get something from it that could help you to continue or help you to move forward in some way.

The more we talked about it I got my research hat on and started to learn about séances and how the in y became popular. A lot of my research brought me mostly to women, which was interesting. If you look directly at the history of séances, it’s generally men who are recorded in relation to sort of spiritualism and in general the numbers of women who were prominent as part of spiritualism, and within the popularity of séances, it is massive comparatively. Then if you put that alongside the time spiritualism and séances were getting popular, which was when women had so little power, it started to become this really interesting way for women to gain power or create power or find a voice within, I suppose, hidden within the voices of others or this person or this force that’s communicating to you. So we started getting really into that history.

LT:Can you tell us about a couple of the mediums who interested you most, that you found in your research?

AH: One woman who really stood out — I haven’t done anything with the research about this woman yet, so I’m still trying to figure out how to see that — is Leafy Anderson. She’s a famous spiritualist from New Orleans, who moved to New Orleans from Chicago. I think it was maybe in the 1920s and she started a spiritualist church. She already had started spiritualist churches around Detroit, Chicago, but this was her moment of making this pivotal decision to move South, which also kind of went against what everyone else was doing at that time. It was the great migration and everybody’s going north. There’s this really interesting thing that happened when she moved to New Orleans because New Orleans was a place of so much incredible political history and demographics, some of the most diverse in the whole of the region. The cultural heritage had so many different threads from so many different narratives and stories. She had this platform to speak to all of these different threads and use them. I suppose everybody who was there and all of the culture that was available to build something became a unique identity for the people of New Orleans but also became a platform for people to speak on. Especially marginalised people who often didn’t have a voice.

I think that’s also potentially what drew more people towards this church because all of a sudden they had this idea that whatever you feel inside you, you feel it deeply and passionately to scream out or to say out loud because it’s come to you from somewhere that was completely valid. I suppose that’s the power of that and for disenfranchised people it is massive.

LT:Thinking about your contemporary conditions and practices, what is it about séances and exorcisms and these kinds of things that you think fits into your practice, or in what ways did you find them interesting?

AH:Well all of this research was last year and I was doing a couple of different projects at the same time. There was this collaborative project Sonic Séance and then, as part of my kind of individual practice, I’d been working with a historian looking at the historical relationship between Scotland and Guyana. Specifically, the historian I was working with, his research has detailed Guyanese women who had been in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries and the way that his research detailed it was the barebones. ‘That’ site recorded in the census: this person was here at this time, this day and this fact in the form of a number or a sentence without any detail. The wider narrative of who they were and what they did and how they felt was missing.

I’d been travelling to the different locations in Scotland where these women were recorded to have had a presence and also I’m from Guyana, I was born there and then moved to Scotland when I was a child. So it’s kind of bringing these things that I had from Guyana and these memories of Guyana and also stories, proverbs, and then taking them to these places and maybe just trying to sort of speculating or imagine what these women’s lives might have been like. How they might have felt or just what that meant to me at that moment right now. How that history was present in my time as I was there. I’m starting to think about silence and women. Specifically the ways that women are silenced and not just in terms of what women were allowed to do in the 18th and 19th century but also the way that they’re recorded and the way that any voice they had is still even after the fact and after the day being continually silenced.

There started to be a little bit more of a crossover between these two research projects. I started thinking of speaking to a past, speaking to history and thinking about that process of speculation as speaking to this history. There is a philosopher, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and I remembered reading a text of hers called The Politics of Translation. The work talks particularly about translation as a kind of relationship with a writer rather than necessarily a relationship with the text. So I suppose through these words, I was also trying to speak to the person and get answers because it’s not enough just to translate the words. It’s also to build the feeling and to build an understanding. I started thinking about that when researching and speculating about these women. This relationship with them are with kinds of unknown and unseen people translated into (in general when you’re reading or when you’re interacting with anyone that isn’t there) how you’re having a relationship with them and how you’re bringing so much of yourself into that whilst trying to kind of figure out where they are in it. I loved that it felt like a really empowering process in both of the projects.

LT:I thought it was interesting when you were saying before, that reading groups were an important part of the project that you did for Sonic Séance as well. So having these groups of people coming together and thinking about reading as a form of séance is really interesting.

AH:Yeah. So the reading groups: part of that came out of the fact that there was a huge amount of research behind these projects. The four of us were going through this process of learning from each other and hearing different opinions based on really different circumstances. It felt like an important thing to open that out and think about how voices can speak together through reading and also the sharing of research. It started with Audre Lorde’s text, The Trans­for­mation of Silence Into Language Action. That was going alongside the themes of Sonic Séance and I was thinking about the importance of finding a way to speak. Also all of the different ways that people do speak or find a way to kind of communicate or put their experiences or their thoughts forward in relation to sonic séances that, because of the methodologies of the work, have to do with the way that we wrote together and also kind of speculated together.

Mele Broomes, who hadn’t been writing before, all of us discovered she had this amazing poetry. I’ve never read poetry that I’ve loved so much. It would make me laugh my head off or like cry my eyes out. I think she found that all of a sudden she had this outlet for her experiences. So then we moved on to the Audre Lorde text Poetry is Not a Luxury. That, essentially, is a kind of thinking about writing or finding a way to formulate words as really important, almost like a testimony or something. I am here and this is my experience. There’s a part that I like where Audre Lorde talks about the rules of poetry which keep people out. This idea is the poetry that touches you means something. It doesn’t follow these rhyming singlets quartet wherever they are, they break all of those rules and can penetrate right through because they come from somewhere real and women have this amazing access to that. I loved that.

Doing a reading group as well, my reading group technique is: everybody reads two paragraphs (if they want to, you don’t have to). So you hear every paragraph twice. The first person will read the first paragraph, followed by the first paragraph and just the first paragraph. The second person will read, the first again, followed by the second paragraph and the third person will read the second paragraph, followed by the third, so it means that every section of the book, you have spoken it and you also get to hear it because it’s repeated. Also hearing two different voices say the same thing, there’s something about the way that opens up all these different things of how something can be said and it can be heard, and how everybody can bring something incredible and different to a text. Just from the act of saying it aloud.

LT:That’s super interesting because before when we were researching for the podcast Khadea and I shared that Audre Lorde text with each other, Poetry is Not a Luxury. I think it’s really interesting how she writes, how important poetry can be for women. She talks about how it’s a hope or a dream about survival first made into an idea. Then on one hand it’s a form of resistance and on the other hand it’s part of a complex survival toolkit that you’re empowered with once you’ve put these ideas and distilled them into something that could be an action. I was wondering because you do a little bit of writing in your practice that goes alongside your performances, how would you see writing as a either part of a personal survival tool kit or something that you use within your practice is a way to express sort of ideas into actions or something?

AH:My relationship with writing has been built over for a long time. I thought that I was terrible at writing, I thought that I really couldn’t do it. I loved reading and also taking time to figure out how you feel about things or how you understand things. I remember when I did university the first time around and meeting lots of people and everybody had so many opinions and I didn’t know what my opinions were. There were so many situations when I just felt like maybe I would have this feeling, this intense feeling that I would feel in my body. Maybe it would be when I was listening to a lecture, or maybe it would be when I was having a conversation with someone. I felt it physically and I could never find the language to express how I was actually feeling or why something had such a physical presence in my body.

LT:There are so many barriers imposed as well. I used to think that about writing too! It’s like if you’ve not done a writing course and you have these predisposed ideas that you should know all these rules that come to writing poetry. And it’s like, well I’m not doing that cause I don’t. Do you know what I mean? You don’t feel like you understand that or something. Actually, you know it is just insight. Yeah. You get this feeling.

KK:I feel very similar because when I was in education, there was this big focus on English grammatical style and formats and there was no room for just feeling the deeper hidden emotions and letting them just come out and that started very early on. Then moving throughout life, I just felt like I swallowed all my words and I wouldn’t be able to get them out because of this Western idea of how you need to communicate or the rules and not knowing them. I think it creates this barrier.

LT:Self-censorship or something like that.

KK:Yeah.

AH:Although it appears to be self-censorship. It is external. It’s kind of all of these different things that are silencing you. Not allowing you to reach out and find the words. So when I started writing it was when I’d gone back to study a Master’s and was having to do a lot of essays. It was a historical Research Masters. I had to do a lot of essay writing that I was not used to because I am a sculptor and I started thinking about referencing and quoting and how this is a requirement to prove your point. That there were all these different ideas of what is an “acceptable reference”. I suppose, an “acceptable reference” is how many times this other person has also been referenced to this thing. That’s what makes it valid. Then you end up with this sort of mono-dialogue that doesn’t bring in other voices. I started thinking about the different types of writing that could speak to me about an idea and a lot of it was researching Caribbean history. What a British academic had written about Caribbean history didn’t speak to me as much as a poet from Guyana that I’d been reading since I was a kid and how that poem could speak about much more complex things that I understood because when I read them that physical feeling that I couldn’t put words to, I would feel that again in my body as I was reading.

So then starting to make all of these kinds of more sensory connections between things. I started thinking about this when I was writing essays and I developed a bit of a methodology around how I was referencing. Almost using referencing as a kind of creative process or like a collaging process. So looking at literature and looking at poetry and looking at songs and looking at pop culture and seeing how these kinds of things spoke to me in some way about whatever I was writing and could kind of be collaged together to create a language. In Sonic Séance that was what I was doing when I was writing the text. I was kind of collaging things that I’d been thinking about and that I’d maybe write down from my head combined with a song I use a lot of lyrics from the Nina Simone song, Obeah Woman, which just I think is the most incredibly powerful song when thinking about an alternative form of séancing and just this concept of Obeah in general, it’s kind of got all of these complexities and all of these different routes.

I suppose this idea of having a connection to something unknown jumped out and spoke to me and some of the lyrics from that song I just get so much from. I think, what was it? It was, “I eat the thunder and drink the rain”. [laughing] I get tingles in my body when I hear that sentence. And also I was watching a lot of lectures by Denise Ferreira Da Silva and I learnt about a Caribbean kind of critic and philosopher called Silvia Wynter, who wrote about Caribbean cultural heritage, but also about humanness. She wrote about this concept of humanness and of towards being and thinking about what it means to be human. So all of this stuff got chopped up and mixed up and moved together, combined with the conversations I’ve had with the other women and séance-ing methods. It’s all of these different things that speak to you and finding a way to use these to then speak as well. To find my voice in their words.

KK:Yeah. You’ll see things that speak to you and they sometimes have the language or the words that you’ve been looking for but didn’t know you were looking for something like that just there. It’s like this thing in the text Poetry is Not a Luxury, like the nameless and formless and, it’s sort of trying to find them around me and they usually come to me in different formats.

AH:Yeah, and I love that feeling kind of when you’ve been struggling to understand something and then all of a sudden you might read just one sentence and all of a sudden it just all falls into place and makes so much sense. I think that it’s in all of the different processes that this happens, like poetry, collaging words and creating poetry is a process of understanding yourself in relation to the world. Understanding what you think and where you fit in, in relation to all of these broader narratives. Especially thinking about marginalised voices. Thinking about what it means to be a woman and what it means to identify as whoever you are? What it means to be Black, white, what it means to be a person of colour? It’s those things that conversation builds and it grows. Also not being allowed to decide what that means. Coming from a marginalised group, where being able to decide what that means has been done for you or historically has been done for you. That process of kind of understanding who you are, creating your identity and understanding your identity feels even more important.

KK:I feel that sounds a lot like what the tarot card workshop [at Rhubaba] was exploring. The ways of finding and looking within. Finding meaning and going to yourself to find things out and using symbols or words to prompt that in a way. I don’t know.

LT:It’s always there. You know, classic tarot cards have sort of pre-decided meanings or whatever made up by someone. However, when you’re starting interpreting your own symbols I think this adds another layer or a sort of realisation that it is yourself that’s speaking and it’s nothing to do with the cards, but the cards are creating the prompts.

KK:The text, Transformation of Silence, comes across where Audre Lorde’s talking about and it makes me think of the betrayals of myself into small silences or like not speaking, and then through your journey, you’ll come to a point where you recognise the power is actually within yourself.

AH:Also the way that I think maybe she’s quoting a daughter or quoting a child who says, how if you hold something inside, it just kind of destroys you and I suppose thinking about that, and that feeling of the way that something can manifest and build and come out in different ways. Yeah. I love tarot. [laughing]

LT:It’s something that I used to be really against. I was quite resistant to the idea of it when I first came into it. I felt quite sceptical about it or something like that. I don’t like this kind of idea that like, oh, this means that. But when I started researching the method and sort of hearing about how much agency you have as a reader to move the elements around and ultimately you can make your own cards. And I was thinking, okay, this is kind of different from what I had created an idea of it in my mind, but I guess it’s again, to do with this kind of, and it’s the same with like séance and exorcism and how the, you know, these practices have become disavowed by society for so many reasons. And it’s interesting that it’s women and other marginalised groups that can use these as something to be empowering, which is quite fascinating I think for me.

AH:Yeah and I suppose these kind of things go against science and those kinds of colonial ideas of “this is something that is correct” and this is “something that’s kind of crazy” if it’s in any way spiritual. Also this idea that spiritual is anything that’s not science it’s really interesting. I remember when I got my first tarot set and I asked my mum if I could do a reading to kind of practice and she absolutely refused. She was mad. She was like, ‘I don’t want to know’. It was essentially something that was going to tell us something terrible, or this idea that it’s some kind of force. Whereas the force is you, as the person, who’s going to give the meaning to something that’s presented to you. I suppose like you say it’s the way that it’s been presented to people.

I’d been researching Jumbie’s, which is a Caribbean word for ghosts and started looking at different ones and learning who the ghosts were and what their different meanings were. Something that I started thinking about when I was researching them is I suppose the way that you build something to “a ghost”. The automatic impression of a ghost or a spirit is something to be afraid of. Or it’s scary. Or, I suppose also, the idea of being haunted doesn’t have a positive connotation. It has a connotation of being kind of hounded or attacked. Or having a lack of control over something. Or not being able to shake something.

In the Caribbean, there’re so many Jumbie’s and they’re different on different islands that you go to, and even just getting into the Guyanese ones, there were just so, so many. Then also if you think of creating or this idea of an unknown that doesn’t have a form and doesn’t have a physical, clear, tangible form. Trying to create some kind of form that can maybe make sense of something that isn’t tangible as a process of understanding or coming to terms with something. Even figuring out survival strategies and thinking of how to deal with something. I then started noticing all the different ways that kind of history exists in these ghosts, one of the evil Jumbie’s from Guyana is called the Dutchman and it links back to the earlier colonial days. The Dutchman is a plantation owner, and there’s a tree that the Dutchman haunts, a silk cotton tree. This tree is full of, or it’s like attached to, terror. Historically this tree that’s big and strong would have been the tree that people would have been hung from. So then even, potentially that memory of the tree that people were hung from becomes the tree that you should be afraid of. And like you should be afraid of it because it’s haunted by the Dutchman. I suppose it’s finding some way of manifesting, I suppose a feeling that you have that’s linked to an unknown or uncertainty. There’s a lot of Jumbie’s who link to West African history. Or there’s Jumbie’s that are linked to Amerindian history (those who are indigenous to the Caribbean). Different histories, and it’s almost like trying to give form to, I suppose presences that aren’t physically present, but finding a way to make them physically present. That could be positive or it could be negative depending on your relationship to whatever this form is. Thinking of, or coming to understand something in a nonscientific way is kind of written off as “mumbo jumbo” or “it’s evil” or something. Whereas actually, it feels like it’s a process of understanding something complex.