Titles of my work, yes. You mentioned Deana Lawson.

It’s a known-known. We know there are other souls happening around us all the time—even around that hole in the couch. She’s seeing this hole and thinking about those who have sat amongst us, those who have used this place as a portal, who have gone through the portal of death into a second life or who may be back here in a reincarnation. That really aligns with this practice, which I think is shared across a Black diaspora, of thinking with souls and thinking with death. When we arrive at blackness, we often arrive through death. Many theorists and practitioners have their own ways of saying so, but it’s always very apt. Especially, if you’re arriving at this from a Black British, African American or Black French perspective. It’s interesting there’s not the term ‘African-French’, but that’s another conversation.

I was talking to Saidiya Hartman about this—how these terms were arrived at, and why they’re so heavily practiced—especially when it comes to America. I have a lot of friends who say that they are Black American instead of African American, others who only say African American. It’s about the desire to place power onto linguistics itself. Saidiya mentioned that a lot of university courses in the US are changing their title from ‘African American Studies’ to ‘Black Studies’. That was quite cool to me as it signals this shift from thinking only about the New World—and taking that to be singularly American—to having a more global capacity. I’m excited by that.

But even in its unconsciousness it’s a conscious choice, because that terminology comes from the colonizer just picking up any old word and using it. That’s what happened with the West Indies—Columbus just picked up a word for the Other that he already knew and used it again for this new place. Which is often the case: conflating a former Other with a new Other.

There are African immigrants, but perhaps fewer than in Europe. But I think you’re right in so far as Europe has this disengagement that happens when old meets new, whereas America just has the new. Stuart Hall talks about this with his three présences: présence africaine, présence européenne, and présence américaine. I always move to change that last term to be présence nouveau monde aka New World presence, because ‘présence américaine’ re-synthesizes this idea that only America is dealing with the post-colonial experience of racism. But what’s interesting about this from a Black British perspective is that we are both the ‘présence européenne’ and ‘présence nouveau monde’; mutually. We generally know what our heritage is, at least for the first pit stop—whether you’re in France and you know that you’re from Martinique or you’re in the UK and you know you’re from Jamaica. So, to me, that’s a key difference between here and the US. And then again, as you said, I went to school here with people who were born in Africa. My Nigerian friends aren’t Nigerian by movement, they’re Nigerian because of birth. Because they have Nigerian passports. That’s really what you’re saying in terms of Europe having Africans, right? The idea of a ‘Contemporary African’ sounds wild, but that’s kind of what we’re talking about.

We have the contemporary generations versus only being able to say “I’m a descendant of…”

[laughing] Marcus. Jahmal. Exactly!

Or desire.

“I ain’t no African.”

Sure, but then we’re fighting from within ethnicity, and nation, right? Nation is a concept that I have so much difficulty with because I feel that to formulate a nation is to use the master’s tools. Jamaica has such a commitment to being a nation, for example, but I’m cautious about this—which is why I held a lecture series as a Stuart Hall reading group called R.I.E.N. (Race, Identity, Ethnicity, and Nation). I’m still figuring out what the desire for a nation is, outside of a desire to create a potentially fascist Black Republic.

Differentiation. Right. But then I think that nation, and the actual move toward an idea of a nation feels like instating a border, boundary, or territory. And what is that doing beyond just once again using the master’s tools?

There’s a need for security in that desire for belonging. It feels good to know where you’re from. It’s like when people do an ancestry test and then they can say “I’m Nigerian and I’m this and I’m that.” But the thing is, ancestry.com doesn’t understand that you’re only Nigerian insofar as your tribe was in Nigeria for some period of time. Do you know what I mean?

The soul and the unseen: exactly what I was going to say. You mentioned blood, and I thought back to souls—souls have more prescient weight here. Blood thins, blood changes, and the colonizer’s blood runs through us because of rape and pillage. But souls can’t be ignored. So thinking through souls just makes things more honest and more able to be carried, right? You can carry souls more than you can carry blood. One is lighter than the other. Potentially. Depending on how troubled your souls are.

Which takes us to your prompt of ‘New Black Surrealism’—and also to the language and titling of my own works. A number of the titles—I wouldn’t say a majority, but a number—are instigated by a past artist, writer, etcetera and my belief that there can be shared remembrances across souls. My title The Myth of the Noble Savage: A Hoodlum Afar And A Saint At Her Desk, is a good example of this. The title is quoted from two places: bell hooks for “the myth of the noble savage” and Édouard Glissant for “a hoodlum afar and a saint at his desk.” With the hooks quote, she’s talking about this romanticized notion of our Blackness and she says in parentheses “(the myth of the noble savage).” I felt she had just briefly dipped her toes into poetry with that phrase. She quickly returns to didactic argumentation, but I wanted to take that parenthetical and continue her poetics. So I went to Glissant’s passage that says “imagine a young man oblivious to anything that is not his machine; before it he is absolutely ‘deranged in his senses,’ a hoodlum afar and a saint at his desk, one who has conquered the mechanics of vowels and consonants and penetrated their color.” He’s thinking about how linguistics meets a colonizing hold, just as hooks is when she mentions the myth of the noble savage. I wanted to play with placing the two together to make visible their shared remembrances that I think a lot of us have in this postcolonial place.

They are portals, yes. I think that artistic work should be a portal. That aligns with how I think about good art that I’m making—and when I say ‘good,’ I mean in the sense that it’s something worthy of leaving my studio. Because the studio is a place of practice and not everything you make should leave. I have a mantra that I describe as a post-it note. Perhaps all our generation’s mantras are on post-it notes—which is very Virgil (Abloh) of me to say! It is “good art belongs in the conversation.” So if there’s a work that I’m making that doesn’t make someone want to have a conversation—even just in their mind—about it, with it, for it, or against it, then it’s not good; it’s not worthy of presentation. When you are trying to start something off the work has to be good to create the portal for more. I’m always trying to start something.

My work has soul. There are points when I directly feel like I’m putting souls in the work, certainly. A good example would be my series of spades—those sculpture paintings that are in deep-set mahogany frames and made with oil-sticks. When I’m working with oil sticks, I get really obsessed with the head that forms over the top. I was actually geeking out about this with Anthea Hamilton recently on how oil sticks form a literal skin that you have to peel off to start working with them again. It makes them very human, this skin. I was thinking about that engagement with humanness and the desire to break free from the old colonizer’s debate about what is human and whether Blackness gets to be included in that. When I use oil sticks, I think of them as these souls, the heart of the work, that get situated quite explicitly by me in the piece.

A different version of thinking through souls occurs in A Caribbean Ossuary. For this sculpture, I put all this cut crystal glass I had collected in Marseille into a cabinet. Then I bound the cabinet up, but without any support or protection, and shipped it to my gallery, which meant that all the glass broke in transit. I have this great affinity for performing objects—as a means to perform work without the body. It’s a way of thinking about this hyper-placement of duty and work that’s put on Black and Brown women. I guess we could say it started with bell hooks’s definition with the womb as a machine for slaves, for producing more and more slaves. With the cut crystal I was thinking about work, performance, and also how glass is made—a process of hyper-heating and then hyper-molding. All this made me feel that if the glass broke in transit there could be this release of souls on many different levels. So that’s what was happening there—the souls got released into the ossuary.

My grandma was my focus while making this work. She is part of the Windrush generation. I was engaging with how she and that generation deals with emotions, with trauma. There’s such space that’s being created for descendants of slavery, but not as much for the displacement that happened with her generation taking up the Queen’s call to rebuild the nation of the UK. I wanted the breaking of the glass and the release of the souls to help think about her generation’s movement so I positioned the ‘casket’ that held the glass on a diagonal in the gallery, to look as if it had been moored at sea. Yet, inside the casket’s bound encasing there are these fractures that need to be addressed. That can be addressed and should be addressed.

It’s funny, in terms of making works that exist beyond your time, I had a confrontation with a conservator who freaked out over me using anti-climb paint and newsprint in my paintings. He said to me, “You know that’s going to change color, right? Very quickly.” And I said, “Yes, I do. That’s okay. I don’t actually want to make things that last forever in that respect.” He was very mad, but I don’t care to have such a heavily weighted timestamp on my work—it doesn’t have to last forever. It’s about the conversation that is being had now and that needs to be had now—and whatever the latent result of that is, we can think about that when it unfolds.

Yes, and it’s so colonial. I mean, why would I want that? It makes me think of the Eva Hesse sculpture made with resin that was on view at the Guggenheim in New York: Expanded Expansion (1969). The museum took the work out of storage for an exhibition after about fifteen years and saw that the resin had completely yellowed. You look at photos from when Hesse made it and the resin is transparent in those—but I love that it’s yellow-brown now. The Guggenheim continues to reconsider how to deal with the change, but I am left wondering if the artist just wanted to make this object with no long-term consideration of conservation. Perhaps that’s the conversation she wanted to have. And it worked beyond her, because here I am, now, still thinking about it. Still learning from it.

Exactly. That’s our end quote, ‘don’t fight against natural change!’