EMOTIONAL PRACTICES is an online art programme exploring how emotions shape our work, and how artists position the self emotionally in the process of art creations. The aim is to draw on decolonial thinking to privilege emotions as a critical lens of enquiry into subjectivity and our world views, experiences, feelings and lexicons. The programme was curated by OPEN research initiative.

OPEN draws on decolonial methods to explore how our world views translate. We (re)think individual positions in terms of diversity and difference of experience. Our aim is to discover and develop OPEN art and design practices with transformational capabilities that are inclusive of emotional work, self-care, respect and positionality.

OPEN started in late 2018 as I was leaving the UK for Australia (following a force that guides me places) and we started voicing a feeling of restlessness with our positions as educators in Art & Design institutions. As the debate around decolonizing the curriculum took momentum, we found ourselves asking what the hell are we doing and how are we doing it. Besides questioning our positions, we faced ever increasing conflicting and conflicted positions in the students, contents, readings, artworks, discourses, researches with which we work. OPEN was born out of our recognising and staying with these conflicts and opening up(hence the name) spaces for exchange and holding, allowing for other forms of knowing, thinking and feeling – non-colonial, decolonial – to emerge, in time. We are living extremely conflicted times and to stay with the conflict, to stay at the crossroads, feels important.

OPEN is an opportunity to foreground these conflicts and crossroads not to resolve them.Conflicts and crossroads have been the guiding force and the very condition of existence for many for a very long time. Coloniality has been responsible for increasing the conflictual and crossroads existence of many while paradoxically promising to resolve them. We stop at trying to resolve them with the terms and concepts we have employed until now. One resolution is “no resolution”,co-existence and pluriversality. In OPEN we recognise that the time has come to make sense collectively of new terms, new forms of relations and new forms of knowledge and making. By ‘new’ please also consider ‘old’ forms, since as a historian I am not particularly obsessed with the idea of progress, innovation or revolution. By ‘new’ I mean to say other and the other is not new.  

I was born and raised in Brazil, you see, where I lived a privileged start to life. My skin colour, my regional accent, my family history, my everyday experience coincided with those represented on mass media. I was part of the norm. But the relevance, or the real privilege of being born in Brazil, is that you are surrounded by other perspectives, experiences, forms of living, everywhere, and they can become part of you, those multiple indigenous and Afro-Brazilian epistemologies and ontologies, understandings and knowlegdes.

(My word processor application doesn’t like the idea of knowledges in the plural. It underlines the word with a thin red snake and asks me to replace knowledges with knowledge – singular, or knowledge’s – a condition of possession. Do I ‘ignore all’ or ‘add to its dictionary’?)

The strongest responses come through emotional states of being. This should not divide us. Knowing who I am, where I’ve come from and where I’m going, this is part of the same process of realising who other people are, where they’re coming from, where they are going to. OPEN is a place for me to locate the strength in emotion and empathy, and try to better understand how our creativity, thoughts and actions can transform and advocate for a more equal and more inclusive society.  
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Our experiences and our feelings affect how we receive and process everything that we see, hear, touch, smell, taste and remember, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.  The disadvantages and advantages of social bias around gender, sexuality, disability, colonialism have all impacted my life. Being ‘mixed race’, being ‘queer’, being female, experiencing ill-health, at different points of my life have meant different things. Can we try to continuously unpick our assumptions as they arise? This means active labour, work and play. Friendships and a career as an educator, historian, writer, speaker, mother and artist, have helped me to consider how we continuously co-create the world that we live in, with all its joys and sadnesses.
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Realisation is a potent word. It implies a process of awakening, a fuller understanding and a bringing into being. People do not come to realisation through being attacked, harangued or coerced. I hope that through OPEN, artists, audiences, designers, curators, performers, writers, readers, activists, thinkers and doers can all find a place to explore life and their place within it, in a different and supportive way. Bitterness seen and shared. Anger heard and accepted. Action through connection and kindness.

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July 2019

Irrational. 
Man-up. 
Hysterical. 
Grow a pair. 
Crazy. 
Be a man. 
Unbalanced.
Boys don’t cry.
Soft.
Sensitive.
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Don’t be emotional.
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Under the cultural shadow cast by ‘Enlightenment’ ideals of rationality, we are taught from an early age that being – or, more importantly, appearing – emotional is undesirable. There is of course an obvious gendered aspect to this. As a woman, being described as ‘hysterical’ is rooted in centuries-old medical understandings of mental and physical health drawn along the lines of gender binary; being told to ‘man up’ reflects the same assumption that stifling our emotions is preferable, and that gender identity predetermines how we do and should behave. 
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I’ve witnessed this attitude through my lived experience of womanhood, but I’ve seen it too in the work I’ve done and continue to do. Emotions, feelings, things that are subjective and amorphous and not easily definable tend to be cast into a category of ‘the unscientific’. The Academy, we are told, likes to deal with certainties and empirical findings: funding grants aren’t made on the basis of immeasurables, we want to see results. 
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Limiting ourselves to this narrow view of what constitutes ‘evidence’ or ‘source material’ ignores a whole swathe of the human experience. As a historian, I deal in a form of storytelling; military records, photographs, balance sheets recovered from the depths of the London Metropolitan Archives are fantastic resources – but so too are the letters, diaries and oral histories that convey individual lived experiences in a way standardised ‘official’ resources do not. Bringing these ‘emotional’ accounts to the fore in academic studies – and beyond – requires a rethink of how we arrange and use ‘knowledge’. It is part of a wider effort to question conventional hierarchies of knowledge, to position ourselves and how we view the world in a wider ‘matrix of colonial power’. This is part of what it means to ‘decolonise’: to recognise and reflect critically on the power structures that have cultivated the world we live in. 
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I see OPEN as a continuation of this work. By foregrounding emotions in art and design praxis, and more recently in curating the online exhibition Emotional Practices, OPEN for me is part of a movement that recognises the received systems, orders and hierarchies within which it operates – and seeks to be more transparent about how ‘knowledge’ and history is presented. 
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This is not simply an academic exercise; it has a real-world impact. Particularly in the context of curating, institutions have tended historically to propagate ‘a’ narrative, ‘a’ truth, that belies the individual politics, agendas, blind spots of the curator(s) that created it. In September 2018, I attended an event called Troubling Objects, hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and introduced by its director, Tristram Hunt. The event was brimming with academics, artists, activists and museum professionals committed to developing practices that would situate museum collections in the context of their acquisition and publicly recognise that exhibitions represent just one interpretation of the stories their objects tell. 

Fast forward nine months.
 
In an article published in The Guardian, Tristram Hunt writes that: '[f]or museums like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualize […] A more nuanced understanding of empire is needed than the politically driven [sic] pathways of Good or Bad.’ 
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Reductive approaches like this reveal a real misunderstanding of decoloniality – and highlight the need do it. Because to decolonise is emphatically to recontextualise. There is no zero-sum outcome, whereby existing ‘Bad’ structures are cast aside in favour of a ‘Good’ alternative. It is about decentering the heteronormative imperialist white supremacist ableist capitalist patriarchy so that we can acknowledge cultures, histories, practices, voices and viewpoints that have historically been silenced by this system. We need to be OPEN to radical change.

OPEN is for me a reality and a possibility, a gift and a promise.


OPEN is for me a project to think, explore, question and connect with personal experiences. Through OPEN I have been encouraged to free my emotional self so that my work is led by my ‘gut intelligence’, a phrase that I came across through Sarah Ahmed, and to whom I am therefore grateful. Gut intelligence is that thing—feeling feelings—that tells us inside and deep down what-is-what. But until recently it was difficult to locate the thingyness of such intelligence/feelings as a legitimate intelligence; afterall it doesn’t match the tone and style of traditional scholarship; it has rarely been a priority in that type of work. And then--when these kinds of knowledges come from bodies that are Other they form a deadlock with orthodox knowingness. They vye to be heard, to be seen, to be recognised; yet so often they are crushed, pushed aside, swung afield, put out of the way by the powers that be as not relevant nor even real. Patriarchy, Westernism, capitalism remain the main culprits for this.

But: the personal knowledges that we have through our unique experiences, the ones that are cut, shaped, chiselled and polished by our subjective realities, by our emotional labours, our sensitivities and our resilience, are deep forms of knowing and thinking.

The way that we feel is perhaps the most important thing that we have: our emotions and feelings are our embodied truths and here at OPEN we choose to celebrate these as the centre of thinking, feeling, being. By doing so we join arms with  decolonial scholars and friends who have taught us so brilliantly—and emotionally—to use our knowledges of otherwise and otherness to our advantage as our truths, and as our politics of social and cognitive justice. Lewis Gordon taught me about otherwise and otherness, and to him therefore I am grateful. His two words continue to guide me in my challenge to Western ideologies presented to me as naturalised truths. Now I choose otherwise: OPEN creates space for our work as emotional, personal, as embodied. Through OPEN we collaborate through self-care—a gift—and care for others’ otherness—which offers the wonderful promise of limitless possibilities.


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