Revista Rights

| RIGHTS & BLACKS | N°25 | 2017

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M.I.A

BELLE facepe velibus evelestiis id quate dunti adis POTRAIT velibus evelestiis id quate dunti adisTiisci ART facepe velibus evelestiis id quate dunti adis FEMINIME facepe velibus evelestiis id quate dunti adis

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Música _ your fine with your belonging for

Música _ your fine with your belonging for

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Levis_ advertising

Photography _ Live Music

Interview _ Amandla Stenberg

Advertising _ your fine with your belonging for

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BL A C K S

_02_ Blacks _ your fine with your belonging for

_17_ Interview _ Amandla Stenberg

_23_ Interview _ Amandla Stenberg

_26_ Article _ Black artists protest

_29_ Advertising _ your fine with your belonging for

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Music and Rights | N ° 25 | 2017 perum culparuptia archita tias as experro omni Natecto voluptat eum ulpariae nectiberupta aceremquibus Puda velique nonsed quidunt alitati rerfers perrum aut autem sae volorep

HUMAN RIGHTS r i g h t s

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/ E D I T O R I A L Ute perum culparuptia archita tias as experro omni Natecto voluptat eum ulpariae nectiberupta aceremquibus Puda velique nonsed quidunt alitati rerfers perrum aut autem sae volorep udaerchil magnatu reiciene sim eosa quid eaquos Apeles est, odigentint occulligenda con pe volupta coneadicisus moluptame si ipsus essinveribus etur?Agnihillo quistio nsequi occatum quidest iorione mpelenit alia nis autem inciaes arciaep udiorep erovidi tiaestio vollum faccum

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photographer

Ute perum culparuptia archita tias as experro omni Natecto voluptat eum ulpariae nectiberupta aceremquibus Puda velique nonsed quidunt alitati rerfers perrum aut autem sae volorep udaerchil mag natu reiciene sim eosa quid eaquos Apeles est, odigentint occulligenda con pe volupta cone et adicipsus moluptame si ipsus essinveribus etur?

Agnihillo quistio nsequi occatum quidest iorione mpelenit alia nis autem inciaes arciaep udiorep erovidi tiaestio vollum faccum

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Francisca Ramírez Valenzuela architatias as experro omni comnihi ligentium aut volorum CONSEDISSIM

Fracisca Ramírez Valenzuela architatias as experro omni comnihi ligentium aut volorum CONSEDISSIM

Francisca Ramírez Valenzuela architatias as experro omni comnihi ligentium aut volorum CONSEDISSIM

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Levis _ Define your own attitude

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Chance the raper _ Parental music disc

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Dior _All women’s fragrances

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Music_your fine with your belonging for r i g h t s

A R T + C U L T U R

AMANDLA Stenberg: high voltage

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Amandla Stenberg _ your fine with your belonging for r i g h t s

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BEGIN

W

hen Amandla Stenberg heard the news that Trump had been elected, she was in Nazi Germany. The 18-year-old actress and activist was on the set of Amma Asante’s forthcoming film Where Hands Touch, the untold story of the biracial children who existed in war-torn Germany, shooting a scene with a backdrop of buildings covered in swastikas.

“There were soldiers that day who were playing SS soldiers,” she remembers. “It was chilling... kind of like a hyperbolic metaphor for everything that was going on.”

And Post-election, Stenberg took to Instagram, writing a letter to her followers (all one million of them) to express her agony – and to offer those who felt the same pain a place to process their feelings. “I’m fucking furious and I do not expect you to be brave or optimistic,” she wrote. “I hope my page is a space where you can feel safe to speak and be angry. I am not denying the concrete and physical danger of the future. I am telling you that your identity and strides are valid — even when you are tired, even when you are just existing as you.”

Post-election, Stenberg took to Instagram, writing a letter to her followers (all one million of them) to express her agony – and to offer those who felt the same pain a place to process their feelings. “I’m fucking furious and I do not expect you to be brave or optimistic,” she wrote. “I hope my page is a space where you can feel safe to speak and be angry. I am not denying the concrete and physical danger of the future. I am telling you that your identity and strides are valid — even when you are tired, even when you are just existing as you.”

Stenberg has already mastered the role of activist, using social media to advocate for, and amplify the voices of, young people who are black, queer and gender nonconforming. The space that she’s determined to conquer next? The cinema.

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_ ADULTHOOD_

As she enters adulthood, Stenberg is taking conversations about revolution offline and changing their course by inserting herself into cultural spaces where people like her still aren’t seen. This is the very thing that drew her to Asante, whose sophomore feature, 2013’s Belle, is a period drama with a mixed-race protagonist. From 18th-century London (Belle) to Apartheid-era Botswana (last year’s A United Kingdom) and now 1940s Berlin (Where Hands Touch), Asante’s glossy period pieces present alternative versions of history, revised and rewritten through sheer force of representation.

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The Ghanaian-British writer-director has often smuggled politics into her love stories something she has in common with Stenberg.

“Sneaky infiltration – that’s something I really believe in,” says Stenberg with a giggle. This shared desire to sneak positivity and equal onscreen representation into mainstream movies has made the pair close, despite a three-decade age gap. It’s a mutual sense of radical sincerity that has brought them together. Stenberg’s name comes from the Zulu and Xhosa word for ‘power’, but her power is soft. Her mantra is that “it’s cool to care”. As feminist artist Jenny Holzer once put it, “A sincere effort is all you can ask.”

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Across three different time zones in Los Angeles, New York and London, I spoke with Stenberg and Asante about authenticity as activism, self-care as survival, and the shared bond of sisterhood between them.

Amma Asante:I didn’t know she was an actress. A few very brilliant young women had reached out to me at that time for similar reasons, and I desperately wanted to be able to fulfil each and every one of their requests, but in fact that didn’t come to fruition with Amandla.

And then, a year later, I saw the video she did on cultural appropriation and hair (‘Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows’). I think it’s every woman’s prerogative to choose to talk about this or not, but I had been trying for a very, very long time with my partner to have a child, and we hadn’t been able to make that work. I just remember putting on my Facebook page, ‘If I had a daughter, she would be Amandla Stenberg.’

How did the two of you meet?

So you see Amandla as a kind of daughter?

Amandla Stenberg: I slid into her DMs! (laughs) I first reached out to Amma in 2013, maybe 2014. I was working on a project (for school) and reaching out to different people that I really looked up to. And Amma was one of them, because I saw (her film) Belle and saw myself represented in movies as a biracial person. I sent her a message saying, ‘Hi, I’d like to interview you for my women’s studies class!’

AA: It’s really interesting because we’re used to referencing each other as sisters, particularly as women of colour. Amandla is both sister and daughter. I want her to talk about it first, actually.

AS: I don’t think I’ve ever felt the age difference, because I don’t really think about age in that more traditional way. But I definitely think that, with black women, there’s this intrinsic tendency to regard each other as sisters.

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“My belief in myself – my acceptance of myself, my ethnicity, my blackness, my everything – is there whether or not I have hair’’ — Amandla Stenberg

Both of you cut your hair recently; I wanted to ask about your relationship to your hair and how it relates to your femininity.

AS: I’d actually wanted to cut off my hair for a while, and then Amma reached out to me, before Where Hands Touch, and asked me if I’d be willing to shave my head. My response was, ‘Absolutely!’ It was emotional, because I understood how my hair had been a symbol of self-love and self-acceptance for some people, and I understood how having that representation was important to some young girls. Now I feel like self-acceptance has nothing to do with my hair. I feel like my belief in myself – my acceptance of myself, my ethnicity, my blackness, my everything – is there whether or not I have hair. And so I think it was important for a period to have my hair be a symbol of self-love, but now I know that my self-love is there, whether I’m bald or have a full ’fro.

tensions ever since I started working in television, probably. But what that allowed me to do was change up my hair while still making sure that my hair was braided underneath. But that for me never spoke to identity, it purely spoke to comfort and what made life easier for me.

What are your thoughts on using your platforms as a catalyst for change? As activists, how do we galvanise action beyond social media and the internet?

AS: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because, growing up having this platform, I feel a consistent responsibility to utilise it well. I think, for a long amount of time, the most effective thing was to use my platform to speak out openly about the topics that were important to me, such as cultural appropriation, black women feeling their power and learning how to have self-confidence – especially black teenage girls.

AA: That’s so interesting, because I remember having this conversation with myself many years ago, and wondering how my connection with my hair said something about my identity and my sense of acceptance. I’ve worn hair exb l a c k s

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That was really important for me for a period, but I’m not sure it’s the most effective (thing) any more. I feel like social media is a little oversaturated with some of those conversations – not to say that they aren’t important – but I think now is a really critical moment to move from conversations to action.

For me, making movies like Where Hands Touch is the next step. Now I feel like it’s my job to be a spy and infiltrate some of the mainstream media and see what changes I can make just by creating that representation. There’s a power in being part of projects like Everything, Everything (an upcoming film in which Stenberg plays a reclusive teen who falls for the boy next door), which is a teen romance movie, but also one of the first teen romance movies to feature an interracial couple. I see it as sneaking in the medicine with the candies.

AA: I can’t help but wonder, in the small hours, what my life would’ve been like were I a 16-year-old kid that had an Amandla Stenberg in my world!

AS: I feel like one of the most impactful things I can do within the realm of social media at this point is try to break down the barrier between consumer and celebrity – between teenage kids and their perceptions of me as a celebrity.

AA: Right, right.

AS: Because one of the most damaging and scary things that I’m witnessing right now is that huge disconnect. It’s so easy to consume people through social media – to mindlessly consume them as ideas instead of people. I understand that my job and a lot of the amazing things I get to do and experience come with having my identity become more like public property, but something that I’m trying to do is figure out how to have my followers think of me as a person.

AA: The courage to be vulnerable is, in itself, such a strength. I totally hear you, Amandla, when you talk about humanising yourself.

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Being an activist also requires you to make yourself vulnerable, in a sense. How do you balance being public figures and taking care of yourselves?

AA: ‘Self-care’ was a word that came to me very late in life – the understanding that I actually had a right to step back and take some time to look after myself.

AS: I am a pretty spiritual person, and that’s because my mom is a practitioner at a church (non-denominational church Agape). I don’t consider myself (religious), but I do believe in a kind of organisation to the universe and events that transpire. I think that just having an internal knowledge of things unfolding how they are supposed to is self-care. My mom calls it surrendering. She’s a surrenderer.

AA: I guess that’s the antithesis of someone who experiences anxiety – as somebody who experiences anxiety a lot, the one key thing I understand about it is that it’s the inability to surrender. Anxiety is trying to control all of the time. Having the skill to be able to say ‘what will be, will be’ is very cool.

AS: It’s something that I’m continuously learning – it’s not like I’ve mastered it or anything.

I see a lot of teenagers experiencing really high levels of anxiety and depression. I’d say that every person I know in my age range experiences it to a degree. I think a lot of it has to do with this human disconnect that the internet is creating, but also general anxiety about global events and the difficult climate that we’re entering as young working people. So I think one of the most powerful things to do in this moment is to have faith.

“It’s my job to be a spy and infiltrate some of the mainstream media and see what changes I can make just by creating that representation’’ — Amandla Stenberg

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BLACK ARTISTS PROTEST_

Emmett Till painting by white artist ‘Open Casket’, on display at the 78th Whitney Biennial, has been criticised for its racial insensitivity

A painting on display at this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York is being protested for its racial insensitivity, with black artists coming forward to highlight the exploitation of a traumatic, racially-charged event by a white artist.

The painting, “Open Casket” by white American artist Dana Schutz, depicts the body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was brutally murdered after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman in 1955. It’s part of an exhibition that “arrives at a time of racial tensions” and aims to, “challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community”.

The artwork derives from a photograph of Till’s body that was published in magazines at his mother’s wishes after his murder; it played a major part the civil rights movement, and is as relevant in America today as it was then as an image of suffering under racist systems. Today, it’s at the centre of a protest surrounding the coopting of black stories by white people.

Parker Bright, an artist, has been peacefully protesting in front of the painting since the exhibition opened on Friday. He wears a t-shirt that says, “no lynch mob”, on the front, and, “black death spectacle” on the back. In a Facebook Live video of his protest, Bright called the painting, “an injustice to the black community,” adding that he believes it perpetuates “the same kind of violence that was enacted” on Till.

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His concerns have been echoed by many protestors and social media users both in the art world and at large.

In a statement on Twitter, photographer Emmanuel Olunkwa wrote: “Schutz’s piece perpetuates what it actively seeks to critique. In short, the existence of the piece shows that blackness and black people can only exist at the hands of its oppressors”, adding, “Schutz’s painting fetishises black death and normalises the violence that black people experience daily”.

Artist Hannah Black has written an open letter to the curators and staff at the Biennial asking them to remove and destroy the work. In it, she said: “in brief: the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun”, adding, “those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights”.

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The letter has been cosigned by other artists including Juliana Huxtable, who recently took part in a show called Excerpt that aims to, “challenge the power of dominant written knowledge in the construction of black identity, culture, and history”. You can read the full letter here. The first version, put out on Facebook, included several signatures from non-black people, but was later edited.

This isn’t really an appropriate response to the accusation of exploiting black pain – there are many mothers Schutz could have chosen to identify with that doesn’t co-opt black experience and trauma.

Curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks met with Bright to discuss his protest on Tuesday. Lew said in a statement to Artnet: “For us it was so much about an issue that extends across race. Yes, it’s mostly black men who are being killed, but in a larger sense this is an American problem.”

“In response to some helpful criticism, I’m now only including Black co-signs,” Black wrote in a new post. “Non-Black people super very welcome to help get painting destroyed tho in other ways.” She added: “Remember, contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends, so most of what happens in it is politically meaningless.

But the painting should still be destroyed, tho.”

In a similarly response, Locks added: “Right now I think there are a lot of sensitivities not just to race but to questions of identities in general. We welcome these responses. We invited these conversations intentionally in the way that we thought about the show.” Despite the growing challenge, there are currently no plans by the Whitney to remove the painting.

In an emailed statement to the Guardian, Schutz responded: “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension”, and, “my engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother”.

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I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO_ r i g h t s

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The film resurrecting the radical writing of James Baldwin ‘I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO’ IS RAOUL P E C K ’ S E S S E N T I A L N E W D O C – W E TA L K T O H I M A B O U T H O L LY W O O D A N D U N D E R S TA N D I N G H I S T O RY

James Baldwin _ I Not your Negro films images James Baldwin _ I Not your Negro films images b l a c k s

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James Baldwin _ I Not your Negro films images

Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro wants you to reconsider the media landscape. “To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality,” goes one passage. “We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are.... these images are designed not to trouble, but to reassure. They also weaken our ability to understand the world as it is.”

The words in the film, recited by Samuel L. Jackson, belong entirely to James Baldwin. No interviews, no talking heads; just Baldwin. The radical author, a black homosexual in the public eye, attempted a book in 1979 called Remember This House: a recollection of his friendships with Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, three civil rights activists assassinated by the age of 40. It was to expose the structural racism of America and Hollywood.

Baldwin only wrote 30 pages and died in 1987.

In I Am Not Your Negro, Peck resurrects the unfinished manuscript. Baldwin’s words are juxtaposed with images of the past and present, forming a collage that suggests little has changed. In 1968, Baldwin was asked, naively, on Dick Cavett’s chat show: “Why aren’t the negroes optimistic? It’s getting so much better. r i g h t s

There are negro mayors. There are negroes in sports. There are negroes in politics.” Baldwin, of course, knew better.

Half a century on, history seems to be repeating itself. What Baldwin wrote in the 1970s resonated then, and it still resonates now, worryingly so, with the cultural commentary cutting deep into the rotting innards of society. Basically, I Am Not Your Negro is essential viewing, and here we speak to Raoul Peck, the filmmaker behind it all, about piecing the puzzle together.

Why did you pick I Am Not Your Negro as the title?

Raoul Peck: For a long time, the title was Remember This House. But I felt I had to be as direct as Baldwin is, in the way he speaks. I knew I had to find a title from where I stand, and from where Baldwin stands. I Am Not Your Negro is exactly that. It says something without being aggressive. It says: “This is where I stand.

Let’s talk.”

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Baldwin criticised cowboy films and loathed Stephen Fetchit. Are those kinds of racial politics still alive in modern filmmaking?

“We are one history, and if we don’t understand the connections, we don’t understand anything” – Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck: Baldwin showed that Hollywood movies are a machine of propaganda that can be very brutal or very soft. It doesn’t have to be obvious. Baldwin teaches you how to watch those films, and what’s the reality they’re telling you. Film transports ideology, film transports culture, film transports a point of view of life and history. It’s never innocent.

But viewers now, I imagine, are watching it with modern politics on their mind.

Raoul Peck: But when I make a film, I try to make it still valuable in 50 years’ time. The film is still a story, and you can always watch a story, no matter when you watch it. I created a character that is Baldwin. So when you see the film, you will go into that story. Of course, there is a connection with your current life. When I use Ferguson, it’s because it’s an incredible symbol, and I use it in an artistic way that is not just news. I frame it in a cinematic way. You can be accurate about the present time, but without making news. I’m not a journalist.

To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six and I’ve since seen the bad guys changing race – between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at Rambo, it’s exactly that. And now it’s mostly Arabs and terrorists. That’s what Hollywood does. The battle that they can’t win on the battlefield, they win in cinema. Yes, it’s happening today. You can binge a TV series or watch a reality show, and they’re not innocent. They take a lot of room in your brain, and you don’t have any space left for your own thoughts. They give you a scripted reality. It’s an ideological tool. Baldwin wrote that 50 years ago, saying the entertainment industry functions like narcotics. This is exactly what’s happening.

Why do you use Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry” for the end credits? That song feels quite present.

Raoul Peck: I had to close the circle. I had to make a real link to today’s situation. There are new ways to fight. I respect what Kendrick Lamar is doing. I like his lyrics, I like his music, and I think he’s continuing a way to address the reality. I use all sorts of music – from jazz to spiritual to blues to classic – and I think the rap of Kendrick Lamar has a place in that context.

So why do those words from 50 years ago still resonate now?

There’s a cut to Doris Day that’s quite noticeable because it’s more abstract than, say, footage of old cowboy films.

Raoul Peck: Basically, it’s the same system.

When he wrote that, there were only three TV channels in the US. Now, there’s cable, day and night. You don’t have that much time in your life, so imagine the invasion of your brain and what kind of damage it does to your brain. We have a superficial view of the world, without touching the essential structural aspect of it. For me, this film is a way to take some distance.

When you see that in 50 years nothing fundamental has changed, it allows you to see the bigger picture.

Raoul Peck: I’m sure your generation knows less about Doris Day, but she was an icon for Hollywood… well, they didn’t call it “whiteness” at the time, but it’s the clean, very romantic Hollywood image. I was submitted to that image as well. I loved watching Doris Day films, but it’s an illusion of real life. Baldwin deconstructs that image. Even the most progressive Hollywood movies like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones – both at the time considered very progressive – were part of his criticism. They used Sidney Poitier for this image that didn’t tell the truth. They brought an image of the black man that wasn’t romantic.

Do you wish you could re-edit the film to incorporate what’s happened in the past few months in America?

Raoul Peck: I have to make sure I’m not dating my movie. I’m not a journalist. I’m not running the news. b l a c k s

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James Baldwin _ I Not your Negro films images

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In the film, Baldwin says: “To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free. It is only very unwillingly and sporadically the home of the brave.” Why do you then cut straight to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant?

Raoul Peck: I was making sure people understand I’m not making a film about the past.

It’s now. Baldwin speaks about young people being lost in this “land of the free”. Elephant and those school killings, it’s the craziest thing that’s happened. The whole thing about gun control and how people are resisting. Everything is linked. You can link it to the absence of gun control and also this country’s violent past.

Or John Wayne killing Indians – kids grow up on that kind of image. The images, words and music are so that you understand everything is linked. We are one history, and if we don’t understand the connections, we don’t understand anything. We are blind people that are drowned by the industry. They can send you to war and you want to kill people without knowing why.

So, knowing your history is important, and it’s understanding how your history is linked to everything, to money, to making profit, to wars, to racism. That’s what I hope the film does. It makes you step back and realise, “Wow, I never saw it that way.”

I Am Not Your Negro is in cinemas on 7 April.

James Baldwin _ I Not your Negro films images

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WHO WAS

ABRA in music: Age is so irrelevant in art

BORN

becoming ABRA

Abra_ ‘Age is so irrelevant in art. Everyone has their own timeline’ – the Awful Records graduate crafting songs for outsiders reveals the epiphany that gave her a new assertive energy.

Text_Liz Pelly Photography_Gregory Harris Styling_Nell Kalonji

It’s an experience that made the Atlanta songwriter and producer see a new potential direction for her own music, which she has been working on for almost a decade in various forms. “Music has so much power,” she says.

“You can change someone’s entire perspective with good music, so why not put that out there?”

Abra’s most recent work, the Princess EP, brims with that assertive energy. Less than 24 hours ago, she was playing songs from it at her first sold-out headline show in her hometown. “It was crazy,” says Abra, smiling. “Everywhere I looked I saw someone I knew. It was one of the best nights ever. I had to be at the airport at 7:30am but everyone was trying to make me go out, which I did and regretted! I packed this morning at 5:30 with tears in my eyes like, ‘I can’t do this.’”

Hard as it was getting on the plane this morning, the show was an important milestone for Abra.

Especially for the presence of her parents, who had never quite been able to comprehend her mostly internet-based success as an artist, despite all she’s achieved: three records, countless collaborations, international touring, magazine spreads. “I don’t think they really understood until they came to my show last night,” she says. “It was packed, everyone was singing my words to my songs.”

It’s

Friday night around 9pm on a rooftop in Chelsea and, as the Manhattan skyline glitters around us, Abra is remembering the intensely bad trip that changed everything. “I took three hits of acid and it ended up being six,” she says, laughing. “I started putting on my own music to see if it would help me or not, and I realised, ‘This is not positive.’ Like, ‘This is not bad, but it’s not uplifting.’ Then I put on this six-hour Buddhist chant on YouTube, and it just changed me.

It took me right out of this terrible downwardspiral trip into just, like, calm peacefulness.”

Abra is an experimenter, messing with 80s beats and making shadowy, reverb-heavy hooks bounce over dark-hued drum machine patterns. She’s an outsider even in her own crew, the leftfield Awful Records rap scene, where her type of synth-pop is uncommon. The Princess EP, a six-song set released in July on True Panther Sounds, followed two records self-released via Awful: the BLQ Velvet EP, unveiled in early 2015, and debut LP Rose, out in June the same year.

Between releases, Abra has been honing her skills as a producer, and “trying to evolve as a human being” by reading as much as she can. “If people are going to watch me, I want to make sure I’m a person worth watching,” she says. “I’m trying to make sure I’m living a healthy lifestyle mentally.” Her reading has been varied, from the esoteric spiritual writings of Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov to Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. “I’m just trying to read things that open me up to different perspectives.”

ABRA:

“Age is so irrelevant in art”

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The EP’s confident aura comes through in its visuals, too: on the striking cover, Abra is topless beside an innocent-looking white horse.

“For this project I tried really hard not to censor myself,” she says. “I’m always saying sorry for things. I grew up really repressed. My dad would be like, ‘You’re a little princess, you’re my pride and joy, you can’t do any of this stuff.’

And so I felt like the cover had this kind of Princess Jasmine vibe. Yeah, I’m a princess, but I’m also still going to be me at the end of the day.

Yeah, the white horse is angelic, but it can get wicked too sometimes.”

Princess was entirely written, produced and performed by Abra, largely at home, with scrappy synths and a laptop. It was mostly recorded in her bedroom closet, and it sounds like it – but the music’s rough edges belie a palpable sense of confidence, emotionally vulnerable yet full of strength. “Crybaby” is the centrepiece, with Abra singing “You’re calling me a crybaby / but you’re making me cry” over crackling, highenergy beats before turning the tables on the song’s antagonist: “You always call me a crybaby / Well let me teach you how to cry, baby.”

It’s the outsider song of the summer, an anthem for those late-night moments when you have to be honest with yourself.

For the shoot, lensed by her close friend Pierre Pastel, Abra’s manager took her to a plot of land full of horses trained specifically for movies. “I don’t have any qualms with nudity,” she says.

“You may see me nude but you don’t see me naked. It was completely comfortable.”

“I grew up very insecure and unconfident,” explains Abra, who maintains a sense of anonymity online, never giving out her age or her full name. “It’s just not a healthy way to live. I used to blame it on a lot of people, but it’s just within yourself. Your worst enemy is yourself.

I’ve been trying to make music for people to feel good about themselves, instead of perpetuating sad-girl music. There’s more to life than being sad. I love it when people tweet me and they’re like, ‘I listen to this every morning when I wanna get hype, or when I wanna go run.’”

Abra grew up everywhere. Born in New York to a family of missionaries, her childhood was mostly spent in south London, where her parents were building a church in which her father would become pastor. When she was ten years old, the family relocated to the suburbs of Atlanta. She considers Atlanta OTP (‘outside the perimeter’, as locals refer to the city’s suburbs) to be the place that raised her.

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Even so, Abra grew up with a constant sense of non-belonging. “I was always left out of things, for multiple reasons,” she says. “Both my parents are foreigners. I’m a black girl who everyone thinks is white. They called me Oreo. So it was like, ‘I don’t fit in because I’m not a real black person to black people. I’m a Christian so I can’t do anything. My dad is strict so I can’t go to prom, I can’t go to homecoming, I can’t sleep over at your house, I can’t have a boyfriend…’ It was multiple layers of exclusion.”

Growing up in a heavily religious household, surrounded by perspectives that didn’t feel relevant to her, was frustrating and complicated. It became especially difficult when her best friend came out as gay, and she would get into huge fights with her dad on the subject. “From then on, it was just a downward spiral of me just being like, ‘I don’t fuck with this, and I don’t fuck with that, and this is wrong,’” she says. “‘No and no and no, I’m not gonna just swallow this stuff that I don’t believe in.’ I’ve always been fairly combative.”

In the run-up to college (she eventually studied anthropology at Georgia State, which she says changed her life), Abra turned to music and the internet as an outlet.

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She would cover rap songs by the likes of Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame on guitar, posting YouTube videos under the name Hurricane Gabrielle. Eventually, Atlanta rapper Father found one of them, and saw potential.

He invited Abra to hang with his label collective Awful Records, the crew known for giving a DIY platform to artists like iLoveMakonnen and Tommy Genesis. The new community she stumbled into was inspiring.

“Awful Records gave me a context to exist within,” she says. “I was just this little folksy singer, singing some kind of weird, lo-fi R&B shit. Awful gave me the confidence to be who I am. I was working with a lot of producers before I came out with my own stuff. It never felt right, but I would always show (the Awful crew) and they’d be like, ‘Nah, dog, stick to your own stuff, produce your own music.’ I had a project that was supposed to come out and I showed (Awful affiliate) RichPoSlim, and he was like, ‘You can do better.’” The very next week, she started working on BLQ Velvet. “He was the first person that gave me that confidence. And that’s a really good gift.”

“You can be great at 16, you can be great at 30.

Age is so irrelevent in art. Everyone has their own timeline” — Abra

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The epochal electronic musician is back sounding rejuvenated on new album AZD – we talk radio interference, black art and making music that sounds like chrome.

Text_Chal Ravens

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actress: REBIRTHS and requiems

An actress’s identity is always in flux. For Darren Cunningham, whose first album under the alias came out almost a decade ago, being Actress has allowed him to shapeshift at will, pushing his “R&B concrète” into increasingly abstract territory over four distinct, individually acclaimed albums. But after 2012’s RIP, a solemn epitaph inspired by death, ascension, and the epic poetry of John Milton, 2014’s gloomy Ghettoville was a long exhalation, the “feeling of being dead”, as he said at the time. It felt as if Actress had taken a final bow – but now he returns with his fifth album, introducing a new persona on AZD. His music has always been intimate and intense, but Cunningham has never shied away from big ideas. On AZD, the Wolverhampton-born artist ties the personal with the political, harking back to the electro and techno energies of his early albums and lifelong influences Derrick May and Juan Atkins on tracks that enhance his monochromatic palette with a layer of shining chrome, as imagined by his synesthetic mind.

If Ghettoville seemed like an exhausted coda to the lifespan of Actress, his rebirth as AZD finds him in a playful, rejuvenated mood. There’s humour under the surface, from the title (pronounced “azid”) being an anagram of his childhood nickname, Daz, to the deadpan solemnity of the album’s prettiest track, which he’s titled “Falling Rizlas”.

The album feels charged with electricity. Tracks are battered by static crackle and radio interference, melodies appear as if crossing over from other frequencies. On “CYN”, a sample of New York hip hop luminary Rammellzee is interrupted by grinding industrial noise and delicate Aphexian synths; on “Faure in Chrome”, a brittle interpretation of Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem”, we descend into a noise-splintered symphony.

You could say a mask has been lifted. “Some people thought I was killing off Actress, and maybe in some ways I was,” he says, before adding as reassurance, “it is always personal.”

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Our conversation takes place in southeast London in the second-floor flat that currently houses his synths, samplers and towers of artist monographs. Leaving a ghostly sliver of synth playing softly while the vertical lights of the city blink in the distance, Cunningham explains how the cryptic self-built language of hip hop philosopher Rammellzee and the “outsider” art of James Hampton influenced AZD and argues that dance music is effectively obsolete.

As Actress, you’ve often experimented with your identity. You’ve also released music anonymously and under different aliases. But the thing is, your sound is very distinctive – it’s pretty easy to guess who’s behind those releases.

Actress: Yeah, but on the other side I’m emphasising the distinctiveness in my sound, so it’s almost like an extreme patenting. There is no mystique, really, about what I do. I know my sound is quite distinctive, but I need to send out reminders of that distinctiveness at the same time because it preserves what I do. It preserves my creativity and it patents the language that I’m putting into my music.

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Have you ever been concerned that as you become more proficient you might lose certain aspects of your sound that made it so distinctive, like the sense of imperfection that runs through your records? You’ve talked before about your love of Detroit label Metroplex because there’s always something fucked up about those early techno records – and perhaps as you become more skilled, it can be hard to preserve that.

Actress: I don’t think that’ll ever happen, to be honest with you. I just think that’s naturally the way that I make music – there’s always imperfections in it. No matter how much I refine it, no matter how much I update or modernise the equipment, the imperfections will always be there. And that’s just because there are gaps in my knowledge that I will never be able to fill in.

Or is it because you wouldn’t want to fill them in?

Actress: I wouldn’t want to fill them in, also.

Don’t get me wrong, I do sort of go, ‘I wish I could do this, it would make things so much easier.’

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I can sit at the piano and knock out a tune – I mean, I can knock out my sort of tune – but sometimes I feel I would like to have learned how to play the piano properly. That’s not to say I didn’t have lessons, and this is why I think my music will always have those imperfections, ‘cos I think there’s a slight short circuit in my brain in terms of learning.

You used to produce without a metronome. Is that still the case?

I remember my nan’s friend trying to teach me how to play the piano. He was a 70-year-old man and he was getting so frustrated with me, hitting me over the head with his walking stick, and I was like, ‘I just don’t get it! Can’t I just do what I wanna do?’ And I think it’s that rebellion, not wanting to adhere to the rules and leaving it this long, to the point where I’ve devised a system of working which is kind of half-in, half-out. It’s between the robotic electronic music that I grew up listening to and the human aspect, just physically messing around with stuff.

Actress: That mostly comes from dance, I think. When I was younger I was always dancing. The music I was into was new jack swing, music where you really had to break your body.

So (clicks fingers) I just feel that, you know, and the sort of in-between-ness of it. I’m never (clicks fingers steadily). I’m always finding those gaps that are in between.

Actress: When I first started that was how I started making music, yeah.

That’s a very distinct path to follow early on, not having that ‘click’ to guide you.

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Photography_Viviane Sassen

m.i.a. : bandit queen

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We talk to the divisive pop icon about her identity as a refugee, being a British Asian in the 90s and gaining inspiration from groundbreaking political renegades Text_Kieran Yates

M.I.A. is on the top floor of an east London hotel discussing her favourite freedom fighters. “I’m definitely a bandit,” she says as we talk about one of our mutual favourites, the Indian renegade Phoolan Devi. Famously known as ‘Bandit Queen’, Devi was kidnapped as a teenager by bandits, fell in love with a gang member, and was subsequently gang-raped in a revenge attack over the murder of the group’s leader. She got her revenge when she returned to the village where she’d been attacked and shot dead 22 men. Devi was on the run for two years afterwards, but gave herself up in 1983.

She waited 11 years for a trial, but in 1994 all charges were dropped against her, and she moved into politics just two years later. In 2001 she was assassinated.

Along with Devi the bandit queen, she also cites Indian guerilla fighter ‘Shivaji’ Bhosle, the German resistance group Baader-Meinhof (“They had all these ideas about class that spoke to me from an artistic perspective”) and the first female PM of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto (“There was something quite Bollywood about her because she just looked so good. She was intelligent and she was fucking strong”) as influences.

But it was growing up with Indira Gandhi as the Indian prime minister that really informed her life and work. She beams with her straight white teeth and perfectly applied red lipstick as she describes her. “Before I’d encountered the west or come to England I encountered Indira Gandhi,” she says. “So I knew brown women could stand up.”

“I was always hearing about her,” she says.

“Then when I really got into it, I was like, ‘Wow, this is pretty radical feminism.’ I’m definitely a bandit, or at least a pirate of some sort.”

Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam has woven the idea of standing up deep into the fabric of her artistic statement. I was in university the first time I heard “Paper Planes”, and the hairs on my neck stood up perfectly vertical, as I heard her rattle the lyrics in her mouth and spit them out. It was an uncompromising takedown of the demonisation of refugees, written from firsthand experience.

It’s not an inaccurate conclusion to draw. The pirate within her, plundering culture with no real allegiance to a ‘sovereign nation’, might be a sharper self-assessment than she realises. She is, after all, a proud refugee, a self-styled outlaw giving a knowing middle finger to the media panic about incoming ‘plunderers’ of state benefits. M.I.A. has made a career sidestepping the confines of the status quo, and it’s telling that her icons are all political radicals rather than musicians. b l a c k s

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The powerful, jolting gunshots on the line “All I wanna do is (bang-bang-bang!) and take your money” making it on to mainstream radio was a furious moment, and goaded those with negative attitudes towards refugees, while the line, “If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name” had the same effect.

The message seems to be that it can speak for her, and when it does, you have to listen. Today, she wants to speak about everything else, and over the course of the hour she’s covered Julian Assange, Apple, the Arab Spring and even a bit of Marx for good measure. If she wasn’t so likable, it might feel like quite hard work.

The song introduced M.I.A. to the mainstream (though she had been making waves on Myspace before this) as a force to be reckoned with. As a south Asian girl, with limited representation in pop, watching her stand up and stand out felt like she was speaking directly to me. “Being a refugee is part of my identity,” she says. “I was like, ‘Look, we can have opinions, we can enter the creative world and be respected as equal.’”

She tells the story of her own migration in a pithy, play-by-play journey which she’s most likely rehearsed and repeated over her career.

“My identity constantly shifts,” she says drily.

“In Sri Lanka, I was bombed and shot at for being a Tamil, then when I went to India to study, I was the poorest person in the class so I was treated as an untouchable. Then, when I came to England, I was a refugee and I was called a Paki. When I became a rapper, I was a brown woman and not from the hood in America.”

At the time, Arulpragasam was negotiating her way through her British identity and increased global visibility as an artist. Born in Hounslow, west London into what she calls “an extremely political family”, she moved to Sri Lanka at six months old, then later, to the Tamil Nadu region on the south coast of India. As civil war broke out in the region, she was relocated, aged ten, to Britain as a conflict refugee and moved to an estate in Mitcham, southwest London.

“When I came to England, I was a refugee and I was called a Paki. When I became a rapper, I was a brown woman and not from the hood in America” – M.I.A. All of this dislocation, this rewriting (and sometimes enforcing) the narrative of the Dangerous Brown Woman in the West is part of M.I.A.’s identity as an artist: powerful, charming and problematic in equal measure. Speaking after a public furore following her scheduled – and cancelled – performance at Afropunk London, she shrugs, “I don’t want to be kept in a quiet little corner. We need a broader scale to communicate on because that’s our problem; it’s about reach, we’re not given enough of a reach because the media outlets just haven’t put us there and we can’t always fight for those spaces.”

“Paper Planes” was poking at the pressure points of the US government, which refused her a work visa to record her 2007 album Kala, despite the fact she was living in a rented Brooklyn apartment at the time. (She is still unable to obtain a US visa, she says, but for different, undisclosed reasons). Sonically, the song’s trembling basslines and psychedelic beats were a blueprint for the space that she was bulldozing for herself.

It’s not just her misdemeanours that have us watching. Her aesthetic was crafted during her time at St Martins in London, but not without difficulty. “When I went to art school I was a poor person from a council flat who shouldn’t be at St Martins,” she says. From the ginger extermination in the controversial video for “Born Free” to the kaleidoscopic thrill of manipulated Bollywood samples on “Jimmy”, her work has always been about visual messaging and cultural coding.

Arulpragasam’s ability to be professionally uncompromising (she recounts an anecdote about how Diplo once remarked that talking to her was like “negotiating with North Korea”) and boundary-pushing – often to her own detriment – is fascinating. This year alone she’s been sued by the French football club Paris Saint-Germain and publicly challenged for her comments on Black Lives Matter. Even today, she’s tripping over ideas and words and huge ideas, and it’s not the album that she wants to discuss.

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M.I.A_ “All the cool brown girls had the quiffs and the red lips, and watching the second generation explosion of girls going insane was incredible. It was amazing... and then 9/11 happened� .

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I ask her how the lines have shifted for her as global success enabled her to be simultaneously liberated and locked into her image. She makes abstract globular shapes with her hands.

“I think we’re living in a time where political freedom is a really weird, blobby thing and the blob is difficult to grab on to because it keeps moving,” she says. “I remember in 2010, a year after the war had ended in Sri Lanka, and those people (Sri Lankans) were still awaiting some sort of justice. I felt like I needed to come here (to the UK) and my family was banned from America. The idea of ‘freedom’ was really put to me – you can have it, but your family can’t have it and your people can’t have it and even your politics can’t have it”.

But while the story has been carefully crafted through Arulpragasam’s music (“Arular is shouty, Kala is going around the world, Maya is when you get the dream and Matangi is where you realise it comes at a cost”), she has always come before it. Her worldview is at the centre of AIM, and this is an album where global headlines have triggered memories of her own experiences of conflict. The freedom she raps about is a quest to find her own in a brave and uncomfortable space of labels and corporate interests and ‘making it’. On “Foreign Friend”, the lie is revealed as she muses, “We get out of our tent, climb over the fence / when we get our flatscreen TV / then we pay rent / then we think we made it.”

With her latest album, AIM, there are so many targets in the crosshairs it’s hard to keep up. It’s true that if anyone is entitled to feel like they’ve been shouting into a political vacuum over the past few years, it’s her – and this is an almost desperate attempt to make her point. Characteristically unsubtle at times, (on “Borders” she asks, “Politics? What’s up with that?”), it’s also a powerful declaration that rewrites the narrative of freedom.

We discuss the anticlimax of landing in a country that doesn’t welcome you as you’d hope in relation to the post-Brexit landscape, where the fear of white British values and culture being eroded seems to have taken hold. “The idea of ‘white’ freedom being under attack is so powerful,” she says. “When you’re a refugee, you become the place where you land. You have to embrace it. British Asians in the 90s were insane. I went to Hampstead college which was 80 per cent brown and at that time we didn’t think we were gonna have problems. All the cool brown girls had the quiffs and the red lips, and watching the second generation explosion of girls going insane was incredible. It was amazing... and then 9/11 happened.

Musically, the record is a cluster of sounds steeped in semantics. Motifs of caged birds appear in “Bird Song”, and there are tracks titled “Foreign Friend”, “Visa” and “Borders” – it’s all very literal when it comes to noticing her own restrictions. Songs like “Jump” are guttural and evocative – you can hear her clamouring towards an idea of political freedom just out of reach (“When I see that border I don’t cross the line”). The intention is clear, even when Arlpragasam’s ideas don’t quite cohere – but when they do, it’s spectacular.

“Things went backwards. This is why I’m putting this record out, to slow down division.

It’s going backwards because stupidity is winning,” she says. Asked why she thinks that is, she launches into a tirade about the distribution of power and wealth, her voice rising as she keeps coming back to the same point – that she doesn’t know really, but there are hundreds and hundreds of complex factors.

M.I.A.’s rapping style has always been an acquired taste, even as far back as the early, jerky, Peaches-inspired MC-505 productions, with the strange emphasis on certain syllables, the London twang disrupting the cadence of a line, the sideways pronunciations.

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“Let’s just say this,” she says with a weary smile. “I thought that, by 2016, we would have had 20 MIAs! I didn’t think I’d have to come out of retirement at my age and still be waving the flag for Indian girls and Tamils and Muslims. I didn’t think that would be where we are.”

Wherever we find ourselves, it’s true that M.I.A. continues to be political just by virtue of existing. Her visibility proves that brown bodies can exist, and be sellable - well, hers at least.

While the world hasn’t moved on in the ways the Arular-era artist would have hoped, she’s navigating her way through new worlds again.

I make a joke about getting the only other western brown pop star in for one of the record’s singles (“Freedun”, featuring Zayn Malik) and she’s in on it: “Well, it’s only us out here!”

It’s depressing, really, that there is still only one M.I.A. more than a decade into her career, and that the world has created other brown caricatures in the place where others like her might exist – hijabi terrorist, ISIS sympathiser, benefit scrounger. Can you really stand up in the pop world when brown (let alone, a refugee) still isn’t the desired default? “We come from big cultures of community, and individuality is a thing you need to fight for,” she says, taking a big breath. “That’s what bandits do.”

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BREAKING

WOMENS in the word:

THE GIRL

about intelligent and power

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FAYE WEI WEI IS LONDON’S DREAMIEST PAINTER_ Ahead of her London show opening, the artist talks to Antonia Marsh about drawing inspiration from poetry, mythology, classic artists and her collection of trinkets Text_Antonia Marsh

Confronting cosmic themes of myth, love, and memory, the poetically symbolic elements in young British painter Faye Wei Wei’s towering oil paintings hang suspended in a dreamlike ectoplasm. Brides, sphinxes, boxers, knights, snakes, horses and a lioness all cohabit, enacting a vibrant and mystical silent play, as if dancing off the walls upon which they’re hung for her show Anemones and Lovers opening tonight at Cob Gallery in London. In an enthralling twist, while her canvases exude an indelible sense of femininity that the artist has no issue associating with, her investigation into certain characteristic female and male dichotomies paradoxically expose her concerns with questioning the accepted tropes of each sex.

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Combining an almost surreal assemblage of visual cues gleaned from an obsessive collection of art historical sources, Wei Wei emulates a rich plethora of influences in her work. Whether Rembrandt’s compositions, the marble floor of a Vermeer, Cezanne’s infamous Plaster Cupid, David Hockney’s idiosyncratic handling of water or the early Renaissance fresco painter Piero della Francesca’s depictions of glinting armour, the artist weaves a tapestry of references together with her own secrets, anxieties and emotions, delicately painted into vibrating arabesques of gemlike colour.

Artwork by Faye Wei Wei

Visiting Wei Wei’s studio is not unlike entering an Aladdin’s cave of shells, flowers, trinkets, souvenirs, books, poems and torn out pages of images, amassed instinctively and obsessively in an unconscious and effortless example of the developing role of the artist as collector and archivist in a world so bloated with images and content.

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I loved exploring the fragments in your studio: the shells, daisies, the Virgin Mary holy water, and other objects you showed me, all your books scattered across the floor that you referred to as the “cloud of books around me.”

Sometimes awash with swathes of brushwork, and others flooded with a single colour, the spaces between the figurative or symbolic elements of your paintings have a presence of their own. After discussing your collection of shells from Japan and why their disparate display interests you, it became clear that these spaces don’t feel secondary, they maintain an almost equal importance. What is it about the spaces between the shells, and the spaces between your figures that interests you?

How vital to your development of a painting are these surroundings? How do you start a painting?

Faye Wei Wei: When I begin with a blank canvas, I like to lay out on the floor all the images and paintings and references that I felt drawn to that morning, then I sit amongst the crowd and begin to draw. Then when I come to attack the picture plane and sort of leap over this cloud of images, my eye will absorb and subconsciously be thinking about certain symbols or feelings.

As well as the flat images, the objects you mention are my jewels! I have this plastic Egyptian toy that fills with sand that a kind shopkeeper of an antique shop gave me one day when I was wandering around Brooklyn, having lost my voice, I pointed at it in a glass cabinet and he gifted it to me in a brown paper bag. I think it’s my lucky charm!

Faye Wei Wei: My drawing tutor in New York would talk about Rothko’s paintings being about the emotional vibrations between human beings. She would speak about the importance of the sensuality of painting and the importance of the mark making, how every mark should feel and how you should really mean it when you place them down. When I begin to paint I often start with the figure and the objects around them, then comes the background colour that floods the rest of the spaces, pins down the picture like leaves on the surface of a pond, or like these shells I have from Tokyo, each glazed and placed in its place within their wooden box. It is within this fluid, flush of colour that I really enjoy the paint, pushing it into the canvas, letting the skin react to my touch.

Light reacts to the luminosity of oil paint and suddenly I find that all the floating symbols, the snakes, the bleeding lance, the window – they feel as if they are connected, trying to evoke that very human emotional vibration. I guess what I think is, in a way there is a hierarchy in terms of when you read a picture, people react to the human figure first, and there I hope to pin the viewer’s interest with the painting, then I hope they notice the symbols and the relationship between still life and the figure, then there is the negative space that can denote depth or flatness – therein lies the magic for me.

With such a tapestry of symbols and woven stories and narratives that go into each painting, what do you hope the viewer takes from your works… how vital is it that they understand your visual language, or are your paintings open to individual interpretation?

Faye Wei Wei: These symbols and fantasy stories I imbue my work with are so personal to me, so it surprises me, but also makes me so, so happy when people react to them and say they like them. Someone recently said they thought that the boy in, “He Donned His Trousers of Striped Grass” looked like their boyfriend! I love that you can read so much from a painted face, two eyes, a nose and a mouth. When I’m painting I get really lost in the process, I become really in a sort of trance and when I step back and see what I’ve made sometimes it can really surprise me, it’s like all these secrets and hidden longings or sad things come to the surface, but I find them really comforting because I know these figures who are holding my secrets will stay silent for me forever!

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Artwork by Faye Wei Wei

Artwork by Faye Wei Wei

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You mentioned the dualities that reappear in your paintings: snakes and thorns, drawn in reverse to one another, the knight in shining armour versus the naked vulnerable boy, the women in wedding dresses versus the lioness or the sphinx… Can you explain these recurring pairings? Where did they originate and what have they come to represent for you?

Your paintings often look at love as a theme, but rather than exalting or celebrating love, they seem to call it into question. In colour, gesture and composition, the paintings may seem romantic in their initial outward appearance, but you mention that there’s a darkness there.

If, as you say, the boxers symbolise frustration with love, then by the same token what role do the knights and brides play in the paintings?

Does this archaic fairy tale still exist, or do your paintings aim to call it into question?

Faye Wei Wei: The more that I paint, the more these symbols appear into my bag of tricks.

Then I just notice pairings in them quite subconsciously. The triangles that indicate the slither skin of the snake, inversely create the piercing thorns of a rose’s stem. I have always been drawn to things in pairs, my compositions often end up being heart shaped, two lovers dancing, two boxers fighting, a tulip caressing another tulip, a horse in duet with its rider. I guess it’s also to do with the nature of things having an opposite, every flower has a shadow, every moon has a sun. With the knight in shining armour being paired with the vulnerable naked boy, I think of the sea urchin, a black five-point star with spiked black shell, protecting the treasure of its flesh inside. I think eating is one of the highest forms of pleasure, and sea urchins are my favourite taste.

Faye Wei Wei: I think growing up as a girl, you are exposed to a lot of fairy tales and this Disney idea of romance. I am obsessed by these stories but at the same time of course I think they are archaic and quite dark. I remember learning about ancient Roman baths, how people would use this curved blunt scraper to scrape their dead skin and this would be made into a love potion. I wonder if that ever worked.

I also wondered if you could touch on the perceived femininity in your paintings, I remember a story you told me about a male teacher at art school who described them as “pretty pictures”?

How do you circumnavigate such assumptions, or do you welcome them?

The boxers, the knight, the bride appear more than once in the paintings, almost like characters in a painted play. Is there an underlying narrative to the works in the show? Do these characters tell a story when all together in one space?

Faye Wei Wei: I don’t hide from these labels, I know the work is decorative and contain a lot of what is considered, feminine qualities. But I think that is where their strength is, because it is a truth that belongs to me. Gender is performative and the way I express it is not something I am going to feel ashamed of, or try to mask under the guise of “stronger” colours or more “masculine” subject matter. I feel like I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t feel right. Emotions are universal. Love is universal – and for now that’s how I’m going to express my paintings, like a happy pearl in a clam.

Faye Wei Wei: It’s been so wonderful to see the paintings come together and hung at the gallery, the figures winking at each other from across the room. I always think the figures know each other, some of them make an appearance in multiple pictures. There isn’t any specific narrative I have in mind when painting, but somehow the figures are intertwined. The way we hung the show, there’s the room at the back that I wanted to feel more grand and cathedral like, these larger works placed in a four staring at one another, the colours are deeper, richer and the mood is slightly darker. The front room for me feels more light, the palettes are softer, the works in there feel more vulnerable to me.

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Artwork by Faye Wei Wei

Artwork by Faye Wei Wei

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Text_Liz Pelly Text_Jack Mills Photography_Fumi Nagasaka Styling_Emma Wyman

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the ACTIVISTS The events of 2016 galvanised a generation of young Americans to speak out — we spotlight the activists organising for real change in the second of a three part series.

When President Trump won the 45th US Presidential election in 2016, the New York Times declared it “a stunning repudiation of the establishment.” And yet for many on the afternoon of November 8, it felt like progress had suddenly been set in reverse. Many of Trump’s native New Yorkers took to the streets with banners and flaming effigies — symbols of resilience and revolt in the face of impending doom.

As protests continue to ignite across America this year, we platform a young generation taking charge of their nation’s future — from protecting trans rights in the prison system, to standing in the way of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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KIRK KNIGHT In his teens, as socially conscious hip-hop collective Pro Era started taking off, crew member Kirlan Labarrie suddenly changed his name to Kirk Knight. In interviews, he jokingly tells people it’s a nod to Curren$y’s breezy boombap tune “Michael Knight” – but actually, his reasons are far more personal. Born and raised in the neglected Brooklyn province of Flatbush, Knight has long suffered from insomnia and does much of his beatmaking by night. Over a cracked phone-line from New York, listening to his thoughts on a broken American society and a generation unable to rip their eyes from the glare of a post-truth internet, you start to understand why this mindful young artist struggles with sleep. “For the people (complaining) that Trump is in office – yeah, that’s bad, but it’s actually about understanding the situation that put him there,” he says. “There’s a lack of education, knowledge. People get confused and angry about things they don’t understand.”

Since forming in 2011, Pro Era have become the poster boys of sensitive, politically engaged rap: even Malia Obama has been spotted wearing one of the group’s t-shirts. But talking to Knight, it’s clear he feels uneasy about the types of rallies many of his peers – and no doubt fans – attend. “How many years have people protested? Obviously, it’s not the answer,” he observes.

“There’s always going to be that one person in a protest that takes it overboard, that kills a cop, hits a cop – and that just gives them a reason to start blasting everybody. To kill us all off.”

This year, Knight will release an instrumental hip-hop album called Black Noise, and will produce on AABA, the fourth LP from Joey Bada$$, Pro Era’s breakout star. Besides that, he’ll be hitting the history books, mining the annals of black culture in the US. “Self-education and self-expression is the best thing in the world,” he says. “It’s the one thing that gives the people something to start bringing things down with.”

“People would rather just follow something that’s easier to understand – like if you put peanut butter on a pill, it’s easier for people to swallow,” Knight continues. “Then there are the people who actually want to assert themselves... The freedom fighters.”– JM

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Kirk wears lambskin hoodie Juun.J b l a c k s

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Grace wears leather race suit Belstaff, wool top Neil Barrett, boots Louis Vuitton r i g h t s

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GRACE DUNHAM

“Every time I make the choice to do something where my name and face are visible, it’s usually followed by a period of regret and uncertainty,” Grace Dunham admits. While using their social capital to highlight under-supported causes could feel powerful, these days the 25-year-old writer and activist prefers more direct strategies.

Raised in New York City, Dunham recently relocated to Los Angeles to focus their energy on Support.fm, a new crowdfunding platform set to help queer and trans people navigating jail, prison and detention centres. The site will offer a secure online platform for people seeking to raise bail money, a service prohibited on other crowdfunding platforms. “It’s time to really focus on how people’s lives will be changed (by Trump), and what work we can do to protect people and reduce harm,” says Dunham.

By ‘resources’, Dunham means more than just money. “A lot of the privileges that we have are networked... Think about your family, your friends, your job, the institutions or companies you’re tied to. How can you communicate with these people to urge them to make different choices about how money is both saved and spent? What are the resources that you have – whether it’s money, time, a legal degree or a car – that could be in the service of these movements that are already doing such amazing work? People have more resources than they’re taught to locate.” – LP

Support.fm plans to work with pre-existing organisations doing related prison-justice work like Familia: TQLM and Trans Queer Pueblo.

“There are rich histories of movements that have been in place for hundreds of years, resisting racism and colonialism and capitalism,” says Dunham, whose work over the past few years has included writing for The New Yorker, collaborating with trans activist Reina Gossett, publishing a digital poetry book (The Fool), and appearing in the film Happy Birthday, Marsha!, about transgender activists Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

“Being in a political dialogue with yourself and your community is a lifelong process and it’s not something we’ll ever complete. You need to learn, research and think about the ways you can use the resources at your disposal, without ignoring the fact that there are dynamic movements (already) in play that we need to follow the lead of and support.”

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INDIA MENUEZ AND SHISHI ROSE

“There is a certain gratitude I hold for every villain, (because only by) having evils identified, and bigots self-outing, can we can clarify a direction for progress,” says India Menuez, contemplating Trump’s 2016 election victory.

The Brooklyn-based multihyphenate has spent much of her adult life side-eying the patriarchy, be it through her fierce activism and community work, or her rebel-minded TV and film roles. In the 2012 French drama Something in the Air, she played a furious student rioter; fast-forward to this year, and the actor-activist stars in I Love Dick, a TV adaptation of Chris Kraus’s cult novel about a couple who fall for the same college lecturer (the namesake Dick, played by Kevin Bacon).

One of Menuez’s regular collaborators, New York activist Shishi Rose, also uses Instagram to offer support for marginalised people. “The best tool any of us have is our voices,” says Rose. “We are in a time when there is so much information at our fingertips. We just need to utilise it, and spend each day not apologising for the privileges we have, but using them for the better of others.” Looking to the year ahead, Menuez is resilient. “Maintaining hope in harmony with your criticality is what I believe can keep us moving forward,” she says.

“There are endless ways in which people can use their platform for good. In terms of how I use (mine), I recite a mantra that my mother always told me: ‘Sharing is caring.’” –JM

The show was directed by Transparent creator Jill Soloway, and sensitively explores love and sex through the lens of creeping obsession. “I feel so much gratitude for getting to work on I Love Dick through a year that was so fucked up,” says Menuez. “The show works on every level to address intersectional issues of injustice.”

Alongside I Love Dick, Menuez spent much of last year working with the pressure group NoDAPL, which aims to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “We called senators, the army corps, the president, congressmen,” she recalls. “We urged them to stop the abuses being made on the natives gathered in prayer (not protest), and to push to stop the pipeline.” Menuez is experienced at organising people in the name of social and political dissent.

At 15 (she’s 23 now), she co-founded Luck You, a now-disbanded co-op uniting the city’s DIY art scene. These days, if she’s not modelling for Eckhaus Latta, she’s helping out at not-for-profit artist networking space 8-Ball Community.

Left to right: India wears gingham dress Erika Cavallini, elastane body 3.1 Phillip Lim. Shishi wears chlorine-washed denim oversized jacket with metal studs and leather details Gucci, all other clothes and accessories her own

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Left to right: Arianna wears tshirt BRUJAS, oversized paper wool gabardine trousers with asymmetric fastening and braces Emporio Armani, jewellery their own. Robin wears denim vest Erika Cavallini, jeans Levi’s, jewellery their own

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BRUJAS

“When given the space to dream out loud to the public, we’ve always stated that we had political intentions,” says Arianna Gil. “Now they are coming to fruition through projects like 1971.” A founding member of BRUJAS, Gil is referring to the skate collective’s limitededition streetwear line which benefits people targeted by the prison system. BRUJAS, who self-define as a “freeform, urban revolutionary feminist collective that expresses community through skateboarding and political organising”, started with a series of informal parties and skate meet-ups a few summers ago – but it has always meant much more, embedded in a belief system and vision for the world they want to live in.

“All of these people were men, and most had a political, misogynist messaging. Inserting our ethos into a medium that has a lot of hegemony is a smart way of inspiring critical dialogue about our institutional enemies, i.e. prisons and the state.”

Nastasia adds: “To me, giving direct and material support to people behind bars and people who are being hit with criminal charges is one of the most important things we can do with our time, energy and resources. It’s the only thing short of tearing down the walls that makes sense to me.” – LP

The BRUJAS × 1971 line was dreamed up

by Gil and Izzy Nastasia, an editor at Mask Magazine who has been working on anti-racist, anti- state efforts for the past 11 years. The two wanted to raise awareness of last year’s US prison strike, so they schemed ways they could get people to move some of the money they would spend around the holidays towards their friends’ prisoner support projects like Freedom 2 Live (F2L). “1971 is an exemplary mediadriven project entirely produced by BRUJAS,” says Gil, pictured here with another of the collective’s founding members, Robin Giordani.

“We should be defined by the things we create, not what people create about us.”

“I grew up skating downtown around the skate teams and creative directors of brands that dictated what was cool to youth,” continues Gil, whose 2017 plans include the #deathtoallmalelineups project (which calls attention to the cis-male monopoly on the music scene) and collabs with BRUJAS and the NYC party GHE20G0TH1K, as well as dropping some rap records that Gil helped produce.

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JAMAL LEWIS

I don’t set resolutions for myself, but maybe my all-time resolution is that I want to manifest the space between my fears,” says Jamal Lewis, a community organiser and filmmaker from Atlanta now living in New York City. “Especially in the age of Trump. But even before Trump, I couldn’t say that America had not been a fearful place. Because people are taught to fear. That’s often how leaders influence people. Especially in the realm of politics and religion. They teach people how to fear them, but also how to fear themselves.”

By day, Lewis can be found organising communications and messaging in the midtown Manhattan office of the Audre Lorde Project, a community organisation for queer and trans people of colour (QTPOC) in New York City.

Outside the office, the work continues. Lewis is currently writing and directing the film No Fats, No Femmes, which will offer a lens on the politics of desire. The documentary, whose title plays on a phrase that can often be found on queer dating website profiles, features personal narratives from QTPOC, fat, femme and disabled people. “It’s (about) investigating and exploring how one maps desire, and how that has a large impact on the entire world,” Lewis explains. “So much of how people move and excel in the world is contingent on desire.” w

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“When you grow up in the US education system, so much of what you have to endure is people telling you who you should be,” Lewis continues. “Who you should not be. What you should fear. At some point, you deeply internalise it.

I deeply internalised so much fear – so much second-hand fear. I say second-hand, because it was always fear that other people projected on to my body. And that still happens today... I think about holding fast to dreams, and working at them every day. And not allowing fear to consume how I live my life.” – LP

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Jamal wears oversized distressed denim jacket Philipp Plein, top, septum ring their own, diamante earrings Gillian Horsup

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C I N E M A

ART in the word: +

P H H T O G R A P H Y

moving figures

Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

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Campbell Addy talks sexuality and spirituality in his work The photographer explores his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing and his experience of coming out as gay at 17 for his debut solo show

Text_Jacob Bernard-Banton and Kareem Reid

The inspiration for British-Ghanaian photographer Campbell Addy’s first ever solo exhibition, hosted at the KK Outlet, carries as much depth and complexity as his portraits themselves. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, the photographer always felt that his sexuality and his faith were incompatible.

tural identities” in the world of art. Faith, sexuality and the beauty of the black, often male, body are hallmarks of Addy’s work, featuring heavily throughout Matthew 7:7&8. Alongside the new show comes a collaborative series between Addy and fellow artist and partner Edvinas Bruzas entitled Unlocking Seoul, a fascinating glimpse into the South Korean capital’s LGBT scene. “I don’t just want to make a nice image,” Addy says, “I’m always trying to provide a story and context.” Below we spoke with the photographer ahead of the show’s launch tonight.

While Addy eventually broke away from religion, he took a scripture, Matthew 7:7&8 (“seek, and ye shall find”), as both the basis and the title for his latest creative project. “(It) has resonated with me,” says the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design graduate, “for whatever it is I want in life, I need to seek it out and find solace in my resolve.”

Addy, south London born and bred in New Addington, is already behind a healthy roster of creative pursuits. Chief among them is Nii: started in summer 2016, it is a casting and modelling agency that actively addresses poor representation in the fashion industry and the accompanying Niijournal, a publication highlighting issues of “sex, religion, racial and cul-

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Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

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THE END OF A CHAPTER Why is now a good time for you to stage a solo exhibition?

Campbell Addy: I’ve been reflecting and looking at my work as a whole – this is what I’ve created so far. It’s not a lot of work (but) it sits well together... It’s establishing myself as the type of artist I want to be.

What are the ideas behind the title of the show?

Campbell Addy: I grew up as Jehovah’s Witness, everyday I would read the Bible. Someone asked me recently if I was religious. Everyone assumes if you’re gay, you’re not religious.

I grew up in a very religious household and there are things you can’t just leave in the past, it stays with you – like my morals are deeply rooted in religion whether I like it or not.

The scripture Matthew 7:7 always resonated with me. If I wanted to get a job or do something, I told myself that I would have to go and seek it, not just sit and wait for it to be given to me. It’s always been something at the back of my mind. It’s personal to me and reflects the journey: the work is the journey. Nothing is handed to you. When people ask me how I achieved something I tell them I grab it with both hands. The religious aspect is like closing the chapter on that part of my life. I lost a lot when I came out, my family, friends – it’s almost as if you have a new life the day you leave it. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed out on because I was in such a closeted world.

An artist who is part of the exhibition, Kelsey Lu (who goes by the name Lu) told me she had also grown up as Jehovah’s Witness and it was enlightening to see the positive side. Growing up you hear that those who leave the truth lead bad lives, but she’s thriving and it was a beacon of hope for me. I never spoke about being Jehovah’s Witness until I met her; I was really scared. It was something I hadn’t come to terms with. There’s a picture where I’m laughing in my corridor thinking that something so small was holding me back because I didn’t think I was worthy enough to be connected to my spirituality because I was gay and condemned. Now I know it’s man who condemns the act – I’m a model citizen. r i g h t s

Campbell Addy: And the beginning of a new one.

A lot of it is reconciling two very different parts of your life – both of them can exist together.

I made sure my family – who I usually don’t allow to see my Facebook – saw everything about this exhibition. Some of my religious friends say, “How can you have an exhibition that can have homosexuality in it and it have Bible verse as its title?” For me, that is part of me and something I’ve been hiding away from. I thought I was wrong. I grew up Jehovah’s Witness and I’m gay and there’s nothing wrong with it.

You have your own relationship with it now, it’s a positive thing – you’re accepting all the different parts of yourself.

Campbell Addy: I wanted to lock it away and it was taking its toll. But it’s actually fine.

The exhibition also shows works from your collaboration with Edvinas Bruzas that you both undertook in the summer of 2014. Can you tell us more about those images?

Campbell Addy: We took the pictures together in Seoul (because) I wanted to go somewhere unknown. The gay community was so secluded. We’d go to these bars for a month; we went everyday till 4am to gain the trust of the people.

(It) was really hidden – we had to learn some Korean. I wasn’t trying to be a voyeur, I wanted to portray what we saw. We saw a disconnect: in nightlife, there was only one space for them.

I’m so lucky to be gay in the UK. (In Seoul), there are no rights, exploration or flamboyance: your friend can be gay but you can’t – it’s frowned upon. My partner is white and I’m black – we were an experiment in their eyes, an out interracial couple.

How has being published in fashion magazines affected your work as a photographer?

Campbell Addy: Fashion magazines influenced me at first but then I had to partition my brain and think, “I am a photographer first who happens to work in fashion magazines”.

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Gatekeepers use the fact that they have worked for little reward for years as an explanation and I wonder why they feel as though I have to do the same. I won’t suffer in the same way. I’d find myself on sets and clients (would) dismiss me, (they) wouldn’t think or know the photographer was me. It took a toll. My image became this huge thing, in a way it hasn’t before. Instead of prepping my photography equipment, I’d obsess over how I look even though I wasn’t being shot – just a downward spiral.

I had to look at my work differently: is this image able to stand on its own? I connected dots between shoots that spanned over two years; it was very therapeutic for me. I was at a point where I was fed up with working, because of the fast pace of the industry – having a shoot on Monday and having it done by Friday, no time to sit and think about the work I was doing.

This process really helped with that: looking at the bigger picture as opposed to just the pages of a magazine.

How has life been since graduating from CSM? Campbell Addy: It’s been really hard. Bouts of depression and severe anxiety, purely because I was in a bubble and didn’t realise that as a student at CSM, you have to meet new people and work with them, which I’ve struggled with despite being an outgoing person.

(But) life after uni has (also) been great. I’m so blessed to have the success I have in my life but it’s a constant battle fighting against invisible enemies coming in all shapes and forms, whether it’s anxiety or clients approaching me to do a shoot because it’s “about diaspora” or they want black people to shoot. They try to put you in a bracket.

I’ve been able to use the platform I have to meet many creatives that being in the CSM bubble denied me. London’s an island, there’s the whole world. London isn’t the be all and end all of a career as a creative person. There are other places - it’s okay to forget about London sometimes.

The other thing is race. Yes, my work addresses race and racism, because I’m a black photographer... I couldn’t just be an artist and that has affected me emotionally.

Being young, people want to take you for a mug in the industry because you’re a person of colour. They think they’re doing you a favour by giving you a platform, paying you small bits and bobs. I’m a black person with something political to say (but) really I want to do what I love and be able to live from it – just like they are living off what we’re making for them. It’s a shock to their system... b l a c k s

Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

Photography Campbell Addy and Edvinas Bruzas

| RIGHTS & BLACKS | N°25 | 2017