Black Women in the Creative Industries from my and B.O.O.K's (Building.Our.Own.Knowledge) perspective’

B.O.O.K

Building.Our.Own.Knowledge

M e l i s s a n d r e V a r i n

Black women and genderqueer beings have been systematically under-privileged or constrained to perform within de-limited roles within the creative industry. This is part of the ruins on which we are growing B.O.O.K.

Building. Our. Own. Knowledge (B.O.O.K) is a co-created cloud for interrogating, finding, making, and sharing experiences and knowledge emanating from Black artists in particular. The communal project is an invitation to re-think and re-make knowledge and culture on our own terms. B.O.O.K (r)evolves through radical sharing, caring, and disrupting by using and developing non-extractive collective mechanisms for reinventing the everyday as a political space for collective healing and liberation.

The soft infrastructure of B.O.O.K is supported by a self-organised working group composed of 9 Black artists, writers, researchers, facilitators and curators including:

Antonio Roberts Mojere Ajayi-Egunjobi Jae Tallawah Samiir Saunders Sym Mendez Last Mafuba Hannah Adereti Ayesha Jones and myself - Melissandre Varin

We are running artist residencies; commissioning West-Midlands-based Black artists; making B.O.O.K podcast inviting Black artworkers and authors to share their knowledge; holding space for B.O.O.K club to collectively reading, bouncing ideas, and dreaming inspired by Black authored texts for children and grown-ups; we are also preparing the ground for curatorial interventions in Birmingham, supporting Black filmmakers - ultimately attempting to build loving environments.

B.O.O.K aims at facilitating access to, creation, and sharing of knowledge by any means necessary. We try and test ways not only to bear witness to local Black artists, but to actively acknowledge, celebrate and honour their existences and artistry.

I could not mention my love and admiration for beings such as: Amahra Spence who started MAIA group, Yard Art House, this is Abuelos, and Black Land and spatial Justice project in Birmingham; educator, researcher, curator Sylvia Theuri, and visual arts producer, and founder of BLOCK radio Cara Pickering in Coventry creating the magic and solid ground for projects such as B.O.O.K and beings such as mine to find their footing.

Thinking about locally based Black women in the creative industry I thought about sharing about Loraine Masiya Mponela. Loraine Masiya Mponela, a Black, mother, poet, sanctuary seeker (activist), current chairperson of Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group (CARAG), used to be a beloved housemate of mine at Coventry Peace House – among other things. I have been nourished by this friendship and its emphasis on the importance of practicing communion as an artworker.

Last Winter 2021 Loraine shared with me a recording of one of her talks. I compiled a meditative performative writing to ‘repost’ her work. In Spring 2021, Loraine shared her knowledge during a soon to be released audio conversation on: ‘revolution: a space where I feel safe and loved’ with invited artists Roo Dhissou, and Ryan Christopher. I later invited Loraine to make an installation and perform at Arcadia Gallery in Coventry as part of a group show I curated under the name: multiplicity of us. It has then been a pleasure to find another way to support Loraine’s artistry with an artist residency at B.O.O.K.

As B.O.O.K artist-curator, I asked Loraine while inviting her to do a B.O.O.K residency:

What does it mean to do nothing while being Black?

B.O.O.K residencies are windows to revisit past work (ideas, projects, dreams…) by all means. B.O.O.K operates within cracks where we identify fictitious gaps of support, we inject abundance. B.O.O.K offers to its beloved residents a £1000, mentorship sessions by a Black-led arts organisation from the region, and an unlimited access to linoleum dreams. Linoleum dreams is a caravan we converted into a healing (art, library, rest) station. We support Black artists from the region by allowing them to breathe in and out for a moment. We do so and do it - well because we are a bunch of Black queer, gender fluid, women, and men who listen, observe, contribute, and attempt to transform lived experiences.

MOVING LINES: FIFTY REASONS TO DANCE

Following from the offerings in Creating Socially Engaged Art: Can Dance Change The World? (2021), this figurative publication by Patricia Vester transcends lines by questioning and challenging how dance connects us through the intergenerational encounters that have shaped us.

AVAILABLE FROM 29 APRIL 2022 £10 LIMITED EDITION

Pre order online

DANCE PERFORMANCE AS A TOOL TO UNEARTH THE COLONIAL PAST IN THE PRESENT

F a r i d a N a b i b a k s

The work of Dutch artist, performer, and philosopher Farida Nabibaks is shaped by the principle that the integration of embodied knowledge in debating our shared history is necessary to represent the whole of the past in our present, embodied experience.

Nabibaks was born in Suriname, a former colony of the Netherlands in South America and part of the Caribbean. For over twenty years she has lived in the Province of Gelderland in the Netherlands. Nabibaks is the founder and artistic director of Reframing HERstory Art Foundation, which centres on using dance performances to delve into the colonial history of the region and its current reverberations. Since 2020 Nabibaks has been creating Radiant Shadow, a triptych of dance-theatre productions. These contain personalised stories and historical traces from the realm of workers and caretakers who were made invisible and whose existence has consequently been erased. Radiant Shadow can move audiences as the hidden stories creep out of the shadows to present themselves through the bodies of the performers. They unveil the ‘other side’ of colonial wealth and riches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as testimonies of an underrepresented part of this shared history, the dark side of Dutch prosperity.

To date, two Radiant Shadow performances have premiered. The first, Margaretha, revolves around the household of a castle in the eighteenth century, where a portrait of a white countess dominates the hall. On closer inspection her Black servant emerges from the shadow to offer her fruit while a trustworthy dog sits at her feet. What is their story? What is daily life like in their world? The second performance, Anna, is about a Black enslaved girl in the eighteen century who chaperoned her master’s two daughters, who are almost her own age, from their plantation in Suriname to Arnhem in the Netherlands. She remained there her whole life, in obscurity. Through the dance performance the space of these en-shadowed ancestors is reclaimed. As an extension of this artistic practice, Nabibaks is working with Radboud University’s Radboud Institute of Culture and Heritage (RICH) on the government funded research project Feeling the Traces of the Colonial Past, led by professor Liedeke Plate. The aim of this project is to understand how dance can be used to mobilise feelings and emotions for a more capacious understanding of the Dutch colonial and slavery past. Traces of the colonial past pervade contemporary life and affect people physically and mentally, in various and often unacknowledged and unrecognised ways.

Image credit: Foto ANNA = PR picture for Radiant Shadow performance 2, Anna. Photographer: Ton van de Born

The research asks how dance performance and participation can elicit sensory responses to, and emotions about, our colonial legacy. Personal experiences and emotions, addressing themes ranging from the modernity/coloniality nexus to Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome are investigated. Through these approaches, Feeling the Traces will develop a methodology for integrating embodied knowledge about the colonial and slavery past in current public debate on the subject. To read more about the research project please visit the

Radbound University website

PAULINE BLACK OBE

Serendipity is thrilled to welcome Pauline Black OBE into the fold as our newest Patron.

Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2tone band The Selecter. Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All. Since 2010, she has toured internationally with The Selecter. Her memoir Black By Design was published by Serpent’s Tail in late summer 2011.