What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I am working on several projects for the fall. My solo exhibition for Berlin Art Week ›Alle Menschen werden Brüder‹ at the project space Neun Kelche consists of new collages, a wallpaper work, and an installation of costume objects. Two of the costumes will be worn by dancers for a performance on 14 September. The performance is part of a running collaboration with sound artist Nathanael Amadou Kliebhan. This exhibition is primarily about the idea that Ludwig van Beethoven was bi-racial, and accordingly explores a potentially lost Afro-German history, ›whitewashing‹ in Western historiography, and the concept of ›white passing‹. The titles refer to several Beethoven sonatas. On the same day, 13 September, an exciting group show will open at SAVVY Contemporary for which I developed a wall arrangement and a hanging installation. This year I am part of the Dekoloniale Berlin residency in Berlin, and for this I am working on a large format site-specific textile work that will be on view at Nikolaikirche. It deals with the colonial history of indigo blue and the textile industry. There will also be another, smaller work at the Dekoloniale project space on Wilhelmstraße, which is located where the Berlin conference of 1884 was held, where large parts of the African continent were divided up under Otto von Bismarck. The Dekoloniale exhibitions will open on 14 November and I am looking forward to the production phase in the residency studio at Gropiusbau. Parallel to this, I am currently producing the installation ›Fruits of Hope‹ for a corridor at London’s Somerset House, where 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair will be taking place. This is a collaboration with October Gallery in London.
Do you have a daily ritual?
I start off each morning with a cup of tea. Then I take care of my emails and other administrative tasks to keep my head free for the rest of the day. Yoga or the gym a few evenings each week is also important for me. Each day is different, depending on whether an assistant is at the studio and what kind of work needs to be done, and I often travel for extended periods. But I always include a few mindfulness exercises in my day and take these brief moments, for example, to have a cup tea in order for me to really step back and take a break.
What do you listen to while working?
There are different modes I go through when I am working. For my collages, for example, I am very restful and focused, it’s almost like a trance, and I usually listen to mediative music. For my textile work, I usually have an assistant working with me, I can talk and listen to music like rap, soca, grime, or dancehall. And then there are phases when I am planning, collaging, building, and then I listen to more restful music, like Billie Holiday, Tracy Chapman, as well as a lot of lovers rock, roots etc. I listen to podcasts when I’m not working, because they would otherwise distract me too much.
Which book do you like to gift?
›Kultur und Identität: Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielheit‹, a collection of essays by Édouard Glissant translated into German. The volume of essays isn’t very long, but it’s very dense and potent and includes many nuances that he writes about in his longer works. In addition, it stands in relationship to many other thinkers from Black and Caribbean studies from older generations and today. I received it as a gift myself, and it has helped me personally and in the process of my work to understand myself more and more as part of the Caribbean diaspora and as a German artist. Since it’s a collection of essays, it is very accessible to me, especially because of this German translation.
For me, it opened the door to a long tradition of post-colonial philosophies that stretches back over centuries and should be cited much more than it is. For example, Glissant studied with Fantz Fanon in Paris, where he also met Léopold Senghor and learned from Aimé Césaire. They are the same generation as Sylvia Wynter, who as an influential Jamaican philosopher played an important role in the movement. They all built on the ideas of W.E.B. DuBois and brought them to the next generation.
Glissant uses poetry to produce resistant new inventions using a colonial language and symbols from nature, such as the rhizome as a dynamic root network and landscapes, for example, like the archipelago as a Caribbean island landscape to describe dynamics of a diasporic life. He coined the term ›creolization‹. This visual form of thinking influences me a great deal in relation to the symbolics and linguistics in my work and I would like to share it with others.
Which art work would you like to have at home?
This year, I saw Tavares Strachan’s incredibly powerful exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. He has a series of paintings on outer space that I love a great deal, since I refer a great deal to cosmology and infinity in my work. I think one of these works is called ›Magnificent Darkness‹. I would love having a work like that.
Your favourite exhibition venue in Berlin?
Ever since my childhood, Hamburger Bahnhof has been my favourite place in Berlin. I always thought it would be great to have an exhibit there.
What accessory or object could you not be without?
There is a small but very important tool at my studio that helped me advance a great deal in the process of my visual collages in 2021 and that’s not so easy to obtain. It is a small opener for tubes of silicone and acrylic paste tubes that I have probably have in my hands twenty times a day. It cuts open the tubes quickly and cleanly, and then I can attach the applicator. The company from which I purchase more sustainable silicon used to sell these attachments and my supplier gave me two of the last ones he had, I keep very good care of them and they always have a special place on my tool wall.
What keeps you going?
I think what keeps me going is a certain chronic nostalgia for another place that probably does not exist. Growing up in Germany, as a child I thought there must be another place where I would probably feel more at home. In a sense, I found that in London, but in the meantime I realise that I have to create the feeling of my home from within myself. So I am optimistically searching for an unfixed place that allows me and other like-minded individuals to have more room to exist in their nuances and complexities, that enables structures that promote a more fluid way of life and dissolves existing power hierarchies.
I think artistic work is the product of an artistic genealogy, a social network, and is based on a support system, not just the lone individual. For this reason, knowledge about the artists who paved my way is what keeps me going. A few artists I follow and who keep me going and inspire me include Hew Locke, Christina Quarles, Jack Whitten, Firelei Báez, Nick Cave, Wangechi Mutu, Tavares Strachan, and Ellen Gallagher. There are also conversations with my parents, my siblings, and friends, literature and film, and exhibitions that allow me to understand myself as part of a greater whole. I work from what you could call a sense of community and productive longing. I think it’s wonderful that as an artist I can be as free as possible, and can continue that way for my whole life, in the best of cases getting ever better.
Who would you like to meet?
At the moment, I would love to meet Firelei Báez, an outstanding Caribbean artist whose exhibition I saw this summer at South London Gallery that touched me deeply. In her interviews, she has a very warm energy and it would be great to exchange ideas with her.
I would also like to meet with some of the artists mentioned above. At the start of the year, I was lucky to meet Tavares Stachan at a preview of the exhibition ›Entangled Pasts‹ at the Royal Academy. In addition, I had the privilege of studying in Düsseldorf with Ellen Gallagher, who influenced me a great deal as an art mentor.
What do you look forward to after you’ve finished work?
The last opening of this intense phase of work will be in November, and I look forward to flying to Jamaica shortly afterward. Once there, I want to bring more slowness into my life, just exist, read and spend some time with my family. After finishing work, I always try to create free islands where I can step back and relax.