If someone was to approach me and to ask me what is my work about I would say
that I'm a poet, that I'm interested in poetry
and in my work it's very much a sort of poetic quest for a language to express
experiences which are part of the everyday experience of people like
myself
Dance, theater, music, sculpture, painting, all of these different modes of
art-making are encapsulated into my practice which is why I chose film as a medium
for making my work
One of the things which I've been involved in at the studio is working on
my archive and that entails us going back to early works and trying to think
about way of reconnecting them to the present
'Looking For Langston' is a poetic documentary
and meditation on a poet of the High
Renaissance called Langston Hughes. He was one of the most important poets
writing at that particular time last. "Langston Hughes wrote that the ordinary Negro
hadn't heard of the Renaissance and if they had it hadn't raised their wages"
The work was really in conversation with a lot of the excitement around black
independent film and queer cinema. It was very much an artistic statement around
black gay desire.
And to transgress the way one was being viewed and seen
A work that is nearly 30 years old comes kind of into its time in this new time
where we're really gone back to revisiting questions around Black Lives
Matter, around the notion of black queer visibility. We can say that some of these
things have become both mainstreamed and at the same time there's a lot of
antagonism
it is very timely to make a work like 'Looking For Langston' become visible to
a new generation
One of the themes of which people tend to look at my work is questions around
Black identity and diaspora. But behind the love of my work is really an underlying
theme which is the theme of capital and labor and after the crash in 2008 I was
very interested in making a work that would somehow explore how that came
about.
"Pouring all over you and people calling you greedy."
"What's wrong with greed?"
"Are there angels that are going to run society without
greed? Sadly not but we've got to keep the wheels turning."
Capital itself is
quite hard to film, it's quite hard to depict so one can only really depict it
by its effects
"And he sent me to Dubai and it's the beginning of my story"
I'm someone who's very interested in global culture and that begins really my
own biography, the fact my parents come from the West Indies from Saint Lucia and
I've always been involved in what I see as a global conversation in my work
One of the things for me in terms of incorporating years of archive is how to
articulate it, how to make it signify in a different way from his original
intentionality
'Ten Thousand Waves' looks at the more conveyed tragedy which occurred in 2004 when over
23 Chinese cockle shell pickers died while trying to eke out a living in the
Lancashire coast and I was moved by this event. I wanted to make a work that would
bring attention to this tragedy that occurred
We see one lone survivor and it's of course surveillance infrared camera
I was really trying to look at this question of migration, a question that
would literally rip Britain apart of recent years we've witnessed
It's this relationship between the political and the poetic which I'm trying to
bring out
One of the reasons why I'm very interested in the archive and its
articulation is really about trying to get to grips with the idea of memory
That memory is something which is not part of the Black vernacular. It's not
recognised in the general culture.
Thinking about questions of, say for example, black
gay desire, it's something that doesn't exist in the archive exempt through songs or maybe poems
Utilising archive for me is very much about trying to look at the ways in
which one can think about the present by looking at the past and it enables you
to signify a future direction around debates around aesthetics or questions
of black identity which continually haunt the present