Colour Circle

How do we best express our desire for the abolition of social structures that keep us

locked in positions of separation? We may, of course, not feel locked inside structure, we may not be aware of one, so we may be asking ourselves what need is there, and what desire, to change what structure? So you can see from this that I am one of those that does see a need for change, and the structure I am talking about is that system that makes up the colour line. What colour line? The one expressed by African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and so many after him, the structure that brought about the civil rights movement, black feminism, and so many other conscious actions for change. So this is another contribution to this debate: the project, process and politics of the colour circle – which comprises the acknowledgement and inclusion of blackness into our wholeness, instead of dividing us into black and white, as if blackness and its knowledge only matters to some of us. And if it isn’t broken down into, and if it remains in place the way it had once been constructed, what then. Then how move?

I’ve been experimenting with wild wool – sheep wool found in fields, and placing it elsewhere, as an act of revealing things. Objects we don’t notice, which could cause a revolution of the mind if we do: the idea that there is an aesthetic which we can assemble out of the ordinary, and which entirely different pathways to the structures that we are made to believe in: those of the commercial and the pre-fabricated. Wool as a starting point to an intervention – and I continued from there.

Back in 2008 0r 2009, I made this illustration to show how we are all connected because we all come out of Africa, if not now then some time ago, and if not then, then in the very beginning – once again it’s about including Africa into our wholeness (just as it is about including blackness into our wholeness – colours within us and outside!

Art is, I think, the widest independent space where change is and becomes most likely to happen (at least it has that potential, even though it’s not always explored), and so I might often just be posting some of my photos here – though my poetry and performance may address the issue much more directly. And yes, I am planning on publishing my poems and performances here as well, but it all depends also on what I can achieve on this blog. u.t.