I haven’t done my WC3 yet – sorry! I’ve decided to use it as an opportunity to interview someone — an indigenous rights activist, or BAME intersectional environmentalist activist, but I’ve yet to decide who. I’m asking around my networks now. I will be responding to the prompt:
Create a piece of writing that uses specific writing structures, tones, or organizational methods to enact or embody your position.
I will be using the interview format to embody my position, i.e. platforming someone else’s voice, using the process as an opportunity for me to learn, being transparent about the limits of my knowledge, and making my own learning process part of the outcome.
A regular part of my activist practice since the BLM protests of 2020 has been to actively conduct personal research, to approach people and ask questions, to seek to further understand the complex issues I campaign about. I found the confidence to approach people in full transparency that this was personal research. Here I will basically do the same, but in a slightly more formalised way. While I think it is a great idea as a response to the brief, I also think it will help bring much-needed clarity to my position too, or at least to further my development, because at the moment I’m at risk of going round in circles.
The starting prompts/topics for discussion will probably be:
- decolonising the conversation around the climate crisis. because it’s fair and just and right, but also because I don’t think we’ll solve the climate crisis without decolonising the conversation around it, telling the truth about how we got into this situation, so we don’t continue to repeat the same mistakes
- how we have that conversation, what role design plays in that, and what form that conversation must have in order to live by the values it proposes.
But I want the interview process to be open, and led by the participant. I don’t know where the conversation will lead me. Maybe it will give me some answers, but it is likely it will also raise more questions. Maybe it will inspire new people to talk to. I like the idea that this could become a longer series. Maybe it would become an iterative series – many version of the same conversation, with different people. Maybe the whole thing opens out into a polylogue, a term coined by Julia Kristeva, that I discovered in Maura Reilly’s Curatorial Activism, meaning “an interplay of many voices, a kind of creative ‘barbarism’ that would disrupt the monological, colonizing, centristic drives of ‘civilization’”.
Two other key influences for this idea have been, Evan Nicole Brown, whose Against The Grain lecture discussed the value and ethics of interviews. You should be critical about which voices you elevate and put on public record, and think about finding new sources for topics, so as to make sure you are not merely contributing to the feedback loop of whose voices are heard, but are adding more to the conversation. She talked about how to interview respectfully, and how to make interviewees feel accurately represented in the outcome.
Similarly, Issue 3 of Unknown Quantities was entirely made up of interviews. Here they resisted the impulse to curate too heavily, or to give their own angle/perspective on their subject. By featuring entirely interviews they created a open space for incomplete and ongoing conversation:
The questions we proposed to our interviewees sought no right or wrong answer, nor did we expect them to provide a fixed conclusion. Instead we hope it will provoke a debate about a term that habitually passes us by silently.