2. Why London? Which London? Whose London?

This is a lightly edited transcript of the second session of Ibraaz Mission Gathering 00: Why Now? which took place on 21–22 February 2025.

• Does London need another arts and culture institution?
• If so, what is missing that used to exist or never existed?
• Which London? Whose London? There are many Londons.
• How can we operate in the centre without reifying the centre?

Panellists: Evan Ifekoya, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Group), Tai Shani
Moderator: Guy Mannes-Abbott
Respondents: Sophia Al-Maria, Muhannad Hariri, Dima Srouji, Ashkan Sepahvand, Myriam Ben Salah, Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso, Adam Broomberg, Stephanie Bailey, Radha D’Souza

Guy Mannes-Abbott: A big welcome to you all for this vital panel and foundational question about the choice of London now, and the ‘which?’ and ‘whose?’ questions we’ll get into soon. But they apply anywhere, don’t they? The overriding question is: Why London? To which I’m going to offer just a couple of brief remarks. While there are many instinctive reasons for Ibraaz not to return to or land in London, the metropole, the core of the imperial core, especially right here, it’s also easy to put forward an argument about the necessity of establishing a space here and now, particularly as a response, directly or indirectly, to Gaza. Let me give you two quick points to support this claim. Firstly, I came this morning from home on a street named in honour of Arthur Balfour, which speaks for itself. And secondly, I’m reminded of Cameron Rowland’s brilliant show at the ICA in 2020, which highlighted the mahogany doors and handrails in that Crown Estate building that continues to accrue asset value, but which derive from slavery in Jamaican plantations. Why London?

The absolutely relentless inhumanity that we have all witnessed in Gaza and beyond over 16 months now, is designed in part to erase humanity as a category. So, we must repropose a pressingly intimate and maximally inclusive new collectivity, a new ‘we’ against the self-identical ‘I’ of murderous exceptionalism, supremacism, and genocide. There is another broad reason why it’s necessary, I think, for us to be here, which is that the space for public engagement with the things that we are already talking about today is under threat in London like never before in my lifetime. I’m the least paranoid person you will ever meet, but those pressures are severe and becoming increasingly concrete, as many of us know from decades of experience. They’re a step or two away from the kinds of events that Eyal [Weizman] was talking about in Germany in the last few days, and those steps may be big steps, or they may not be. But while it is still possible, it’s vital to be taking up this space publicly, to consolidate that possibility, and to push back and out from it.

Lastly – before we get into details, nuance, variation – a quick note on errancy, which speaks to the unhoming of slavery, genocide, climate breakdown, and dispossession, against which Saidiya Hartman identifies the creative practice of social poiesis: the seeking of a place better than here in improvised social collectivities, large and small. We’ve witnessed an attempt to shred the possibility of commonality and collectivity, of the human and more than human, and the need to consolidate what remains of humanitarian law, as we’ve been hearing, and repropose these very categories. What we’re engaged in here, I think – after ongoing genocide and climate breakdown – is this social poesis. 

So, let’s get started with Evan, followed by Anjalika and Kodwo, and finally Tai, who will introduce themselves, after which we’ll discuss some of the points raised amongst ourselves before opening to conversation between all of us. I remind you that everything is allowed and encouraged: questions, notes, references, very short statements. Please don’t hold back. Which London, whose London, and why London?

Evan Ifekoya: Thank you, Guy. I want to start by saying alaafia, salam alaykum. Peace be with you. It feels important to introduce myself by honouring the complexity of my ancestral traditions that make up the breadth of who I am. But my guiding question today is, what will become of our artefacts? And Anjalika, it’s interesting that you mentioned that point about the forgotten histories because this is something I think about a lot in my work as an artist, but also in the way that I practice and move through the world. I am a meticulous record keeper of my own practice. I have, since the beginning, always kept hold of all the flyers, the press cuttings, any handouts from conversations and meetings. It’s been important to me to keep hold of that because ultimately, if I don’t, who will? I’ve always had this sense that the things that I’ve been involved in matter, and if they matter to me, they’re going to matter to somebody else.

It was only really in the last year or so that I actually invested in these proper record boxes and took things out of the random collection of cardboard boxes that they were in. What you don’t see is the notebooks; the diaries; the research; the unpublished manuscripts; Black Metamorphosis by Sylvia Wynter; my notes from visits to Octavia Butler’s archive in Pasadena – all records and resources that I make available to anyone who’s working with me. You know, anyone who comes to visit my studio. When I have assistants, I always make a point of making this information available because it’s the kind of stuff that you won’t always see or read about in the books.

Another investigation that I’ve been in pursuit of recently is thinking about what does it mean to start to gather or collect some of this material – to assemble some of this material? I realised there was this point earlier on in my practice where I was obsessively seeking out evidence of African artists because it was at a time when African artists were not the trendy thing. It wasn’t ‘au fait’ to talk about African art, let alone Nigerian art, let alone Yoruba art, so I was again seeking out evidence. On the right here is something I must have got off eBay, this drawing of Nigerian weapons and ornaments from 1900. I continue to be obsessed with this particular drawing. Again, this evidence of the tools that one would use in ceremony, in ritual, and I want to underscore this point around ceremony and ritual because, for me, this idea of what becomes of our ceremonies, what becomes of our rituals, is a question that continues to permeate and be really at the heart of what I do as an artist.

This question of what matter matters, I think, relates to the responsibility a cultural institution might have to do some of the work of preserving and maintaining an artist’s or cultural worker’s practice outside of the artwork. Towards the end of last year, I got to contribute to an exhibition called Making a rukus! Black Queer Histories Through Love and Resistance (2024-25), which was a representation of the rukus! archive in London, an archive of Black LGBTQ histories. It was an archive that I spent a lot of time researching and studying around 2012-15, so I was really chuffed when Ajamu X and Topher Campbell, both artists who started the archive, actually invited me to interpret some of that material and also contribute an installation. Part of that installation was this piece that you see here, which is this mirrored dance floor, where on the ceiling you have a configuration of nightlife flyers, and when you’re standing on the floor, which you can do, it becomes this infinite loop, infinite spiral, seen from below.

This idea of how we continue to deal with and negotiate and speak to and from our histories in order to better understand and better reimagine the present and future, is an ongoing concern for me. That is a view of the one-room installation at Somerset House where you see this re-presentation of archival material. I highlight this because the experience of visiting an archive, and my experience of having visited the rukus! archive, was one that was quite cold and quite clinical. To visit an archive – rukus! generally is held at the London Metropolitan Archives, it’s a very kind of austere place – there’s a formality to the process of interacting with the material. So I think about what an institution could do to enable a different way of experiencing archival material. You know, the evidence, the ephemera of various practices, and ways of being, living, and working.

With a project that I’ve been involved in since 2018, Black Obsidian Sound System (BOSS), I’m also thinking about how do we keep records of the work, when a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it actually exists outside of an exhibition space or a screening at a cinema. I’m sharing here an image of this collage I put together of photos in our studio of various events that we’ve done: our workshops; snapshots from parties; drawings people have done; photos of people wearing our T-shirts. This is also to remind us as a group of the value and significance of what we’ve done, and not just the accolades of a Turner Prize nomination or things like that. But actually, this is the work, this is the practice. So anyone who visits, who comes to use our decks or anything like that, can also be reminded of what goes on around the work. There is an invitation here to think as well, about what is the role of an institution, an organisation such as this, in contributing to the maintenance of the records like this.

There’s a lot more that I could say, but I’m aware that I have to keep it pretty short. So, I will leave it there and just say: how can we redefine the artist’s archive, perhaps in particular from a peripheral space to something more accessible, integrated, and within reach? I’m inviting the question of what role a cultural institution such as Ibraaz can contribute to that.

Kodwo Eshun: My name is Kodwo Eshun, I’m one part of The Otolith Group along with Anjalika Sagar. Lina Lazaar and Stephanie Bailey invited us to create a residence library here at Ibraaz for one year. What you’re going to hear is some thoughts from that process of composing the library, which is still ongoing. What you’re going to see is moments from that process and what you’re going to hear is some thoughts from that process. 

This is called ‘The before and after of time, which only gradually reveals itself’, which is a quote from Fredric Jameson. These are notes from a process by which an artist’s collection becomes a residency library. It has a second title, ‘20 Suggestures’ – not suggestions, suggestures, which is Ian Penman’s term – ‘for a spora’ – not a diaspora, a spora, which is Ade Solanke’s term – and in brackets (DXG 2021. Edit for 2025.) DXG stands for Department of Xenogenesis.

Anjalika Sagar: Department of Xenogenesis is a platform that came out of an exhibition called Xenogenesis that we did, at the Van Abbe Museum, in Sharjah, Melbourne, Richmond, Virginia, Dublin, and other cities. It comes from Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. Xenogenesis is an invitation to think with us about some of the ideas that emerged in and from and out of that exhibition. I'm going to start:

20. The urgencies of the present, the polycrises of our political reality brings us face to face with the horizon of our interpretation.

Kodwo Eshun: 19. They reveal the limits of theory and they confirm the importance of theory.

Anjalika Sagar: 18. It becomes more important than ever to understand the events of the present in terms of a before and after of time; the time of imperialism that gradually, then suddenly, reveals itself.

Kodwo Eshun: 17. Much has been accumulated in the Otolith Library, which contributes to thinking the before and after of the present, through contemporary modes of transmission within a contracting public educational sphere.

Anjalika Sagar: 16. The pressures and stresses faced by fellow travellers, educators, students, artists, and friends makes it clear that multiple forms of exclusion, inequality, and maldistribution are normatively performed by educational and art world institutions.

Kodwo Eshun: 15. Simultaneously, we have observed a reframing of pedagogy within an art world in which the managed deterioration of the social fabric places responsibility for the maintenance of the social upon the shoulders of artists invited to produce and reproduce the parameters and the protocols of their so-called identity.

Anjalika Sagar: 14. The corporate person sneers at the so-called subject.

Kodwo Eshun: 13. The corporate person is in fact a psychopath.

Anjalika Sagar: 12. The corporate sovereign is the one who turns his risk into our danger.

Kodwo Eshun: 11. This is the financial system: their risk, our danger.

Anjalika Sagar: 10. Citizenship: our hostage to their risk.

Kodwo Eshun: 9. So many so-called international contemporary art spaces and museums induce deference, demand esteem, and elicit regard underwritten by the corporate oligarchic form of donors, trustees, and advisors sustained in turn by extractive industries, arms manufacture, and are now fully weaponised.

Anjalika Sagar: 8. Those generous donors, now unveiled

Kodwo Eshun: 7. In many of these spaces, we observe an atmosphere of taciturn neutrality in which minority communities are invited to lubricate an image of liberalism that shields the violence between the scenes –

Anjalika Sagar: behind the scenes. 6. Diverse representation by institutions or the latest trends in Black art practices do not automatically or necessarily signal institutional commitment to unlearning.

Kodwo Eshun: 5. These strategies serve to enforce imperial centres as the transmitters of truth, when in fact cultural freedom is fugitive, transnational, mutable, creole, heterotemporal, and above all ungovernable.

Anjalika Sagar: 4. Analysis requires a world within a world for independent study, gathering, thinking, self-learning, provoking, and agitating to gain traction upon colonial violence that provides the infrastructure for techno-authoritarian libertarian populism.

Kodwo Eshun: 3. It requires comprehending the deadly aesthetic power wielded by algorithmic governance in the present.

Anjalika Sagar: 2. It requires gathering the autonomous movements and independent collectives that initiate practices of study inseparable from the aesthetic of sociality required to move against the necropolitical pedagogies that drive education today to renew what Rabindranath Tagore called Visva-Bharati or ‘a nest for the world at home’.

Kodwo Eshun: 1. It is through an awareness of these registers and these forces that we can create a study for a spora with our friends –

Anjalika Sagar: and comrades.

Kodwo Eshun: 0. An earthly study. A study of the unthought where we may and should and must trespass.

Tai Shani: What I’m going to present are the ramblings of an artist, but also someone who is involved in organising as well. They are just some of the things that I’ve been thinking about. I realise that questions unravel and disorder, and unfortunately, they are a series of questions. But maybe that is the only way forward: rejecting heroism in the way we act, understanding we are contributors, not executors, of change and part of a process that spans possibly many lifetimes. The failure to effect radical change immediately is not permanent failure. Also, I realise I’m repeating a lot of things that everyone else has said – sorry, but I wrote this a few days ago!

In the current age, and this recent chapter within which we are swirling at incredible speed, it is hard to situate or understand the function of this moment within a superstructure crisis. Is it the denouement of white supremacist colonial patriarchal capitalism? Or is it Empire’s epilogue? Perhaps, horrifically, it is the introduction to an age whose arc veers irrevocably towards unspeakable fascism until complete annihilation. Understanding where this moment sits within a grander narrative is slippery and is susceptible to the ebbs and flows of hope – which is a very strict discipline – and despair. It is equally hard to imagine a cultural institution that is tied to neither state nor amassed wealth – both of which render these spaces untrustworthy and neutralise the potential for these spaces to be truly transformative or emancipatory – while also being an institution that meets the demands of cultural workers, whose perspectives have been forged in competitive arenas long-succumbed to the decaying logic of capital.

Can an institution aspire to be revolutionary while also fulfilling the more individualistic desires, as well as the basic survival needs, of the cultural workers – who would be producing the work as well as making up the audience – when so many of these desires are fundamentally counter-revolutionary? Prestige, hierarchy, profits, etc. – this is perhaps the more difficult question. Has culture become so inexorably mired within the forces that promise the destruction of its aims, that it needs to reimagine what it is completely, for whom and how it is made, regardless of where it is shown?

Culture is still deeply exclusionary in a myriad of ways. Despite its recent mishandling of emancipatory politics, it remains classist, racist, and hostile to huge parts of society which are our political allies. What of the work made in an anarchist squat, for example? Do the countercultural tendencies of these communities mean that their cultural production is forever siloed from the broader conversations, and importantly, the taste and more visible stratum of the art world? I know that we value work that is affectively institutional or expensive looking. Maybe our distaste for work that sits outside of this particular visual culture spells doom for the potential of culture’s role in revolution.

Institutions have intransigent red lines in terms of what politics we are allowed to express. They refused the words genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. We must not forget that this refusal is also contagious, but it is also contained by ever-shifting parameters, which also casts a corrupting shadow on the politics that it does permit. The refusal to understand the interconnectedness of climate catastrophe, trans rights, and the abhorrent genocide is, in and of itself, a kind of union-busting practice. Accepting this red line is the pre-emptive permission to all kinds and forms of censorship and violence.

What London? An alternative to this, maybe, should happen in the belly of the beast, so to speak. The ever-more fragile conditions of exo-capitalist life, such as community and profitable acts of creativity, building solidarity, organising, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, can feel impossible in the city. The price of proximity to the seat of power is devastatingly high. Perhaps this is also really old thinking that is irrelevant in a multipolar world governed by corporatised fascists. 

Reality is being dramatically organised in ways that are as equally terrifying as they are radical. We need to do the same. Responses need to be truly ambitious and radical on our own terms. There remains a considerable draw to big city life for people with progressive values, despite the difficulty of existing here, so it makes sense to try and collectivise politically and forge new models of organising. I can’t help but feel these coalitions have to be across socioeconomic spheres and milieus, also with groups that are leading this incredible movement, which have commitment and stamina that we can learn so much from, while it also inspires us. We can also be contributing with our own expertise to bigger groups – we do not have to be the focal group. This means privileging the social contract over the power of art to be politically transformative. Every artist is also already a citizen and must be mobilised as such.

Guy Mannes-Abbott: Thank you all. Can I ask Evan to pick up on one of the things that you were talking about in relation partly to ‘Where London?’ or ‘Which London?’ and ‘Whose London?’ Are there places of ritual and ceremony in London that you can talk about?

Evan Ifekoya: My own home for sure is one of these places – it’s the tradition that I am most closely aligned with, of which I am a priest in training. The fundamental tenet, in a way, is that the home becomes the temple. That is where a lot of the practising happens, either at my home or at the home of people within my ‘ilé’. Even with B.O.S.S., for example, we make a point at our events of there always being some kind of grounding practice or ritual that opens our space. Even if we’re doing an event in an art gallery or somewhere more focused on nightlife, there’s always going to be this invitation to ground, to arrive, before anything takes place. 

This idea of the sacred, the ceremonial, for me it’s something that doesn’t just happen in our more conventional religious spaces. Actually, we invite or offer up ceremony everywhere. That’s why I give the acknowledgement at the beginning, the greeting, ‘alaafia’ in Yoruba, in Ifa, and ‘salam alaykum’, because Islam is also in my ancestry but so is Christianity, ‘peace be with you’. There’s something about reminding ourselves, acknowledging the fact that we might be from one place, but actually a lot of us are from many places and if we just step back in our lineage, if we zoom out, we realise that things are way more complicated than we realise. So, I think turning cultural institutions into spaces where ceremony can happen, where ritual can happen, is something that I think is paramount to what we’re practising at this time.

Guy Mannes-Abbott: You talked about what is matter, what ought to matter, and artists archives. I’m interested to explore a little bit further about what this ‘matter’ is, as such – does it carry worlds, for example? – and this area between the smallest unit of matter and what matters.

Evan Ifekoya: I think it’s great that Anjalika and Kodwo offered up the proposal around their archive of journals and magazines, which for sure are really important records. But what I was trying to speak to from the beginning is the more ephemeral and intangible aspects of the ways that we work and practice. I guess what you all saw were the boxes and not what was contained within: the scribbles and notes, the shared diagrams or brainstorming, that go into making a project happen, that go into making a protest happen, that go into the ways that we organise. I’ve always been quite interested in collecting: all my diaries, which map all the things that I’ve been involved in, and all the unpublished stuff that doesn’t make it into the formal record. There’s something about that step before the moment of publishing that I’m curious about studying and being in a group and shared context.

Guy Mannes-Abbott: Thank you. I’m going to throw that back in a slightly different form to you, Kodwo and Anjalika. It’s striking to me that the physical object is obviously central to this particular project that you’re talking about, which is interesting in 2025. So again, what is this thing about? What is matter? What matters? How do we access what matters?

Kodwo Eshun: There’s a couple of contexts which are really overdetermining how we see the project of building a research library in the centre of town. One is, of course, that we live in the wake of 14 years of austerity, which has not been diminished by a so-called Labour government that has successfully terminated dozens and dozens of public libraries within London and across the UK. That culling will disproportionately affect peoples of the global majority. A second is that London is nothing if not a geography of manifold Black archives. I’m not making a strict distinction between collections, archives, and libraries. Instead of trying to establish a strict hierarchy between each of those notions, the idea is to expand the capacities of each, to enable the porosity and the friction of all of those. It’s a matter of descending the scales of where those exist and tuning into what Evan calls the intangible. 

The material dimensions are important for us because that’s what people can gather around. What we want is materials that act as support structures for intergenerational conversations, intergenerational transmissions; for building a living bridge between those who provided the conditions for us to do what we want to do and the future generations to come, those who only exist in vitro now.  What we call material is the occasion for those gatherings. We don’t see the surplus of material that you can find on many useful platforms as impinging upon the necessity of pamphlets or booklets or journals. Actually, there is a kind of affective adjacency and reciprocation at work between both. 

So, we’re trying to build something that is useful, usable, and scaleable. There is a scepticism, which I share about the possibility of building community in a desert like central London, which rejects people like us and which we reject in turn. The idea is to do something that is more modest and more material than a community. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Anjalika Sagar: The fact is, the library, for us, doesn't exist in central London—I mean, parts of it will exist here in central London, but they have existed within Stoke Newington, which has been a site for many gatherings of people coming together for 23 years to talk with us, and think with us. The challenge is to assemble an intertemporal vehicle by and through which to think with forms, aesthetics, and with materials, in order to assemble, let’s say, not just a library, but a library of thinking on the screen. 

The essay film, for me, has incredible power to basically produce gatherings, and it always has had that power. Third cinema, experimental cinema, from Chris Marker to Anand Patwardhan in India; experimental and political filmmakers have assembled many different forces on the screen. And I think for me, the challenge is how does this library continue to have that sense of privacy that happens in the home? Frankly the idea of the public now is set upon by vampires, and people who would like to destroy that. So, I think in the sense of producing an intertemporal vehicle of thinking across forms – across the many forces that have been accumulated in our library, which are not just books – the library here will be in relation to the library at home. 

Stoke Newington has given birth to many different movements. There’s a cemetery near us which is full of the dead, people who have been involved in anti-colonial movements. It’s important to remember that London is full of these histories, brimming with these histories. We don’t need a biennial; we don’t want to use these ridiculous terms like local and global. London itself has long histories of conferences, of gatherings, of people coming together from all over the world. That sense of internationalism has existed here for a very, very long time.

I think the challenge for us has always been and remains in the gathering that one can do on the screen, in relation to putting forces together that shouldn’t be otherwise put together. There is so much to think with, in relation to London. We are both Londoners. We were both born in London. We’ve seen the challenges that London has been faced with as communities have been destroyed here. I think that it’s important to think not just London, but many other cities in the UK, as forces for all kinds of complex resistance; libraries, peoples, aesthetics, films, gatherings, that have been going on for, I would say, a good 200 years.

Guy Mannes-Abbott: Thank you. Tai, can I ask you a question about patronage. I’m remembering that in Ahmedabad, the wealthy Jain industrialists lent money to the Mughals, and at least four Mughal emperors guaranteed Jain ritual and religious sites throughout Gujarat. They also lent money to the British, and during the non-cooperation movement they paid their own workers to go on strike. In that context, I was wondering what is the best vehicle for us to assemble and work with and through, for you, in terms of an institution or anti-institution?

Tai Shani: I don’t really think I can answer that question hypothetically, really, as in practice, I don’t really have an answer to that. I’m a visual artist that does work in a commercial arena as well as in an institutional one, and I’m very aware of what that means. And my work is not explicitly political. I’m political as a person, if that makes sense, and I use the voice that I’ve been afforded to speak about things that I think are important, but I don’t make work that necessarily speaks explicitly about politics. It’s very much about, I guess, thinking of a kind of anarcho-communist horizon and bringing back affective artefacts from there. That would be the practice. Some of the films have explicit things in them, but that’s not the core of my practice. It’s not proposing an idea in that way. So, my work can also exist in lots of different contexts because of that.

That’s what I mean about the separation of citizenship and artist, because I do think our institutions are really compromised. Gaza has really brought that to the surface and it kind of makes you think about all of the politics that were so explicit in the last few years. It’s just shameful, really, that institutions that profited from the work of people that were interested in anti-racism, trans rights, and feminism, are now willingly cooperating with the demand to not speak about this. That has become just very clear, and I’m very disillusioned by that. And I’m excited by the idea of organising with people that organise and people that do stuff and that are actually invested. But there is an aesthetic clash for sure, and that’s kind of what I was trying to talk about a little bit in that rambling bit of writing. There is a clash in terms of the aesthetics that we have in the art world and the people who are involved in political organising that’s outside of that. There’s a kind of lack of translation that happens there that I’d like to find a way to bridge, somehow.

But you see, I don’t think art is the thing, I don’t think it’s adequate in this moment. If we want to bring in people that have the stamina, that are leading the movement, that are committed, they will also have ideas that we won’t be able to take into our more professional spheres. Do you see what I’m saying? And these are things that we have to contend with, I think, as people. I’m more interested in how you create a space that can offer some of the legacies of intellectual thinking around politics, but also bring in other people on an equal footing, not as ‘enjoyers of’ but ‘participants in’. That would be, to me, something that would be worthwhile.

Guy Mannes Abbott: We’re going to open to the floor in a second, but I just wanted to say two things quickly. Transmissibility seems to me to run through all of these conversations, which recovers presence, and which is why we’re here. And what we’re about to do is to transmit between us.

But also, just to say very quickly, I was trying to think of ideal examples of places and locations in the city, and I couldn’t really think of any, precisely for the reason you’ve just alluded to, which is that when you participate in something, there are obviously various layers in which you participate, but the key thing for me is that you’re received into that participation. I was trying to then think of an example of that. And the best example I have is of these love marches over the last eighteen months in London, and not to over-romanticise it. So, the moment one joins a random group of people. If I remember, the strongest feeling I had was having gotten home, because I don’t have to justify anything about myself in this context, and that’s an unselected group, which for me was really powerful.

Tai Shani: Yes, may I interject? That’s a really good example. Obviously, these marches are allowed because to a certain degree it is easier for the state to allow for them to happen than to disallow them from happening. And there is a critique around whether they serve their stated purpose. But there’s still a huge body of people there that come every week. Why are we not able to find alliances with these people? Why is the art world such a fallow place for that?

Kodwo Eshun: I think every artist is engaging in a research practice, whether they name it as such or not. What is compelling to us is to link the theory and practice of a library, here, with some of the spaces that Sumayya and her team have assembled on that wall there. Spaces in London like the Institute of Race Relations in Pentonville Road, where Race and Class is published. The George Padmore Institute, which houses an entire collection of Black Liberator which is housed above New Beacon Books, just around the corner from Finsbury station. The Broadgate Institute in Spitalfields. The Engels Library. The Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, which contains an entire run of Frontline magazine, The London Metropolitan Archives in Pentonville, where some of the archives of the Greater London Council are housed. I would say 85 to 90% of these spaces are run by young Black women. They clearly are not doing it for money. They’re doing it for love – of those collections, those libraries, those archives, for the present, for the future. 

The modest proposal is to link this prospective space to those under-resourced, undervalued spaces which are sustained by a strong sense of protection. That’s what those young Black women are doing. They are safeguarding those collections for the present and for the future. That sense of seriousness, of preciousness, which is not the same as fetishisation, imbues those texts with a sense of having survived into our present, despite, and in the face of capitalism’s desire for destruction. That enables us to understand that we can undertake interventions with these historical artifacts that are not in themselves historical. Historical artifacts can have a prophetic dimension. They can speak to the future in the present. 

Artists do not work with historical material in the name of history. Artists are not just weak or insufficiently funded historians. Artists are often trying to do things that are transhistorical, transchronological, intertemporal, and interscalar. The goal is to invite these materials to travel across time, across media, to potentiate their movement out of disciplinary containment to get them to speak to each other in discrepant languages, in affective adjacencies. It’s necessary to link up to collections that have decades of experience, to learn from them and with them.

Guy Mannes-Abbott: Thank you. We haven’t got staged questions, so it’s a free-for-all. 

Sophia Al-Maria: Thank you all. I wanted to link up a couple of things that puncture the Q of the ‘Q&A’ a little bit, around this question about what material matters that Evan brought up. How the hell to level things out and I guess horizontalise an institution? Or what artist means, and also this archive thing. I feel really strongly that this location is important to the protests that you were talking about, and I wonder about opening up the idea of what an archive or a library is, like a library of walkie-talkies; resources, materials, to, you know, have a giant printing press so that we can have the means of production and have that be open. Obviously, that opens up a whole can of worms in terms of safety. But that’s my biggest question, I think, today: how safe is this space?

Muhannad Hariri: I like how the conversation got to a point that Eyal was making, which stuck in my mind, about this dilemma: citizen versus artist, that is, the difference between an active or activist citizen and the detached or disengaged (to whatever extent) artist. I think the point Eyal was making about tarrying with the dilemma, sticking with the dilemma, seeing where it takes you, what bombs you can find if you discern long enough – I believe all of this applies to the difference between citizenship and being an artist. It is actually an interesting way to think about Ibraaz connecting with all these other spaces raised in the panel. It’s not that Ibraaz can figure it all out, nor should that even be the ambition. It just needs to network and find, you know, discern those, let’s say, new roles, new things, that artists can do to bridge the gap. So rather than just saying, ‘No, I’ll be an artist in one space and an activist/citizen elsewhere’, the intention should be to challenge and remould the practices that have instituted the distinction.

There is an analogy here with the issue that Eyal was lamenting: when investigating an atrocity one is faced with awkward and seemingly inane questions such as whether she was shot by an Israeli or whether it was an accident, or perhaps it was an IDF bomb as opposed to a stray missile from the resistance. The questions are horrifying within the context of an ongoing genocide, especially one that is being aided and abetted by the whole western world and the complicit media that so frequently uses such questions to obfuscate the truth. It’s so bad that I know a lot of people, sadly, who will take the kind of the anti-orthodox point of view and just say, ‘To hell with international law, it’s just useless’. And you know what, they feel very vindicated, for example, by Netanyahu never getting punished despite all the condemnation – and really, what can you tell them? So, it seems you just have to accept the division: law and decency versus reality, and there is no way to make them touch in places like Gaza – but this has to be something we reject and strive beyond. And the way Eyal put it is that, well, you can’t really produce something new unless you really tarry with the dilemma longer and longer and longer and maybe somehow develop something out of that.

Dima Srouji: A question that I’ve been thinking about is ‘What London’ rather than ‘Why London?’ London is made up of our collective histories and fragments, in the way that Anjali is talking about it. There’s been a really long history of anti-colonial spaces, whether in homes, in different archives, in books, which are also part of who we are. If you go to the Palestine Exploration Fund, or if you go to the Victoria and Albert Museum or any of the institutions that have actual fragments from Gaza, they are fragments from our home. The city is built of our fragments, and they are partially our ancestors, the way that Evan was talking about it. 

I’ve been working on an exhibition with the Palestinian Museum on the archaeology of Gaza, and we don’t think of London as other. We think of London as part of who we are. London is literally built off of our blood and tears and human remains, which exist in Cambridge. There are Gazan skulls that were excavated by British archaeologists in Cambridge. So, the city belongs to us, and there is an important relationship here to ownership. I don’t think that occupying this space today in Mortimer Street is weird at all. I think we actually own it, and it makes sense for us to all be in this space together. So, thank you for the space that you’re providing for us.

Ashkan Sepahvand: Thank you for your presentations. I found myself zoning out a little bit to look at the last line of the wall text: ‘How to operate in the centre without reifying the centre?’ I started to feel a bit irritated by the question, because of its assumption that where we are is the centre. What does that mean? Sure, we’re in the centre of London. We’re in the centre of Empire, or whatever Empire has been, fine. But it feels like the phrasing of the question itself inadvertently reifies the centre. So much of the political psychosis we’re witnessing all over is basically the result of the former centre not being able to admit that it’s no longer the centre. This positionality is long gone. If only the so-called ‘centre’ could grasp this and maybe just sit back, relax, and let others do whatever they’re going to do, need to do. It’s materially clear when you travel into central London – it’s empty, there is no ‘real life’. Maybe the question can be rephrased to think about how this space can instead reveal something about the empty centre?

I was really intrigued in the discussion by the Otolith Group’s proposal of spora, a word which I guess simply means seeds. It made me reflect on the composition of this panel, how so many of us in this room, or even the inhabitants of this city, all belong to the global majority. The diaspora is us. And of course, sure, communities have been scattered, former centres have given way to newer ones, and here we are, in a place that ‘shouldn’t’ belong to us but, in many ways, we have come to possess. We have planted ourselves here – our seeds are unexpectedly growing. It’s the discourse of ‘doikayt’ – hereness – that interests me, how the diasporic actually transforms ‘the here’ and makes it into something that even those ‘from here’ can’t fully lay claim to. Sylvia Wynter talks about this in her book Black Metamorphosis: how the transcultural encounter and entanglement of displaced peoples leads to the creation of a new world, quite literally. I guess my question is, how do you translate this relationship between ‘letting go of the centre’ and the ‘transformativity of hereness’ into an institution?

Myriam Ben Salah: One question and one comment. My question is linked to the previous comment, which is, I feel like behind ‘Why London?’ the other question is: ‘Why not Algiers or Accra or Beirut or La Paz?’ Or: where are we speaking from? And why aren’t we speaking from those places, which was tackled a little bit during the introduction? My other note was something that Kodwo said, that one of the principles guiding the library was to reveal the limits of theory while confirming the importance of theory. I feel like that’s a very interesting guideline for an art institution: to reveal the importance of art while recognising the limits of art.

I think there has been a lack of humility in institutions in general. This sense that art is going to restore justice or save the world – we know very well that that’s not the case. There isn’t an inherent good by default in what we do. We’re not on the right side of history. So how do we tackle these questions as institutions? How do we distribute, fund, produce, circulate, communicate what we’re doing?

Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso: This institution – and the composition of the people here – is an opportunity to create a third space. Look at how beautiful this building is. For it to sit right in the centre of London as a hub for Global South artists and communities is very moving. There is so much possibility here. Here is a moment for us who, as Pankaj Mishra describes, have to inhabit two worlds; to take respite from the pain and wholeheartedly exhale in an interbeing way. Institutions like this are not just an opportunity to break the cycles of silencing, but to encounter and feel able to experience pleasure; to create space for the irony, joy, and humour. Because we are constantly having to confront censorship, and then? I have been taking refuge in activist spaces because many cultural institutions are very boring at this moment. And so I don’t think we need to dwell in categorisations: that you’re either going to be the artist or the activist or the citizen. We’re forgetting pre-label times, and that is a natural space that we should inhabit and create more physical forums for.

Adam Broomberg: I’m wondering a little bit whether the question of why London is a bit naive, because the experience that Francesca [Albanese] and Eyal went through in the last few days in Berlin is only a premonition of what’s coming here very, very soon. And I think to hold a meeting like this in Berlin, we would be in a dungeon with police outside and we would be on a Signal group, and we would be alerted to the address half an hour before. And that’s been our reality for the last eighteen months. And so, I’m worried whether everybody is still a little bit naive and enjoying the comforts of London, whereas the German police that beat me and arrested me were trained with the same choreography that the English police were, that the South African police were, and the Israeli police were. And I think that that’s really on the horizon here. And we should think about it.

Stephanie Bailey: I could just add to that because it reminds me of when the National Security Law was being passed in Hong Kong, and everyone here was like, ‘Oh my god, they are losing their freedoms’, but the policing bill here was very similar, and actually the NSL came from the colonial laws. And I think this is what Radha and I have been talking about, which is the dilemma that Eyal talks about, that we are experiencing the losses of freedoms everywhere, but in different ways and through different means. And for me, the big question is then: ‘How do we learn to listen to each other when one can’t speak? But, Radha, you wanted to say something.

Radha D’Souza: Thank you to all the panellists for your contributions, and I want to apologise if I sound like an old, unreformed leftie who has not really learned anything over time. But I came to this country when Gordon Brown was already on his way out. So, I haven’t seen, Anjali, the kind of London that you are talking about. And this is my first experience of a Labour government, so that gives you the context. But when I came to London, the first art spaces that I was introduced to were these small communities in East London, for example, which for years have been doing community education on the East India Company and the Anglo-Dutch spice wars. They do all kinds of things. Then there are other communities, small ones in Liverpool, working on art through healing and ecology. So it seems to me that there are a lot of small communities who are doing good work, which is what you’re trying to say. 

But I also wonder whether there is a class divide within the art world, because there is a whole art world which is not speaking to this world, and this world is not speaking to that world. I wonder what role an organisation like Ibraaz would have in this class conversation, if you like.

Anjalika Sagar: Thank you for bringing up the multiple and complex situations of practices, cultural and otherwise, going on in this city, in Birmingham, in Liverpool, and elsewhere. I’m interested in the forces of solidarity and the many different terms needed to describe the complexities of a country like the UK. The financialisation of education has destroyed any kind of understanding of class. Class is something that needs to be brought up. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan were meeting with other film groups like Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, which was based on a practice around the essay film that acted as a vehicle of transmission that had a relationship to that first decade of Channel Four. These kinds of complexities have existed in this city. The biennial circuit art world didn’t or doesn’t have the sense of cosmopolitan internationalism that existed here for many years. I want to say that it still does exist here. It just doesn’t take place in institutions.

Kodwo Eshun: I just wanted to connect what Adam said about Berlin as a prefiguration of what will happen here in London to Sophia’s point about how safe this space is. I think these observations are ways of speaking of and to the same question. That’s a question, I think, for Ibraaz and the KLF. It’s a question we think about all the time. I think it would be good to hear from Lina Lazaar. In a way, it gets to the heart of what it means to do a project like this at this moment in time.

Tai Shani: I just want to end on something hopeful, which is going to be an unpopular register for what we’re speaking of. But when I open TikTok, which I love, I see things that make me hopeful. I see young people writing folk songs about Luigi Mangione. I see young people dressed in Palestinian clothes at school, in the streets. That gives me more hope than anything I see in institutions, unfortunately. And I do wonder if there’s such a huge energy around that – and it is big because they want to take that app away because it is so pro-Palestinian, and it’s a way young people can share strategies and places they need to meet. Art should be in collaboration with those young people, not separate. We do have ways of thinking of things that can be contributory to that. But I do think that there are a lot of very hopeful things happening. I don’t want to make it sound like there’s nothing hopeful happening. You see young people advocating for important things on there, and that’s really important. There are millions of them. 

Evan Ifekoya: That’s a really good point. TikTok is enabling young people to express themselves, to articulate what they’re relating to at this moment. But something I worry about, when, or if, it does disappear: where are the records of that? That’s why I’m all about encouraging young people to create their own archives. It’s important that we share libraries, but we also need to equip young people with the tools to create their own and actually keep teaching people how to do this work. We don’t just engage with the past, we encourage people to create and remember and recollect and record their own present as well. Take somewhere like the May Day Rooms, which has a Riso printer; a place like this could similarly have those kinds of tools that enable reproduction to happen in the moment, to encourage people to keep printing things, to keep actually working on paper. Let’s not forget about paper as a way of actually just tracking where we’ve been and where we’re going, mapping what’s going on.

Then the question that came up around safety. Yes, I think an institution does have a responsibility to think about that. But I also want to ask and encourage people to also take responsibility for cultivating safety from within. That’s something that I often think about with the people I work with who occupy positions of marginality: how do we create safety from within so that we can move wherever we need to be, so we can be in these spaces in central London and not feel like we have to hide or shrink? This question around safety is something that we ask ourselves to take responsibility for, too.