Infrastructures of Yearning
This piece is based on a keynote I gave at New Cinema Days in April 2023. It was later made into an audio piece and here it is presented with new inserts. An audio version is included at the end.
Audre Lorde asks us What do we want from each other after we have told our stories? In a poem called there are no honest poems about dead women.
In it I find a set of questions (which might be a map) to navigate how we (deep inside ourselves) long to belong with others.
The ways that we want
to be heard and remembered.
To be seen.
While our desires, our longing
and our grief
are still alive
— not just after they, and we,
have passed. Thinking with yearning; desire, eagerness for something; is messy and unruly. In her book Abolitionist Intimacies the poet and activist El Jones grapples with the emotional messiness of feeling desire that is not abolitionist “as long as there are prisons, surely there are people who should be in them” and the one that is ‘it is not that we want to persecute desire. It is that we want those things not to have to be desired, because they are a given.’
It is perhaps this emotional messiness that makes yearning antithetical to the managerial.
Desire moves faster than thought, it can’t answer your question of if not this then what, it reacts angrily to moderation, to a theory of change, to incremental progress.
Desire then, can then be a rehearsal of direct action.
It needs, it wants then to be now, even if it knows that then can’t be now, it knows, because it needs, somewhere, what it feels like for the future to be present.
I don’t mean to be utopian, even though I think utopias are beautiful. I’m not here to give a TED talk on the power of imagination. I don’t care to create for my own pleasure and comfort, another false infrastructure of hope.
I truly don’t think art or any new form of it, on its own can change the world. But I want to say that I wish for, I ardently desire, an infrastructure, a set of relations that could be this scattered, various, generative, this spontaneous in its desires and tactics. This, audacious in its longings.
In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics bell hooks tells us “True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.”
I want to ask today, what would it mean to create an infrastructure of cinema that envelopes yearning as an orientation towards life?
That doesn’t enact but resists domination through attention. That confronts pain rather than consumes or neutralises it. That enables voice choice and agency for everyone rather than taking it from some to give to others.
I won’t say I have the answers but I will say I yearn for them, because without these answers, or perhaps without the search for them and others to search with me I feel unfree, untethered and unconnected to cinema.
*
In her 1993 essay Playing in the Dark Toni Morrison describes her experience of coming to know how the white literary imagination functioned to form the essential (white supremacist) characteristics of the American literary tradition.
Describing a fish swimming in a bowl, she evokes the sense of a structure hiding in plain sight, ‘that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world’.
What is the glass bowl and water of the cinematic imaginary?
I am increasingly convinced it is not a circular formation but a line - a border?
In their book Against Borders: The Case for Abolition, Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke De Noronha describe what borders do:
“In conventional accounts, borders establish where one country ends and another begins. They are lines on maps, permanent and taken for granted. Borders delineate a country’s territory and mediate the movement of people and goods in and out. They keep out the things that are prohibited: undeclared sums of money, live animals, invasive plant species, disease, drugs - and of course, unauthorised people.”
In cinema, cultural policies and ideologies of nation states mirror one another in acts of bordering. We might be familiar with how borders enact scarcity: how they dictate what can and can’t be shown, who can and cannot attend what, what can and can’t be made, where it can be seen and made and who by.
But in addition to this scarcity, cultural exchange can mobilise abundance as a form of bordering connecting imperialist desire with the spectacle of celebrity.
What is revealed about the intersections of the desires of Hollywood glamour and the desires of settler colonialism when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends “Bollywood Shalom” a star studded film event in Mumbai? What is happening when he says we “We believe in Bollywood. World loves Bollywood. Israel loves Bollywood. We want Bollywood in Israel. We are putting our money where our mouth is.” What is he imagining when he asks the stars in attendance to join him on stage for a selfie “like the one at the Oscars?” So that everyone knows about the “great friendship between Israel and India?”
How do racial capitalism, liberal posturing and the marketisation of choice commingle and change each other? How do we as cultural workers, gatekeepers and consumers whoever we may be, and whatever we believe, generate these meanings and keep them in place?
What is happening when a cultural elite of critics and programmers cannot see the way a big budget epic forms a Hindu, upper-caste, masculinist vision of a strong India that feeds a growing Hindutva fascism so applaud its cynical mobilisation of anticolonial and decolonial imagery?
How do this elite contribute to the rewarding of this film on the world's biggest film stage by supporting it with gushing praise, choosing it so others will too, making it certain that such tropes and affectation will be deemed profitable, marketable and relatable and that any nuanced unpicking of their logic be deemed niche, academic, and fringe?
We may not relate to content aimed at the masses, the kind that can be rebranded colonial nostalgia or politically neutralised revolutionary epic. Big budget spectacle may not contain the form of our yearnings, but how might we still be implicated when we form and reform forms, new or old?
Our progressive aims become acts of bordering too as we make sure to map and represent different cinemas and to share the wealth of the global cinema industry to wider audiences. Big streamers and smaller cultural agencies reach out into neglected territories. Over the multiplicity of film languages - different ways of (making and) seeing - are asymmetric access points, which are hidden through desires; both real and imagined; of visibility and representation that can transcend all borders.
In all of this connecting and reconnecting what is being hidden about the fiction of the border? How are these subtle acts naturalising the border and the violence that keeps it and the people it separates in place?
*
If we desire an infrastructure that allows life for all desires and not just, some, we might have come to know, as Morrison did, that ‘the subject of the dream is the dreamer.’ Such a realisation can bring into view the need for more voices, more stories, more visibility and access.
In the infrastructure of art-making as we know it, these asymmetric points of access become untethered from their roots in the nation state allowing this asymmetry to be detached from the demands of politics. These become floating signifiers attached to the softer impulses of interest, fetish and concern.
This ‘concern’ is a form of deferential yearning — a compromised hope. This seems to draw attention to the ways infrastructure can bend and adapt to our present day wantings or learnings, but only in a form that obscures how these infrastructures are formed by the history of the present which is in itself formed by the ongoing desires for the forces which create asymmetry: domination and power.
What is at stake in the colonial lie inside the gift of representation and exposure through filmmaking and cinema while the nation state is taken for granted?
Mauritanian director Med Hondo put it plainly when he said:
“Whether I make a film in Paris or Nouakchott, it is pretty obvious that my country will not see it. Over the long terms the situation becomes a latent suicide,”
*
The act of bordering in national commercial cinema can feel comically blatant. If we yearn for something different then perhaps we realise that scale is a moderator. That production value and ethical values might somehow be intertwined: we might form solidarities based on these shared values.
But do we think deeply enough about how and why?
What implicit act of bordering happens when we co-produce ‘independent’ cinema? What happens when a film moves from lab to lab all dominated by the privileges of money and cinematic technologies from the US and Europe? In being handled in these settings how does the artist and the image change? Whose yearning is absorbed and contained? Whose autonomy do we hold?
Hito Styrel describes the Poor Image as the “Wretched of the Screen”
{Utilising a framework from Franz Fanon, a liberation fighter as well as scholar and psychologist, Styrel follows connections into her writing and her work. This militant clarity muddies when it merges with the infrastructures of art making and resourcing in which her work circulates}.1
These images she says:
“testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.”
Under racial capitalism how can this ‘poor’ image, made poor partly due to asymmetric access to state-cinema organisations but also partly due the prevalence of a dominant gaze that others it exist or actualise in an autonomous zone?
Can it?
Joy James’s theory of the ‘captive maternal’ describes how those bound by love to persons hunted by the state can either stabilise the systems which produce this violence or turn against them in revolt. Filmmakers from places that are not the US or Europe who carry a political autonomy through their filmmaking and also wish to pursue an international film practice under the depredations of racial capitalism face a similar choice. For these filmmakers cinematic practices and industry standards are imposed upon indigenous practices. In their efforts to make work and show it, what does it mean for them to take on the idealisations and colonial aspirations of the perfect image? What does it mean for a filmmaker with an oppositional gaze to have or to choose to inscribe beauty where there is none there, simply in order to make images at all? What and whose longing is being visualised when new images are changed by dominant gazes and dominant gazes remain unchanged by new images?
How is this system of entrenched filmic language intertwined in the nexus of top tier film festivals, and their attendant markets? Who is choosing the image and why, how are they making sense of the image and why? Who are they doing this for?
*
Are we sure when we are sharing films we are not just containing them, imprisoning them to be seen by the same eyes over and over again in exchange for a place in history, the canon, the archive?
As programmers are we map makers? Do we want to be practising in our desires the colonial politics of recognition or do we desire to draw something else — a bridge —to somewhere else stretching borders into connection beyond ourselves? Into other possibilities beyond reward, remuneration, genius, fame or institutional recognition?
At the Symposium on Cinema in Developing Countries in India in 1979, Ousmane Sembène told the gathering:
“If we have gathered here to discuss the role of cinema in developing countries, I think it would be right for us to discuss why these directors face these identical problems. It is because, I think, many governments would be very happy if we talked about cinema only as an art form, as an aesthetic medium. They would not be so happy if we spoke about the strikes in our country and the troubles in our country. I personally do not see any purpose as a creator to use this aesthetic aspect to communicate with this minority of bourgeois people who are in our country.”
Semebene’s desire to not only speak to an elite makes me wonder: what does it mean to be embedded and implicated systems that excel in their resilience against emancipatory transformation and have to navigate what they offer anyway? In the context of cinema the courage to step out of the frame into an alternative narrative is not always an aesthetic decision and yet never can it be divorced from its aesthetics. Who has the space to choose what they say, how they say it and be sure that this will be received?
*
When Margaret Thatcher was after the BBC for what she saw as its leftist bias on the Falklands War, The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the US bombing of Libya, she sought to undermine its influence along with those of the unions at ITV and BBC, by creating a new broadcaster - Channel 4 which was led by young independent entrepreneurial producers rather than unionised workers.
A side remit which became central to its subsequent output and influence was to create broadcast opportunities for filmmakers on the margins of screen cultures, many working on the minimum wage, some wageless, never before allowed to make for television.
For a few short years before Thatcher disbanded the Greater London Council in 1986, the Labour led GLC, led by Red Ken Livingstone and Channel 4 led by Alan Fountain active in the Independent Filmmakers’ Association teamed up to resource a series of workshops - Sankofa, Black Audio Film Collective, Retake amongst them. Additionally Ceddo Film and Video Workshop emerged, named after a 1977 film by Ousmane Sembène, which depicts the Senegalese people’s struggle to preserve their traditions in the face of colonial oppression.
One of Ceddo’s films, The People’s Account, from 1985, documents a series of testimonies from a housing estate in Tottenham, North London, site of the Broadwater Farm Uprising. In response to the slick contortions of mainstream media accounts of the unrest, the film, shot on low cost digital betacam opens with an unvarnished commitment to truth telling, stating plainly, factually and directly:
‘Three major uprisings rocked London and Birmingham in late 1985. Each was sparked by an act of police lawlessness against a Black woman.’
This truth unfurls into an insurgent methodology of presenting the unfiltered self determination, tenacity and resilience of men, women and families as well as the righteous anger that fuelled communities who rose up in defiance of state brutality.
Although the film had been cleared by lawyers, the Independent Broadcasting Authority took issue with phrasing in the film such as ‘police racism’ and ‘self-defence by a community’ and demanded editorial changes.
Ceddo translates loosely as ‘the resistance of a culture’. Cultural theorist Kobena Mercer referred to this filmmaking cohort as ‘cinematic activists.’
The collective stood firm in their methodological commitments refusing to change the edit, so Channel 4 declined to air The People’s Account.
Despite the infrastructures of risk and possibility that the UK government and its cultural bodies had both accidentally and intentionally set up, it was never shown on British television.
I want to hold the yearning in Ceddo’s refusal to weaken in their commitments, to stay true to their name, to their global solidarities as I want to hold the yearning in the people that commissioned it in the first place.
I want to ask, where did one commitment stand firm and where did one weaken?
Thinking about The People’s Account I wonder how can we want everything for everyone and still be wanted?
*
In 2020, the year of the pandemic and global racial reckonings, the Sight and Sound Film of the Year was Oscar winning filmmaker Steve Mcqueen’s Lover’s Rock. The film was part of Mcqueen’s Small Axe series, which one critic, comparing it to Mcqueen’s Oscar winning 12 years a slave, described as the “epic about black people’s history in Britain …which had never been made, until now.”
Small Axe appears at the moment that the UK film industry appears to reckon with its lack of attentiveness to certain images, certain stories. An outpouring of critical support is generated around these films that attend to testimonies that have never been given a platform to speak.
Everyone seems finally to want everything for everyone.
At this time a contradiction appears, perhaps because it must.
Our faith in testimony through the medium of the screen and the possibility of appearing on it appears unwavering even as we are flooded with the proof that liberation through these means has repeatedly been withheld from those most impacted by state violence.
Where does this unwavering faith in testimony come from? Whose yearning is it?
When on and off screen we are shown over and over again that having a platform to speak does not free everyone, that having a voice confers no universal benefit, why do we wish to speak and be heard in these ways?
I wonder, in a medium that supposedly collapses time and space, What role does narrative fact and fiction as well as geographical and historical proximity and distance play in our ability to collectively meet the livedness of state violence with love and care and immediacy?
Steve Mcqueen’s most recent film about the ongoing tragedy of the Grenfell tower in Ladbroke Grove in London where on On 14 June 2017, due to state neglect that residents say they had long testified too and had been and is ongoing for many years before and after, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London, at 54 minutes past midnight and burned for 60 hours.
72 people died, two later in hospital, with more than 70 injured and 223 escaping into precarious housing and still awaiting justice.
Mcqueen’s film is neither a small or big screen epic but it shows us how a filmmaker might struggle with their yearning as a tragedy unfolds in real time. In a text to accompany the film which is on exhibition at the Serpentine, Paul Gilroy expresses a need “to know whether art can play a role in the difficult pursuit of reparation and restoration”.
Gilroy’s commitment to need to know, and Mcqueen’s commitment to struggle with its possibility has no guarantees just as the struggle for justice to be heard and understood by officialdom and juridical systems carries no guarantees.
But artistic struggle with integrity and lived struggles for state integrity can confer different benefits.
*
Perhaps this understanding of the role of the filmmaker in perpetuating the unequal distribution of power which constrains who is allowed to speak but also the terms of what can be said and how it will be heard is why McQueen’s film is almost silent, with no story, no soundtrack, no beginning or end credits, no narrativising.
Here Mcqueen trains his camera and the eye of the audience who he holds captive, on the detritus of a still unfolding act of violence.
I long for all of us who are responsible for supersaturating the world with images, to consider the work that these images do and why. If as Gargi Bhattacharya writes “heartbreak is the class consciousness of racial capitalism” then what work is our infrastructure doing with this heartbreak?
How is it working toward moderating substitution—cultural consumption or even deference — as a stand-in for material change?
In the politics of deference, we might talk about our privileges, our different intersections, the different rights, risks and freedoms our passports, our citizenships, our lineages, or accidents of birth allow us and what we might do to acknowledge them. Even though these privileges are power, we talk of them as passive appendages that we have not chosen. We rarely talk about how the ways our relative power is extracted from somewhere continues to extract in the present, and how our acknowledgment of this does nothing to remedy this, nothing to draw attention to the ways we hold on to power through choice, and also passively through fear of risk and change.
I yearn for us to begin to ask, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore does, why do things happen where they do?
I yearn for us to ask ourselves, why is this happening where I am? What will I risk, what will I give up, what will I break and step out of to change it? Who will come with me?
Even if it makes us feel helpless. Even if it bores us.
*
Cinematic practices are technologies and ways of working but they are also about the flow of resources that make those practices possible. These resources can be mechanical — our tools, the size and progress of our operations, our production and organisational spending, sales and funding.
Our resources are also relational - the quality of relationships, resilience, happiness, culture, dynamism, trust and relevance to the world we live and want to live in.
I want to ask a question which might bore us, but it is a question about the distance between institutional structures and personal risk. What resources are cared for and how when money flows from a registered charity under a Royal Charter?
Since the 12th century charities have been created by the wealthy or the god fearing to help poor heathens, it was partly through these charities that the grubbiness of their colonial exploits could be laundered. Still now our charities fund us, some doing oppositional work, but some upholding moderating control — convincing us that we are doing work that is good for society through disseminating public funds. What is the ethical code of public money when it also mingled with the money of the poorest in society desperately trying to solve their problems by winning the lottery? What kind of ethical relations are possible within this?
Is there a link between the ways that our organisations, producers, filmmakers, freelancers are drowning in neoliberal methods of oversight like reports, risk assessments, financial spreadsheets, board/committee meetings so that the presence of resource rich and time poor business and aristocratic elites can limit their liabilities and conduct the oversight to keep order?
Order over who and over what?
What if the chair or the director of an organisation did not simply talk of multiple crises, and declare institutional dysfunction but committed to clarifying how and who that dysfunction empowers and disempowers and why it empowers and disempowers. What if they could name their fear in naming the why and the how, the fear in longing for too much for some people and somethings and and falling out of belonging with other people and other comforts.
What if the role of the board was not to keep order, but to keep desire?
To help us to demand everything even if their own interests were put at risk? What if a board and the organisation lead each other towards the subversive risk of desire not away from it.
Then, would Directors and producers of organisations and films still have to perform a bureaucratic hypochondria, to steer projects and organisation towards the transactional?
*
What other ethics, processes and relations might be possible if we didn’t have to demonstrate we have followed existing ones? What if we no longer enabled unfettered power and influence through the need for a main protagonist in the invisible drama of our administrative processes, what if a single charismatic figure at the centre of this bureaucratic back and forth, the focal point on which power, meaning and agency is pinned could be set free?
How might we reorient our processes so we might embrace approaches of collaborative accountability, entangled materiality, co-agency, vulnerability and co-creation?
Would the contract we enter into still be a ‘business affair’ that ‘exploits’ the rights of a filmmaker?
*
For the past few years I have struggled with what it means to have lost faith in the idea of reform but also to work in systems and infrastructure where reform is seen as the only way to enact change. I have asked myself what it means to work in cultural production and desire abolitionist praxis? I define abolitionist praxis in way that Dylan Rodriguez does as
“a practice, an analytical method, a present-tense visioning, an infrastructure in the making, a creative project, a performance, a counterwar, an ideological struggle, a pedagogy and curriculum, an alleged impossibility that is furtively present, pulsing, produced in the persistent insurgencies of human being that undermine the totalizing logics of empire, chattel, occupation, heteropatriarchy, racial-colonial genocide, and Civilization as a juridical-narrative epoch”.
Or as Ruth Wilson Gilmore abbreviates:
“Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything”
*
A postscript
A letter about fear and change
“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” - Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Gilmore and Lambert, 2019).
Dear L,
Do you remember the story we used to read about a girl who turned into a moon, a tribe, an island, and the boy who becomes a bull, the sky, a kite?
The author Aracelis Girmay, who is a poet, wrote it for her girl when she was small. It began as a series of collages, little fragments of images that she reassembled into another whole one.
Before she wrote the text to go with them, she wrote a letter to herself. Writing something new, she knew that things she already knew, and things others had known before were worth rehearsing, relearning, revisiting. She began by re-searching through old stories told over and over - stories of physical and spiritual transformation; metamorphosis. Old stories that rehearsed the future as relearning, revisiting the past, never losing the imprint of it, even as it transmuted into something new.
She writes:
“experience of the world is physical and emotional osmosis.
Those who are born near the sea will carry with them, always, some sense or salt from that sea - no matter how far away from it they travel.
Weathered by time and evolution, bodies turn themselves into other bodies, and others still. Sometimes it is the body that changes; we gain scars, grow the physical, move from our homes. There is life. There are births and there are deaths.
Sometimes the essence of a person changes.”
In the book these changes are magical, but in the world, sometimes changes are feared even when we say we want them, even when some of us know that things can’t stay the same if we want everyone (not just ourselves, not just some people) to feel and be free.
Fearing the change that could be metamorphosis, can halt the movement of growth. It can cause us to turn inward rather than out; turn possible fluidity, expansion, into brittle disconnection.
Holding this change in all its uncertainty, attending to it, letting it be, can move us outward, birth something between us.
(Like when you were born.)
(And like every time you change.)
x
An audio version:
This written piece has been delivered as a performance keynote and was later made into an audio piece. The performance took place at New Cinema Days which I called Infrastructures of Yearning. In the live version I spoke over reel of clips that I had assembled as part of my research.
During this research I was thinking about the invitation to deliver a keynote, and what that meant. I thought about “Keynote” as a sound that might be translated into an image - the first note or the key on which the rest of music plays. If there is a keynote to these images it is one of contradictory desires - yearnings that compete with one another.
I gather here some moments I had come across or been drawn to where images had been made through desire for change, or movement, or attentiveness. I was drawn to both utopic and more sinister longings and so I gathered clips where images had been made of everyday resistance which felt seismic for those who were there when they happened or when grand historical inequities mingled with moments of celebration or spectacle. Moments where a feeling of yearning was distilled into a filmed clip or performance, and moments where yearnings and desires clashed with each other, creating discordance that appeared harmonious due to the ways that it was performed, the ways it was or was not filmed, preserved, presented or written about.
The reel showed clips from: A 2018 news report of a gathering Bollywood actors called Bollywood Shalom where Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu recreated the viral 'Oscar selfie'posed with Bollywood superstars as a sign of the 'great friendship' between India and Israel. Ceddo Film and Video Workshop’s The People’s Account (1985) detailing the way that media misrepresentation suppressed, misrepresented and hindered justice for victims of state violence; Little Simz performing Heart on Fire, a song about the artists search for freedom and integrity in capitalist and historically racist structures and industries at the EE BAFTA Film Awards 2023 in front of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the charity’s patrons; actress Shabana Azmi speaking out (to applause and in the presence of the people she directly addressed) at the hypocrisy of the political and artistic establishment at the International Film Festival of India in 1989 shortly after the the murder of a prominent communist playwright Safadr Hashmi which I first encountered in a film by Suneil Sanzgiri; archival footage of Grunswick protestors including Jayaben Desai clashing with the police; the trailer, including press quotes from American and English critics, of Indian director Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), a clip of domestic worker’s union’s demands as recorded in the Yugantar Film Collectives Maid Servant (1981), sections of musings on geopolitics and belonging in Alnoor Dewshi’s Latifah and Himli’s nomadic uncle (1992) and a 1976 performance of Nina Simone singing I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free. During the Q&A the reel continued to show footage of the M11 Link Road protests in East London, pre-gentrification Hackney including images of activists and community significance in the area which have never had films made about them.
The selection of clips, references and images didn’t seek to to flatten difference or force resonances where none exists but to draw attention to points - which are often separated in the division between art and life - where different forces act on each other, contradict one another as well as echo one another. The clips selected display a narrative of yearning - of films made and not made, seen and not seen, stories told and not heard. In the live piece, resonances between the spoken text and the images were not illustrative, but untethered from each other gesturing to possible ruptures and contradictions as well as new connections.
In the audio text this layer of meaning was not present, but I invited those who gathered around it to listen to the piece on headphones in the following ways to create their own layers of meaning with the following instructions:
Listen looking around at the city in which you live. Be sure to take in the sights you see with the full orientation of your neck, not just straight ahead. What do you notice as you turn your attention to your external landscape as you listen? What contradictions, complexities and reconfigurations emerge for you? What do you notice yourself noticing, notice yourself wanting? What do you notice yourself seeing and not seeing?
Turn your attention inward as you listen. What feelings and sensations come up for you while you are listening? For example, did you feel surprise, frustration, or excitement? Did you feel resistance? What kind? How did you hold these in your body? What parts of your body did these sensations settle into? What was the quality of these sensations? Are they cold, breathless, open, nervy or blocked? What other words can you find?
References
Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2022. We, the Heartbroken: Hajar Press.
Bradley, Gracie M., and Luke d. Noronha. 2022. Against Borders: The Case for Abolition. Verso Books.
Chakravorty, Swagato. 2021. ““A workshop focused on issues that mattered”: A Conversation with Retake Film and Video Collective co-founder Ahmed Alauddin Jamal [Video].” Stories From The Block. https://nublockmuseum.blog/2021/02/15/a-workshop-focused-on-issues-that-mattered-a-conversation-with-retake-film-and-video-collective-co-founder-ahmed-alauddin-jamal-video/
Desai, Jemma. 2022. “Permitted to Dream: Reflections on the Brent Biennial 2022.” ArtReview. https://artreview.com/permitted-to-dream-some-reflections-on-the-brent-biennial-2022
Desai, Jemma. 2023. “Yearning as method - notes on programming.” Substack. https://jemmadesai.substack.com/p/yearning-as-method-notes-on-programming
Gilroy, Paul. 2023. “Never Again Grenfell.” Serpentine Galleries. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/never-again-grenfell/
hooks, bell. 2015. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Routledge.
Hunter, D. 2018. Chav Solidarity. Active Distribution.
Kumanyika, Chenjerai, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2020. “Intercepted Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition.” The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/
Ky Tan, Jack, and Alessandra Cianetti. 2022. “On Work | Interview with Jack Ky Tan.” performingborders. https://performingborders.live/interviews/on-work-interview-with-jack-ky-tan/
Lim, SL. 2023. “No Thanks: How the white art left launders the carceral state.” New Socialist. https://newsocialist.org.uk/no-thanks-how-white-art-left-launders-carceral-state/
Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the dark Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Nilamber, Abhishek. 2018. “S A V V Y • United Screens.” S A V V Y Contemporary. https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/events/2018/united-screens-chapter-1/
Olufemi, Lola, Juliet Jacques, and Jack Ky Tan. 2023. “Structurally F–cked.” a-n The Artists Information Company. https://www.a-n.co.uk/research/structurally-f-cked/
O. Taiwo, Olufe mi (Georgetown U., and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò. 2022. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). Pluto Press.
Parker, Rianna J. 2020. “'The People's Account' of State Violence in Britain.” Frieze. https://www.frieze.com/article/peoples-account-state-violence-britain
Price, Yasmina. 2023. “Mothers and mothering.” Africa Is a Country. https://africasacountry.com/2023/01/mothers-and-mothering
Rodríguez, Dylan, M. McLeod, Angel E. Sanchez, and Patrisse Cullors. 2019. “Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword.” Harvard Law Review. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-132/abolition-as-praxis-of-human-being-a-foreword/
Steyerl, Hito. 2009. “In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10.” e-flux. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/25/free-speech-is-a-facade-how-gaza-war-has-deepened-divisions-in-german-arts-world