CARE POLITICS
Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, The Unarrival Experiments. (photo: Scott Shaw)
For artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, darkness is a site for discovery, where the cosmic significance of their Blackness and Transness is investigated. In The Unarrival Experiments, Whitson takes a multidisciplinary approach to access this darkness; dance performance, cosmological research, and writing all serve as mediums for their investigation. Through improvisational gatherings like their Dark Matter Cypher, Sage invites collaborators to join them in the dark, sharing process and discovering possibility. As one collaborator said, “The Cypher feels like being on a live radio show: calling out to the darkness but knowing people are on the other end.”
As a 2020 Getty Marrow program intern with Fathomers, Qianze Zhang spoke with Whitson about their journey of sharing this investigatory process with other Black and Trans folk in gestures of care, ritual, and protest.
QZ: In a podcast episode last year of “Who Yo People Is,” hosted by your friend and frequent collaborator, Sharon Bridgforth, you share your experiences growing up and finding care in a community of Black and Trans folk. Your workshop facilitation practice creates spaces serving Black and Trans folk, and there was great intentionality in the care packages you sent your collaborators during the first remote Dark Matter Cypher. How did this thread of caretaking weave itself into your practice?
SNW: It took time to identify that I was holding the holistic wellness of collaborators because I was in it so deeply. It started with being so taken care of. I have studied and worked a lot with different spiritual practitioners. I have had angels on this plane and beyond who have shown up for me over and over again. I also was instructed by the culture of hip hop, namely the importance of showing up for community. I founded a hip hop performance and community engagement group when I was in college, which is still going. That was one of my earliest experiences of holding the room for other people. I wanted to put something together with all the elements of hip hop: DJs and graffiti artists, Black leadership and an African diasporic lens. So now you've got all these people in the room who are trusting your leadership. What are you going to do with that? If I’m going to ask people to come into a room, be vulnerable, and share their artistry, that needs to be reciprocated somehow. The care packages for the Cypher came from asking, “How would my collaborators’ spirits be nourished? How would their well-being be supported?” For me those components were non-negotiable. The care package became the way to address what we would be missing of having people in the live.
QZ: Your practice has been influenced by such a unique combination of sources and experiences. Could you speak to how your herbalist practice plays in?
SNW: I was asking one of my aunts about our family tree, and she told me about my great-grandmother, Willie, whom she called a rootworker. It was the first time that I heard someone in my family talk about our native ancestry in the context of root healing. She told me about how the community would come to Willie’s home and she would go into her garden and out into the woods and make medicines for them. I wondered, “How haven't I ever heard about this person before?” This ancestor had information for me, and The Unarrival Experiments came from me building a relationship with her. The rootwork practices are indigenous practices of both my U.S. native ancestors and African indigenous ancestors. So there is for me a real coming home in that work. As an Ifá and as an Órísá devotee, my spiritual practice asks for sensitivity to the relationship between our bodies and everything else around us. I learned a lot through the divination of the particular Órísá who are guiding me. So, it was also through the divine that my rootworking path has become revealed and embraced.
QZ: Your Illumination Catalogue combines your caretaking and herbalist practices as you plan to create essences honoring the lives of Trans folk who have been murdered. What is the importance of working at this intersection for this project?
SNW: Illumination Catalogue was the last piece of The Unarrival Experiments to crystallize, while the others were there from the beginning. As I was finishing the first Unarrival Experiments book during my last writing residency in Hawaii, I was starting to experiment with darkness and more vast natural spaces. It became clear that being unable to talk about Trans people's chosen birth dates, as opposed to dates connected to dead names and families that misgendered them, was a huge missing piece, not just in the project, but in the universe. There's such a deep alignment between spiritual giftedness and Trans embodiedness — so many cultures around the world understand that. What does it mean then to be unable to locate the magical astronomical activity connected to when they were brought into the world? Illumination Catalogue was birthed from my wrestling with how to honor the futurity of Black Transness in ritual gathering. It feels opportune to pay reverence to those we have lost so violently. Paying reverence and walking with ancestry are extensions of Yorùbá tradition.
What I don't want is for Black Trans communities to be spectacles, so the gatherings cannot be spaces for public consumption. They're not designed to be witnessed, which is to some degree antithetical to what it means to be in performance. And there's lots of theories on the absent audience in the performance art tradition that aligns with this.
QZ: Your performance work is simultaneously performance and work-doing, to which the audience are witnesses. A precious result of this is that the full depth of the work is not accessible to a non-Black or cisgendered audience. When you’re in the work, how much is open to the unplanned?
SNW: The process of being in the unknown is everything to me. I have to be in process to figure out what is really true and make discoveries about a work. I'm always deeply engaged in research as a part of the work while simultaneously making significant room for Spirit to arrive. I was doing research with Charlotte O’Neal (a Black Panther Party artist and activist who fled to Tanzania when her husband was set up by the police) and while organizing her archives, I asked about the symbolism in some of her paintings. Her response was, “Child, I don't know!” It was this wonderful moment of an elder giving permission, saying, “I am in response to Spirit and I could not tell you exactly what every little thing means.” So for me, the unknown is choosing to be in collaboration with Spirit and sometimes that can be really frightening.
This translates to my teaching style, as well. When people ask me what I teach, I sometimes struggle to answer because what I teach is usually aligned with where my research interests are, and that changes. Since I have a background in performance and in creative writing, they're enmeshed. I am always teaching what I am either interested in learning or I'm currently engaged in. It feels really important to be in the room curious with students.
QZ: I found that when watching your performances, I would wonder, what do those specks of light mean? That dip? That spin? These questions unsettled me because they seem to undermine the way your work resists colonization -- when these details are labelled and explained, something is lost.
SNW: But I want to honor where those questions come from. I'm incredibly detail-oriented. There are rarely moments in my creative work when something “just happens,” though there are definitely intentional spaces and structures for Spirit to happen. I often designate sections to be improvisatory. I identify the elements that will combine to make the intended magic of the work happen, but what exactly that magic will look like will be unknown. Also, most of the moments in a work come from specific tasks, scores, or narratives. (Even if by that time we arrive, we've journeyed far from that initial point.) There is a great deal of specificity that arrives from being available to the unknown, and my job is to listen for it. Once I hear that it's been found, it's not really actually negotiable, it's then about getting precise about what the moment needs. So it is what people hear; it is what people see. It is the way that light is in the space. I'm thinking of Oba Qween Baba King Baba, where the audience of witnesses was up in the upper gallery and the performers were on the floor. So the elements moving in a work like that, that aren’t always visible or obvious, also impact what's happening in the room.
QZ: The Unarrival Experiments performances are not meant to be considered linearly, but they do inform one another chronologically. How do you decide what to work on next?
SNW: Sometimes the next step is, sadly, conditioned by marketplace. If someone tells me, “I can give you three days in a warehouse,” my mind goes, “How do I continue to build this project in service with this kind of opportunity?” I have been committing to do less of that because I think it presents a disservice to the work.
Sometimes it's about what a space has to offer. Other times, I take myself directly where I feel the most curious or have the least information or need to figure something out in order to keep going. The Cyphers help me in this learning, being spaces to gather in to improvise around themes. This year, for a lot of us, has been a real project in listening. Sometimes it’s being in the dark, in the waters of the work and digging and then hearing a sound in the distance. Sometimes it’s what calls.