It’s much better to make them feel it, giving them enough space to understand it for themselves. When they do get it, it feels very personal, hard fought and hard won. That seems to be the thing that drives transformation.
Rebecca, you’re a filmmaker, among a number of other things, and you’re in the process of making a film about Zakiya Mckenzie and Khady Gueye’s work, Soil unsoiled. I was wondering if you could start by telling me a little bit about what brought you to this particular project?
I run a creative strategy and impact media agency, Nyar K’Odero. That group was started through the production of a documentary called Breakfast in Kisumu, which I produced and directed a couple of years ago. I’ve always been in the film space in some way, shape or form. I’ve always been making – I studied art at university and specialised in film, but took a long meandering path before I came back to it.
My mum and stepdad live in Gloucestershire. When my film production happened, it was informed by the places I stayed in and the people I met, not just in the UK, but in Kenya, which is where I’m from, and which is where some of Breakfast in Kisumu was filmed. When I thought about starting up a company helping others tell stories in the same way, it became clear that not being London-centric was important. There are other people, people of colour, brown people like myself, who inhabit traditionally white spaces. Being physically in those spaces and understanding the materiality of people’s lives through the rural surroundings, or the majority white demographic, that was an important physical feature of storytelling. When I incorporated the company, we decided to base ourselves in Gloucestershire.
Then, at the very beginning of summer last year, I met Khady. I’d just got back from the States, and one of my friends who works for the BBC sent me an interview and said look, have you seen this is happening close to you, a mixed-race girl in the Cotswolds making a lot of noise about race! We connected, and spent a long time thinking about how to make that moment and that revolt more long term.
And then Matt [Nightingale] got in touch. Zakiya and Khady worked together on the poem, and Matt and I started talking about how to capture the conversation in a way that wasn’t shaking people by the shoulders and saying, “you shouldn’t be racist because”. The worst way you can make someone understand something is by telling them it directly, and that’s something we explore a lot through film. It’s much better to make them feel it, giving them enough space to understand it for themselves. When they do get it, it feels very personal, hard fought and hard won. That seems to be the thing that drives transformation.
You mention that your work involves helping people to tell their stories. For you, what were the most important aspects of the sculpture’s story, that you wanted to bring to light through film?
One of the things that I still haven’t decided on is whether the revolution will be interpersonal. Sometimes I think it’s going to be the case, and sometimes I’m not so sure. But I do believe that every conversation, action and interaction is inherently political. One of the things Khady does unapologetically is to bring her lived experience to the ways that she talks about race. The poem holds these personal experiences in tension with the ways in which we all experience nature.
The thing that I want to draw out is the constant argument between the political space we all inhabit, and our personal politics which are innate and specific to our experience. I think the idea that you can hold those things both together and within one another is really important.
One of the things Khady does unapologetically is to bring her lived experience to the ways that she talks about race. The poem holds these personal experiences in tension with the ways in which we all experience nature.
And what about your own experience of nature? You said that your family and your work is in Gloucestershire – have you spent much time in the Forest of Dean, and has your relationship to the forest changed since you began the project?
I grew up in Kenya and spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. For me, that’s always been an important part of making, and thinking about how we inhabit spaces and how their aesthetics can be used to communicate.
I come back to Gloucestershire as much as I can, and have spent the last year going back and forth between London, the forest and my parents, seeing Khady, going for walks, and getting to know her family and daughter. It’s been a nice, happy, ongoing experience. I’ve realised that what I thought was rural in the UK, the Cotswolds, wasn’t really that rural. It sounds naïve to say that the Forest of Dean feels a long way from London, but it does, and there’s something powerful in that difference. It has changed my expectations of people, and the conversations I’ve had.
That’s not to subjugate them, but to say that time is experienced differently, and priorities are different, and the way you approach that space is inherently changed by that fact.
There’s two black women existing in this rural white area, but that’s just the political space. Place is something apart from that: it’s a land, a memory and a collective mythology.
It strikes me, actually, that both this work and your earlier documentary, Breakfast in Kisumu, are interested in people and places, and experiences of places. How do you see the relationship between these two films?
When I make film, I try to think around empathy and how you can bring it across without being cloying or condescending. Place has a lot to do with people’s stories and experiences, so you’ve got to treat that with reverence and respect.
I don’t use talking heads because I don’t like the idea of people telling you how they feel direct to camera. With Breakfast in Kisumu, a lot of what I tried to do was create the idea of travelling through two places, using the landscape to tell the story. I wanted to allow the voice of the narrator to be held in that place, and to allow the visual narrative power of those places to affect how you felt about what that person was saying.
Inherently that exists with Soil unsoiled too. There’s two black women existing in this rural white area, but that’s just the political space. Place is something apart from that: it’s a land, a memory and a collective mythology. There are lots of borders in the UK which exist in our collective consciousness, in the same way that there are lots of borders in Africa which exist in colonial consciousness. To move across them and acknowledge them for what they are, but also for what they are not – which is real – is an important political act.
Khady has an unwavering approach to conversations about race, and she and Zakiya are at the forefront of these conversations. I have a lot of admiration for this piece, and for their stories.
Elsewhere, you’ve reflected on Christina Sharpe’s idea of ‘wake work’ – activities that resist racial violence. To what extent do you think that public artwork, in the Forest of Dean and elsewhere, can provide those spaces of resistance?
It’s difficult in the UK, because everyone is certain that they’re “not racist, but…”. Because we don’t have the same proximity to our own history of slavery, we haven’t been very good as a collective at allowing art in this country to do strong resistance work. It feels like resistance must be more subtle and can’t speak back to an immediate, felt ancestry.
Some of that is because we think too much about accessibility as an ever-increasing space – the more people you bring inside, the better job you’re doing. But that’s not always true.
One of the things that’s amazing about Soil unsoiled is how much it is the thing that it is – for, and by, black women. That’s the true method of resistance, allowing things to be what they are, and acknowledging that some people might not be able to understand the work, because it wasn’t made for them. Getting everyone into the room isn’t the point.
Khady has an unwavering approach to conversations about race, and she and Zakiya are at the forefront of these conversations. I have a lot of admiration for this piece, and for their stories.
Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, in conversation with Dr Beth Whalley, Forest of Dean Sculpture Trust Associate Historian, 2021
