TATI #04: I fit in the world, and the world fits in me

Hello, hello, hello.

It’s a Saturday morning in Abidjan as I read this letter one more time before sharing it. It’s a longer one but I had a few things on my mind you see, and it is Saturday after all.

I have been saying to anyone curious about my work that I’m now interested in growing away from work focused on personal memory to collective memory. When I say that I’m referring to “Et pourtant, moi je me souviens”, my project on contested memory in Guinea. I now realize that, in an unexpected way, it is also a progression from looking at my mother to looking at my relationship to my motherland: Guinea.

That said I have been disappointed with my pace these days. I’m doing many things that are not related to making art. Beyond that, I have done more talk about what I want the project to be about than any actual research. Still, some useful thoughts and questions were born out of this gestation:

• First, what is Guinea to me? What does this country mean to me? Why is it important for me to see “Et pourtant, moi je me souviens” through?

• Second, this project cannot only be about me expressing anger at the erasure of the memory and suffering of some. I want it to be regenerative. I want my rage to be creative. I think of the expression Césaire used, in this clip that often comes up on my Instagram feed, when talking about the volcanoes of Martinique, his motherland: “a cosmic anger, a creative anger”.

Yes. That is what I want to tussle with.

For all my lamenting, I have been up to a few things

I am now a Building Beyond Fellow, a program of the Prince Claus Fund. This is timely as it will help with the structure I’m lacking at the moment, while giving me a space to explore how to incorporate spatial design in my practice.

I am also a Foam Talent 2026 Runner-up. The Runner-up category was introduced this year. This is another dream come true and probably the third time I had submitted my work for consideration. This distinction means a lot because I have long admired the artists who have been anointed Foam Talent over the years. I think in particular of Yushi Li (Foam Talent 2022) and Juno Calypso (Foam Talent 2016), whose work is so deliciously subversive.

Last October, I was in residency in Cairo via the ARD South program. During my time there, my interest in the notions of displacement and home drew me to work with the Sudanese diaspora, the more recent one. I wanted my point of entry to be music and sound and I was lucky to be welcomed by wonderful musicians and artists during that brief time. The capstone of my residency was, yes, the making of some images, but also a return to playing with sound. You can listen to what I’ve conjured here.

Finally, yes, I do have my tati recommendations

Below are the three things that have moved me and lingered these past few months:

1. Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy. This is Roy’s memoir, but above all Roy’s homage to her mother. Although, to be honest, homage might not be the adequate word. It is her sharing of her mother with us, as she was. In all that made her exceptional and in all that made her a bully. I loved learning about Roy’s life and her unflinching commitment to being an active witness. I also marveled at the beauty in the act of enshrining her mother in this book. By the end, as Roy was grappling with her grief, I too was grappling with the complexity of it.

How could I not love her?
How could I ever pretend to understand her?

2. Born in Blackness by Howard French. The subtitle of this book is the best summary I could offer: “Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War”. This is the first non-fiction book I’m attempting to read in a while and, to be fully transparent, I have still some ground to cover: I’m at page 338 of 431. I am learning so much (I can now tell you a lot about the Kongo Kingdom) and I am moved by French’s reflections on acts of remembrance (too scarce) and sites of forgetting (too vast).

3. La Yugular by Rosalía. If you’ve made it this far, please give the song a listen here and reply to let me know with a word (or more) what it made you feel. As for me: yes, I too want to fit the world in me. Often, I feel it already fits in me.

Yo quepo en el mudo
Y el mundo cabe en mí
Yo ocupo el mundo
Y el mundo me ocupa a mí

With an enraged but never despairing heart,

Hady

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