Chat with Harold Offeh
Harold and I talk about not knowing what to say when someone asks you how you are feeling and the horror, tragedy and subsequent activism and protest of this week. We wonder on if the scale of the reaction makes this different from previously normalised aggressions. Harold talks about Maxine Walters, the democratic party politician in the US and talks about the need for systemic change. We talk about how to be creative at this moment, and Harold describes taking time to upload and speculate. We talk about anxieties of the relevance of works and ideas now and how to apply things that may have been incubated now for months. We talk about the postponed show at the Welcome Collection, which looks at happiness as a social construct. We touch on 'Joy inside our tears', Stevie Wonder and dance in relation to trauma. We talk about Harold's personal archive of references, drawing from important milestones in culture and key icons such as Grace Jones. Harold talks about being drawn to feminism's particular strategies and challenges to given ideas of representation. We talk about the plurality of the positions of teaching and education as a process of exchange, as a relationship to structures of knowledge and as a mode of dissemination. We talk about being given the opportunity to do a PHD. We talk about Harold's nascent discovery of Brecht and how it informed the materialisation of the audience. We talk about being a latchkey kid and living in your imagination. Harold talks about realising he did not have a materials based practice and using the specificity of a given location as a way to tackle anxiety around this. We talk about the social usefulness of art and the rookie as a position of agency. Harold goes into his description of the 'black universal' and musical examples as a toolkit. We end on connectivity, grazing through reading and playlists and wandering through online space and reinforcing working methodologies to atomise things.
Image:
Covers, After Grace Jones. Island Life. Photo, 2015
Links:
http://www.haroldoffeh.com
http://boldtendencies.com/open-call-from-harold-offeh/
http://turf-projects.com
https://eastsideprojects.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnxHnkpmyhI (Short Maxine Walters Interview)