Holding Space for Beauty and Blackness

The triptych on the far wall features three pieces, entitled Acknowledging the past, A confrontation of the present, and Imagining the future. Looking more closely at the triptych by Isabel Okoro, I realize the way Black people are holding each other – not intimately with fingers interlaced, but by the wrist, as if both, ornamental as a bracelet and gripping like a cuff. I ask curator, Liz Ikiriko, about this and she explains that Okoro’s intention is to “reflect a sense of care; a certain sense of intimacy but that there is struggle within that. That utopia is still messy.” I understand immediately and feel the responsibility of community. My gaze is pulled into focus, realizing the apples atop the Black heads as both targets and symbols of hospitality in institutions of Western education. The Black power presence that stands sturdily behind the seated “students” reminds me of my own thesis work as an undergrad, where I challenge the teaching that “privilege is an invisible backpack¹White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack. MacIntosh, Peggy. 2003. Peace and Freedom Magazine.” and instead position it as an unvisible weapon²Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Gordon, Avery. 1996. University of Minnesota Press.. As Avery Gordon explains about the ever-presence of Black people, so present that there must be a mechanism to explain how we – and all of our contributions – are somehow overlooked: “hyper- visibility is a persistent alibi for the mechanisms that render one unvisible.”

It is always there, and so becomes a sonder, unable to be fully seen. As I look to the multiple images presented by Isabel Okoro, I focus on the dark skinned figure holding a defiant “Black power” fist in several of the frames. Because of their repeating portrayal, it would be easy to skip past their significance to focus on what new information this next image is portraying. But I know better. They are always there to render permanent that they have always been here and will be present in the next image as well; a haunting, a promise, and a comfort.

I begin to think about questions that occupy me as an abolitionist today, including if Black people can ever have a relationship to Nature and Land that is truly free. Questions about food sovereignty on Indigenous land, ecocide, and the post-humanist dreams of technocrats propel me into thoughts about our futurity. I realize that Okoro’s photographs are taken in Scarborough and Lagos. They amplify her similar occupation with how Black people might materially re-connect to the lands that nurture us. Liz offers her understanding of the term “landscape” being “a colonial construct,” when thinking about Black people being in Nature as a:

“continual impossible possibility to extract ourselves from a form of capitalist patriarchal system that has been dominating our lives for so long, and that the practice, the act of continually proposing what it looks like for us to embody natural spaces and for these propositions to continue to ask ‘can we be natural,’ ‘can you see us as natural, ‘can we see ourselves as natural,’ ‘can we connect to these places,’ and I know that that’s something that’s important to Isabel and it’s important to me in terms of thinking about the fact that there are no places that I think of as being uninhabitable or disconnected from Black people.”

I think of my own phenomenological practice, the art I create from my experiences in urban spaces, and fall back in love with McKittrick’s edict that “As a way to emphasize that the lesson is not to make and therefore stabilize space, but instead to continually theorize place as relation, and recognize that the work of theorizing is in itself how Black geographies are lived and expressed. This is for me what Black cities make possible: urban worlds unhinged from the coloniality of place, and comprised of secrets, and narratives, and stories, and songs that are sites of learning.”³"Dr. Katherine McKittrick’s: Living Just Enough for the City/ Volume VI/ Black Methodology." 2019.

The way Isabel double and triple exposes her photographs, confronting her audience with the presence of diaspora, and showing Black people in nature grounds the question, is freedom ever simple, to which Liz coolly replies “Yeah, I don’t think it’s easy, but I think it’s simple.”