A letter, fragments, glimmers and traces

A Letter written to the curators of Radio Ballads published in the book of the same name.

Radio Ballads: Songs for Change.

What kinds of collective songs are needed today?

Radio Ballads: Songs for Change takes its name from a revolutionary series of radio programmes broadcast on the BBC from 1957–64, a time of rapid change across the UK. Combining song, music and sound effects with the voices and stories of communities, each original Ballad focused on the lived experiences of workers and groups whose voices were otherwise rarely, or never, heard in the media. Building on these histories of collective song and storytelling, this publication shares the process of Serpentine Civic Projects creating four new Radio Ballads over 60 years later (2019—2023), with artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim and Ilona Sagar in collaboration with carers, organisers, social workers and residents in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Radio Ballads: Songs for Change centres the voices and experiences of people whose care keeps many of us afloat through civic, grassroots and informal networks. Sharing complex and intimate stories of living and working through multiple ongoing crises, these four projects are woven together by eight songs of collaborative work: Working In and Against Systems, Listening, Processing, Embodying, Dreaming, Supporting, Connecting and Voicing. Together they consider how creative collaboration can open up new spaces to process experiences of mind/body health, domestic abuse, terminal illness, grief and end of life care, and to generate interdependence and collective healing. Exploring new possibilities for us to gather and organise together, Radio Ballads: Songs for Change asks: what kinds of collective songs are needed today?

Stories go in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. It helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside and between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. Part of finding is getting lost, and when you are lost you start to open up and listen.¹

Abolition: 1) “a theory of change […] a theory of social life […] about making things,”² 2) “deliberately everything-ist; boldly addressing the entirety of human-environmental relations.”³

Dear Layla, Lizzie, Amal,

Thank you for inviting me to write to you about my impressions of what shape Radio Ballads has taken, inside the shapes in which it was conceived.

I receive your invitation as an opening to write around, and into, what has already been generated in me from moving with all the works made in the process, but also through the way that you carry the practices in this project inside you, and through you, how these have then transferred into me through all the other spaces we have made and shared together.

In return for these traces you have left in me, I share with you fragments and glimmers—the detritus of existing that I gather as I move through the world—from teachers and teachings which are my instructions to building infrastructures that affirm life even as we navigate those that endlessly show that they don’t.

All these pieces matter, all these movements belong together.

I

Radio Ballads and our times together has for me carried the expression of the question under what conditions can love be given, received and sustained? What does it mean to institute and organise it? So here, I don’t want to (won’t) write about the institution again and again to sustain it, I will (want to) write about what we do to sustain ourselves, again and again to survive and imagine beyond it.

I enclose some poems that are close to me right now. Ones I read again and again, like prayers, like portals, like guides. Ones I wish I could read out loud with others, ones I read (sing) silently to myself. They help me find my words when I try to think and practise what it means to be an abolitionist and work with and against institutions (because we live with and against them—we are bound by them in our lives) and with and against the flow of capital that nooses us to relations that are bloody and violent. They help me when I forget that there no new words, only new ways of making them felt.⁴

In trying to think in this way, I get caught and embroiled in conversations about critique in the intersection of these two ideas—institutions and abolitionist desire—but what I imagine when I close my eyes, is not the shaming or dismantling of the institution but a world in which the things that I most desire to do with others, would be given the space to root, form shoots and blossom. That I could, if I wanted to, (if I chose to) sometimes work inside an institution like you do. That I could do this work against domination—not as a manager, or gatekeeper, a keeper of order, but as a caregiver, as the holder of collective desires.

II

There is a timbre of voice

that comes from not being heard

and knowing you are not being

heard noticed only

by others not heard

for the same reason.⁵

In starting with poetry when speaking with/against the institution I want to explode the need for what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “the passive voice… the language of the state. The status quo. The enforced state of being the voice that generates the mythology that violence of the state is inevitable.”⁶

It is this voice that suggests that the boot is as human as the face that it tramples on, and that the face must become as dehumanised as the boot to survive. I want to start, as Radio Ballads does, with the voice of the face; I wish for the boot not to exist.

I send you poems because you are poets, in all the ways that you have woven worlds and feelings and commitments through Radio Ballads, how you have kept the complexity of multiple hearts beating and desiring. You have created conditions for aliveness even as you find a way to express the failures of the state to affirm life.

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.⁷

III

In her poem “There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women” Audre Lorde asks us “what do we want from each other after we have told our stories?” When I think of the times we have offered stories together in a circle, in the spaces we have shared I remember how these stories have become shared knots, to unpick together. In other places though, I wonder about the terms of this offering.

Stories, so often the currency of respectability, are demanded by those who dominate others. In these hierarchical formations stories are the weapons in our fight to be made sense of, in spaces that are hostile to our opacity. Every time we tell a story in spaces we are marginalised, and it circulates between our bodies and those that wield something over us, what do we learn? Are our desires met? Or do we learn again and again that testimonies in and of themselves confer at best asymmetric benefit?

Cultural institutions in particular welcome stories; seemingly magnanimously. When we offer our stories here, there seems little risk: no one has the power to take away our children, to house us in unsafe housing, to protect or make us vulnerable from abuse. Here stories are offered space. a promise of witness, an audience - but how actively can this space, or this gaze, be held? In their passive receipt of these stories how are cultural institutions implicated in the violence of the state? In inviting these stories in, how much desire do they in return generate for the transformation of the conditions that generated them? How much can the materiality of real beings and their messy lives be acknowledged when they are desired only for their testimonies, or considered only in the past tense, not in the messiness of the present? Through an atmosphere of theory and dissecting frameworks, how is the burden of commitment that is invited by the telling of these stories transmuted into a more palatable inertia?

IV

“Art-as-we-know-it is an invention. Manufactured by white European colonial metropolises, it is only a little over 200 years old. It arose hand in hand with the beginnings of industrial capitalism, it rested on the same philosophical myths that enabled extractivism everywhere: the toxic dualisms between nature and culture, mind and body, individual and common, art and life.”⁸

I am writing to you on 11 December 2023, the day of a global strike to demand an immediate ceasefire as Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinian people and four days after the murder of Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer by a targeted Israeli airstrike.

I write you a letter today because I wonder if I can reclaim the intimacy of something that is made formal and distant when it is addressed to an institution. I wonder what will happen if I write this in the direction of the institution via your bodies, through a desire to connect with you; on a day on which we have been invited to impact all aspects of civic life in a show of solidarity.

Did you know that the root of the word civic, the word which allows your care to exist within the container of the art museum comes from an original from the Latin corona civica; denoting a garland of oak leaves and acorns given to a person who saved a fellow citizen's life? This letter and the words in it are an offering, a garland that I drape around us all.

I write to you at a time when many letters are being written and statements are being made. In the writing of these letters, their receipt and circulation, alliances are being made and unmade, fractures are appearing. I write to you at a time when the art world is being asked to care, and more starkly than ever it is being revealed, again, in the most ugly ways, that this care appears and disappears in a void between interlinked value systems—the marketplace for products and careers, and the hungry machine of spectacle on which all that can be deemed art depends.

I am writing to you at a time where the fictions of our freedoms are being peeled back to reveal the inherent myths on which we have been told our freedoms rest.

V

“Space is often viewed in Western thinking as being static or divorced from time. This view generates ways of making sense of the world as a ‘realm of stasis’, well-defined, fixed, and without politics. This is particularly relevant in relation to colonialism. The establishment of military, missionary, or trading stations, the building of roads, ports, and bridges, the clearing of bush and the mining of minerals all involved processes of marking, defining and controlling space. There is a very specific spatial vocabulary of colonialism which can be assembled around three concepts: (1) the line, (2) the centre, and (3) the outside. The ‘line’ is important because it was used to map territory, to survey land, to establish boundaries, and to mark the limits of colonial power.”⁹

I have wondered if the intimacy of witnessing the glimmers of possibility despite the void, inside the void, might be my contribution to the letter-writing. So many of us write because we feel unheard, and some of us wonder what freedom is exercised in these missives, these requests sent upwards, which draw attention to what we wish was a given: the necessity to orient towards more life for everyone.

What does it mean for these spaces—which say they are civic or are shaped by curare (the root of curate, to care)—to be so immune, so indifferent to the colonial double standards on which they rest, to show again and again how seemingly practised in smoothing out the reality of these standards they are, and how unpracticed in the capaciousness needed to hold the realities of organised abandonment that these standards demand? What then does it mean to write towards them, to generate a call, to attempt to engender care within them? What exactly is being spawned in these spaces of selective care (which are also spaces of selective abandonment)? How can words, and the acts of nurturance desired inside them, hold their shape when they are passively received and circulated? Can we receive these words as another form of presentation, when they can so easily be un- and re-done for such different ends, different outcomes?

I write to you as a body in this system that has taken in the desires inside Radio Ballads. “To reach inside the body is to activate movement. This space enables us to exist or survive.”¹⁰ I, a body, am encircled by intimate networks and their attendant commitments, communities, institutions, and rules, I am shaped by historical forces, spirit, mystery, earth, and soul. I write body to body to you; three bodies, three hearts, and souls and spirits and imaginations. Three sets of lineages connected to so many more through this project, which maps not just artworks, or projects, but relationships and entanglements in a messy, conflicted, web of relation.¹¹

VI

I want to write and witness the yearning in your work. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom bell hooks writes:

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”¹²

I have written to you in as intimate a form as I can find in this book, which is a public record of the yearnings inside Radio Ballads, the yearnings of all the hearts that make this project. I want to write that I see that you held these capacious yearnings inside spaces built to govern by restriction—a regulated space that longs for, and survives through, keeping order.

I am writing at a time where disorder is being demonised, where resistance to established order is being represented as destruction. I want to, through writing through this moment through the desires inside Radio Ballads, return us to the ways that resistance can be experienced, avowed and witnessed; rendered alchemical and capable of transforming things that feel impossible to shift.

We cannot have belonging for everyone—between us—if we only long for this order which keeps us apart from one another.

In order to belong to each other, we must be longing for something else.

VII

I write to you as a mother, whose care is limited and expanded through asymmetric access to money, status, respectability, and inheritance. I am writing to you as a mother who sees the practices that are actualised in Radio Ballads as a form of birth work, sees you as doulas.

You are three sets of hands opening out in offering, three mouths forming words of validation, invitation and affirmation, words with meaning close to you have everything you need / we can do this / I believe in us. You are holders of lamps guiding through transitions.

In their zine made during in October 2020, Abdul-Aliy A Muhammad, Pato Hebert and Theodore (ted) Kerr write:

“We understand a doula to be someone who holds space for others during times of transition. In our rage and resourcefulness, our hope and our hurting, our conviction and our care, we hold space for the transition that an uprising might be. We can also safeguard and shepherd seeds, helping to cultivate conditions for change. A doula minds demands and dangers, needs and the nascent. A doula asks. A doula listens. A doula can be quiet. A doula can scream. Doulas can use our hands, networks, traditions, skills, phone chargers, stimulus checks, leftovers, voices. A doula can lose their voice, happily hoarse with the recourse of call and response. A doula can sing, and a song can doula you through transitions. A doula can give water and masks, Zoom massages and knowing nods, harm-reduced healing touch, delivered meals and transferred coin, a couch. A doula can be scared, sick, sceptical, believing, embarrassed, ecstatic, evolving, humble(d), joyful, spent, rejuvenated, determined, deliberate, irreverent, innovative, interconnected. A doula recognises and honours limits. A doula can offer reassurance and rest, replenishment and release. A doula dances with uncertainty, admits to not knowing. A doula is a formulation, a formation, a praxis, an action, an opportunity to give and to grow.”¹³

Solidarity and love are doulas.

A doula is the invisible labour that allows not just the birthing of a new life that will be cared for, but also the birthing of communal care. A birth guided by a doula forever interlinks the destinies of those who care with those who will care and be cared for. The doula is not the care itself, even though the technology of doula-ing is care. The doula is not the mother, but the doula reveals something important about the mother. The doula shows how the mother is not just a noun but also a verb, a possible action that is collective (civic), that does not have to be privatised in one place.

The doula births a mother as a verb through a passage endless in its commitments, because the doula knows that we owe each other everything, and that the journey to find each other is sometimes long. Just as Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes abolition, a doula is about presence, not absence.

A doula affirms life.

VIII

Even when they are dangerous examine the heart of those machines you hate
before you discard them
and never mourn the lack of their power
lest you be condemned
to relive them.

¹⁴

But the doula cannot birth the new future alone, the doula is an idea around which a constellation must form. Constellations appear from what we have been taught is there, if we imagine them otherwise, do they transmute into a new image?

Can we have motherhood without the singular Mother around which all power, meaning and agency is pinned?¹⁵ Around which all can be taken away?

What would it mean to enact curare not towards the perfect form of curatorial practice but towards an “un-curatable” one, towards the desire to enact care outside of processes birthed in constellations formed from colonial double standards? What would it mean to want not just one thing—to be wanted—but to want everything for everyone as we are wanted?¹⁶

If the curatable is the act of witnessing (display, spectacle) afforded by the sanitised inheritances of domination and subjugation then what witnessing might be possible from the less respectable inheritances of resistance and solidarity?

For the Zapatista Army of National Liberation art was imagined as that which is neither seen nor heard:

“For us, Zapatistas, art is studied by creating many imaginations, reading the gaze, studying in listening, and practising.

It is by putting it into practice, that is, by doing it, that you will begin to see the result of the science and the art of imagination—the art of creativity.”¹⁷

(My question remained unanswered, unsettled, wobbly, thirsty. I level myself, an inside-out landing, a constellation of stars. I change where I'm stood.)¹⁸

IX

What happens, though, when we put things into practice in places that are far from autonomous zones? Spaces that have built the muscle of professing but not of committing? Places that function and exist through numbness created from the myth of neutrality? Places where we must create straight lines out of circles in order to regulate and reduce in force? Places where we are taught to defend the order required to save a structure, but not invite in the disorder that might save the life inside it?

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding.”¹⁹

Will we be told that the flow of water (memory) is something that can be controlled? That imagination must be limited so that memory can be shaped? Will we be asked like the Indonesian collectives who formed a Biennale from their practices of nongkrong, forming culture out of simply being together (just as you did in Radio Ballads): “What is an art museum without art?”²⁰

If art returns itself to the practice of living and the work of the curator becomes more akin to that of a doula, moving us through transitions together, then will we be able to swap out control for trust, fear for faith, decentre spectacle so that we can encircle and resource the remarkable, (extra)ordinary capacity to give and receive love?

Will we find each other, manage to be still, together, “in that fine space / between desire and always / the grave stillness / before choice.”?²¹

VIII

“Solidarity is beautiful in deep, meaningful ways that can banish the flat darkness of nihilism. Solidarity is the boundless mess of the imagination put into action—sometimes it can feel frictionless and safe, but sometimes it also demands risk. Though the beauty of solidarity is that a group can come together and find safety and strength collectively, to effectively hold power to account.”²²

Each work in Radio Ballads is made up of the air, the light, the breath between us all - each work is a material result of relation. Through each one, I have learned about firm, flexible strength that is required to continuously recover the conditions of love in places that ask us to simply endure in its absence. I have learnt that the corporeal; the very material of us, is formed through interdependence, we are simply less alive without it. This sensual, embodied truth is what has been impressed upon me. I will remember it.

It is something material, I have felt it, I will feel it. We will feel it together.

(Vibrations felt through the impulses and agitations of a silent hum. This does exist. You know it, if you've heard it, you will know it, if you take time to listen).²³

All my love,

Jemma x

1. Tafoya in Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Fernwood, 2008).

2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022).

3. www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html

4. Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a Luxury,” (1985), in Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Collected Essays and Poems (Silver Press, 2017).

5. Audre Lorde, The collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton Company, 1997).

6. www.aaihs.org/the-problem-with-the-passive-past-tense/

7. “If I must die” by Refaat Alareer.

8. Jay Jordan and Isabelle Fremaux, We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press, 2021).

9. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

10. Lyrics from “Listening in Your Silence” performed at the opening of the Radio Ballads exhibitions at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, March/April 2022. The song was collaboratively written by Helen Cammock and Pause as part of the project Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience.

11. Staci K Haines, The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice (North Atlantic Books, 2019).

12. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994).

13. alexandrajuhasz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/what-does-an-uprising-doula-do-zine.pdf

14. Audre Lorde, “For Each of You”, The collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton Company, 1997).

15. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering (PM Press, 2016); Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996).

16. www.instagram.com/p/CzjsZtQI5uF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

17. enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/08/08/the-art-that-is-neither-seen-nor-heard/

18. Lyrics from “Listening in Your Silence,” performed at the opening of the Radio Ballads exhibitions at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, March/April 2022. The song was collaboratively written by Helen Cammock and Pause as part of the project Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience.

19. Toni Morrison, from a talk given at the New York Public Library in 1986.

20. www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/09/22/documenta-15-closes-curators-ruangrupa-exhibition-kassel

21. Audre Lorde, “Echoes”, The collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton Company, 1997).

22. artreview.com/why-the-artworld-must-stand-with-palestine/

23. Lyrics from “Listening in Your Silence,” performed at the opening of the Radio Ballads exhibitions at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, March/April 2022. The song was collaboratively written by Helen Cammock and Pause as part of the project Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience.