Page 115 - Sharp: The Book For Men FW21

the movie. Most of my life was spent around other musicians that I grew up with, so it wasn’t until this time that I was surrounded by visual artists all day long, and seeing kids [in school] that were much younger than me and that were so talented really pushed me to be better.
When did you focus your work on the themes you address now? Honestly, it was really just my entire life and the experiences that I’ve had as a first-generation Canadian. Both my parents are from Ghana and experience otherness in a very different type of way, the otherness from living in a colonial stateside country like Canada and a particular kind of racist system that exists in a country on stolen land. There’s also the more minute experi- ences, even within the Black community, of being Ghanaian. Where I lived, there were Ghanaian kids around, but my more immediate circles at schools were a lot more Caribbean kids. There is a kind of strange relationship [that’s] often good but sometimes a bit adversarial between Caribbean folk and continental Africans, so there was a certain kind of otherness experience in my social group. Especially coming from London, Ontario where most of the people around me except for my family and extended family were white, and I had to deal with the racism there, then coming to Toronto, where I was now around people that looked like me. That was a great experience, but there was still that otherness; I felt ostracized in a way. So there are those experiences that filtered into who I am and therefore what I do.
But I have to say that the “Building Black” show was what made the shift for me. The Black women in particular that were around me were instrumental in my own development and Black consciousness, who I am and understanding where I am in this world. That led me to an opportunity to present during Black History Month with the TD Black History Month series, which they’ve been doing for years, where they’d create brand new local organizations for Black artists to present in key cities across the country, from Halifax to Vancouver.
There’s an inclination when we talk about Black history to just focus on the transatlantic slave trade. There’s these narratives of oppres- sion, and I get that and it’s important to know, but I also feel like the exposition of Black pain is so consumable. When we share videos of Black people being brutalized and even killed, like, I get it — Information Age, share share share —
it helps spark outrage and get the movement going, but there’s exhaustion there, too. Every time we look into the future, we harness what the past has shown, but we trailblaze and point toward the stars and think about Black futures, because we have to imagine the things that we want for ourselves.
What are those Black futures that you’re looking toward?
The futures that are free from colonialism. If they do touch on enslavement, it’s not “These are the things that happened during enslavement,” it’s “These are some of the stories of resistance.” Let’s focus elsewhere and let’s try to imagine something different. Let’s imagine what those rebellions really looked like. And then adding these futuristic and fantastical elements to it. For example, I have an artwork called The Bandit Queen of Walatah, and it’s a triptych featuring these three figurines, more of a smaller scale, but they’re archers and they have this aura of heroism about them, but also an aura of menace. The whole point behind that came from when I was exploring medieval Africa and learning about these empires that existed in West Af- rica during that time, the kingdom of Ghana, of Mali — there’s just so much content there. The first universities in the world were estab- lished there, and there was so much learning and cross-cultural pollination of Islam ushered into the country. There was a lot happening, and the world doesn’t typically know about all of this. So, I really wanted to bring these mythologies and experiences of this particular kind of past, but directed into the future.
The aesthetics of the things that I build — they come from looking at Star Wars and looking at sci-fi structures and wanting to recreate them so we can have a physical documentation of these kinds of mythologies and storylines. Getting back to The Bandit Queen of Walatah, it’s really a story about a girl who escaped enslavement and was left for dead in the desert, and instead forged a will of vengeance against the enslavers. She would descend from the canyons in the desert and rob the slave caravans and free more and more people, and she eventually developed an army of 100 free women, and basically would rob from the rich and feed the poor. And that came about when I was thinking about the medieval era. I was thinking about Robin Hood and all that, and I wanted to challenge my own indoctrination of a Eurocentric worldview. Be-
cause why, when I think of the word “medieval,” instead of thinking of my home country, my continent, am I immediately thinking about things that were happening in Europe? That is a product of Eurocentric movies, TV, educa- tion in school; any time “medieval” is brought up, it’s rarely in conjunction with what was happening anywhere else in the world besides Europe. And I wanted to challenge that. That’s when I developed this theory called “speculative reclamation.” I wanted to have something to call this process, this reclamation of narratives that are speculative. I can’t say for certain — and since I made it up, it’s likely not for certain — but someone from England went to the Sahara, heard about the Bandit Queen, and went back to England and whitewashed the story and then created Robin Hood. Who’s to say that didn’t happen? Because there was so much destruc- tion of culture and so much appropriation of culture that happens even now. You can add it to the way that Black progress, Black stories are consumed, repackaged, co-opted. That’s where the speculative part came up, where I can’t say that’s what happened but doesn’t it seem like something that would’ve happened?
What have you been working on during the pandemic?
I was doing a lot of these workshops in school, and then when COVID hit, it shifted into the virtual realm. That also overlapped with my time getting really pressed; I was building more, there was more demand for my work, and I found that I didn’t have much time to even do the workshops virtually. It was my wife’s idea to create these tutorial videos, so the work that I was doing for young people could still exist and be global, because it’s not tied to the actual live experience of talking to me. I’d still be do- ing the things I need to do in the studio while people are learning and having fun building their descendant in the distant future with an Afrofuturistic flair. A lot of these legacies that we build in the vision kits — they are of brown and lighter brown faces, just because I wanted to fill that gap, because we just don’t have the learning materials. It’s also a corporate thing, too; I’ve done the workshops with university students, corporate groups, teachers’ groups, educators. It’s not directly marketed for children, it’s for anybody who has an interest in Afrofuturism and wants to also have this burst of creativity, fun, and play.
“The Black women in particular that were around me were instrumental in my own development and Black consciousness, who I am
and understanding where I am in this world.”
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