LUX x RCA CCA: An Absolute River
Rieko Whitfield in conversation with curators Livia Nervi and Wan Kit Yeung for the “Grace Ndritru: An Absolute River” exhibition at LUX, in partnership with the Royal College of Art MA Curating Contemporary Art programme
Within your practice you actively use the body as a means to access different subjectivities. How do you think physicality comes into play with decentering linear time?
The way that our bodies experience time is completely non-linear. We hold everything we have ever experienced personally and ancestrally on a cellular level, regardless of where we try to place ourselves within the illusion of chronological order. Embodied performance for me is a way of subconsciously accessing different parts of myself in the past, present, and future.
On the stage, whether in the literal sense or in the daily performance of our identities, the body can become a portal to alternative ways of existing within this world. We are at once already dead and have never been born, and yet we are always in the magical state of becoming. With this understanding comes a powerful and spiritual sense of freedom.
What do you think about the relationship between temporality and nature? Do you believe that nature can be a portal to explore care, through different temporalities and human and non-human subjectivities?
My storytelling and world-building are always connected to more-than-human perspectives.
Every living being has an energetic imprint. I say this from a rather animistic position, but I think deep down we all understand this. If we can extend empathy to a tree, to a river, to a fish, to a stone, what a humbling way of understanding our place in this sentient Earth.
When you create an act of empathy through performance, it becomes anybody’s language. This language is not necessarily a cognitive one, but one that is emotional and embodied. When we live under a hegemonic culture that forces us into rigid, rational, hierarchical taxonomies, embodying empathy becomes a form of resistance.
With our human ability to empathise, we carry a moral obligation to use these abilities to act in ways that are not just self-serving. It takes real courage and vulnerability to care, and that is a beautiful thing.
Everything on this planet is radically interconnected. We must reconsider our place as a species within the ecosystem of a multitude of perspectives and temporalities. The stories I tell are my ways of reimagining our collective existence from the bottom up. We all have the power to reclaim our narrative. In this way, I am always optimistic.
And the stories I tell are inherently political. If we can get people at an intuitive level to feel beyond the illusion of infinite linear progress and hyper-individualistic selfhood that dominates our current reality, we can begin the necessary work of creating deep political change from a place of empathy. This is why I get up in the morning. This is what drives me as an artist.