We’re delighted to present our recent partnership with MAP: ‘the cold,’ a series curated by Camara Taylor!
<<It’s a shame about the Weather>>
<< you get used to it though>>
<<do you?>>
Introduction to ‘the cold’
‘How do you write a shiver? Or the chattering of teeth that becomes an anxious grind?’
Camara introduces the theme ‘registers of cold’ and how we navigate these registers as Black people and people of colour living in Scotland (both migrated to and born here). They highlight works by Nadine El-Enany, Ikuko Asaka and June Evans, exploring ‘race-based environmental essentialism’ and ‘tropicality’ as a tool of Empire, citing the experiences of contemporary Afro-Scots in the 1990s and the British Honduran [Belizean] Forestry Unit in 1940s Scotland. With redaction poetry and digital collages, Camara’s gives us a wonderfully precise introduction to this thought-provoking collaboration.
Read ‘Introduction to the Cold’ by Camara Taylor
Before Emergence: A Means of Break/age
‘Seeds do this year on year, laying dormant in order to survive. A strategic action that facilitates their dispersal in space and time.’
Martha Adonai Williams tenderly explores the tenacity of seeds and how they carefully move out of dormancy, as she seeks ‘a metaphor that situates the Black diaspora within mythologies of the North.’
Read ‘Before Emergence: A Means of Break/age’ by Martha Adonai Williams
Blubber, Guts, Southern Leith
‘tugged & hauled to the flensing plan
or bow, peels back skin &
blubber , & first would leave
the rest of you out to float ⎯’
Nat Raha’s heart-wrenching and beautiful poems sear the digital page, highlighting the colonial plundering of our oceans from whaling in the first half of the 20th Century.
Read ‘Blubber, Guts, Southern Leith’ by Nat Raha
Cold Talk – Camara Taylor and Tako Taal
‘Cold doesn’t exist. I learnt that in a Physics class … Cold is the feeling of loss, it is a pain, a kind of mourning.’
Moving through climate to colonialism to (lost) archives, situated within the pandemic, with highlights of (nervous) laughter and nods towards what is not said, Tako Taal and Camara Taylor explore ‘registers of cold.’
Read Camara Taylor’s and Tako Taal’s condensed discussion of the cold
‘the cold’ is curated by Camara Taylor
Camara Taylor an artist, writer and researcher.
Their current projects focus on the excesses of dominant discourse, and lower frequencies of objection in the context of Black lives. Camara lives and works in Glasgow. camarataylor.com
Artists
Martha Adonai Williams is a writer, facilitator, producer, community organiser, black feminist and friend. Her practice departs to and returns from black feminist world-making, always, with regular layovers in front of trash tv or at the allotment. Her work considers the wilderness and margins as sites of resistance, refusal and homecoming.
Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her third collection of poetry is of sirens, body and faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018). She is a Research Fellow on the ‘Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism’ project at the University of St Andrews.
Tako Taal is an artist, filmmaker and programmer living in Glasgow. takotaal.com
Special thanks to Alison Scott and Rosie Roberts, Reviews and Projects Co-editors at MAP.
MAP is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the discussion and support of artist-led publishing and production. Working across on-and-offline situations, MAP publishes artist writing, moving image, reviews, critical essays and interviews, curating an expanded site for re-examining and developing practices of active looking, reading, writing and distribution.
