Phantom Soldiers
The Girl-Child, the pigeon, the man with the camera
“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” (Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study)
These works are part of an ongoing attempt at metabolising the symbiotic relationship between love and violence in the colonial family unit. Recognising the family as an essential building block of the nation-state, my recent work stays with the trouble of the ways in which love and relation are produced in the imperial imagination. Using stills from family footage produced from C.1950-83 when my paternal grandfather was stationed with the British military intelligence in Libya, Malta and Cyprus, Phantom Soldiers is saturated by layers of relation between the historical, social and personal.
Using Anna Tsing’s idea that within capitalism “patches of livelihood [...] come into being as assemblages,” I am working with assemblage not only as a material register, but a mode of survival and way of seeing and relating. These “open ended gatherings” with “layered, inconsistent and jumbled ontologies,” hold the potential to create fractures within the logic of capital where new ways of being might take root. This assemblage draws together several present and spectral figures: the semi-detached house; the girl-child; the pigeon; the soldier; the man with the camera; and the buddleia in a web of relations, hauntings, ways of seeing, contradictions, fractures and (hopefully) glints of futures.
In reckoning with what art and poesis might mean during times of extreme colonial violence and repression of political resistance within the metropole, I still believe in its vitality as part of a political and social metabolism. Outside of the material culture of protest (e.g. posters, flyers) and direct protest art, I think that continuing speculative, imaginative and open-ended practices that do not follow lines of common sense are important in resisting dogmatism, rigidity, and purity: the signs of a shut down political imagination and recourse to hierarchy and compliance. By engaging in spaces of thought and practice outside of sense-making structures, our capacities for plasticity, paradox, and change can be fed, giving us tools to work around what has been made to seem impossible.
Thank you to Shirley’s Removals (Magali & Wendy) for the cardboard boxes and also my job, Lara for letting my use your Adobe, Fishtank for a year of free studio space and the space for this show, APIG for making life a bit more livable, Gianluca for holding me in it all.
References
(reading that significantly contributed to my thinking around this show)
Larne Abse Gogarty, What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy. Sternberg Press, 2023.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’. October 16 (1981): 39.
Joshua Comaroff, and Ker-Shing Ong, Horror in Architecture. The reanimated edition, New edition. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.
Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World. Random House, 2020.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. Theory in Forms. Duke University Press, 2019.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. MIT Press, 2023.
Michelle Murphy, ‘Against Population, Towards Alterlife’. In Making Kin Not Population. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.
M. E. O’Brien, Eman Abdelhadi, and Josh MacPhee. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. Common Notions, 2022.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.