We are in conversation with Francis Dosoo to discuss how archiving as a research methodology is integral to their art practice as seen through their new work in progress, Untitled Psychodrama, which uses archival materials as a form of storytelling by gathering and recontextualising media. We discuss the consumption of archives and how images can be sourced and composed to reclaim Black diasporic experiences that are often told from white colonial narratives that are upheld within academic institutions. We also explore the differences in the kinds of knowledge(s) found in online archives compared to institutional spaces by discussing the issues around deletion, authorship and consumption.
FD: Francis Dosso
LT: Laura Tully
NR: Natasha Ruwona
LT:Hi Francis, thanks for joining us for this chat. Today we’re going to chat a bit about your arts practice. I thought it might be good to start by talking a bit about your practice and how you got involved in the arts, especially since you’ve mentioned before in conversations that you didn’t study art in a traditional sense, it would be interesting to hear a little bit about what brought you into the “contemporary art world”.
FD:Yeah. I definitely [became involved in the arts] by accident [laughing] but when I was in high school, I was into film and stuff. I was making films and [took a class in] media studies. I almost went to film school when I was around 18. I guess like most things that happen at that age, quite a lot of things change and you just end up doing something different. So I didn’t go to film school [however] the interest was always still there. I was making music at the time as well and I started collecting a lot of photography, film and music. They were all things that I collected, kind of disparately, just like anybody who has a blog or a Tumblr. I used to have a Tumblr. I guess I have a brain where I like mine for information all the time. I just collected a lot of stuff.
Then I started running clubs. The first nightclub that I ran [was] a soul night, like soul and 50’s RnB and I ended up using this sort of database of photos of Black people in America from the 1930s to 1960s on the posters. I then ended up using a lot of the videos I collected from similar eras for the club visuals and stuff, and occasionally for promo videos. I became involved in art from DJing itself to be honest because I guess my practice is now quite research based and I think that the progression for me was: researching, collecting stuff and then appropriating it. The most literal way I did that was through DJing because every three minutes you are having to contextualise a new piece of media alongside something else. I was also creating a wider context for that media with photos and videos. I then think I eventually got very sick of running clubs and I started to see what I do through a lens of contemporary art.
I also started a radio show called Above a Sleeping City where I would improvise as a selector and a DJ for two hours. It started with just playing songs that I liked and then pretty quickly I got into playing clips from films that I liked, then other sounds. After a little while it opened up and I started playing less and less music. I then began overlaying and compiling a lot of different sounds. Anywhere between two and five different sound sources [that were] always improvised. That process took [my practice] into a performance medium with video as well. I think that how I got into the arts was quite organic in terms of literally just trying to express myself and then finding out that the way I was expressing myself could be classed as art [laughing].
LT:Yeah, I think this is maybe a bit off-script but I think when you hear about what’s happening in education right now — there are other ways of learning and educating yourself that aren’t necessarily through these institutional channels that you’re expected to go through. This is something that as a committee we are quite interested in, these more ‘informal’ ways of learning and education through conversations and through reading groups and having these podcasts where we talk about different things.
FD:I was actually having a conversation with somebody yesterday. They were telling me I should write and were saying “oh, why don’t write some of the stuff you’re saying down?” I was like, oh yeah… It scares me because I never went to university and I have a phobia [of] writing. I think this person was saying this in a really lovely way but I think sometimes that there’s a pressure for things to be institutionalised in a certain way. Like the conversation is not good enough or something and it has to become a paper. Whereas the reality is, in my opinion, conversations have more effect than papers do on my culture. It’s kind of adjacent to what you said, in terms of thinking about cultural production through university and then outside of university. I think it is false that the most important cultural production gets done in academia and it’s not true.
NR:I always think as well if it’s not ‘formalised’ in a university or institution then it doesn’t matter. Even with my own writing, knowing that personal experience or lived experience is enough. It doesn’t have to rely on that ‘backing up’ or the references of academics, which has been such a push and pull, because obviously that’s how the university wants you to write. Then [you begin] thinking who’s thought of that in a similar way? Who coined that term? It is actually lived experiences [that] are just as valid, if not more which is really important.
FD:Formalised is the word I think. [It] has to be done in a certain way to be valuable but the irony is that it’s actually really valuable. So, yeah, I totally agree.
NR:Could I ask you about your work in progress? You uploaded on Instagram a screenshot of Will Smith from Bad Boys, a Du Bois text, something from a music video, a personal commitment, and an excerpt from an interview. Could you talk a bit about where those resources came from and how they were sourced whether intentionally or unintentionally and how they have come together?
FD:The work is called Untitled Psychodrama. In a nutshell, it’s meant to be a work that I hope I can perform forever. It’s a two screen video performance with music and in the same format as I was talking about before with improvised music mixing and also some live stuff now. I guess it’s about creating, it’s about reappropriating, well recontextualising historic Black media. The reason I got into that is because I have always just been really obsessed with certain films and images. Some of these images have just stayed with me strongly and honestly I think it’s the same for everybody. I think it’s just the way I’m processing it.
The image of Will Smith [that Natasha mentioned] is from Bad Boys (1995). I just loved that film when I was a kid and Will Smith in general. I started thinking about certain images and there’s this bit where he’s like running down the street with his shirt open chasing bad guys or whatever. First of all, it’s pretty hot [laughing] and second cool because I was like, oh, that’s so cool and hot. I didn’t care about the violence, it was about the aesthetic of him running and that he looked quite soft. Not so much now actually but when [Will Smith] was younger especially, he appeared quite effeminate sometimes, I think. It was just this [image of him] slow motion running [that] always stuck with me my whole life.
I guess my work comes from this place of being like: I have all this stuff and it just lives in my brain and I’m trying to sort of like organise it, to make sense of it for myself. That way by organising it, it will make me understand it better. So yeah the shot of Will Smith in that Instagram post is just one where it’s like a moment where he’s actually interrogating somebody. He looks really like, I won’t say that it looks like a Renaissance painting or something, but it has a beautiful light in it. I guess as a Black person and as a non binary person it’s very hard to find representation in the media. I think that what I have done or what I’m doing is to try to create my own media history using fragments of stuff that I found and that I already saw myself in. The problem is that these things are normally in really toxic and non liberatory contexts. So I take these things out with [those contexts] and put them somewhere else. I guess you remember that as consumers or audience members, sometimes we can choose [and] we can have nuanced relationships with these media. I watched Girl 6 (1996) recently, [directed] by Spike Lee. The film is really fucking messed up. The first part of the film was really good so I’m like, it’s okay to watch the first 20 minutes of the film then just turn it off and to be like, that was good. Then I don’t have to engage with all the horrible toxic shit, you know? So in a way, it’s like that is curation of a sort right?
The clip is from a Sade music video. I think that the worlds that Sade created are pretty amazing. The quotes: one of them is from Du Bois and the other is from Kodwo Eshun, an Afrofuturist writer. I’m thinking about Afrofuturism instead of necessarily trying to just imagine the future. Looking to the future and looking at the past we try to reimagine the past as like a basis for the future that we want to be a part of. The term counter-memory is actually a Kodwo term, it’s about when we’re thinking about a future we’re already assuming the past because the past is narrativised by historians and by cultural critics and by all of us. So when we think about the future we don’t have an assumed past. Instead it [lets us] reconsider the past and tell a different story about the past.
LT:Why did you call it Untitled Psychodrama? I think that’s quite an interesting name for the project.
FD:I actually have a very clear answer to this question [laughing]. It just came into my mind because I like psychodrama, as a genre film. The music I use is [what] some people might find creepy or something. It’s slow moving, weird and shifting. It’s quite atmospheric and not very melodic. A lot of the clips that I choose, the tone of them is quite tense or something.
I wanted to call it Untitled Psychodrama then looked up the definition of psychodrama. It said one: [that it was] a form of psychotherapy, in which patients act out events from their past and two: [it is] a play film or novel, in which psychological elements are the main interests. I thought this is literally what I’m doing. It’s interesting [to consider] this psychotherapy side of it because [in my practice] I literally am reenacting events from the past. I had a friend who studied acting, who actually told me about that process, but he didn’t call it psychodrama, [but] I’ve just always just loved that genre of film.
LT:It’ll be interesting to talk a little bit more about what your thoughts are around the archival processes that you’re doing in your practice that you spoke [about] before and specifically maybe thinking about your response to archiving. Also, how other archives are created and how you use and choose the resources that you have in your work.
FD:I am addressing archiving and I guess it’s become something I like to talk about all the time. I frame everything I’m doing around archiving these days to be honest. I think that we’re all constantly archiving, because [of things] like Instagram and social media. Whereas before, perhaps like when I was [a child], my parents would be archiving more in terms of [the] photos they take and then would put the photos in a photo album and it’d be this highly curated thing. I guess now we have this massive database of human existence. I think it’s complicated. [What] I think about archiving is that people don’t talk enough about how archiving is a creative process or the authorship in archiving in terms of [the] narratives [they are] forming. On Instagram when people are using it in this way, which is performative, they’re actively creating these characters, like avatars I guess. I would say that perhaps most social media is more like: “Oh, I’m just showing you what’s happening”, and I think [that is] maybe that’s an example of how [social media] is very curated.
Everything from talking about somebody writing a book about something, like a non-fiction book, becomes a part of an archival process where you’re contextualising the past. If you go into an archive and find a photo or an artefact it will be labeled in certain ways and the labels are meant to be unbiased. They never are because it’s impossible. They will reference you to other things in the collection or outside of it. So [the archive] become[s] part of this story and archiving is [similar to] storytelling.
Even if, say, this archive [contains] a bunch of plants. These are all the Latin of the names of the plants and you’ve already decided that the plants should have Latin names. So you’ve already sort of elevated a certain cultural history. Those plants might have all sorts of different names in different countries, specifically where they [are] grown now for instance.The Latin names are considered to be like “real names” you know? That’s why addressing the true names of things is difficult.
LT:Yeah, even the word archive is Latin. Well, it comes from Greek originally, but in Latin it means ‘the place where records are kept’. So even the word is from that language, and I think, ‘archive’ in ancient Greek was to do with government so it has this, this power associated [with it] through its etymology.
FD:It is the same as [when] people are talking about [museums and asking] why is it fine for museums to have stolen artefacts in them? This is something we just presumed is fine before because it’s [presented as], “Oh, well that’s what museums have in them.” I think it’s also good for us to question these structures that we’re being told that [exist] at museums. Museums are just considered to be like libraries and it’s just like “Oh, here’s a collection of things that we found interesting.
LT:A lot of these more historical archives feel quite intentionally sourced, whereas archiving yourself on Instagram, it has this like false, almost unintentional sort of a vibe to it when in reality it’s very carefully curated for most people. Which is quite a weird way of “this is my life, but it’s kind of, not…” it’s only a very specific snapshot of what you want to portray your life as to people. Everyone is constantly curating themselves and archiving themselves. I guess what you were talking about before with the family album as being a carefully curated thing. I do think that like Instagram, although it’s very different, picks up where that left off. In family albums, it’s always birthdays, celebrations etc the positive moments. You never see the true picture of the whole person. So it’s a heavily edited personal archive, potentially just as edited and problematic as public archives or museum archives, it’s quite interesting.
FD:Completely, yeah. I think we should maybe take more care when we consume things because if I scroll past something on Instagram I think you can’t have a really critical eye on it because it’s too much. So you end up just consuming it. Whereas it is different if you live in a house with a family photo album for like 10 years, because you’ll become very familiar with those pictures and you have to develop a relationship with them, which will be critical even if it’s not seen as critical. Same difference if you go to the museum once or go to the museum a bunch of times. There’s something about the speed at which we archive just now which is maybe a bit dangerous for me maybe?
LT:Yeah. It’s the sort of limitation of the digital archive is maybe its speed. It is accelerated way beyond what people can actually consume in a manageable way or something?
FD:Yeah to process. It is also liberating for a lot of people. I think it’s that mix where I think [that] right now it is an important time to think about performance and the fact that storytelling is performance. So then if archiving is storytelling then archiving is performance. So let’s remember that. Of course nowadays everybody is a lot more critically engaged with the media [especially] young people today. I think it is an important time for us to think about how we are creating so much and how we're literally recording history all the time.
NR:I always feel like I’m worried that I’m adding to the noise in a way and, I guess that comes with what you’re saying about archiving ourselves and how we consider that. Is what I’m saying relevant? Or how does what I have to say fit in, in this time and space?
FD:Yeah. I didn’t use to post and I still don’t actually post a lot of stuff on Instagram on my ‘wall’ whereas some people post on Instagram twice a day. I feel [that I am] tightly curating my app but to the point of being a bit overly contrived about it. You want to say, okay, this is something which I actually want to be historicised about me. This is something I want people to associate Francis with. Maybe I’m more likely to post more things on the stories because they disappear and are a bit more like a conversation.
NR:Yeah, it’s interesting as well because Instagram has the option to look back in your archive of posts and stories. Then I’m like, why did I post that? It’s weird how the archive is like a timeline isn’t it of different ‘you’s’ and different ‘you’s’ in different spaces and different states of being.
FD:Have either of you been reading Shola von Reinhold’s book?
NR:Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing.
FD:That book is the best book, honestly. I think that’s such an interesting book because the person in the book is a black person, unspecified gender and it’s about how basically the only way they can live their life... (Okay, yeah, I’m saying “it’s about”, this is *disclaimer* my interpretation of it)… the only way they can live their life in any sort of ‘free’ way is by constantly trying to like delete the past because the past keeps trying to find them. When it comes to find them they try to escape it and then a new context tries to find them.
I tried to delete everything from my Facebook, which is like 10 years or so of stuff months ago. Facebook made it so hard to delete it. I had to delete stuff on Facebook repeatedly, multiple times in multiple different ways for it to get rid of it. Like five or six times before it actually disappeared from the timeline! I just thought about how there is an interest to collect information on us so somebody can like have power over us and use us. Whereas, if they don’t have information on us, it’s much harder to control us, crack us and to find us as well, you know? I really sort of demand the right to delete my past whenever I want. Like obviously not in terms of accountability but in terms of like, you know, what hat you wearing five years ago or, whatever.
LT:Someone can still find those posts, even though you delete them five times. That’s the scary thing about the internet. You can burn a piece of paper and it’s gone, but somewhere someone could retrieve that. This power to erase and delete things is very questionable online. If that makes sense. Or, like you say, there’s a violence where, you know, you maybe think you’ve deleted things but actually they can come back to haunt you. You know, you see people who have had like videos or past tweets, like dragged up that have been long deleted.
FD:It’s complicated, right? Because as much as archiving can be violent deletion can be violent. You can delete things which you should be responsible for. People can just run away from accountability to things. They are archiving their past in a way that’s like removing the things that don’t want people to know about. Those things might actually be very important for people to know about. It might be important for their safety. That’s why I think archiving has a lot of responsibility that comes with it. Cause you have to decide what is it that’s important that I share about this and what is okay for me not to share about this.
NR:I feel like there’s so many possibilities as well with digital archives that physical archives can’t provide. I didn’t really start going into physical archives until a couple of years ago, there’s something so intimidating about them. Like all the rules. You can’t bring water in and you get your bag checked for example, and all these different restrictions that make the space feel really uncomfortable. Whereas this year a lot things have been going online and there are many archives that have been digitised and made available online. And that’s been so much more interesting, I think, and accessible to be able to access it for people who have never been in actual physical archives. I think digital archiving can be more open.
FD:Completely. It is definitely beautiful to be able to hold something in your hand, right. It is beautiful to do that, maybe to have physical power sometimes. But yeah, like you said there’s this whole institutional context around it, which is really aggressive. So what does it mean to be a Black person who goes into like a Western, white run institution’s archive and be told to put on gloves, not drink water and like not do this and not do that when they’re handling a picture of a Black person living in Scotland in the 1950s. Because they are saying, “you better be careful with that because it’s important and you don’t understand how important it is.” Whereas the reality is, the people archiving it don’t understand how important it is.
NR:Exactly. It creates such a hierarchy as well, guiding you or even instructing you to handle this material in the building and to behave in a certain way. And that’s the thing, I guess, with art galleries as well on a lesser scale, but there are those kinds of limitations and rules and I think that is really off putting. It makes people not feel comfortable in the spaces as they are being told how to act or what to do.
LT:You need a purpose for being in the archive. What are you researching? What are you doing? Well, what if you just want to know? It’s not very inviting, it feels like you need a purpose or something.
FD:(I am literally plugging it but that’s like Shola’s book as well right?) The main character is getting kicked out of archives because they have to pretend they are doing a project to access the archive when they’re actually just looking for stuff out of their own interest, which is really important to their mental health, their personal growth and their actual work. They have to be like, “I have funding from X and I’m doing a project about X and X”.
I really, really think that there just needs to be a much wider conversation as a society about how it’s really fucked up that these institutions hold on to all these artifacts and then control how they’re used. They also control the context and then control how they are perceived. And then they demand that we dress up in like a nice suit and put on nice gloves to go and look at our own past.
NR:Exactly! Things as well like the National Library of Scotland, I’ve always found it such a weird vibe there. Very middle class. If I’m just there in a tracksuit people are just going to stare, I actually am doing proper research. But like we say again, it's like, well, why can’t I just be there to have a look? There’s the expectation you have to be a certain kind of person, in certain circles.
FD:Most of the people who should be accessing those histories aren’t able to access them. Cause they don’t, they don’t feel like it’s for them because it’s not for them. Who should be looking at these archives? Of course people have to study and stuff but people whose lives they are relevant to, which is a lot of us... it kind of goes back to what you were saying, Laura, about academia in terms of the barriers that are put up. I’ve struggled a lot considering myself as somebody whose voice is worthwhile in certain fields like art and academia. Because I don’t have anything from university [but because of] my personal experiences quite often I know more about some of the subjects than people who’ve studied at the university. Not because one’s better than the other, but just because I’ve done 15 years of research on some of these things. But I would still find it really, really hard to get a job in certain places or be seen as being the same as some other people.
That’s all about gatekeeping and I think that’s why I’m very hopeful for a sort of movement that asks us to listen to the voices of members of actual communities. Put them in positions of power and elevate them on panels and make them positions for things If somebody is getting given a fellowship to talk about the history of Diasporic West African identities or something then maybe that should be someone who’s part of the West African Diaspora. Like you were saying Natasha, [someone] who has lived experience of it probably knows more about it. Because as much as a white person who’s read all the books by other white people, how much can we learn about these things? A lot of people will talk about speaking to their grandmother as being one of the most obvious sources of knowledge and understanding in their personal identities. Why shouldn’t that also be the case, you know? It’s been a problem for me career wise because sometimes I kind of refuse to pretend to be academic because I’m not it. I refuse to pretend to be it but I kind of have to make money.
Before I was getting commissioned by people to make artwork if I had applied for something and I was just like: “Hi, my name is Francis, I’ve watched, like, three films a day for like 15 years… I don’t really have a job. Oh, you know, whatever. I’m like a DJ,” you know that wouldn’t be ‘good enough’. The reality is… no, no, I’ve watched three films a day for over a decade, like do you understand what that means? Whereas somebody else might go to film school and barely watch any films. I kind of just want to refuse to pretend because I think people who are supposedly experts and things are really not experts in things at all.
I guess it goes back to the archive. Maybe we shouldn’t look at the way X person has written about West African history. Maybe we should just completely scrap all of these texts and we should completely reimagine the way that we look at West African history instead of adding to this really toxic narrative. Maybe we should just say, okay, nope, they have all this stuff and then refuse to engage with any of this.
NR:I guess now it’s really great that a lot of people are exploring the relationship between Black people in Scotland but there’s so many white people — white scholars, white historians and academics that are taking up those spaces and speaking at those events and writing the books and getting all the paid opportunities that relate to that because there’s a kind of interest right now. I think that’s a big thing for me when I think about who’s getting to tell the story. There’s never any Black Scottish voices within that, I really rarely see any. I think that questioning who’s getting these opportunities is always a really important thing. Who should be telling the story? What relationship do they have with it? Because at the end of the day for a lot of these people it is just the research part of their job. Then that becomes commodified in a lot of ways because they speak about Black lives as something to be researched or something to be a subject for their work. Whereas actually if there are black people in Scotland getting those opportunities there’s the personal aspects as well and the emotional side of it is paid more attention to.
FD:Yeah, completely. Who better to talk to about being black and Scottish than a black Scottish person? But we’re normally just added on the side of it and it’s normally framed as “We’re giving you an opportunity, here’s like 50 pounds and you can come and sit on this thing” and know everybody else on it will be white. If you think it’s really important to have an actual black person there to talk about it… it’s like: “This person’s here because they’re a lecturer at this university. This person’s here because they have funding from X institution to study this artist or whatever… and this person is just here because they’re black.” And the irony is you are already archived in terms of the way you’ve framed or historicised who these people are.
Like for instance, you can imagine if Nina Simone is invited to a panel (which of course I’m sure she was back then to talk about something). She would have been considered sort of like a vox populi, to have a voice of “the angry black woman” on the panel. You know? You see this all the time… you see old videos of Stokely Carmichael on some show where he’s arguing with a white academic. Or James Baldwin, he’ll be on a show arguing with some white academic. They’re always framed as somebody who’s like “angry”, and maybe doesn’t know so much of what they are talking about in contrast to “here’s somebody who knows what they are talking about…”.
Nina Simone was [a] genius. The ways she understood black identity and the way she understood her identity, black struggle was really embodied. She’s been able to communicate it through the music, obviously extremely well, and through musical structure. The way she broke [musical structures] down and remade them, she would shout and could criticise white supremacy in very nuanced ways through song. So I think often black people get framed as not experts and I think quite often that’s maybe because a lot of quite important black thinkers and practitioners have intentionally pushed against the dominant modes.
Sadly that’s why Baldwin’s popular now, right? People would say “Oh Baldwin talks properly… I can understand Baldwin.” So he’s invited to the table now: palatable. Older relatives would say now: “James Baldwin, he’s such a clever man” but like, would they fuck have been listening to him at the time. No way. It’s because [they have decided] you can come to the table but only if you are speaking ‘this way.’ Whereas if Nina Simone is up there being fucking radge (cause Nina Simone was radge) and getting angry it’s like, “Oh she’s not a reliable witness or reliable source”, you know? But she’s an incredibly reliable source.
Happens to a lot of jazz musicians and stuff as well. [Now they] get honorary degrees from these big music schools and music theory schools whereas when people like Charles Mingus were talking at the time people would just be like, “this person is literally a rambling homeless person” (because a bunch of times Mingus was homeless and stuff). Then after their cultural production has proved to be valuable or when they’re able to understand its worth, then they are like: “Oh yeah, well, we at Julliard want to recognise this person and want to say that we understand how good they are” or whatever. But what about all the other people? What about the 50 or 60 plus years of suffering this person’s gone through because people wouldn’t listen to this stuff, you know? I think that’s all about what’s worth recording and what’s not worth recording. You need to be like important, you know. The ramblings of a ‘mad black person’ aren’t worth recording because they are just ramblings. But for some reason, there’s fucking tonnes of extremely heavy books (I mean physically heavy books) by white people about black history which are deemed to be like important, you know?
LT:It’s like when you’re no longer a direct threat to how things run, or to all those structures of power then… we’ll take your archive and display it in the way that we can control it. That’s just one of the problematic things about archives once they’re officiated by an institution or whatever.
FD:Yeah. The black history cannon as written by — or at the least like contextualised by — white people. “Oh, there was like Kunta Kinte as in from Roots (slavery), then there was Martin Luther King and then now there’s Barack Obama.” That’s the story of black history, you know. And that’s how I think a lot of people see it as like the story of progress but also like what kind of progress? It’s insanely bad how people are using Martin Luther King’s words now to talk about Black Lives Matter to do with non-violence and all that sort of stuff. But that’s because the civil rights movement in America was basically archived culturally as the I Have a Dream speech and images of little black children playing with little white children. If we would have to look back at the civil rights movement, it was that? And then there was Malcolm X, the bad guy, who was trying to cause trouble but luckily Martin Luther King and his friends all held hands and walked across the bridge… and that’s the story. That’s just really, really mad and that’s all about how it had been recorded.
We are in conversation with Francis Dosoo to discuss how archiving as a research methodology is integral to their art practice as seen through their new work in progress, Untitled Psychodrama, which uses archival materials as a form of storytelling by gathering and recontextualising media. We discuss the consumption of archives and how images can be sourced and composed to reclaim Black diasporic experiences that are often told from white colonial narratives that are upheld within academic institutions. We also explore the differences in the kinds of knowledge(s) found in online archives compared to institutional spaces by discussing the issues around deletion, authorship and consumption.
FD: Francis Dosso
LT: Laura Tully
NR: Natasha Ruwona
LT:Hi Francis, thanks for joining us for this chat. Today we’re going to chat a bit about your arts practice. I thought it might be good to start by talking a bit about your practice and how you got involved in the arts, especially since you’ve mentioned before in conversations that you didn’t study art in a traditional sense, it would be interesting to hear a little bit about what brought you into the “contemporary art world”.
FD:Yeah. I definitely [became involved in the arts] by accident [laughing] but when I was in high school, I was into film and stuff. I was making films and [took a class in] media studies. I almost went to film school when I was around 18. I guess like most things that happen at that age, quite a lot of things change and you just end up doing something different. So I didn’t go to film school [however] the interest was always still there. I was making music at the time as well and I started collecting a lot of photography, film and music. They were all things that I collected, kind of disparately, just like anybody who has a blog or a Tumblr. I used to have a Tumblr. I guess I have a brain where I like mine for information all the time. I just collected a lot of stuff.
Then I started running clubs. The first nightclub that I ran [was] a soul night, like soul and 50’s RnB and I ended up using this sort of database of photos of Black people in America from the 1930s to 1960s on the posters. I then ended up using a lot of the videos I collected from similar eras for the club visuals and stuff, and occasionally for promo videos. I became involved in art from DJing itself to be honest because I guess my practice is now quite research based and I think that the progression for me was: researching, collecting stuff and then appropriating it. The most literal way I did that was through DJing because every three minutes you are having to contextualise a new piece of media alongside something else. I was also creating a wider context for that media with photos and videos. I then think I eventually got very sick of running clubs and I started to see what I do through a lens of contemporary art.
I also started a radio show called Above a Sleeping City where I would improvise as a selector and a DJ for two hours. It started with just playing songs that I liked and then pretty quickly I got into playing clips from films that I liked, then other sounds. After a little while it opened up and I started playing less and less music. I then began overlaying and compiling a lot of different sounds. Anywhere between two and five different sound sources [that were] always improvised. That process took [my practice] into a performance medium with video as well. I think that how I got into the arts was quite organic in terms of literally just trying to express myself and then finding out that the way I was expressing myself could be classed as art [laughing].
LT:Yeah, I think this is maybe a bit off-script but I think when you hear about what’s happening in education right now — there are other ways of learning and educating yourself that aren’t necessarily through these institutional channels that you’re expected to go through. This is something that as a committee we are quite interested in, these more ‘informal’ ways of learning and education through conversations and through reading groups and having these podcasts where we talk about different things.
FD:I was actually having a conversation with somebody yesterday. They were telling me I should write and were saying “oh, why don’t write some of the stuff you’re saying down?” I was like, oh yeah… It scares me because I never went to university and I have a phobia [of] writing. I think this person was saying this in a really lovely way but I think sometimes that there’s a pressure for things to be institutionalised in a certain way. Like the conversation is not good enough or something and it has to become a paper. Whereas the reality is, in my opinion, conversations have more effect than papers do on my culture. It’s kind of adjacent to what you said, in terms of thinking about cultural production through university and then outside of university. I think it is false that the most important cultural production gets done in academia and it’s not true.
NR:I always think as well if it’s not ‘formalised’ in a university or institution then it doesn’t matter. Even with my own writing, knowing that personal experience or lived experience is enough. It doesn’t have to rely on that ‘backing up’ or the references of academics, which has been such a push and pull, because obviously that’s how the university wants you to write. Then [you begin] thinking who’s thought of that in a similar way? Who coined that term? It is actually lived experiences [that] are just as valid, if not more which is really important.
FD:Formalised is the word I think. [It] has to be done in a certain way to be valuable but the irony is that it’s actually really valuable. So, yeah, I totally agree.
NR:Could I ask you about your work in progress? You uploaded on Instagram a screenshot of Will Smith from Bad Boys, a Du Bois text, something from a music video, a personal commitment, and an excerpt from an interview. Could you talk a bit about where those resources came from and how they were sourced whether intentionally or unintentionally and how they have come together?
FD:The work is called Untitled Psychodrama. In a nutshell, it’s meant to be a work that I hope I can perform forever. It’s a two screen video performance with music and in the same format as I was talking about before with improvised music mixing and also some live stuff now. I guess it’s about creating, it’s about reappropriating, well recontextualising historic Black media. The reason I got into that is because I have always just been really obsessed with certain films and images. Some of these images have just stayed with me strongly and honestly I think it’s the same for everybody. I think it’s just the way I’m processing it.
The image of Will Smith [that Natasha mentioned] is from Bad Boys (1995). I just loved that film when I was a kid and Will Smith in general. I started thinking about certain images and there’s this bit where he’s like running down the street with his shirt open chasing bad guys or whatever. First of all, it’s pretty hot [laughing] and second cool because I was like, oh, that’s so cool and hot. I didn’t care about the violence, it was about the aesthetic of him running and that he looked quite soft. Not so much now actually but when [Will Smith] was younger especially, he appeared quite effeminate sometimes, I think. It was just this [image of him] slow motion running [that] always stuck with me my whole life.
I guess my work comes from this place of being like: I have all this stuff and it just lives in my brain and I’m trying to sort of like organise it, to make sense of it for myself. That way by organising it, it will make me understand it better. So yeah the shot of Will Smith in that Instagram post is just one where it’s like a moment where he’s actually interrogating somebody. He looks really like, I won’t say that it looks like a Renaissance painting or something, but it has a beautiful light in it. I guess as a Black person and as a non binary person it’s very hard to find representation in the media. I think that what I have done or what I’m doing is to try to create my own media history using fragments of stuff that I found and that I already saw myself in. The problem is that these things are normally in really toxic and non liberatory contexts. So I take these things out with [those contexts] and put them somewhere else. I guess you remember that as consumers or audience members, sometimes we can choose [and] we can have nuanced relationships with these media. I watched Girl 6 (1996) recently, [directed] by Spike Lee. The film is really fucking messed up. The first part of the film was really good so I’m like, it’s okay to watch the first 20 minutes of the film then just turn it off and to be like, that was good. Then I don’t have to engage with all the horrible toxic shit, you know? So in a way, it’s like that is curation of a sort right?
The clip is from a Sade music video. I think that the worlds that Sade created are pretty amazing. The quotes: one of them is from Du Bois and the other is from Kodwo Eshun, an Afrofuturist writer. I’m thinking about Afrofuturism instead of necessarily trying to just imagine the future. Looking to the future and looking at the past we try to reimagine the past as like a basis for the future that we want to be a part of. The term counter-memory is actually a Kodwo term, it’s about when we’re thinking about a future we’re already assuming the past because the past is narrativised by historians and by cultural critics and by all of us. So when we think about the future we don’t have an assumed past. Instead it [lets us] reconsider the past and tell a different story about the past.
LT:Why did you call it Untitled Psychodrama? I think that’s quite an interesting name for the project.
FD:I actually have a very clear answer to this question [laughing]. It just came into my mind because I like psychodrama, as a genre film. The music I use is [what] some people might find creepy or something. It’s slow moving, weird and shifting. It’s quite atmospheric and not very melodic. A lot of the clips that I choose, the tone of them is quite tense or something.
I wanted to call it Untitled Psychodrama then looked up the definition of psychodrama. It said one: [that it was] a form of psychotherapy, in which patients act out events from their past and two: [it is] a play film or novel, in which psychological elements are the main interests. I thought this is literally what I’m doing. It’s interesting [to consider] this psychotherapy side of it because [in my practice] I literally am reenacting events from the past. I had a friend who studied acting, who actually told me about that process, but he didn’t call it psychodrama, [but] I’ve just always just loved that genre of film.
LT:It’ll be interesting to talk a little bit more about what your thoughts are around the archival processes that you’re doing in your practice that you spoke [about] before and specifically maybe thinking about your response to archiving. Also, how other archives are created and how you use and choose the resources that you have in your work.
FD:I am addressing archiving and I guess it’s become something I like to talk about all the time. I frame everything I’m doing around archiving these days to be honest. I think that we’re all constantly archiving, because [of things] like Instagram and social media. Whereas before, perhaps like when I was [a child], my parents would be archiving more in terms of [the] photos they take and then would put the photos in a photo album and it’d be this highly curated thing. I guess now we have this massive database of human existence. I think it’s complicated. [What] I think about archiving is that people don’t talk enough about how archiving is a creative process or the authorship in archiving in terms of [the] narratives [they are] forming. On Instagram when people are using it in this way, which is performative, they’re actively creating these characters, like avatars I guess. I would say that perhaps most social media is more like: “Oh, I’m just showing you what’s happening”, and I think [that is] maybe that’s an example of how [social media] is very curated.
Everything from talking about somebody writing a book about something, like a non-fiction book, becomes a part of an archival process where you’re contextualising the past. If you go into an archive and find a photo or an artefact it will be labeled in certain ways and the labels are meant to be unbiased. They never are because it’s impossible. They will reference you to other things in the collection or outside of it. So [the archive] become[s] part of this story and archiving is [similar to] storytelling.
Even if, say, this archive [contains] a bunch of plants. These are all the Latin of the names of the plants and you’ve already decided that the plants should have Latin names. So you’ve already sort of elevated a certain cultural history. Those plants might have all sorts of different names in different countries, specifically where they [are] grown now for instance.The Latin names are considered to be like “real names” you know? That’s why addressing the true names of things is difficult.
LT:Yeah, even the word archive is Latin. Well, it comes from Greek originally, but in Latin it means ‘the place where records are kept’. So even the word is from that language, and I think, ‘archive’ in ancient Greek was to do with government so it has this, this power associated [with it] through its etymology.
FD:It is the same as [when] people are talking about [museums and asking] why is it fine for museums to have stolen artefacts in them? This is something we just presumed is fine before because it’s [presented as], “Oh, well that’s what museums have in them.” I think it’s also good for us to question these structures that we’re being told that [exist] at museums. Museums are just considered to be like libraries and it’s just like “Oh, here’s a collection of things that we found interesting.
LT:A lot of these more historical archives feel quite intentionally sourced, whereas archiving yourself on Instagram, it has this like false, almost unintentional sort of a vibe to it when in reality it’s very carefully curated for most people. Which is quite a weird way of “this is my life, but it’s kind of, not…” it’s only a very specific snapshot of what you want to portray your life as to people. Everyone is constantly curating themselves and archiving themselves. I guess what you were talking about before with the family album as being a carefully curated thing. I do think that like Instagram, although it’s very different, picks up where that left off. In family albums, it’s always birthdays, celebrations etc the positive moments. You never see the true picture of the whole person. So it’s a heavily edited personal archive, potentially just as edited and problematic as public archives or museum archives, it’s quite interesting.
FD:Completely, yeah. I think we should maybe take more care when we consume things because if I scroll past something on Instagram I think you can’t have a really critical eye on it because it’s too much. So you end up just consuming it. Whereas it is different if you live in a house with a family photo album for like 10 years, because you’ll become very familiar with those pictures and you have to develop a relationship with them, which will be critical even if it’s not seen as critical. Same difference if you go to the museum once or go to the museum a bunch of times. There’s something about the speed at which we archive just now which is maybe a bit dangerous for me maybe?
LT:Yeah. It’s the sort of limitation of the digital archive is maybe its speed. It is accelerated way beyond what people can actually consume in a manageable way or something?
FD:Yeah to process. It is also liberating for a lot of people. I think it’s that mix where I think [that] right now it is an important time to think about performance and the fact that storytelling is performance. So then if archiving is storytelling then archiving is performance. So let’s remember that. Of course nowadays everybody is a lot more critically engaged with the media [especially] young people today. I think it is an important time for us to think about how we are creating so much and how we're literally recording history all the time.
NR:I always feel like I’m worried that I’m adding to the noise in a way and, I guess that comes with what you’re saying about archiving ourselves and how we consider that. Is what I’m saying relevant? Or how does what I have to say fit in, in this time and space?
FD:Yeah. I didn’t use to post and I still don’t actually post a lot of stuff on Instagram on my ‘wall’ whereas some people post on Instagram twice a day. I feel [that I am] tightly curating my app but to the point of being a bit overly contrived about it. You want to say, okay, this is something which I actually want to be historicised about me. This is something I want people to associate Francis with. Maybe I’m more likely to post more things on the stories because they disappear and are a bit more like a conversation.
NR:Yeah, it’s interesting as well because Instagram has the option to look back in your archive of posts and stories. Then I’m like, why did I post that? It’s weird how the archive is like a timeline isn’t it of different ‘you’s’ and different ‘you’s’ in different spaces and different states of being.
FD:Have either of you been reading Shola von Reinhold’s book?
NR:Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing.
FD:That book is the best book, honestly. I think that’s such an interesting book because the person in the book is a black person, unspecified gender and it’s about how basically the only way they can live their life... (Okay, yeah, I’m saying “it’s about”, this is *disclaimer* my interpretation of it)… the only way they can live their life in any sort of ‘free’ way is by constantly trying to like delete the past because the past keeps trying to find them. When it comes to find them they try to escape it and then a new context tries to find them.
I tried to delete everything from my Facebook, which is like 10 years or so of stuff months ago. Facebook made it so hard to delete it. I had to delete stuff on Facebook repeatedly, multiple times in multiple different ways for it to get rid of it. Like five or six times before it actually disappeared from the timeline! I just thought about how there is an interest to collect information on us so somebody can like have power over us and use us. Whereas, if they don’t have information on us, it’s much harder to control us, crack us and to find us as well, you know? I really sort of demand the right to delete my past whenever I want. Like obviously not in terms of accountability but in terms of like, you know, what hat you wearing five years ago or, whatever.
LT:Someone can still find those posts, even though you delete them five times. That’s the scary thing about the internet. You can burn a piece of paper and it’s gone, but somewhere someone could retrieve that. This power to erase and delete things is very questionable online. If that makes sense. Or, like you say, there’s a violence where, you know, you maybe think you’ve deleted things but actually they can come back to haunt you. You know, you see people who have had like videos or past tweets, like dragged up that have been long deleted.
FD:It’s complicated, right? Because as much as archiving can be violent deletion can be violent. You can delete things which you should be responsible for. People can just run away from accountability to things. They are archiving their past in a way that’s like removing the things that don’t want people to know about. Those things might actually be very important for people to know about. It might be important for their safety. That’s why I think archiving has a lot of responsibility that comes with it. Cause you have to decide what is it that’s important that I share about this and what is okay for me not to share about this.
NR:I feel like there’s so many possibilities as well with digital archives that physical archives can’t provide. I didn’t really start going into physical archives until a couple of years ago, there’s something so intimidating about them. Like all the rules. You can’t bring water in and you get your bag checked for example, and all these different restrictions that make the space feel really uncomfortable. Whereas this year a lot things have been going online and there are many archives that have been digitised and made available online. And that’s been so much more interesting, I think, and accessible to be able to access it for people who have never been in actual physical archives. I think digital archiving can be more open.
FD:Completely. It is definitely beautiful to be able to hold something in your hand, right. It is beautiful to do that, maybe to have physical power sometimes. But yeah, like you said there’s this whole institutional context around it, which is really aggressive. So what does it mean to be a Black person who goes into like a Western, white run institution’s archive and be told to put on gloves, not drink water and like not do this and not do that when they’re handling a picture of a Black person living in Scotland in the 1950s. Because they are saying, “you better be careful with that because it’s important and you don’t understand how important it is.” Whereas the reality is, the people archiving it don’t understand how important it is.
NR:Exactly. It creates such a hierarchy as well, guiding you or even instructing you to handle this material in the building and to behave in a certain way. And that’s the thing, I guess, with art galleries as well on a lesser scale, but there are those kinds of limitations and rules and I think that is really off putting. It makes people not feel comfortable in the spaces as they are being told how to act or what to do.
LT:You need a purpose for being in the archive. What are you researching? What are you doing? Well, what if you just want to know? It’s not very inviting, it feels like you need a purpose or something.
FD:(I am literally plugging it but that’s like Shola’s book as well right?) The main character is getting kicked out of archives because they have to pretend they are doing a project to access the archive when they’re actually just looking for stuff out of their own interest, which is really important to their mental health, their personal growth and their actual work. They have to be like, “I have funding from X and I’m doing a project about X and X”.
I really, really think that there just needs to be a much wider conversation as a society about how it’s really fucked up that these institutions hold on to all these artifacts and then control how they’re used. They also control the context and then control how they are perceived. And then they demand that we dress up in like a nice suit and put on nice gloves to go and look at our own past.
NR:Exactly! Things as well like the National Library of Scotland, I’ve always found it such a weird vibe there. Very middle class. If I’m just there in a tracksuit people are just going to stare, I actually am doing proper research. But like we say again, it's like, well, why can’t I just be there to have a look? There’s the expectation you have to be a certain kind of person, in certain circles.
FD:Most of the people who should be accessing those histories aren’t able to access them. Cause they don’t, they don’t feel like it’s for them because it’s not for them. Who should be looking at these archives? Of course people have to study and stuff but people whose lives they are relevant to, which is a lot of us... it kind of goes back to what you were saying, Laura, about academia in terms of the barriers that are put up. I’ve struggled a lot considering myself as somebody whose voice is worthwhile in certain fields like art and academia. Because I don’t have anything from university [but because of] my personal experiences quite often I know more about some of the subjects than people who’ve studied at the university. Not because one’s better than the other, but just because I’ve done 15 years of research on some of these things. But I would still find it really, really hard to get a job in certain places or be seen as being the same as some other people.
That’s all about gatekeeping and I think that’s why I’m very hopeful for a sort of movement that asks us to listen to the voices of members of actual communities. Put them in positions of power and elevate them on panels and make them positions for things If somebody is getting given a fellowship to talk about the history of Diasporic West African identities or something then maybe that should be someone who’s part of the West African Diaspora. Like you were saying Natasha, [someone] who has lived experience of it probably knows more about it. Because as much as a white person who’s read all the books by other white people, how much can we learn about these things? A lot of people will talk about speaking to their grandmother as being one of the most obvious sources of knowledge and understanding in their personal identities. Why shouldn’t that also be the case, you know? It’s been a problem for me career wise because sometimes I kind of refuse to pretend to be academic because I’m not it. I refuse to pretend to be it but I kind of have to make money.
Before I was getting commissioned by people to make artwork if I had applied for something and I was just like: “Hi, my name is Francis, I’ve watched, like, three films a day for like 15 years… I don’t really have a job. Oh, you know, whatever. I’m like a DJ,” you know that wouldn’t be ‘good enough’. The reality is… no, no, I’ve watched three films a day for over a decade, like do you understand what that means? Whereas somebody else might go to film school and barely watch any films. I kind of just want to refuse to pretend because I think people who are supposedly experts and things are really not experts in things at all.
I guess it goes back to the archive. Maybe we shouldn’t look at the way X person has written about West African history. Maybe we should just completely scrap all of these texts and we should completely reimagine the way that we look at West African history instead of adding to this really toxic narrative. Maybe we should just say, okay, nope, they have all this stuff and then refuse to engage with any of this.
NR:I guess now it’s really great that a lot of people are exploring the relationship between Black people in Scotland but there’s so many white people — white scholars, white historians and academics that are taking up those spaces and speaking at those events and writing the books and getting all the paid opportunities that relate to that because there’s a kind of interest right now. I think that’s a big thing for me when I think about who’s getting to tell the story. There’s never any Black Scottish voices within that, I really rarely see any. I think that questioning who’s getting these opportunities is always a really important thing. Who should be telling the story? What relationship do they have with it? Because at the end of the day for a lot of these people it is just the research part of their job. Then that becomes commodified in a lot of ways because they speak about Black lives as something to be researched or something to be a subject for their work. Whereas actually if there are black people in Scotland getting those opportunities there’s the personal aspects as well and the emotional side of it is paid more attention to.
FD:Yeah, completely. Who better to talk to about being black and Scottish than a black Scottish person? But we’re normally just added on the side of it and it’s normally framed as “We’re giving you an opportunity, here’s like 50 pounds and you can come and sit on this thing” and know everybody else on it will be white. If you think it’s really important to have an actual black person there to talk about it… it’s like: “This person’s here because they’re a lecturer at this university. This person’s here because they have funding from X institution to study this artist or whatever… and this person is just here because they’re black.” And the irony is you are already archived in terms of the way you’ve framed or historicised who these people are.
Like for instance, you can imagine if Nina Simone is invited to a panel (which of course I’m sure she was back then to talk about something). She would have been considered sort of like a vox populi, to have a voice of “the angry black woman” on the panel. You know? You see this all the time… you see old videos of Stokely Carmichael on some show where he’s arguing with a white academic. Or James Baldwin, he’ll be on a show arguing with some white academic. They’re always framed as somebody who’s like “angry”, and maybe doesn’t know so much of what they are talking about in contrast to “here’s somebody who knows what they are talking about…”.
Nina Simone was [a] genius. The ways she understood black identity and the way she understood her identity, black struggle was really embodied. She’s been able to communicate it through the music, obviously extremely well, and through musical structure. The way she broke [musical structures] down and remade them, she would shout and could criticise white supremacy in very nuanced ways through song. So I think often black people get framed as not experts and I think quite often that’s maybe because a lot of quite important black thinkers and practitioners have intentionally pushed against the dominant modes.
Sadly that’s why Baldwin’s popular now, right? People would say “Oh Baldwin talks properly… I can understand Baldwin.” So he’s invited to the table now: palatable. Older relatives would say now: “James Baldwin, he’s such a clever man” but like, would they fuck have been listening to him at the time. No way. It’s because [they have decided] you can come to the table but only if you are speaking ‘this way.’ Whereas if Nina Simone is up there being fucking radge (cause Nina Simone was radge) and getting angry it’s like, “Oh she’s not a reliable witness or reliable source”, you know? But she’s an incredibly reliable source.
Happens to a lot of jazz musicians and stuff as well. [Now they] get honorary degrees from these big music schools and music theory schools whereas when people like Charles Mingus were talking at the time people would just be like, “this person is literally a rambling homeless person” (because a bunch of times Mingus was homeless and stuff). Then after their cultural production has proved to be valuable or when they’re able to understand its worth, then they are like: “Oh yeah, well, we at Julliard want to recognise this person and want to say that we understand how good they are” or whatever. But what about all the other people? What about the 50 or 60 plus years of suffering this person’s gone through because people wouldn’t listen to this stuff, you know? I think that’s all about what’s worth recording and what’s not worth recording. You need to be like important, you know. The ramblings of a ‘mad black person’ aren’t worth recording because they are just ramblings. But for some reason, there’s fucking tonnes of extremely heavy books (I mean physically heavy books) by white people about black history which are deemed to be like important, you know?
LT:It’s like when you’re no longer a direct threat to how things run, or to all those structures of power then… we’ll take your archive and display it in the way that we can control it. That’s just one of the problematic things about archives once they’re officiated by an institution or whatever.
FD:Yeah. The black history cannon as written by — or at the least like contextualised by — white people. “Oh, there was like Kunta Kinte as in from Roots (slavery), then there was Martin Luther King and then now there’s Barack Obama.” That’s the story of black history, you know. And that’s how I think a lot of people see it as like the story of progress but also like what kind of progress? It’s insanely bad how people are using Martin Luther King’s words now to talk about Black Lives Matter to do with non-violence and all that sort of stuff. But that’s because the civil rights movement in America was basically archived culturally as the I Have a Dream speech and images of little black children playing with little white children. If we would have to look back at the civil rights movement, it was that? And then there was Malcolm X, the bad guy, who was trying to cause trouble but luckily Martin Luther King and his friends all held hands and walked across the bridge… and that’s the story. That’s just really, really mad and that’s all about how it had been recorded.
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