When I was first invited to work on this wonderful project with @nick_knight and @showstudio addressing the absence, misrepresentation and fetishisation of the black body in visual culture and fashion, I immediately felt that it was necessary to problematise this idea of the “black body” in the first place. In order to do so I wanted to expand beyond the realm of the physical body, to attend to -in addition- the metaphysical, intellectual and spiritual domains, -which the reduction of black people to “black bodies”- a process that has its origins in the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade, attempted to deny we had rights, or even access to. The title Bodies of Knowledge, was chosen very specifically, to highlight intellectual and epistemological traditions, referencing the canons of knowledge, that have been created by people of African descent for millennia, in clear contradiction of racist narratives that sought to deny that we were capable of philosophy, and that our sole value was to be found in our bodies and their commodification and consumption by Europeans. Bodies of Knowledge offers instead a new constellation of alternative knowledge systems. I am interested in the spaces beyond rigid identarian notions of blackness, in working with concepts like fugitivity. According to the critic Fred Moten, blackness is something “fugitive”...it is an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. In his book Stolen Life, he writes, “fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument”. While the Nigerian philosopher and post activist Bayo Akomolafe talks about blackness as freedom, ‘a roaming principle’ as he calls it, with the power to shift, mutate, adapt and be responsive. Bodies of Knowledge offers an alternative way of thinking about “black bodies” that is located within the anti-captivity practices of the black radical tradition. I hope you find inspiration and joy from it 🖤