FACT Journal #1 - Radical Ancestry (2021-2023)

RADICAL ANCESTRY Journal #1

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Unravelling Identity and Belonging

Nicola Triscott

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Future Ages Will Wonder Curatorial Statement

Annie Jael Kwan

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Re(membering) Liverpool’s Deported Chinese Seamen

Lucienne Loh

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Generational Loss: Let the Song Hold Us

Maitreyi Maheshwari

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My Garden, My Sanctuary Curatorial Essay

Carrie Chan

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Artists Exploring Ancestry

Nicola Triscott

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Reflections on Making Art Spaces Where Adult Rules Don’t Apply

Alharith Ahmed, Corey Anderson and Tia HumeJennings (the Bandidos), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (artist), Rachel Mason, Neil Winterburn, Ashleigh Sands and Lucía Arias (FACT)

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Visitors’ Experiences at FACT

Delphie Levy Jones

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Journal #1 RADICAL ANCESTRY

RADICAL Introduction: Unravelling Identity ANCESTRY and Belonging

Nicola Triscott

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FACT’s Radical Ancestry inquiry and artistic programme, spanning from 2021 to 2023, has been a wide-ranging collective cultural exploration into how we construct our personal identities and sense of belonging through our understanding of ancestry and the things we inherit and pass on.

We invited artists and curators to participate through research-based residencies, commissions and participatory projects, culminating in a rich series of artworks, exhibitions, events and various public-facing activities. The programme emphasised creating inclusive platforms and amplifying voices from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, and aimed to evoke thoughtful and affective responses from its audiences.

This journal is an opportunity to bring together texts contributed by curators, artists, scholars and participants who have been integral to FACT’s Radical Ancestry programme. By doing this, we aim to contribute to the ongoing dialogue around the role of art in deciphering the complex nature of belonging, as well as the potential of artistic and technological interventions to shape our perceptions of ourselves and our connections to our cultural heritages, biological identities and shared human experiences.

Starting with a brief explanation of ‘cultural inquiry’ as a curatorial strategy, this introductory essay presents the contributed texts and discusses the programme’s artistic outcomes from two primary perspectives: first, the notion of ‘travelling through layers’, drawing inspiration from an Inuit concept that encapsulates a shamanic, non-linear approach to time and space, and second, the pivotal role played by science and technology – for good and ill – in shaping our ideas of who we are, where we come from and where we belong. We will conclude with some reflections on our learning from this programme.

‘CULTURAL INQUIRY’ AS PROGRAMMING STRATEGY AT FACT Over the past several decades, the nature and requirements of the curatorial role within arts organisations have undergone significant changes. The term ‘curator’ traces its origins to the Latin verb curare, meaning ‘to care for’. Initially, it referred to the caretaking of objects in a collection.

In the 20th century, curators evolved into creators of meaning, weaving narratives by carefully selecting and displaying artworks together, often accompanied by wall texts and catalogues. Today, curatorial strategy extends beyond the display of art to encompass caring for artists and their work, elucidating why artists create what they do in today’s world, and building connections, exchanges and participation between art and audiences.

Curatorial practice can also be viewed as a knowledge-building endeavour, since art institutions wield considerable influence over the formation and development of cultural discussions and conversations. Embracing cultural inquiry as a curatorial strategy involves bringing artists, researchers, participants and audiences together, and orchestrating meaningful interactions and dialogues to explore pressing issues, exchange ideas and co-create knowledge. This approach, originally inspired by John Heron and Peter Reason’s concept of ‘cooperative inquiry’ (Heron, 1996), encompasses a network of connected activities, including research, commissions, exhibitions, discursive events, participatory projects and reflective publications.

As a prominent arts institution in Liverpool, FACT plays a pivotal role in shaping and showcasing understandings of identity, encouraging individuals to explore their heritage and personal backgrounds. The Covid pandemic shifted our perceptions of the communities to which we belong,

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isolating many and highlighting societal inequalities.1 It underscored the role of online technology in our social connections. Emerging from this period, we felt that delving into our understanding of ancestry and reflecting on how we construct our sense of belonging were timely themes around which we centre our artistic programme. The Radical Ancestry programme has fostered a diverse exchange of ideas, imaginaries and visions. These encompass powerful critiques of dominant historical narratives and the reductionist use of science, poetic evocations of shared memory, ritual and collective experience, and the use of ancestry and storytelling as tools to think about our hybrid identities and to construct alternative worlds.

THE TEXTS IN THIS JOURNAL Annie Jael Kwan was invited to curate the first exhibition in FACT’s Radical Ancestry programme.

Future Ages Will Wonder (October 2021–February 2022) was a large-scale group exhibition that scrutinised humans’ tendency to present scientific and technological advancements as symbols of progress and power. The exhibition focused on historical perspectives, ancestral memories, diaspora histories and speculative science fiction, encouraging viewers to consider their interwoven histories and repositioning science and technology as tools by which we can reimagine the past and speculate about the future. Kwan’s curatorial statement in this journal is accompanied by images and explanatory captions of artworks by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Yarli Allison, Breakwater (Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe), Boedi Widjaja, Ai Hasegawa, Miku Aoki and Trisha Baga.

Dr Lucienne Loh discusses Yarli Allison’s installation In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool (於梨 花埠遇上), a commissioned work in Future Ages Will Wonder. Through an intertwining of personal narratives and historical injustices, Allison’s work reconstructs the lost Chinatown in Liverpool and represents the experiences of Chinese sailors who immigrated to Liverpool and their families, using oral histories, photographs, film recreations and miniature dioramas. This approach, Loh notes, has the effect of personalising each Chinese seaman who ‘felt he had turned away from his country and cultural identity’.

Maitreyi Maheshwari writes about the exhibition Let the Song Hold Us (March–June 2022), which considered the shaping of cultural belonging through music, dance and collective actions. Against the background of the lingering Covid pandemic, themes of loss, trauma and attachment ran through the exhibition. Maheshwari discusses the nature and power of collective ritual and artistic expression in navigating grief and building intergenerational understanding through the metaphor of water and fluidity as movement towards a new state of acceptance.

The exhibition My Garden, My Sanctuary (July–October 2022), discussed by its curator Carrie Chan, challenged colonial and patriarchal clichés surrounding East Asian symbols and culture.

Yaloo’s underwater seaweed garden installation reimagined how Korean people and their history are represented, while Sian Fan’s interactive digital installation, set in an anime fantasy video game environment, represented the artist’s conflicted hybrid self-identity as part of the East Asian diaspora. Chan writes that the exhibition experimented with ways for audiences to understand the narratives behind the artworks, including performance, food experiences, music, podcasts and

1 2020 was also notable for the global Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in the USA, as well as the unequal impact of Covid-19 on people from minority ethnic backgrounds in the UK, Europe, Australia and North America

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live discussions on Twitch, and presented digital technology as a means to reclaim a feeling of individuality through one’s ancestral legacy.

Within the programme, FACT commissioned a long-term installation by Chila Kumari Singh Burman which hosted outcomes from eight artists’ residencies. I discuss the artistic outputs from these residencies, highlighting common themes between the works. The artists employed research processes and digital technologies to delve into themes of belonging and selfhood, uncover hidden histories, critique reductive notions of biological identity, and conjure new rituals and forms of spiritual activism. Several artworks incorporate spiritual perspectives, emphasising the importance the artists placed on reconnecting with one’s roots and ancestral knowledge to envisage other possible worlds.

The final phase of the programme was the dual exhibition When Our Worlds Meet by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and When the moon dreamed of the ocean by Josèfa Ntjam (2 December 2022–9 April 2023). When Our Worlds Meet is a collaborative online and physical artwork by artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and a group of young people from Liverpool calling themselves the Bandidos. Their video roleplay game offers a fantastical experience for players and visitors to journey through alternative digital realities. In a collaborative text with the artist and FACT’s Learning team, the Bandidos present some of their ideas and stories, which include a timetravelling portal, researching their ancestors’ experiences, and creating a magical city filled with healing practices.

Finally, Delphie Levy Jones considers the experiences of audiences attending FACT’s exhibitions.

Jones discusses how visitors can be captivated by complex artworks, even without necessarily fully grasping their deeper meaning. She notes that visitors respond to art in highly individual ways, through both social and deeply personal experiences, and concludes that digital art can be perceived as more accessible than traditional galleries.

TRAVELLING THROUGH LAYERS The Inuktitut term for ‘internet’, ikiaqqivik, translates to ‘travelling through layers’, a concept rooted in Inuit tradition whereby a shaman or medicine person traverses time and space to seek answers to spiritual and material inquiries (Soukup, 2006). This idea of journeying across time and space to reclaim, liberate and reimagine the past and construct alternative futures forms the bedrock of Indigenous futurism, Afrofuturism, and similar cultural movements.

In Radical Ancestry, artists, many with migrant ancestries, seamlessly interweave various temporal and spatial dimensions, engaging with historical eras, contemporary contexts and potential futures. As the programme has moved between physical and virtual realms, it has facilitated the intermingling of cultures, languages and people from diverse backgrounds, enabling artists to illustrate the multiplicity and fluidity of identities emerging from the multidirectional migratory processes that shape our society today.

Approaching ‘radical ancestries’ through ancestral and historical perspectives, several artists produced poignantly intimate works that touch on the transmission of memories or trauma across generations. This approach is central to the exhibition Let the Song Hold Us. In Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s video installation As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night, soprano Nour Darwish sings a melding of two songs from Palestinian and European musical traditions, 6

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embodying a Palestinian mother’s grief for her daughter. The piece considers the repercussions of trauma on a personal, collective and national level, with references to blood emphasising how shock and pain cascade through generations, potentially manifesting biologically as well as through shared history. Concurrently, Korakrit Arunanondchai’s film Songs for Living is the artist’s response to the loss of his grandfather, filmed during the Covid pandemic. In Rae-Yen Song’s installation ≈≈aaaaaahmaaaaaa≈≈ a group of ceramic other-worldly figures sigh a gentle lament around a display of objects inspired by memories of the artist’s maternal grandmother.

Continuing this time-travelling approach beyond the familial, in Future Ages Will Wonder artist duo Breakwater (Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe) meticulously crafted Fermented Flower, an installation centred on a woven screen referencing the history of Chinese indentured labour through the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster2 and connecting it to the ongoing exploitation of migrant workers. Lucy Hutchinson’s residency and her resulting performance piece, Into the Shade, draw from the artist’s historical research into the Lancashire witches, conjuring their memory back to life to shed light on how their tragic history still haunts us today through contemporary constructions of gender, class and regionalism.

Shifting their focus towards imagined futures and parallel worlds, several artists and participants used gaming technologies and social media networks to explore more fluid expressions of selfhood, employing concepts of ancestry and spiritual wisdom to create fantastical worlds and avatar beings. Common themes in these worlds include reconnecting with more-than-human realms3 and the transformative potential of ritual and ancient beliefs in fostering collective healing.

Through these approaches, the artists circumvent and challenge their experiences of displacement and the broader forces that work to confine and restrict identity. Instead, they celebrate mutable and multifaceted identities, drawing on dreamed ancestries to co-create visions of emancipatory futures through immersive participatory works.

With the tools of art and technology, the artists in Radical Ancestry embarked on journeys through time, geography, language and history, revealing hidden stories of diaspora and marginalised communities while emphasising the importance of intergenerational memories and traditions.

The persistent theme of temporal and spatial entanglement opens up different perspectives to conventional linear narratives of knowledge, breathing life into overlooked events and histories, all the while envisioning more equitable, inclusive worlds of existence. Just as Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism challenge traditional norms and redefined futures, these artworks redefine the past and future, offering new narratives and possibilities that challenge the status quo.

THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY The exploration of the role of science and technology in shaping our understanding of ancestry and identity has been a recurring theme throughout this inquiry. Langdon Winner (1986) posited that

2 On the evening of 5 February 2004, at least twenty-one Chinese illegal immigrants were drowned by an incoming tide at Morecambe Bay in northwest England while harvesting cockles. Fifteen labourers from the same group managed to return safely to shore. During the investigation and trial, it emerged that the labourers were inexperienced at cockle harvesting, spoke little or no English, and were unfamiliar with the area.

3 The term ‘more than human’ refers to a perspective that acknowledges and values the way that humans connect with the rest of the natural world, including animals, plants, ecosystems and even non-living elements. This concept emphasises that humans are not separate from nature, but an integral part of it.

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technology wields both liberating and repressive influences on society, altering power dynamics and citizenship experiences. This duality of science and technology finds expression in many of the artworks and is also expressly explored in the exhibition Future Ages Will Wonder.

Digital technologies and social media serve as a double-edged sword. They offer opportunities for individuals to experiment with complex and changing representations of the self and different ways of relating to others. However, these same platforms can also perpetuate stereotypes and biases. As we have noted, the virtual realms facilitated by digital technology can provide ways for artists from migrant and diaspora backgrounds to navigate their sense of belonging and claim their own creative space with several artists harnessing video game technologies to explore alternative realities and viewpoints. McKenzie Wark (2007) coined the term ‘gamespace’ to describe the unique temporal and spatial dimensions offered by video games, which are distinct from the physical world. Within this gamespace, players can traverse diverse virtual landscapes, discovering novel modes of existence and experimenting with different roles. In the programme, examples include GLOR1A’s Black futurist game, SWARM, in which players construct a new civilisation, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and the Bandidos’ game world When Our Worlds Meet, which transforms Liverpool into four realms populated by dragons, queer feminists, communists and time-travelling dancers, reshaping the frameworks that govern our lives.

Exploring the fluidity of digital personas can enhance our comprehension of displacement, belonging and disconnection, both in our own experiences and those of others. Sian Fan’s artworks in My Garden, My Sanctuary delve into the tension between romanticised and sexualised portrayals of Asian women in film and video games, as the artist seeks authenticity beyond these stereotypes. In Lotus Root, Fan adopts an anime video game format to draw attention to and disrupt these clichéd depictions, with hyper-real avatars glitching and fragmenting in a delicate dance of uncertainty. Digital technologies and social media can also facilitate the formation of supportive virtual communities, fostering acceptance and inclusion among individuals with shared interests or experiences. Ebun Sodipo’s Following the Gourd, an interactive star map and archive representing an imaginary asteroid’s celestial sphere, was developed collaboratively with young LGBTQ+ individuals online. The star map’s constellations contain the stories of participants, connecting them and amplifying their voices.

Another central theme has been the role of genetic technologies and biometrics in shaping our understanding of race, ancestry and biology, both positively and negatively. Boedi Widjaja, responding to his family’s migratory history and his own identity, created a visual writing system using his genetic code, blending it poetically with DNA from various sources, ancient texts and almanacs. In A Tree Rings, A Tree Sings (树龄°述铃), Widjaja explores the concept of epigenetics, pondering whether we can inherit ancestral memories’ images and sounds. On a different note, Ai Hasegawa’s design work (Im)possible Baby delves into the possibilities of emerging biotechnologies, speculating on same-sex couples conceiving genetically related children.

Taking a critical stance, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s film Dust to Data scrutinises how science, including anthropology, archaeology and genetics, has historically been used to legitimise prejudice. They highlight the enduring impact of historical racial bias on our understanding of human genetic diversity and the perpetuation of racial categorisations in genetics. Meanwhile, artist in residence Andrius Arutiunian’s interactive installation The Irresistible Powers of Silent Talking dissects the flawed science behind AI-enabled biometric surveillance software iBorderCtrl, suggesting that biases against certain migrant groups motivated its creation.

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Image: Ebun Sodipo, Following the Gourd (2022): activation performance at the exhibition opening for Let The Song Hold Us at FACT Liverpool.

Photo by Drew Forsyth.

Image: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, As If No Misfortune Had Occurred In The Night (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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Radical Ancestry has provided diverse perspectives on how technology and science influence our individual and communal senses of self and inheritance. Digital technology can create space for new forms of self-expression, storytelling and community building, nurturing bonds and a sense of belonging. However, it can also reinforce stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes, perpetuating harmful narratives about certain groups. Similarly, the vast potential of science to unveil human diversity and interconnectedness is significantly compromised by its historical entanglement with prejudice.

CONCLUSION - WHAT WE LEARNED Radical Ancestry has developed methodologies that enable people to express themselves creatively and to participate collectively in an inquiry around a shared matter of concern: how our understandings of ancestry and inheritance contribute to the development of our personal identities and our sense of belonging. Usually, we think of inquiry and research as things done by people in universities and research institutes. But what if the topic to be looked into is people’s own understanding of their relationship to the world? Researchers may observe people or ask them questions, but this approach doesn’t effectively engage with the genuine concerns and experiences of those involved.

As well as helping to transform our practices, the Radical Ancestry inquiry has successfully tapped into the knowledge, experience and interests of participants and contributed to revising our understanding of the world.

Through the Radical Ancestry programme, we have treated artists, curators, audiences and participants as active agents in the development of ideas. We have brought curators into the organisation on long-term residencies to get an understanding of the context of our city, region and audiences to inform their curatorial approaches to creating a new exhibition. We have cemented a process of longer-form working with artists through residencies, which has brought the artist’s perspective into the heart of the organisation, influencing how FACT works from within and helping to understand what a model of cultural inquiry looks like. We have developed ways to involve young people as experts in areas that affect them directly, such as the city they live in and the social media they inhabit. When we presented the work that they developed in partnership with artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley in our main gallery, the young people took ownership of the work, talking to the audiences themselves.

FACT is interested in ways of giving a voice to people who are not usually heard, those who have been marginalised or rendered invisible, through creating and sharing stories using the tools of art and technology. We want to tease out histories omitted from official records, platform unnoticed experiences, and nurture new ways of looking at the world and imaginaries of how things could change.

Traditional repositories of history and knowledge, as well as modern technologies such as AI and genetic testing, possess the potential to perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce biases. This can lead to a narrowing and distortion of the rich complexities inherent in our identities, exacerbating social divisions and deepening inequity and alienation. In response, the artists and curators in Radical Ancestry have taken steps to rebalance these perspectives. Through the adoption of non-linear and inclusive storytelling methods, they have offered a fresh lens through which to explore and

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Image: Sian Fan, still from Lotus Root (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

Image: Tessa Norton, still from The Trouble with Dark Circles (A Mixtape) (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

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illuminate the intricate narratives, diverse cultures and hidden histories interwoven through our varied ancestries.

Using digital technologies, they have crafted alternative archives and dreamed worlds that transcend the confines of time and space, blending reality with fantasy to connect people in novel ways. Through critical reflections on history, science and the lingering legacies of colonialism, they have shown the transformative potential of artistic practices to disrupt established norms and narratives, crafting more nuanced visions of who we are and how we belong.

In an era marked by diminishing tolerance for difference, particularly in the context of Europe’s growing anxieties surrounding immigration from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, individuals who manage to overcome the barriers of ‘Fortress Europe’ often confront stereotypes and reductive labels based on their political status. In this landscape, the exhibitions and artworks of Radical Ancestry, coupled with the public’s reactions to them, underscore the profound value of artistic agency in challenging and reshaping the dominant stereotypes that serve particular political purposes. These creative works demonstrate how art can help us to comprehend and embrace the complexities of human identity and experience. With stories and visions that flow between dimensions of past, present and future, they actively intervene in the contemporary cultural and political terrain to offer us glimpses of a more accepting, hope-filled future.

REFERENCES Heron, John (1996). Co-operative Inquiry: research into the human condition. Sage.

Soukup, Katharina (2006) ‘Travelling Through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies.’

Canadian Journal of Communication 31(1), 239–246. doi:10.22230/cjc.2006v31n1a1769 Wark, McKenzie (2007) Gamer Theory. Harvard University Press.

Winner, Langdon (1986) The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. University of Chicago Press.

NICOLA TRISCOTT BIOGRAPHY Dr Nicola Triscott is a curator, researcher and writer, known for her expertise in the intersections between art, science, technology and society. Since 2019, she has served as Director/CEO of FACT Liverpool. Previously, she was the founding Director of Arts Catalyst (1994–2019). Over 25 years, she built Arts Catalyst into an international arts and research organisation, commissioning more than 170 artists’ projects and curating or co-curating numerous exhibitions. Nicola was Principal Research Fellow in Art/Science at the University of Westminster (2017–19). She lectures and publishes on several art and science specialisms.

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RADICAL Future Ages Will Wonder ANCESTRY Curatorial Statement

Annie Jael Kwan

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‘Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.’

Since Pericles, a Greek statesman and war hero of golden-age Athens (circa 449 to 431 BC) made this bold declaration, the long view of history has revealed many twists and turns – not least that the mighty Athenian empire lost the Peloponnesian War with Sparta after a plague wiped out almost two-thirds of its population. To ‘wonder’ at each milestone and turning point in our stories of progress and development is thus to be alert to ever-changing vagaries of fortune – to feel curiosity, astonishment, even admiration, but also doubt. Two millennia after Pericles lived, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an esteemed feminist judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, affirmed that ‘Dissents speak to a future age. [...] That’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow’ (Bader, 2002).

Through this multi-perspectival lens of ‘wonder’, we may re-examine the valorising narratives of scientific achievement and technological advances that have been closely intertwined with modern discovery and expansion, but also with the domination of people, lands and resources.

Advances in genetic research and engineering, such as gene editing and CRISPR1, have opened up new vistas of imagination and industry, with poetic and philosophical speculations about origins and possibilities, but they have also raised corresponding ethical issues of practice linked to the centralisation of biodata and surveillance.

The speck, the droplet, the pixel. The granular contains an intimate potency for regeneration and contagion with planetary impact: we saw how laboratory spillages and ecological imbalances resulted in the Covid-19 pandemic. We saw its tragic impact on human life, on sociopolitical structures, healthcare systems, local communities and our use of the internet.

To wonder is thus to dig into the bedrock of institutionalised and common knowledge, including the myths of science, profit and progress, and interrogate the normalised structures of violence and inequality. To wonder is to arise from the scorched earth and spark anew the wayfinding of lost ancestral histories, the nurturing of alternative kinship networks, and the reimagining of stories we tell ourselves, about our past, present and future selves.

Featuring nine artists from the UK and around the world, working across multiple disciplines and media – textiles, embroidery, found and sculpted objects, algorithms, creative design, print, photography, moving images, augmented reality and installation – the exhibition presents a showcase of diverse thoughtful and provocative artistic ‘wonders’.

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CRISPR is a technology that can be used to edit genes.

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Ai Hasegawa’s speculative design project (Im)possible Baby, Case 01: Asako & Moriga envisions the use of emerging biotechnologies to enable same-sex couples to have genetically related children, stimulating discussions about the social, cultural and ethical possibilities of alternative kinship and communal care.

Ai Hasegawa, (Im)possible Baby, Case 01, Asako, Moriga (2015), Shared Baby (2011, 2019). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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Yarli Allison’s installation In 1875 We Met At the Docks of Liverpool 於梨花埠遇上 reconstructs the lost Chinatown in Liverpool and explores the experiences of Chinese sailors and their families, using oral history, interviews and digital mapping.

Yarli Allison, In 1875 We Met At the Docks of Liverpool 於梨花埠遇上 (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Trisha Baga’s 3D film 1620 transports an experimental theatre troupe, DNA USA, back to the beginning of colonial American history – the landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620 – to perform gene therapy on the country, repairing flaws in the ‘narrative DNA’ in the rock.

Trisha Baga, 1620 (2020). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Boedi Widjaja’s body of work draws on an invented visual writing system that interweaves his genetic code with ancient texts to question whether ancestral memories can be inherited through epigenetics.

Boedi Widjaja, A Tree+++ 记因・基亿 (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Boedi Widjaja, Book of genealogy (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Artist duo Breakwater’s tapestry and sound installation Fermented Flower confronts the racist history of botany, exploring plant classification as a source of wealth in trading and capitalism. An intricately woven screen references the history of Chinese indentured labour, connecting it to the ongoing exploitation of migrant workers.

Breakwater, Fermented Flower (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s film Dust to Data prompts viewers to question the construction of civilisation and its racist origin stories.

Exposing the archaic mathematical tactics used to justify prejudices, the film challenges established narratives in archaeology, prompting viewers to notice and critically question hidden biases within scientific knowledge.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Dust to Data (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Miku Aoki’s installation Zoe comprises the artist’s handmade stuffed mutant specimens and embroidered hangings. It reflects on the work of John Hunter, a surgeon and pioneer of artificial insemination, himself represented in textile form examining his specimens. The juxtaposition of traditional domestic craft with scientific progress invites audiences to reconsider the power dynamics associated with scientific advancements.

Miku Aoki, Zoe (2019–2020). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

REFERENCE Ginsburg, Ruth Bader (2002). NPR (National Public Radio), 2 May, 2002 ANNIE JAEL KWAN BIOGRAPHY Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher. Her practice intersects contemporary art, cultural and pedagogical activism with an interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative knowledge, collective practice, solidarity and spirituality. She is the Director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative that launched the Southeast Asia Performance Collection at the Live Art Development Agency in 2017, and she leads Asia-Art-Activism (AAA), an interdisciplinary, intergenerational research network. She is the founding council member of the Asia Forum for the contemporary art of Global Asias. She was recently appointed as the Curator of the Brent Biennial 2025.

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RADICAL Re(membering) Liverpool’s Deported ANCESTRY Chinese Seamen

Lucienne Loh

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In the summer of 2021, I collaborated with Yarli Allison 林 雅 莉, a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese interdisciplinary art worker based between London and Paris on their project In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool (1875 於梨花埠遇上). The project involved a video installation which featured in FACT’s Future Ages Will Wonder (October 2021 to February 2022), an exhibition that placed alternative historical perspectives and personal stories at its heart in order to question the construction of ‘history’. Challenging ‘official’ narratives, which are often sanctioned by those in control, means questioning the power dynamics as well as the economic means that determine whose stories are told – and, in turn, whose stories are heard.

My research involves community-based oral history projects by Chinese communities across the UK, in a bid to understand the diversity of the Chinese diaspora and its settled communities in the UK, as well as their migration journeys and experiences of life as migrants and descendants of migrants. I am particularly interested in the ways in which these communities have endured racially motivated hostilities, prejudice and racism.

Allison’s project seeks to confront the fraught history of Liverpool’s deported Chinese seamen, which involved their forced expulsion in 1946 to various port cities with links to the wider British empire, including Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. The project used a recording I made of a workshop I held in 2018 for members of the Chinese community in Liverpool, some of whom were descended from Blue Funnel seamen who were deported.

The workshop reflected my interest in the confluence between oral narratives that accounted for a longer history of systemic racism and the intergenerational trauma that can stem from that inherited sense of racist violence. Allison and I discussed in detail how art could potentially (re)address this trauma and seek to rewrite the personal stories of those who disappeared, for their families.1 Following the end of the Second World War, the forcible repatriation of 2,000 Chinese merchant seamen was ‘one of the most nakedly racist incidents ever taken by the British government’, Liverpool MP Kim Johnson has argued (BBC News, 2021). The Chinese sailors had crewed British merchant ships, bringing armaments and food from America. While they were on shore in the UK, many forged relationships with British and Irish women and had children. When deportation orders were served by the Home Office on the Chinese seamen during a series of police swoops on the Liverpool dock area in 1946, fathers, husbands and partners effectively ‘disappeared’, leaving families distraught and traumatised, desperately struggling to understand and reconstruct what had happened. Only in July 2022 did a Home Office report confirm that Chinese seamen in Liverpool had been specifically targeted and coerced into leaving their families (Dragons and Lions, 2022).

Allison’s work endeavours to bring to light the complex intergenerational stories of grief, dislocation and loss that are personal to the families of the repatriated men. But these stories simultaneously serve as wider collective recountings of the trials and tribulations of migrants from different regions of the Sinosphere, and the search for work, community and belonging in a foreign land. Allison’s research unveiled a range of complex socioeconomic factors across Chinese regions in the mid1870s that led to many Chinese men deciding to embark on a risky seafaring life.

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There were two journeys: in the mid-1870s many Chinese seamen travelled to the UK, and after WW2 different Chinese seamen were deported.

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Images: Yarli Allison, In 1875 We Met At the Docks of Liverpool 於梨花埠遇上 (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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In Allison’s film, we can see the trepidation felt by countless Chinese men as one man voices his desire for work on distant shores while he shovels coal aboard a ship that acts as a temporary refuge before his insecure, uncertain future.

The film also painstakingly recreates the interiors of the boarding houses used by the Chinese seamen on shore, many of which were located on Pitt Street in the centre of Liverpool. Allison’s virtual reality images of the Chinese seamen’s domestic lives offer an alternative way of representing their history. The minutiae – rice cookers, cooking utensils, Chinese ingredients, items of clothing – humanise these men, exposing their vulnerability and their isolation from Liverpool’s wider society. In the film, one seaman speaks about his fear of ghosts, in which many traditional Chinese believe: he hopes they will not haunt him for betraying the Chinese empire of the time by going to shovel coal for Western forces. This emotional appeal in Allison’s creative work bleeds into a viewer’s sense of the history of the forced deportations, personalising each Chinese seaman who felt he had turned away from his country and cultural identity. These deeply intimate creative insights into the Chinese seamen provoke our sympathy and a sense of abhorrence towards the British government for its racist actions, which reduced the seamen to nameless, faceless objects.

REFERENCES BBC News (3 June 2021) ‘Apology Call over Chinese Seamen World War Two Deportations.’

Dragons and Lions (2022) ‘Government Report on Repatriation of Chinese Seamen.’

LUCIENNE LOH BIOGRAPHY Dr Lucienne Loh is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She was co-curator of the recent British Library exhibition Chinese and British, and she works closely with the Liverpool Chinese community. Her research involves the cultural history of racism against the Chinese community in the UK, and representations of resistance. She is the author of The Country in Postcolonial Literature (2023).

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Journal #1 RADICAL ANCESTRY

RADICAL Generational Loss: Let the Song Hold Us ANCESTRY

Maitreyi Maheshwari

MAITREYI MAHESHWARI

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FACT’s Radical Ancestry season sought to reconsider questions of belonging. If the first exhibition in this series, Future Ages Will Wonder (curated by Annie Jael Kwan), interrogated the knowledge disciplines that categorise and define our identities, the second exhibition, Let the Song Hold Us, considered the informal, familial and social qualities of our heritage.

Emerging out of the pandemic, the end of the transition period for implementing Brexit protocols, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the continuing aftershocks following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, this exhibition, which had initially been conceived as a celebration of the stories and songs that bring us together, became an elegy for the loss of family, for a pervading awareness of environmental devastation, for generational dissonance, for a sense of estrangement from the nation state or land we might think of as home. It gave voice to a yearning for connection that had long been there, but that was amplified and made more palpable by the enforced isolation of the pandemic.

The exhibition presented six new works by artists. Each considered the irreconcilable rupture between generations living in the diaspora – often as a consequence of empire. Some of the works dealt with the consequences of the division of land and the subjugation of people – the confusion, loss and grief (both intimate and political) that this invoked. Others considered the effect of dislocation on future generations, and how identity and a sense of self continue to be shaped by external forces, conveying both the difficulties of the present moment but also the possibilities for catharsis, healing, connection with others, and joy. Not bound to a specific region or culture, the exhibition (which drew its title from a previous work by Korakrit Arunanondchai) reflected on the universality of music and myths as the threads that bind and hold us.

At the heart of the show were two film installations that played alongside each other about grief, mourning, and how to overcome these to become part of the world again. The loss at the heart of each work was both personal – the unbearable loss of a loved one – and existential – a lost homeland, lost hopes and histories.

In Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night (2022), a mother, played by Palestinian opera singer Nour Darwish, sings of her despair and disbelief at the loss of her daughter. She sings in the haunted, empty interior of a crumbling church, in smoke-filled olive groves and in a burned forest full of tree trunks, suspended and cut off from their roots. The operatic aria crescendos as the mother strips off her futuristic ceremonial dress and submerges herself in a pool. When she emerges, her plain white dress is dyed indigo – a pigment traditionally associated with funeral rituals in Palestine. The intensity of the colour fades over the course of the mourning period, signifying a slow return to society.

The aria combines two musical works from different cultural traditions: Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (a song about the death of children) and the traditional Palestinian song ‘Al Ouf Mash’al’ (a song about the loss of a beloved in battle), both composed around the start of the 20th century. Their confluence in this work speaks – lyrically and musically – to the cultural churn that took place when the Ottoman empire fell following the First World War and Palestine came under the British mandate. Archival footage from this time depicts scenes of everyday life disrupted by the shelling of buildings, military manoeuvres and trench warfare. Personal tragedies became woven into a larger conflict and the cycles of violence and upheaval triggered, as the lyrics of the aria explain, by ‘the cataclysm of a century ago’.

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Image: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, As If No Misfortune Had Occurred In The Night (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, Songs for Living (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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‘My cells are imbibed with the clicks of a gun Each violent instant lodged in my codes’ As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night explores the impact of trauma on one’s epigenetics – the environmental and behavioural conditions that influence the way one’s genes work. When they were developing the work, the artists met with epigeneticists whose research indicated that politically inflicted trauma would have epigenetic impacts that could be observed in future generations. The lyrics draw a connection between the possibilities of the future being ‘shackled by a past’ that is embedded within you, beyond your reach.

The exhibition coincided with the centenary of the ratification of the Balfour Declaration by the League of Nations, the reverberations of which have increased in intensity and violence over time.

While the artists’ works often use elements of science fiction to speculate alternatives for the Palestinian people, this work is perhaps their most historically grounded. The heightened emotions and theatricality of the operatic form in As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night create the sense of a universal grief that is passed on from generation to generation, and what it means to exist within such turbulence, where the repetitions of history make time itself seem to stand still.

As the ‘roaring storms’ come inside, personal loss becomes a metaphor for political limbo and displacement, and the song’s invocation to mourning is the first step to overcoming either.

If Sansour and Lind’s work dwells on the anguish and sense of stasis of being left, by contrast, Songs for Living (2021), Korakrit Arunanondchai’s collaborative work with Alex Gvojic, offers a frenetic visual collage where grief is physically consumed and collectively cleansed and reborn.

The film is a companion piece to Arunanondchai’s film Songs for Dying (2021), which drew a connection between the separation of spirit and body that the artist saw in his dying grandfather and the 2020 pro-democracy protests in Thailand, which signalled a separation between the symbolic, sacred power of the Thai monarch and the body politic. After losing a loved one or after a failed revolution, where the spirit of a person – or people – has separated from their body, how do you come back to a sense of oneness again?

Made while the artist was in Korea, Songs for Dying combines personal documentation and news and social media footage with newly shot narrative scenes that draw on local animist and shamanic practices. The artist believes that ghosts help us to reconnect with life, to process the negative emotions – longing, anger, feeling unfulfilled – we experience. Like mycelia, these ghosts help to decompose – or ‘decreate’ – these things that are left over, allowing them to return to the cycle of life and rebirth.

The overarching themes and symbols in the first film continue in Songs for Living, which was shot, in collaboration with cinematographer Alex Gvojic, largely on the empty streets of New York during the pandemic. This work looks beyond Thailand to consider a more general ghost-like existence.

We see young people daubed in white paint, ghosts in this world, gathering around a fire where conscious and unconscious, immaterial and material, mind and body meet. Fire cleanses as well as consumes. A burning bird becomes a symbol of revolution; a burning house a site for new beginnings.

The film recalls visual tropes from sci-fi, cult and horror films, from the Mockingjay salute of the Hunger Games trilogy (which became a popular sign of resistance during the Thai protests) to the characters drooling black goo (a metaphor for the wretchedness of the blood of the ghost and all 27

Images: Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, stills from Songs for Living (2021). Courtesy of the artists, Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, C L E A R I N G New York/Brussels, Kukje Gallery, South Korea.

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this unprocessed history, or the crude oil of environmental catastrophe). The royal Thai insignia of Garuda – a shape-shifting bird-man depicted in Hindu and Buddhist pantheons as a loyal steed of the god Vishnu, which has come to signify divine approval of a king’s duty and the power of the state – appears transformed into gothic winged couriers, gliding around the nocturnal city on electric unicycles, delivering these undigested remnants, traumas made flesh, to the ghosts in isolation. Like mushrooms, the ghosts consume what is left behind, digest it, and allow other things to connect or grow.

The artist explains: ‘When you think about ancestors and land and rituals around burial, there’s something there that breaks the binary between mind and body. You become a part of everything in both the ritual and the physical sense. You can imagine that things grow out of it [the burial], and you eat it again – you are connected to the ground and to your ancestors in a very direct, biological way.’

The film’s fluid non-narrative visual structure, which follows the motions of falling into and coming out of water, submerging and re-emerging, is overlaid with a text performed by singer-songwriter Zsela, which draws on the writings of Simone Weil, Édouard Glissant and Czesław Miłosz. Although they are from different generations and geographies, all three writers were émigrés whose works examined their political and spiritual relationship to higher powers – the state or God. Their writings are a manifestation of lives lived, embracing the uncertain, the unknowable, seeking symbolic communion and refusing the oppressive circumstances in which they existed. But Songs for Living features, and speaks to, a generation that has grown up between local vernaculars and a global culture spread across the internet of memes, music videos and movie franchises. Social relations that were once face to face and knowable are now imagined, taking place largely in one’s mind (Arnold, 1983/2006) (or on one’s phone). Belonging everywhere and nowhere, this generation grieves the loss of utopian ideals. Once held as a symbol of nations coming together for the betterment of all, the windowed facade of the UN building features heavily in one disorienting sequence. Instead, the artist as shaman invokes a new kind of higher power: a prayer and a rebirth into a new kind of togetherness – an ecstatic, oceanic feeling of oneness, not just with other people, but with everything: with nature as well as one’s ancestors.

Loss and mourning are also at the heart of Rae-Yen Song’s installation ≈≈aaaaaahmaaaaaa≈≈ (2022). It is set in a sanctuary, centred on a glowing stained-glass jewel protected by suspended animalesque ceramic vessels that wail and dribble a melancholy dirge, facing a vitrine of ritual artefacts and encoded drawings. The stained-glass window is a portal to the digital realm; it can be activated by viewers using augmented reality. When this happens, the flowers depicted become animated, and their watery blue tears fill the surface before transporting the viewer into the artist’s online familial archive, Song Dynasty Life.

At the heart of Song’s work is a desire to connect, in a material and physical way, to the fragmented memories of the artist’s maternal grandmother, and the stories Song’s mother has shared about her. As Song explains, ‘The work is a glimpse of a deeply emotional private story, drawing out its essence to birth a new tale that tells of the power of water and whispers in shaping life and death.’

The work creates a space in which the silence and sadness that once existed around those stories can be healed and comforted through contemplation and song.

Song’s practice of ‘self-mythologising as a survival tactic’ becomes a means by which Song can fill in the gaps in understanding the artist’s own diasporic heritage, which was lost or violently taken away. As Nikos Papastergiadis suggests in his book Dialogues in the Diasporas, ‘The presumption 29

Image: Rae-Yen Song, ≈≈aaaaaahmaaaaaa≈≈ (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Zinzi Minott, Fi Dem V — A Redemptive Song (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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that the past was a closed space or that tradition could be reduced either to a manipulable commodity, or to a reified spectacle that could be inserted within the consumption industry, was symptomatic of the enlightenment view of history as a linear march of progress. Traditions have to be seen as the principles with which society interprets its place in the world’ (Papastergiadis, 1998).

By questioning things that have historically been given importance, and playfully embellishing the knowledge and rituals the artist does have, Song is building a personal idiosyncratic culture and belief system. The online archive the artist is creating features notes and digital videos of the artist and the wider Song family on various outings, in costume, allowing the artist to claim a sense of belonging with these distant histories – and to create stories for the future.

While water can be a symbol of both mourning and renewal, in Zinzi Minott’s Fi Dem V – A Redemptive Song (2022), large vinyl stickers on the floor and the animated wave at the start and end of the work reference the deadly ocean triangle of the transatlantic slave trade, which eventually brought workers from the Caribbean to post-war Britain on the HMT Empire Windrush.

The work’s lush, foliage-rich environment and peacock chairs and the soothing sound of Aretha Franklin singing ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ lull viewers into a gentle contemplation of rolling waves and archival footage of sugar plantations and people disembarking the ship at Tilbury Docks, before they are visually and sonically jolted into a different reality. Pixellated colour blocks and jumpy edits disrupt the flow of the video. Minott uses these ‘glitches’ deliberately to reflect her experiences of racism.

Since 2018, when the scandal surrounding the Windrush generation came to light, Minott has been creating a new video each year to celebrate this generation and to explore questions of Blackness, migration, and her family’s diasporic heritage. This fifth instalment roots the series in Liverpool, contrasting the city’s history as a major port in the slave trade and the struggles of Liverpool’s present-day Caribbean community. The consequences of the British empire, and how it has affected the lives and stories of people from the Caribbean, through precarity perpetuated by the UK’s political and societal systems, play out in the work, alongside moments of dance, celebration and joy.

In her influential book Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell writes: ‘Black people invent ways to create space through the rupture’, a survival strategy rooted in the seeming disruption of intersectional identities that finds power in the glitch as ‘an error, a mistake, a failure to function’ (Russell, 2020).

For Minott, the glitch becomes a way ‘for the ancestors of enslaved people to amplify themselves’ (Minott and Bugel, 2023); the fractures in one’s sense of belonging are an acknowledgement of not just that history of displacement, but also the opening up of other spaces through which to shape the future.

The consequences of the British empire are also present in Tessa Norton’s installation Dark Circles (2022), which transports viewers to the liminal space of a railway station waiting room, anachronistically stuck in a time that has never really existed. At one end of this film-set-like installation is a two-screen video with looping snippets of archival footage from the postindependence ‘Golden Age’ of Hindi cinema. Song and dance numbers and historical melodrama feature three glamorous actresses Cuckoo Moray (1928–1981), Helen (b. 1938) and Merle Oberon (1911–1979). All three were of Anglo-Indian descent. Norton’s work is a meditation on the ambiguity and contradictions inherent in this identity, and the unreliability of history and memory as arbiters of the past.

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A product of settler colonialism, at one time encouraged by, then rapidly marginalised within, the empire, the ‘not quite English, not quite Indian’ status of the Anglo-Indian identity formed its own subculture. Anglo-Indians occupied prominent roles on the Indian railways and civil service, as they were seen by the British as inherently better than the natives – but not good enough to be welcomed into elite British society in the Raj. This in-betweenness and ‘unbelonging’ opened a complex negotiation between identity and the representation of feminine sexuality in the postcolonial era. Cuckoo Moray and Helen’s not-quite-Indianness allowed them to perform in more provocative, Westernised and sexualised roles than was culturally permissible for their Indian counterparts. They were seen as pioneering feminist icons by many, but were rarely given lead roles outside of the ‘nautch’ dance spectacles they were cast for. Instead, Merle Oberon sought to pass as ambiguously ‘white’, concealing her Anglo-Indian heritage by claiming to be from Tasmania.

Norton’s prose poem forms a soundtrack to the work. It draws on the format of mix tapes, with the text mingling with songs featured in the work, other contemporary music, and field recordings of machinery and trains – the mechanical beat to which the empire ran. Synchronised with changing lights, the work unfolds like a séance with the ghosts of this past – perhaps Norton’s own ancestors, who were also Anglo-Indian. The text questions our discomfort with this history, the complicity of the Anglo-Indian identity with the empire’s violence, and the liminality and marginalisation of this identity within the empire. For Norton, the Anglo-Indian identity was reshaped with each generation, moulding itself to fit the changing society it found itself in. Norton’s work becomes a way of conjuring up these ghosts and setting them free, because perhaps not all histories should be preserved.

The fact that history and the archives that preserve it are unreliable is at the core of Ebun Sodipo’s online project Following the Gourd (2022). Sodipo explains: ‘Trans people of colour don’t often have access to their history and, when they do, it’s dark and full of pain. I want to bring a history that doesn’t hurt, a history that heals.’ The title of this piece is taken from an African American spiritual song that people sang as they journeyed from the enslaved southern states of America towards freedom in the north.

Made by young LGBTQ+ people and led by a small group of Black trans people called the Cartographer’s Committee, the work is a searchable star map of imagined constellations made up of videos of daily rituals, snippets of songs and voice notes that have been transformed into the group’s own archive of lived experiences and mythologies. Much like Rae-Yen Song’s survival tactic, Sodipo seeks to tell stories to future generations, recording new rituals and ways of being that will help other trans people find a community and a sense of belonging rooted in traditions they create, rather than simply inherit.

Belonging, just like identity, is fluid, constantly changing. This generation of artists grew up knowing the world both before and after the internet, and their works suggest a sense of self that allows them to belong everywhere. Yet, in the process of code-switching and existing in an inbetweenness, there is a palpable sense of loss, a mourning for the rootedness known by past generations: a rootedness this generation can never attain. However, this is balanced with a refusal of the kinds of identities and labels that limit who they, or the generations that came before them, were ‘allowed to be’ (Kebede, 2010). Belonging exists across a time–space continuum that is characterised by change and transformation – of our epigenetic coding, to embellish the gaps in our traditions, in our digestion of the individual to become one with the collective, in our disruption of the whole, our mapping of the new – and in our letting go. We might lament the upheaval that change brings, but we also sing to the promise of better times ahead.

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Image: Tessa Norton, Dark Circles (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Ebun Sodipo – Following the Gourd (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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REFERENCES Arnold, B. (1983/2006) Imagined Communities. Verso Books, p. 6.

Kebede, S.S. (2010) The struggle for belonging. Working Paper Series No. 70, University of Oxford, p. 17.

Minott, Z and Bugel, S. (2023) ‘If I didn’t say something, nobody else was going to’: Zinzi Minott on making art about the Windrush scandal in The Guardian. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/ jun/22/if-i-didnt-say-something-nobody-else-was-going-to-zinzi-minott-on-making-art-about-thewindrush-scandal Papastergiadis, N. (1998) Dialogues in the Diasporas. Rivers Oram Press, p. 13.

Russell, L. (2020) Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso Books, introduction to the e-book.

MAITREYI MAHESHWARI BIOGRAPHY Maitreyi Maheshwari is Head of Programme at FACT Liverpool, where she is responsible for overseeing all exhibitions, residencies, learning projects and events.

Previously, Maitreyi was Programme Director at Zabludowicz Collection, London. She has also worked on the Youth programme at Tate Modern and the Interaction programme at Artangel.

She has an MRes in Cultural Studies and Humanities from the London Consortium, and an undergraduate degree in History of Art from Edinburgh University. She has written for, and edited, numerous artists’ monographs, as well as a collection of interviews for Artists in Virtual Reality (2021, published by the Zabludowicz Collection).

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Journal #1 RADICAL ANCESTRY

My Garden, My Sanctuary Curatorial Essay

Carrie Chan

CARRIE CHAN

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The concept of the My Garden, My Sanctuary exhibition (July–October 2022) started with an Instagram post. A friend wrote about her research project with the South Korean artist Yaloo, whose work was represented by a murky green image of digital seaweed. When I clicked into Yaloo’s profile, animated beauty sheet masks appeared throughout her account. The mask is a symbol that’s familiar in beauty stores yet unfamiliar in the context of digital arts. In her Instagram posts it was positioned as a key icon submerged in an underwater seaweedy world full of fragments related to South Korea. The seemingly random mix of elements invited the viewer to investigate Korean identities, and alluded to Yaloo’s hybrid cultural journey as a South Korean who migrated to the USA, where she was seen as an ambassador of Korean culture.

When I moved to the UK in early 2020, I became aware of how East Asian symbols are misrepresented or commodified in Western culture. I began to wonder why Asian-owned businesses loved to use the lotus symbol, without any obvious reference to the journey of spiritual enlightenment in a Buddhist context.

I had an interesting conversation with British Chinese artist Sian Fan about how typical East Asian symbols – from seaweed to the lotus – have been stripped of their traditional and contextual meanings. Sian, reflecting on her mixed identity, said that she connected with her Asian heritage through popular culture as she was growing up. Some examples she gave were anime characters in the manga series Sailor Moon and the video game Grandia. It was only when entering adulthood that she realised how problematic – and common – these romanticised tropes about Asian women were, particularly in the gaming world. We discussed how we could resist white patriarchal males in the digital world. With Sian’s expertise in creating her own avatars, could we challenge these tropes in an interactive, gamified way?

The conversation was reflective and stimulating for the artists – and for me. We constantly found ourselves navigating between mediatised and local perspectives. Jihoon Kim, who analyses the moving-image practices of East Asian artists, commented that these strategies of world-making enable artists to ‘respond to and go beyond the homogenising impact of cultural and technological globalisation’ (Kim, 2019, p. 10). Kim commented that these worlds might not be about specific forms of culture, but about proposing ‘new logics of production’. Emerging digital tools and platforms enable artists to tell their stories in more interactive, engaging ways.

Such reflections led me to ask these curatorial questions: how can digital arts provide alternative spaces for us to look beyond romanticised versions of cultures? How can we deconstruct these colonial, patriarchal clichés and recreate our belongingness in a playful, adventurous manner? And would this be relevant to the Liverpool community, which is known for its immigrant history?

These questions were instrumental in conceptualising the exhibition My Garden, My Sanctuary, which was curated in response to FACT’s 2022 theme, Radical Ancestry.

The artists presented a series of large-scale animated installations and interactive gaming environments using commodified symbols of East Asian culture that have become familiar globally.

These symbols included K-pop dance routines, the use of seaweed in food and beauty products, hypersexualised female avatars, and spiritual icons stripped of their religious significance. Yaloo and Sian Fan took these symbols and mixed them to build playful new worlds. These worlds challenge Western, patriarchal definitions of East Asia.

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Fig 1: Yaloo, Birthday Garden (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Fig 2: Yaloo, Birthday Garden (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

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Both artists were keen to explore their heritage from a spiritual perspective. It was clear from the start that the exhibition experience should include references from a typical tourist visit to a temple in Asia. The scenography was designed as a parody of touristy, orientalist cultural experiences.

It offered the perfect setting to satirise the commercial appropriation of traditions and canonised standards of Asian femininity.

The temple’s cultural meanings are complex. In a temple there is usually a garden, a pond, some statues and an altar. For many people who live in Asia, it is a place where one enters the spiritual dimension – to worship a deity or one’s ancestors. The lotus pond represents spiritual enlightenment, tranquillity and purity.

The spatial design of the exhibition restages an allegorical rite of passage – or, in modern terms, a coming-of-age journey. Inspired by East Asian culture, it proposes the recreation and reclamation of cultural identity through a whimsical, water-inspired experience. Water is an important element of a rite of passage: it is fluid and mysterious at the same time.

Yaloo’s installation Birthday Garden offers a childlike journey to an underwater seaweed garden, where the artist excavates pastiches of family history, ancient Korean beliefs and media stories about Korean culture. The artist calls herself a ‘tour guide’ who guides the audience through the colourful gate into the imaginary ‘outer space’ (Fig. 1). This is where humans and non-human matters collide. The installation, the music and the avatars’ dance movements all allude to the changing experiences of women in South Korea across three generations.

The seaweed pond, which is a birthday soup, acts as a poetic repository for memories and heritage (Fig. 2). People from all over the world are familiar with the idea of seaweed as a food commodity from Korea. But Yaloo here invites us to the Korean tradition of consuming seaweed soup to celebrate a birthday.

By positioning a mask as the object of worship, the artist pokes fun at how beauty standards are canonised and manufactured through the global operations of K-pop and K-beauty. A common contemporary ritual is to put on a nourishing beauty sheet mask. Yaloo uses a giant sheet mask to immerse viewers in her open-ended reimagination of Korean identities and history.

From the meditative space of Yaloo’s installation, the audience encounter Sian’s Lotus Root, which is more emotionally charged, challenging and action-filled. If Birthday Garden offers a childlike experience, Lotus Root mirrors our experience as adolescents, when we start to question who we are. There are moments of frustration, angst and confusion.

This experience is portrayed by Sian Fan in the digital installation, which evokes an anime fantasy video game set around a glossy black lake with lily pads. But the scenography sets itself apart from a typical lotus sanctuary (Fig. 3). Nestled in the environment are a series of hypersexualised female avatars: hyper-real versions of the artist, digitally enhanced with a photo filter. They exist in states of tension and perform looped vignettes of choreography embodying key movements from media including Sailor Moon, Final Fantasy and Grandia.

As the audience navigates the controlled game, they see the avatars perform a series of awkward motions. These refer to the artist’s own struggle with how her identity is controlled by patriarchal, globalised media productions. The avatars explore their feelings of conflict around the 38

Fig 3: Sian Fan, Lotus Root (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Fig 4: Sian Fan, Deity (2022) with performance. Photo by Drew Forsyth.

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romanticisation of female Asian identity and their struggle to comprehend and embody an authentic way of being. Their movements glitch and fragment, further expressing their sense of disconnect, fragility and uncertainty. The audience has control over the digital environment, yet they can only follow the path set out by the game.

A reflection of the artist’s experience of growing up as part of the East Asian diaspora, the work presents the virtual and physical as dual metaphors for the artist’s split identity in our increasingly digital world.

The spiritual experience ends in the foyer space of the gallery, where visitors encounter a modern shrine by Sian, Deity (Fig. 4). The work features an interactive digital performance incorporating motion capture using Xbox Kinect. It captures the artist and transforms her into a virtual avatar, representing a hyper-real version of herself clad in typical fantasy video game character attire.

Installed as a shrine to the digital self, the work evokes a vanity mirror, surrounding the performer with three screens. The artist or any member of the audience can perform here, their movements becoming those of the avatar. The black mirror of the screen engulfing the body explores our connections to who we are in the virtual space. It also references obsidian mirrors, which are used in shamanism to create portals to spiritual dimensions.

The work completes the coming-of-age experience, which highlights the adult experience of ‘worshipping’ our digital self on a screen. As Brodsky (2021) comments, ‘the structure of social media confers visibility on certain images rather than the others, images that then become the ideal’. The perpetuation of such stereotypical depictions, racial assimilations and sexism are exacerbated by the online circulation of images.

Throughout the curatorial process, co-creation and engaging with audiences from different backgrounds was key. While the exhibition has a strong focus on digital storytelling, I worked with the team to experiment with performance, food experiences, music and podcasts as well as a live discussion on Twitch. For Yaloo’s work, we invited University of Liverpool students who were K-pop fans to reflect on how Korean identities shift through music and dance. The students worked with the artist to choreograph a dance piece, which was mapped to one of the avatars known as a ‘guardian angel’ in the temple space. Together with the artist/curator Sufea Mohamad Noor, we staged an event called Hardy Lotus: we invited about thirty members of the public to discuss the meanings of cultural symbols and traditions over a five-course meal. The event offered an accessible way for the audience to understand the narrative behind the exhibition.

The exhibition offers viewers an immersive, whimsical journey to help them reflect on the impact of media and technology in an interactive way. This process of reclaiming who we are and reconnecting to our heritage is at times playful, at times adventurous and painful. Yet I believe that, through technology, we can reimagine our belonging.

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REFERENCES Brodsky, J. K. (2021) Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology.

Bloomsbury Publishing.

Kim, J. (2019) ‘Postinternet Art of the Moving Image and the Disjunctures of the Global and the Local: Kim Hee-cheon and Other Young East Asian Artists.’ CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21.7. doi:10.7771/1481-4374.3657 CARRIE CHAN BIOGRAPHY Carrie Chan is a London-based curator and researcher specialising in cross-media storytelling, placemaking and digital arts practices. She is currently the Contemporary Programme Curator at the V&A Museum, London. She was previously the Curator-in-Residence at FACT Liverpool. She curated the show My Garden, My Sanctuary, which looks at the remaking of coming-of-age stories through commodified Asian symbols. Through curatorial and research practices, she has explored how technology inspires new approaches to world-building, audience experiences and narration.

She is interested in how technologies open up new spaces for artists and designers from Asian and other minority backgrounds to expand their storytelling practices.

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Journal #1 RADICAL ANCESTRY

RADICAL Artists Exploring ANCESTRY Ancestry

Nicola Triscott

NICOLA TRISCOTT

Journal #1

Within the framework of the Radical Ancestry programme, FACT hosted eight artists’ residencies, with each artist selected on the strength of their proposals for projects based on the theme of radical ancestry.1 The residencies primarily focused on research and the development of artistic practice, while also inviting artists to create and present new online and gallery-based works.

Although the topics proposed by the artists and the ways in which these were expressed were extremely varied, several thought-provoking convergences and parallels were evident. The artists examined themes of belonging and identity, researched hidden histories, created new rituals and forms of spiritual activism, and built new worlds or ‘virtual borderlands’2 – spaces of ambiguity and liminality where new forms of identity, connection and culture can emerge. The resulting works contribute to Radical Ancestry’s investigation of the multifaceted nature of belonging, the significance of ancestry and inheritance, and the transformative potential of technological and artistic interventions.

In describing the artworks, I have drawn on interpretative texts written by my FACT colleagues Charlotte Horn and Lesley Taker, in collaboration with the artists, combined with my own observations and thoughts.

CRITIQUING BIOMETRIC TECHNOLOGIES OF CONTROL In his residency, Andrius Arutiunian researched and critiqued the use – and misuse – of biometric technologies. Biometric testing, including fingerprinting, facial recognition, DNA testing and iris scanning, is used by governments and institutions to surveil individuals and exert control over people. The use of these technologies raises concerns about threats to privacy and personal autonomy, and actively shapes societal norms and practices, potentially influencing individuals’ self-perception, subjectivity and sense of agency, reducing them to mere components.3 Also, significant concerns exist regarding how biometrics perpetuate and exacerbate racial inequalities (Benjamin, 2019). Biometric technologies are not neutral; rather, they are imbued with societal biases and historical injustices.

Arutiunian’s installation The Irresistible Powers of Silent Talking presented a playful and powerful critique of iBorderCtrl deception detection software. Developed at Manchester Metropolitan University, the iBorderCtrl system was supposed to scan the facial micro-expressions of migrants entering the EU at border crossings and decide whether or not they were being deceptive. Funded by the European Union, it was tested in Greece, Latvia and Hungary, drawing criticism from human rights groups, which described it as an intrusive, pseudoscientific and reductive technology.4 Arutiunian’s installation used the same algorithm and avatar (a virtual border agent in the form of a white man) as that used by iBorderCtrl, to draw attention to the absurdity of an algorithm trained on the responses of actors who had been briefed to pretend to tell the truth or pretend to lie (Arutiunian, 2021).

1 Andrius Arutiunian was selected because of FACT’s part in a long-standing programme funded by the European Commission, the European Media Arts Partnership. Erin Dickson, GLOR1A, Kerolaina Linkeviča and Hope Strickland were chosen through ‘FACT Together’, an annual, online commissioning scheme set up to support early-career northern artists. Ashley Holmes, Lucy Hutchinson and April Lin 林森 were selected for Jerwood Arts/FACT fellowships.

2 The notion of a virtual borderland draws on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands: the physical and metaphorical spaces where cultures, languages and identities intersect and collide (Anzaldúa, 1987).

3

For an overview of the use of biometrics in society, see Ajana (2013).

4

See Chelioudakis and Digitalis (2018).

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Image: Andrius Arutiunian, The Irresistible Powers of Silent Talking (2022).

Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Lucy Hutchinson, Into the Shade (2022). Photo by Drew Forsyth.

NICOLA TRISCOTT

Journal #1

EXAMINING HERITAGE AND CULTURAL HISTORIES FACT commissioned Liverpool-born artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman to reimagine FACT’s upstairs gallery as an inviting space within which our artists in residence could experiment, show work and engage directly with the public. Inspired by her Punjabi Hindu heritage and upbringing in North Liverpool, Burman redesigned the gallery as a living room, with walls, furniture, and a Tuk Tuk (an auto rickshaw commonly used in India) richly decorated with a kaleidoscope of colourful motifs such as Hindu deities, Bindis and tigers, and neon light-works. In its first iteration, the installation Merseyside Burman Empire hosted a series of films by the artist. In Dada and The Punjabi Princess (2019), Burman challenges stereotypes of Asian women with images from pop art, Hindu mythology, Bollywood, punk and political rallies, interspersed with text reflecting the uneasiness of the time: “Multiculturalism has come unstuck … Populism rises again … The will of the people”. Another film Candy Pop and Juicy Lucy (2008) is a dream-like psychedelic piece featuring pop images of ice cream cornets, lollies and an ice cream van, referencing her childhood and her father’s line of business as an ice-cream man.

From September 2022 - August 2023, Burman’s installation shifted and adapted to become a temporary home to works by other artists, events and workshops. Over the course of this year, artists in residence Lucy Hutchinson, Ashley Holmes and Hope Strickland chose to delve into histories, stories and archives that hold meaning and relevance for present-day social attitudes and cultural practices, such as music, storytelling and museum collections.

Lucy Hutchinson set out to investigate the persistence of fictional narratives related to gender, social class and regionalism – and to speculate about how to disrupt them in the future. She focused on the Lancashire witch trials in 1612 and the harmful narratives that demonised the women involved. These women’s abilities – to heal, nurture and support each other – were ignored, and instead rumours and gossip were spread about them, leading to the infamous witch-hunts.

As Silvia Federici wrote, a witch was ‘the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeah woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt’ (Federici, 2004). Hutchinson’s installation Into the Shade drew on witchcraft, printmaking and biotechnology to reflect on gender, social class and regionalism and their continued relevance today. In this immersive performance piece, the artist wove ritual, sound and sculpture into a haunting collective experience that conjured the Lancashire witches back to life.5 Ashley Holmes focused on the legacy of Black music, specifically Dub, a subgenre of reggae music, and its social, geographical and musical influences in Britain, with an emphasis on Liverpool.

He used Dub as a way to understand, and draw connections between, past and present music and social culture. Holmes’ artwork, Decaying Tail of a Sound, encompassed a performance, an installation and a sound composition (derived from field recordings, conversations and materials collected during his time in Liverpool). In the installation a mix of visuals, writing and experimental sound was used to delve into lesser-known geographical histories and philosophies related to the African diaspora. Holmes also invited artists Ratiba Ayadi and Seigfried Komidashi to take part in the performance: they presented live sound works that drew on echo, reverberation, temporality and conceptions of place, responding to the themes of Holmes’ research.

Strickland’s short film I’ll Be Back! investigates the connections between Maroon ecologies, resource extraction and racial violence. Her film focuses on the story of François Mackandal,

5

The sound for the event was produced in collaboration with Aubrey Jackson Blake, a sound artist based in London.

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Image: Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Merseyside Burman Empire (2022). Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Hope Strickland, still from I’ll Be Back! (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

Image: Ashley Holmes performing Decaying Tail of a Sound (2022) at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Erin Dickson, Harton Moor (2022). Photo by Rob Battersby.

NICOLA TRISCOTT

Journal #1

a rebel slave known for his radical powers of metamorphosis. Using a combination of digital, 16mm and archival film formats, Strickland examines museum collections that hold objects of colonial violence, questioning historical institutional collecting practices and commenting on the intersections of myth, history and power.

Together, the works by Hutchinson, Holmes and Strickland remind us how important it is to critically examine the complexities of cultural histories – as well as to disrupt harmful narratives.

TRANSFORMING PERCEPTIONS AND CHALLENGING PRECONCEPTIONS Erin Dickson is an artist whose practice examines tongue-in-cheek themes of ‘Britishness’, particularly northern culture, through a variety of digital and analogue techniques. During the pandemic, Dickson moved back into her teenage home on a council estate called Harton Moor in South Shields in the north-east of England. Just like many estates built in the 1970s – quickly built homes packed into out-of-town or otherwise isolated estates, frequently lacking facilities – Harton Moor has a poor reputation outside the community. For her residency, Dickson proposed creating a contemporary portrait of Harton Moor that would transform these perceptions.

Dickson realised this vision in a highly effective animated film work, shown both online and as the centre of a gallery installation. Harton Moor is an animated guided tour of the council estate.

The meticulous rendering of the streets and houses of Harton Moor, depicted in a colourless, translucent environment, contrasts with the messy reality described by the film’s narrator, Jessica, a child who lives on the estate, who charmingly describes the relationships between people on her street. In the installation, the film was accompanied by lifelike 3D printed sculptures of Jessica and her neighbour Dave. The film and installation reveal the captivating incongruity between the architect’s idealised designs and the residents’ complex lives. It shows visitors the community through a child’s eyes, and invites them to reflect on how place and people interweave to shape our sense of belonging.

ANCESTRIES, SPIRITUALITY AND CREATING NEW WORLDS Several resident artists chose themes of ancestry, ritual and spiritual invocation, highlighting their importance in the formation of cultural identity and in connecting people.

April Lin 林森’s research residency started with the questions ‘who counts as an ancestor?’ and ‘what does ancestry mean’? Lin’s resulting artwork, The Earthly Realm is Out of Balance, is a research-driven interactive game featuring a chatbot, which was also shown as an interactive gallery installation. By texting the chatbot, participants converse with an other-worldly guardian called the Interface, who looks after a cosmic library containing various perspectives, practices and provocations on ancestry. Participants are prompted to reflect on their own ancestry, read extracts from the Hall of Understandings, and contribute their thoughts on ancestry to help rebuild the library, which has fallen into disuse: the implication is that forgetting about our ancestors has an impact on the environment, politics and spirituality which becomes increasingly difficult to undo over time. Lin’s work prompts viewers to consider how they construct, sustain and represent ancestry. The artist uses the format of a cross between a chatbot and a ‘choose your own adventure’ game to encourage participants to think about the concept of belonging, emphasising the importance of creating ways for people to collaboratively expand their notions of ancestry and the connections we share.

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Image: April Lin 林森, The Earthly Realm is Out of Balance (2022). Photo by Drew Forsyth.

Image: Kerolaina Linkeviča, still from Primordia (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

NICOLA TRISCOTT

Journal #1

Kerolaina Linkeviča’s Primordia is an immersive online work and gallery installation. It is inspired by the artist’s research into Goddess/Goddexx worship and ancestral belief systems, and delves into femme-focused prehistoric ancestries to challenge the prevalent patriarchal structures.

The installation includes ceramic sigils and embroidery works, a nod to art forms practised by generations of women in Linkeviča’s family. In a presentation at FACT in 2023, the artist discussed their notion of the ‘imaginal’ – a realm as real as the physical world, with its own form, time and space, rooted in an ancient, vast understanding of reality. The imaginal can be accessed through imagination exercises that include altered states of consciousness, journeying and rituals, leading to positive change and informing creative practices.

Linkeviča spent their childhood in Latvia and feels a deep personal connection to the forest, animism and folk magic, as well as to the multiverse of computer games which they grew up playing. The artist is interested in the ability to experience, envision and feel beyond assumed identity, embodying the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds through virtual bodies (avatars): ‘By entertaining and working with the idea of the imaginal and accessing it through imaginative embodiment we pause the rigidity of our assigned identity, allowing for creative potentialities and expanded explorations of this other world’ (Linkeviča, 2023).

SWARM is a visually rich near-future game-based interactive experience created by GLOR1A, an artist whose practice is centred in Black futurism and sci-fi, in collaboration with alpha_rats, a game developer. The game is set in a world in which humans have the opportunity to build a new civilisation, the Orun Rere universe. Participants are prompted to create an avatar, which facilitates self-expression, helps to release them from preconceptions of identity, and helps them to develop a universal language that can foster understanding and transcend boundaries. A star constellation in the game holds reports of individuals who have undergone this process. GLOR1A describes the game as a social experiment that asks participants to challenge their own preconceptions.

The works of these artists offer insights into the transformative potential of ancestral connections, spiritual practices and collective experiences. Through immersive and interactive approaches, they draw on ancestries and spiritual wisdom as forms of technology to create new worlds that emphasise our connections to each other and to the world. The use of gaming and social media formats fosters a sense of inquiry and agency in the viewer-participant, allowing them to have more fluid, open-ended experiences.

IN CONCLUSION The artists involved in Radical Ancestry residencies challenge restrictive and traditional notions of identity, investigate the histories and power dynamics that inform our sense of self and place in the world, challenge conventional narratives, and offer fresh ways of relating to the world beyond the human and the present. They deliberately move beyond binary oppositions such as ‘us and them’, ‘human and not human’, ‘reality and fantasy’, ‘physical and virtual’, creating artworks that foster a nuanced, fluid understanding of cultural identities – and that celebrate plurality.

Some artworks criticise the reductive and biased nature of biometric technologies or negative representations of certain groups and communities in the media. Others present thought-provoking critical reflections on history and colonial legacies, or emphasise the importance of music and cultural expression in constructing identity. Several provide insights into the complexities of ancestral connections, the power of spiritual practices, and the transformative potential of ritual in shaping cultural identities and fostering collective healing.

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REFERENCES Ajana, Btihaj (2013) Governing through Biometrics. Palgrave Macmillan.

Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.

Arutiunian, Andrius (2021) ‘A Short Conversation on Mistrust and Deceit.’ soundcloud.com/ factliverpool/a-short-conversation-on-mistrust-and-deceit Benjamin, Ruha (2019) Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

Chelioudakis, Eleftherios and Digitalis, Homo (2018) ‘Greece: Clarifications Sought on Human Rights Impacts of IBorderCtrl.’ European Digital Rights (EDRi). edri.org/our-work/greececlarifications-sought-on-human-rights-impacts-of-iborderctrl/ Federici, Silvia (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Autonomedia.

Linkeviča, Kerolaina (2023) ‘FACT 2023 Presentation.’ kerolainalinkevica.co.uk/fact-2023presentation

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Journal #1 RADICAL ANCESTRY

Reflections on Making Art Spaces Where Adult Rules Don’t Apply

RADICAL ANCESTRY

Alharith Ahmed, Corey Anderson and Tia Hume-Jennings (part of the Bandidos), artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and FACT’s Learning team (Lucía Arias, Rachel Mason, Ashleigh Sands and Neil Winterburn)

THE BANDIDOS, DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY & LEARNING TEAM

Journal #1

When Our Worlds Meet is an artwork by artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley in collaboration with the Bandidos, a group of young people from Liverpool aged between 13 and 18. Together, they created a Full Motion Video Role Play Game1 that takes viewers and audiences to different worlds and moments in time. When our worlds meet consists of four digital worlds that explore themes including gender, inequality, access to food, Liverpool’s history and fun. It was presented as an installation and online game as part of FACT’s Winter 2022 exhibition (2 December 2022 – 9 April 2023), and its Radical Ancestry theme.

In this article, we present some of the original ideas the Bandidos created for the artwork. The project was commissioned as part of FACT’s Learning programme, where young people’s knowledge and experiences of online culture are at the core. We want to offer them more opportunities to learn from the ways artists use technology. In the Learning programme, we invite artists to work with groups of people to create artworks. The participants are the experts in the experiences we are exploring together, and the artist leads on the creative vision. The aim is to present an artwork that engages with all kinds of audiences, not just those interested in participatory projects.

Danielle’s practice connects archives and technology, especially through video games, to share experiences and knowledge that otherwise would not be seen. Her work seemed highly relevant, because a lot of young people aren’t listened to and don’t get to participate in contemporary conversations.

In When Our Worlds Meet, Danielle created a work shaped by the messages the young people wanted to share. They acted as ‘directors’ for the vision in both the game and the gallery installation. Danielle explains: ‘We worked together for a year to devise a new way of existing and being. When you come in here [FACT], you’re going to step into a new city that we’ve designed together and, through various portals, be able to access thoughts and feelings of young people around Liverpool.’

The Bandidos imagined a version of their city, inspired by Liverpool’s history and their favourite pop culture and video game references. They used drawing and writing to create ‘a world’ – but it was never one world. There were multiple story lines and realities that Danielle channelled and presented as a visual archive of geographies, each with its own rules and origin stories. Danielle comments: ‘I usually describe myself as a mediation person during the process and then, towards the end, I’m a director, when I put it all together. Most of the process was just listening and not creating anything, just listening and listening and listening.’2

1 FMVRPG is a term invented by the artist that mixes Full Motion Video and Role Play Game genres. Full Motion Video games use a branching logic similar to text adventures, with the addition of pre-recorded videos for visuals instead of interactive graphics. RPG games are a digital development of tabletop strategy games. They often feature complex characterisation and well-defined fantasy worlds and isometric 3D graphics.

2

Quote from ‘Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: worldbuilding a cyberpunk playground’ by Will Jennings writing for Recessed Space.

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Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

THE BANDIDOS, DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY & LEARNING TEAM

Journal #1

Here are some of the Bandidos’ original ideas and story lines.

TIME-TRAVELLING PORTAL TO OTHER WORLDS Tia Hume-Jennings came up with the idea of a portal as the main narrative of the game, a way to travel through time and understand the history of the city. This is Tia’s original story: A portal was found in a derelict building in Liverpool in the late 70s by a group of researchers who built the building back up to the way it used to look, using bricks and furnishings that came from the original building. They did this by using the portal to go back in time and take the pieces from the building before it was destroyed.

The building had many different uses over the years but the earliest use was a hotel. This is believed to be the origin of the portal. Using energy from people all over the world the portal was created. It stayed in the basement of the hotel. The hotel ran from 1920–1958 and in the late 60s to mid–70s it was converted into a multiple–floor disco with each floor being a different type of vibe. It was built around the portal due to its geometric and colourful look, almost like a floating disco ball.

HISTORY AND OUR ANCESTORS Alharith Ahmed’s intention in the game was to use teleportation to allow people to see what his ancestors have been through, and understand Liverpool’s history. He reflects on how you learn about this through intergenerational exchange: All these stories are from my grandparents, from mutual people. They talk about slave trade Europeans from England. France. Portugal … They would go to, like, the Empress, the King or Queen, talk to them, but behind their back they would kidnap people and sell them for maybe guns or gunpowder, and they would steal a lot of gold … They would all come back because they became bigger and, you know, stronger by more military … A lot of people were taken to Brazil, the Caribbean and America … you know, slave forced labour … for like 30 days. From one continent to another. And how at schools, they don’t talk about how it [Africa] has natural resources and [it] really was milked dry, which is now why there’s poverty everywhere.

In the game you can see some of the photographs Alharith found on social media. What does it mean for him to be able to find and share this information online?

It’s a great opportunity for those who are not educated to actually learn: education is key.

Knowledge is key. People need to educate themselves more on these topics because they could never be forgotten. I see TikTok or YouTube like just modern-day universities. Everything you need to know about anything on this earth is on TikTok and YouTube and also books.

Books are very vital and important for everyday life and use.

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THE BANDIDOS, DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY & LEARNING TEAM

Journal #1

YOUNG PEOPLE’S CITY Two of the Bandidos worked together in a ‘super cool awesome demo-socialist utopia you access through a cave in Sefton Park’. Magic plays an important part in this world, with witches who practise healing and medicine. Corey Anderson wove magic and witchcraft into their fantasy world and gave everyone basic rights to access food, Wi-Fi and healthcare. Corey explains: Magic for me isn’t like the typical kind of magic where you think it’s like powers and stuff.

It’s more like something that you can pass on to other people, like an energy, like, when you meet someone and you just feel instantly better when you talk to them. Happiness is a kind of magic that can make you feel so much better.

Actual witches, all these people that practise witchcraft: green witchery and cooking witchery and garden witchery and all stuff like that, where it’s kind of using plants and natural resources.

The idea of the witches’ healing practice grows from Corey’s own experience of women’s ability to heal: This is gonna sound horrible. I can never imagine, at least with these men I know today, it’d be hard for them to accept that they could help other people in ways that isn’t like money or something like that. And obviously there’s really nice guys out there. Like you can just be there for someone. Yeah. With like, you know, the magic stuff and being able to give someone something straight from you rather than something that’s material.

For the online game, Danielle manifested their creative ideas for a better, more inclusive society, confronting viewers with the problems of these spaces and asking us to take responsibility for ourselves. You can travel through four different worlds, each with their own meanings and consequences. Danielle explains: ‘I really don’t like non-interactive artwork, just because I feel art has been stuck in this period of just observing and us being able to put our references on whatever’s happening. I really like work that requires activation.’

The project focuses on the knowledge and experience of the young people. There is no curatorial intro text: instead, they wrote the ‘Terms and Conditions’, preparing you to enter their territory.

‘Usually young people have a space that they’re made to adhere to by the rules, but instead we’re made to adhere by their rules in their space’.

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THE BANDIDOS, DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY & LEARNING TEAM

Journal #1

The gallery install brings you into the game world. In Danielle’s words: ‘I want people to come in and feel a bit thrown. It’s kind of a confusing environment to be in because it doesn’t feel like a bespoke art show, it feels like an imagination of a place that we want to exist, something that we might have 3D modelled, but instead built for real.’ As well as working on the narrative, the Bandidos created their own avatars, representing how they want to exist in their worlds. Danielle explained: ‘We’ve made an avatar for each of them [the Bandidos]. And so around the space, looking over you, holding power over the space and keeping the bounds, are the avatars of the young people. And the reason that they’re hung up so high and not kind of “in the space” is because I want them to feel a lot more powerful than us, because usually young people don’t.’

CONCLUSION ​ ne of the privileges of working at FACT is that we learn a lot by researching and working with O artists as they produce and show their artwork. As part of the Learning programme, we aim to create a similar space for the young people as participants.

In this project, Danielle was very keen to present the work she made with the young people on their own terms. Adults would enter the exhibition and be expected to take responsibility for who they are as they engage with it. The worlds they shared with Danielle didn’t join up neatly, but she resisted the pressure to tie them up into one simple story. Adults coming into the space said they felt like they were in the young people’s heads. This is an example of how art can make space for a different kind of dialogue between young people and adults. We think they found this incredibly empowering.

At the point of writing this article, we had finished the project and were evaluating it. We asked ourselves: Why doesn’t adult society prioritise the same areas of knowledge as young people do?

We ended up valuing most how the young people gained agency to share their knowledge on their own terms. We think this agency could grow because the young people were embedded within FACT long enough to access conversations around the curation, presentation and promotion of the project and the exhibition. This is a kind of agency that emerges through the unique qualities of long-term art collaborations in galleries. Also, we are committed to adapt to the needs of the participants, as we should being a public venue and social agent.

We would like to finish this article by recognising how lucky we are to be able to exist in this space of collaboration between an artist and the young people, and witness these young people’s realities and stories channelled into Danielle’s art.

If you want to play the game, click here.

If you want to know more about the artwork and the project, click here.

If you want to learn more about the game, click here.

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Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, still from When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, still from When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, still from When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

Image: Bandidos Terms and Conditions, in When Our Worlds Meet (2022).

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby.

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, still from When our worlds meet (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

THE BANDIDOS, DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY & LEARNING TEAM

Journal #1

LEARNING TEAM BIOGRAPHY There are four people in FACT’s Learning team: Lucía Arias, Rachel Mason, Ashleigh Sands and Neil Winterburn. Our practice combines critical pedagogy with art curation and production.

In the Learning programme, we invite artists to work with groups of people to create artworks together, usually relating to their experiences in the world and how they feel represented (or not) in contemporary conversations. We are particularly interested in designing spaces where young people (aged 12-18) can be heard.

THE BANDIDOS BIOGRAPHY This is how one of the Bandidos (the group that worked with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley) describes themselves: ‘It’s a group project where we all make a game type thing that represents us individually and all of us as a group and what we take from Liverpool and put into the game.’

‘We are people who do not aim to please. We identify as things you may not want to believe. We believe people should be proud of who they want to be.’ Alharith Ahmed Omari, Corey Anderson and Tia Hume-Jennings were generous enough to share their thoughts behind the artwork.

DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY BIOGRAPHY Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley works in animation, sound, performance, and video games. Her practice records the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining reality and fiction to create participatory work. In 2021 Brathwaite-Shirley was a resident artist at Wysing Arts Centre in South Cambridgeshire, UK. Her work has been shown at Science Gallery, London (2020); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2020) and arebyte Gallery, London (2021), among many others.

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Journal #1 RADICAL ANCESTRY

RADICAL Visitors’ Experiences ANCESTRY at FACT

Delphie Levy Jones

DELPHIE LEVY JONES

Journal #1

Visiting FACT is more than just observing art – here, you experience it.

FACT’s theme, Radical Ancestry, began in 2021. Since then, it has included curators and artists collectively reimagining notions of belonging. Over the years, FACT’s Visitor Services team have provided insights into how our audiences have received and responded to artworks, as well as into audience experiences in the galleries. In this article, I look at some of this feedback and explore why it’s so important to consider visitor experience and the audiences we reach when we’re planning our future programme.

The pandemic left us all isolated. For some, this inspired personal creativity, but it opened a gaping hole in the physical experience of art. Post-lockdown, when people were yearning for artistic stimulation, many placed emphasis on the need to provoke imagination and conversation and to build a community. When the FACT team was exploring the theme of belonging through Radical Ancestry, it felt essential to consider how to make visitors feel they belonged too. So we asked: instead of observing art, as people have always done, how could our audience become part of the art? How could we ensure that visitors belonged in the spaces and in the galleries? No longer forced into bubbles and to keep a social distance, FACT was again able to create environments where audiences could enter immersive new worlds where they could explore, play and roam.

The audience is the focal point of the art exhibited at FACT, and its goals are to enrich minds and shape the future of art, nurturing and inspiring innovation and creativity. While FACT’s Programme team offers career-enhancing engagements for young people to design and create, its Visitor Services team ensures that whether you’ve travelled from afar to take a tour or wandered in on a whim, you leave feeling inspired by artworks that embrace new technology and experiment with your sense of self. FACT is based in the heart of Liverpool’s city centre and takes pride in the community that has formed throughout our time here. While this community includes locals who have been loyal visitors over the years, FACT is also located in the home of the oldest Chinese community in Europe. FACT has been described by a visitor as having a ‘true commitment to internationalism’, and it strives to represent this through the diversity of artists and the inclusivity and accessibility of their work. FACT wants its audiences to feel seen and heard and, most importantly, that they belong.

As a queer Jewish woman, my identity is compartmentalised and intersectional.1 It can often feel fragmented but also whole, and I regularly wonder about my own ancestry, and acknowledge how confronting, but also comforting, that can be. I visited a number of FACT’s Radical Ancestry exhibitions prior to beginning my time as FACT’s Writer in Residence.2 Before I was aware of the season’s theme, I felt connected to the gallery in a way that spoke to internal feelings I often suppress. As a visitor, the focus on immersive installations in the galleries ignites in me a unique personal response to the art. Where a frame or screen typically acts as a boundary to separate the viewer from the art, here the audience can become travellers through the art: active participation is a key ingredient in the success of the exhibitions. The spaces the artists and FACT create go ‘above and beyond the sense of being an audience member’.

1 ‘Intersectionality’ is a term coined by Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw. It refers to the analytical framework used to understand how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege.

2 Artworks I visited prior to working at FACT were by Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ashley Hope, Erin Dickson and Josèfa Ntjam.

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Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Drew Forsyth.

Image: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Drew Forsyth.

DELPHIE LEVY JONES

Journal #1

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and the Bandidos’ When Our Worlds Meet exhibition really resonated with me. Initially, the immersive video game seems fantastical – you get a surreal sense of an alien world gripping you from within when you enter the gallery. However, when you play the game and explore this alternative digital reality, you learn how the installation intertwines a distant impression of utopia with the freedom to reimagine your own past and future. One visitor said that this exhibition, alongside Josèfa Ntjam’s film installation When the moon dreamed of the ocean, helped them relate the concept of reimagining history to the other members of their LGBTQ+ poetry group.

When Our Worlds Meet forefronts the histories, cultures and stories of the under-represented, particularly archiving the experiences of the Black trans community and the ideal worlds imagined

by Liverpool’s young people. Giving a creative outlet and voice to those who are often marginalised, particularly in our post-pandemic society, is so important. From listening to audience responses first-hand, I know that the way I relate to Brathwaite-Shirley and the Bandidos’ work is reciprocated.

In a world that can feel so binary and oppressive, hearing a group of older teenagers (utterly in tune with the aims of When Our Worlds Meet) cheering as the game read ‘gender means nothing here!’ fuelled my optimism for a real utopia, where today’s generations ensure that future society is accepting of all. Anyone – even those who don’t relate to the Black trans experience – can form an intimate attachment to the notions of belonging and ancestry. One visitor felt ‘very moved by the swings asking “Do you feel trapped?”’, as she herself often felt trapped, and realising that she was not alone reassured her. She is not alone – this theme recurs among visitors.

I’m only twenty-two, and I found the art created by those younger than me to be profound and surreal: it appealed to my own identity, it shared my politics and sexuality. The four worlds and portals designed by the Bandidos also have the power to relate to visitors in quite personal ways.

The utopian colony where queer feminists and communists exist freely appears like paradise to the youth who enter FACT. It was interesting to consider that this utopian colony was next to the world made of meat. In the younger generation, veganism is more common today than it has ever been, and I couldn’t help wondering whether this confrontational contrast was intentional: were the artists trying to make visitors aware of cruelty to animals and the environmental impact of meat production and consumption by the older generations?

Unfortunately, from upsetting personal experiences, I am aware that young people can dismiss or mitigate horrors of the past. When I have spoken about the Holocaust and my Jewish ancestors, I have been dismissed with ‘that was so long ago’ and ‘it’s not like that now’. However, with global statistics and personal attacks displaying the festering nature of institutionalised anti-Semitism, it’s crucial to utilise platforms to educate the public on how these issues are still incredibly prevalent.

When Our Worlds Meet encourages viewers to witness the journeys of enslaved people.3 While this subject matter may seem ‘historical’, the ‘theme-park world’ in the game, where those working the land are kept in poverty, reinforces the notion that discrimination and prejudice are dangerous consequences when people are dismissive in the face of inequality.

Josèfa Ntjam’s art works in a similar way: in an underground cave filled with jellyfish, mushrooms and plankton, life forms become metaphorical carriers of memories too heavy for a single being to bear. Symbolising the aftermath of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, the exhibition

3 In one area of the game (the Dystopian Portal), viewers go on a journey to discover more about the transatlantic slave trade and the lives of enslaved people. In another (Fun World), all the ways in which you might win at a game seem rigged so that you are always kept down. And in the Castle x Communists we encounter Boris, who is ‘the empty soul of colonialism’: he believes that money justifies anything, so he cannot fundamentally change as a person.

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Image: Josèfa Ntjam, When the moon dreamed of the ocean (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Drew Forsyth.

Image: Sian Fan, Deity (2022). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.

DELPHIE LEVY JONES

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aims to show that the weight of these memories can be shared among the collective, fragmenting with time and distance to form new possibilities. While the art has a depth to it that is full of cultural significance, on the surface, the alien, magical combination of photomontage, film and sound is enthralling – and has had a great impact in terms of inclusivity. A visitor with autism spectrum disorder found the exhibition relieving and poetic: its calming sensory elements balanced the intensity of the identity discourse. The galleries were praised by a wheelchair user as being accessible, but comments like this weren’t limited to the physical galleries in FACT. While the exploration of social issues forms the building blocks of FACT’s art, it is equally encouraging to hear visitors ‘fascinated’ by an exhibition ‘before finding meaning behind it’. This comment was made by one regular visitor in reference to Ntjam’s When the moon dreamed of the ocean. It is important to recognise all the ways in which art can resonate with us and captivate us. Art is both personal and communal. While you might be part of a collective that responds in a particular way, you might also be the only person in the world who has that perspective to, or connection with, an artwork – and that’s what makes it so special.

Curated by Carrie Chan and described by visitors as ‘mesmerising’ and ‘existential’, My Garden, My Sanctuary similarly invites curiosity and playfulness, submerging visitors in an underwater garden of seaweed and lotus flowers. However, like many of FACT’s exhibitions, the artwork’s true meaning lies not on the surface but in the depths of the water. Artists Yaloo and Sian Fan aimed to reclaim their cultural identity by challenging the commodified symbols of East Asia. Brilliantly, Chan highlighted how important it was to host this exhibition in Liverpool, stating that ‘the opportunity to bring two acclaimed digital media artists’ to a ‘city with a strong history of Asian immigrants and diaspora’ was both thought-provoking and incredibly relevant. One visitor reported in response to the exhibition My Garden, My Sanctuary that digital art as a whole was ‘more accessible’ than art in a ‘normal’ gallery. A painting is always a painting, she said, but digital art offers something new and evolving.4 A visitor who was a motion-capture artist said the interactive film pieces were enjoyable, and his wife commented that the self-expression and freedom of the art displayed felt surprisingly personal to her. She was from Russia, and she often felt a lack of acceptance when it came to creativity, expression and identity. This reinforced how special it is to feel as if you belong through art. We know that FACT can be that safe space for everyone to explore.

While reactions like these are validating to hear, it is also important to consider audience responses that suggest how we can improve visitors’ experience. One visitor said it felt like something was ‘missing’. Why was the artist not there in the room? Just like theatre wouldn’t be theatre without the actors, he felt that installation art would benefit from the presence of its artist: something ‘performative’ should have its ‘author’ at hand. While the artist being present permanently is unlikely to be achievable, the visitor had asked an insightful question: how can artists be more involved in their own art?

An artist has a ‘duty to find an adequate expression to convey it to as many souls as possible’ (Sand, 1886). In short, art needs an audience. A good artist serves their audience and ensures their works are accessible enough to be appreciated. To create is to connect, and with the fantastic connections made between FACT and its audience during Radical Ancestry, I am excited to see what can be achieved and who can be reached in FACT’s next season.

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Read the beautiful poems the artists have written in response to their own work here.

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DELPHIE LEVY JONES

Journal #1

REFERENCE Sand, George and Ledos de Beaufort, Raphaël (1886). Letters of George Sand, Vol. III. Ward, p. 241.

DELPHIE LEVY JONES BIOGRAPHY Delphie Levy Jones is a postgraduate Critical and Creative Writing student at the University of Liverpool. She has recently completed her placement as a Writer in Residence with FACT Liverpool, and her contribution to FACT’s inaugural journal has been a great personal achievement.

Her usual journalism comments on societal issues ranging from religion to feminism, while her fiction is often poetic and explores the natural world and humanity’s place within it. She was recently published in No Parties magazine and took a draft of her novel to Writing on the Wall’s 2023 Pulp Idol heats.

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FACT is supported by

Future Ages Will Wonder was supported by Co-funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union

My Garden, My Sanctuary was supported by

FACT Together and the Jerwood / FACT Fellowship Programme was supported by

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Josèfa Ntjam and The Imaginists Society was supported by

with support from Eleanor Rathbone Charitable Trust.

FRONT COVER: Boedi Widjaja, A Tree+++ 记因・基亿 (2021). Installation view at FACT. Photo by Rob Battersby.