DS

So excited to be in conversation with Suneil tonight. I had the pleasure of working with him on his current solo show at the Brooklyn Museum “Here the Earth Grows Gold,” which includes all new work.

SS

All new work.

DS

Including a two-channel video from his ongoing forthcoming feature-length film Two Refusals. Your previous trilogy of short films would maybe fall more within experimental documentary, whereas Two Refusals is less beholden to a specific genre.  You previously worked as a video journalist, which is something we haven’t really discussed before.

SS

From 2017 after I graduated from grad school and I moved to New York, I needed a job. [Laughs.] I needed to pay the bills and got a job working as a video journalist, even though I had no background in journalism, whatsoever. But I picked it up quite easily and was very drawn to the medium of short form like social media videos, which were really popular, if you can remember, all the way back in 2017. These videos would get around 20 to 40 million views. I found it to be a space that I could perhaps pry open some of the political engagements that I was interested in. I was also thinking about how certain artists like Harun Farocki, who's been a big influence in my practice, would work with German cable television news, specifically  in order to advance his, for lack of a better term, agenda and interest in the medium of mass media. I was also interested in finding ways to pry open these spaces to explore the various subjects and topics that he was interested in.

I was covering a vast array of things, including a lot of indigenous sovereignty, a lot of Palestinian coverage, especially during the Great March of Return in 2018, and anti-gentrification movements. A lot of various political activities that I was interested in that I didn't see getting nearly as much of a platform. I tried to find ways to platform these important topics and bring people into the studio to do op-eds that we would work on and write together, including a piece about decolonizing the Brooklyn Museum and protests at the Brooklyn Museum. Later, in the beginning of 2021, I started working at a news outlet called More Perfect Union, which still exists, which was specifically focused on labor struggles. We were solely focused on labor struggles in the U.S., and that was a really interesting and beautiful time. We uncovered a lot of abuse in Frito-Lay factories and I won a Sidney Hillman prize for journalism for uncovering abuse, sweatshop-like conditions at Frito-Lay. It's been an interesting turn in terms of seeing how some of the aesthetics, more the editing techniques, would find its way into my work.

DS

I wondered if some of the more formal aspects and narrative strategies of these very short, digestible, informational videos were something you intentionally brought with you into your own practice or were these things that you ended up pushing against?

SS

So much of the videos are about capturing people's attention, and so we learned very quickly,  tips and tricks, on how to get people hooked on a video within three seconds.

DS

Well, people seem to be sitting and watching your 30 minute video!

SS

36 minutes. [Laughs.] People have literally told me I could not stop watching. Ironically, the capitalist capture techniques of  getting eyeballs, those specific techniques innately found their way into my practice. The goal is to keep people watching in museum spaces.

DS

Can you tell us some of those techniques? Or are they trade secrets?

SS

No, they're super, super secret. [Laughs.] This is basic journalism, which I did not really have a background in:  essentially, don't bury the lede. What is the who, what, when, where, why, and how do you do that at the very beginning? Also, what is the most provocative way in which you can hook someone in? I think there's different ways, but for instance, I opened the film on a black screen, and it's just this hush, whispered voice that says, “Some questions swallow you whole.” I remember that, to me, was the most important moment in the film. But when Sham-e-Ali and I wrote the script, that question came way later. With some of these short-form videos, I wanted to bring the most potent question at the very beginning of the film to draw people in. I think some techniques innately wound up in my subconscious and found their way into the work or in all of my works.

DS

Why did you stop that line of work?

SS

Actually, it was weirdly painful. I started developing a lot of pains from video editing for 10 hours a day. I had a lot of problems because I would get so sucked into editing and we had tight deadlines. My body was rapidly deteriorating [Laughs.] I've worked in so many different trades. I've worked as a welder. I've worked as a delivery driver. I've worked in so many different jobs that I did not expect video editing to be the one that deteriorated my body so quickly. I've had shards of metal stuck in my eye from welding, and that was nothing compared to the way my body felt sitting at a desk for ten hours a day. So I wanted to step away from that for health reasons. And also because I love teaching.  It's a space where I get to explore the questions and concepts that I'm interested in within my work, in a place that is thinking together through ideas with other people. I'm constantly learning from my students. I find it an extremely interesting time to be teaching, to say the least.

DS

I think that spirit of generosity and curiosity comes across in your work as well. I want to talk more about the trilogy of films, which you have become most well known for over the past several years, beginning in 2019. The three films use your own family's history, your father's in particular, as a framework for thinking about some of the questions or issues you already discussed, including diasporic identity and anti-colonial struggles and those intertwined histories, both past and present. What led you to that focus on a very personal story?

SS

Whenever I get this question, I'm always reminded of the first time I was asked this question by someone else who phrased it a bit differently.  It was originally more about working with my father in particular and the question was like, how did you prepare for this? The way I answered that question was, I've been preparing my whole life.

The impetus was this moment in 2017 when my father celebrated his 75th birthday and retirement and sat down with me and my two older brothers and narrated his whole life and specifically stories about growing up under Portuguese colonialism in India, in Goa. Stories from his childhood that I had never heard. It synthesized a lot of what I had already been thinking about in terms of histories of anti-colonial struggle. I had never really thought about it in terms of the Portuguese in India, what that question was, and what life was like under that time. It was an interest in the subject matter, but it was such a lifelong process of unpacking my own identity and unpacking a history and a culture that I did not grow up with. What are the possibilities in that gap? In that space? It's taken me on a nonstop journey because every question that I looked at opened up so many more questions, and it became a space of constant learning.

The project with my father has come to an interesting place where I'm not really working with him at this moment, but it also came from a place of wanting to heal, also,the personal juncture within our relationship because we didn't grow up together. My parents separated when I was eight years old, and so I never really got to spend time with him. It was a way of connecting with him and also connecting with my heritage and a culture that I didn't grow up with, but have  a claim to, in a sense.

DS

I'm curious if you felt that your personal connection to these histories gave you permission to make work about them? Or I guess a  related question would be: how were these films different from your previous work? I remember asking you about this during our first visit. You were like, “Yeah, you can't see that.”

SS

One day, one day.

DS

The survey exhibition.

SS

[Laughs.] A lot of the work that I did in grad school, and a lot of the previous film work I've done, developed the aesthetics that would inform the trilogy of films. They were also grappling with questions of  collective history and memory.  For example, a project I did in grad school was about the history of the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, where some 300 students were massacred in 1968 by the government in Mexico City, on the exact same site where the Aztecs were massacred by Hernán Cortés. There was this collapsing of time within this locality that I was interested in. I was exploring that from a variety of ways, including using desktop aesthetics.

Collective history and memory have always been very important to my practice and the material that I'm interested in. But the process of working with my father... it was a work that I made for no one but myself, originally. I didn't think anyone was gonna see it. It was a work that felt like the first film at home, but not at home in the trilogy. So the first film was a work that I did not anticipate anyone ever seeing because at the time I had had very little success in getting anyone to see my work. I didn't think it was gonna take off or play at all at these festivals worldwide and travel the world multiple times over. I made the work and was feeling pretty good about it, shared it with a friend, and then that friend shared it with a programmer and then it just took on a life of its own. But it was a work that I very much made for myself in a way of grappling with these questions and contradictions of history and memory in my father's growing up under Portuguese colonialism and connecting it with a wider intercontinental network of anti-colonial resistance.

DS

Your more recent work has clearly resonated with people. Perhaps one reason is how the subject of your films, the tension between history and memory and how we narrate them, are so tightly bound to your formal or aesthetic concerns and strategies. As you said, you're using a range of imaging technologies that allow you to traverse time and distance. You’ve framed these visual strategies within the idea of diasporic thinking, and your work is indebted to your deep engagement critical thinkers on this topic. Was this something you were thinking about or did it come together more organically?

SS

All of these things had been building to each other and synthesized at the right moment at the right time. I had been deep into my studies in grad school with post-colonial theory, black radical tradition, and understanding questions of internalized white supremacy. I grew up in Texas, and read “Black Skin, White Masks” early on. I think I encountered it in 2015, which is maybe late, but still an appropriate time for all the confluence of the thinking. I encountered  Stuart Hall's work and found a deep investment in his understanding of diaspora.

Then, also, hearing my father talk about life under occupation and the multiple questions I had about that, even the banalities of it. It's so many of them. So much of it is not the kind of violence that we associate necessarily, but just the mundane things, things that I didn't even think about. The film opens up by him talking about how he didn't grow up with a clock. They didn't have clocks. So I wondered what that question of time was like. The way he talked about time was that they would tell time by the sound of the train, and the train in this violent history of colonial extraction once again, fraught to say the least.The train and the imagination in India is one that is framed by exploitation and extraction. So that always was interesting to me. It was also this dream of an escape because the train also has this idea of escape to it. So telling and marking time by the sound of the train was such a specific moment because I would ask him these questions of his first time growing up or going to see a film. These very small questions that raised larger concerns. I wasn't just asking him, "How mean were the Portuguese soldiers?" or something like that. It was much more mundane things that revealed these beautiful and symbolic gestures.

DS

These mundane things and symbolic gestures are echoed by your use of various imaging technologies, including Zoom and desktop aesthetics. Why did you feel it was necessary to include these more vernacular forms of screen-based images?

SS

A large question was how technology, and specifically screen-based technologies, change our relationship to these questions of identity and diaspora and perhaps of questions of decolonization, such as the medium of instantaneous televisual communication? Skype, Zoom, as we know it now, things like that.  So instantaneous communication was one of these mediums that I was interested in, and the implications of what that means for the collapsing of distance and time in relationship to thinking about the distance that I was experiencing here in the U.S. and my family back in India. A lot of it also was hiring a drone videographer to experience things that I was not able to experience. A lot of what I do is work with 3D renderings and animations, which is another way of giving life to a space of absence. What could have been is always a recurring question for me in relation to the implications of a longue durée of colonialism.

For those who don't know, the Portuguese colonized India for close to 500 years, so almost twice as long as the British were there. I think about that longue durée, and that time, and these questions of what could have been. Stuart Hall talks a bit about that. Even in the film, the interview that I excerpt where he says, "History is full of moments that were never realized." So I take animation and 3D rendering as an opportunity to realize some of those moments but they're not quite as literal, they're more fantastic moments or moments that have some sort of poetic gesture to them, such as an image of my father draped in a giant cloth running over a train or like the letters in Letter From Your Far-Off Country that are flowing away in this endless abyss or lots of oceanic imagery. The animation of the Devchar spirit in Golden Jubilee. It’s thinking of animation as this poiesis. Life giving life to something.

DS

You mentioned the question, “what could have been?” That seems to be the driving question of Two Refusals. The two-channel video is an excerpt or component of a feature-length film you are currently making. What made you decide to pursue this question as a long form film rather than another short?

SS

Market pressure? [Laughs.] I think that yeah, there is definitely a tendency for filmmakers who make short films, to go into the long form naturally. It's expected of you. At the same time, the works are quite dense. Each film is super, super dense. I did want to challenge myself to try and make a work that perhaps still had as much impact as the short films, but was not quite as tightly wound and had much more room to breathe. That was a consistent piece of feedback I had gotten from people, like “Hey, your films are amazing, but they're so dense and it's really difficult to breathe within the works and process everything.”

DS

I was gonna say, sometimes you've mentioned things, and I'm like, wait, I don't remember that part. But I've seen them multiple times.

SS

They were never really meant to be all seen all together at once, right? I'm always interested in the way things circulate, but the film circulated in a very strange way. Almost entirely they circulated during the pandemic, as festivals turned to  online platforms. So these films, which employed desktop aesthetics, found their way back onto the desktop as opposed to the cinema screen. So many people were watching these films on their desktop, which I was interested in. At certain times, films would play not in chronological order. So the second film would play, but then the first film would play one place, the second film would play another place, and they would be simultaneous but not together. There's this interesting non-synchronicity between the trilogy. Seeing them in order is also another way to experience them, but they don't have to be viewed in that order at all.

Going back to Two Refusals and the 36-minute version at the Brooklyn Museum, it's also still dense. [Laughs.] It's also a very dense film. When people watch it, I'm like, so what'd you think? And they're like, yeah, I'm still processing, that's a really dense film. We'll see what happens with the feature. Now that the 36-minute version has has played and is continuing to play, I'm interested in taking the feature in a different direction, going a more personal route, going back to not necessarily my father, but my grandmother, her family's history of anti-colonial struggle as armed freedom fighters, and also a history of poetry there. Once again, tracing those networks but really reflecting more on a personal level because, like the essay that I wrote for the exhibition, I find that there's so much there that I want to talk to or talk about, and the feature seems like a natural place for that. As opposed to 60 more minutes of the 36-minute version at the Brooklyn Museum.

DS

There's not really any personal information. There's snippets if you know your previous work.

SS

Cool Easter eggs.

DS

There's some things in there, but it's not explicit in the way of your other three films. And was that intentional? You became known for this trilogy, which was so tightly bound with your family history–did you want to try to tackle the same material or question, but remove the personal narrative?

SS

Once again, I'm still processing the work because we just finished it less than a month ago. It was the first time collaborating with a writer, the poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, who's based in Philadelphia and is of Hyderabadi Muslim descent. We operate in different worlds. Then, also, there were so many other collaborators. It was the first time I worked with the whole crew or multiple crews.  It was a big process of exploring. I was trying to find ways to draw in the personal, but every time I tried to draw the personal, it was at the expense of what Sham-e-Ali was doing. It was a way to try and balance. The trilogy of films did a lot of work introducing audiences to the personal backstory and history so that this work could stand on its own without having to justify itself by explaining the filmmaker's heritage. There's a push for authenticity, which, once again, is going back to conversations around diaspora. Authenticity is always the marking of that type of disjuncture—the non-belonging—and, I mean, it's a trope at this point, right? It's a trope that I am very hesitant to engage with the more I engage with it because you get an interesting backlash in different ways.

DS

I didn't say authenticity earlier, but I guess that’s what I was getting at.

SS

And it was one that I never wanted to perform. It was an authenticity that was me trying to figure this stuff out for myself. And if anyone else wants to listen in, that's great. But, for me, it was thinking through and grappling with all of the contradictions and questions that I had, not just in relationship to my own life, but in relationship to history, like history as a contradiction. Also in my work outside of my art practice,  like activist circles and movement-based work, in terms of this question of world-building, how do we get out of this mess? As someone who definitely wants to get out of this world and have a better world, what are the ways in which that has been attempted throughout time? What can we learn? What can we take away from that? The kind of personal tie is always rooted in my ancestors and thinking about ancestors and, I don't wanna say debt, but this relationship that we have to those who came before us, and for any of us, right? It doesn't matter if you have to be from the Global South or whatever else. So many people had to struggle for any of us to be here at any point in time, period. So we all have an obligation to those that came before us to honor the work that they did and to continue that work. It's a conversation across time and a struggle across time, whether that's shedding the past and building something new and something better or honoring the work that has come before you to continue that struggle.

DS

I'm holding a copy of Joan Kee's book The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity. Two Refusals, at least in its two-channel version, is really about histories of solidarity between Goa and various countries in Africa, which were under Portuguese colonial rule. And I know we were both talking about and reading this book at various points this year…

SS

You turned me on to it.

DS

The book came out in May while we were working on the show and it felt like all these things coming together. Kee is critical of this idea of Afro-Asian solidarity, at least how it’s been imagined, employed, and romanticized in artistic practices and discourses in recent years.  One thing that I think your film does really well–along with your sculpture and your essay–is put some pressure on what solidarity means or actually looks like, especially in relation to liberation struggles and the idea of a global majority. It’s messy to say the least.

SS

So messy, yeah.

DS

Was this also something you were actively thinking about?

SS

I wanted to push back against some of these narratives.  Because so much of the work is the poetic gestures that Sham-e-Ali's script opens up. I could have gone another route, which is the more traditional essayistic format, but I wanted to be so much more open, and I think the work is so much richer because of that because people bring their struggles to the work as opposed to me telling the audience about a particular struggle and a particular history. Of course, that does happen through the two interviews that are in the film, but the in-between, the fictional poetic moments are so open that every time I hear from someone they say,  “I see this history play out in this place.” I think about Palestine. I think about so many other places and people. What I want is for people to bring their struggle to the work, as opposed to me bringing my struggle or the struggles that I'm interested in.

In terms of complicating the histories, there's absolutely an over-romanticization of anti-colonial struggles, which often resulted in dictatorships and civil strife. In particular, I’m thinking of India right now, which is under an ethno-nationalist fascist regime that is bent on the destruction of Muslim communities and is drawing on thousands of years of Brahminical patriarchy and upholding the caste system. There is also the regime’s treatment of the indigenous populations, also known as the Adivasi communities. This is a vicious form of authoritarianism that has developed since 1947. I’m interested in the aftermath of what these so-called moments might mean, while also, once again, being critical of things like the Bandung Conference, which was the Afro-Asian meeting in 1955, with the heads of these countries, only male leaders.

Part of what the work does, and part of what I literally do is, in a certain part of the film, I cut up the 16mm prints of these images of the Bandung Conference, of MPLA propaganda from Angola, a variety of this anti-colonial material, and I'm slicing it up with scissors, cutting it into little bits and pieces, and then I tape it back together. And you get these fractured images that are visceral and dissonant. They collapse, cut, and stitch together so many different histories that are at times incongruous. I'm really interested in that. There was also the whole burial, like I bury 16mm films so that the images decompose and then I resuscitate them. There's the psychoanalytic interpretation of burial and retrieval and unearthing these histories. There's various techniques that I'm interested in, like how the image can then complicate these histories?  It's not enough for me to just say, "These histories are complicated and messy and inconsistent." Cool. Yeah. But what does that look like? How can we visualize that inconsistency? How do we understand the pain and the terror that comes into it not by showing images of pain and terror, but by looking at how the fragmentation of a pre-existing image or the burial of an image can exist at twenty-four frames per second.

DS

There's something very haunting about the film, and not just because the protagonist is literally being haunted in her dreams by the Adamastor. You also deploy and degrade archival images to haunting effects, and even the music and 16mm film have otherworldly qualities.

SS

These histories haunt us. Taking up Jacques Derrida’s hauntology of history, especially in cinema, because all images are images of the past, so all images that we see have been taken in another time, in another place, and are haunting our present moment. That's Derrida's understanding of hauntology and I take that quite literally to understand the inconsistent histories of Afro-Asianism and struggle and the resistance and the weight of the past and the weight of 450 years of colonialism. And that burning question of what could have been is the question that haunts the main character, the protagonist in the film, and haunts me.

Working on the film was the most miserable experience of my life. I saw a Miyazaki quote, where he was like, “Filmmaking only brings suffering. I can't believe I actually want to do another one.” The haunting was like there was a lot of doubt throughout the making of the work. I don't know if I ever conveyed that to you as a curator.

DS

You received the UOVO prize at the Brooklyn Museum which basically gives you about a year to create a show. There had been three previous recipients, all working in different media, but generally people have presented a combination of existing work and some new work. But you produced all new work, including a two channel, 36-minute film which required you to travel across the globe. It's amazing what you were able to do in less than a year!

SS

Many sleepless nights. I would wake up in a cold sweat many, many nights. That's where the impetus for the main character actually came from, about this woman whose dreams are haunted by this mythological figure from Portuguese mythology called the Adamastor, which is like a tempest, like the Shakespearean tempest of a storm cloud that haunts a character's dreams. So I was quite literally haunted, where I would wake up terrified of the histories that I was dealing with in various ways and of questions that I could not get out of my head. Also, there were so many things I was reading on Twitter that made me really sad, whether it's anti-Blackness involving South-Asian communities, and this kind of violence that existed with a history of anti-Blackness, and reading the comments section.

Things where I was just like, it doesn't have to be this way. Why is it this way? What? That drove the research. It's also coming out of the history of the 2020 uprisings, which were then compounded by this wave of anti-Asian hate during the COVID pandemic. The mobilization of Black and Asian communities was, of course, a huge inspiration and why I think people are also interested in these histories again. Interestingly, I remember sitting in on a conversation with Joan Kee and The Otolith Group, and I asked Anjalika and Kodwo a question: “Why do I see the Bandung spirit and these questions of Afro-Asian [relations] having a resurgent moment now?” I was asking them, what do you think contributes to that? What do you think it is about this present moment that people are interested in these histories again? Because these histories, people have been interested in them for quite some time. There's a large amount of scholarship that's been going on, but there's something about the present moment that seems these questions are now taking the forefront. [Laughs.] I mean, they didn't have a satisfactory answer for me. They said, it's always been relevant, it's never not been relevant. But I do think it's also because people are reevaluating this question of solidarity and possibility, but also acknowledging the pain and the contradiction of things like the '92 Rodney King history with Korean Americans and Black Americans. There's so many histories. There's so many touch points for these conversations. But the underlying premise is: what if it didn't have to be like this? That's the driving force in my work: what if this world didn't have to be the world? The class that all of my students are here for is called “Imaging Virtual Futures.” It's about how artists engage with this question of world building and world building that exists in antithesis to colonialist, racist, patriarchal structures. And so that's something we've been exploring. I don't know if we've been exploring it well or not, but it's something we've been exploring throughout the semester. It's something that I've always returned to.

DS

Related to imagining new futures or world building, you've also participated in movement spaces, many related to the issues you addressed in your work as a video journalist. Obviously, your work is deeply connected to your politics and world view. How do you see avant-garde film functioning within these movements?

SS

To put it simply, I don't think that avant-garde film will change the world. I think we would've seen the world change by now if that had happened. There's no shortage of avant-garde work. But, art always exists alongside movement work, and there's such a long history that is drawn upon the coexistence of struggle and art. Within the art world, we have a very particular vision of what political art looks like and generally it sucks. When we think of political art, there's a very specific idea...

DS

Like agitprop.

SS

Or even work that is celebrated for criticizing a certain government and we should love it because it's criticizing a certain government. Sure, yeah, that's great. But I'm almost exclusively interested in this question of what can images do? How do images circulate? How do they change? What is the way in which we can find a new language for cinema and of the moving image? I love that I got to explore sculpture with the show, and there's a lot of images in that sculpture, so I'm interested in spatial configurations of images. I think avant-garde film has the potential to get us outside of pre-described ways of thinking and feeling and experiencing the world. And also experiencing our relationship with the screen because we have such a specific relationship with our screens. I'm interested in the way in which there might be a new relationship, and I don't know if new is the right term, but a different relationship between audience and screen that film can shift viewers in and out of different forms of consciousness. I think that these things exist side by side and they inform each other. But no, I don't think it's ever gonna change the world. [Laughs.]

DS

I do think artists and their work can put pressure in various ways on institutions. But there are also contradictions that emerge in the systems that support or circulate work like yours. Of course, your own work deals with the contradictions of liberation struggles. So I’m curious to hear about your experience  working within an institution like the Brooklyn Museum. When we reached out to you and you're the recipient of the UOVO prize, what was your reaction?

SS

My first reaction was like are you sure you have the right email, like really me? [Laughs.] It's an honor. I'm so grateful to you and to all of the incredible people who worked on the show because there were so many people. I'm so glad that there's that list of credits in the wall text because so many people believed in the show and wanted the show to happen. So that was incredibly moving.

DS

But your work has been challenging for the institution in numerous ways. For example, you wanted to make a sculpture that includes a basin of water…

SS

We had to go through a lot of hoops to make some of that work happen. I think that there has always been an inherent imbalance of power. Some people think that artists have more power than they do, and unfortunately, that's not always the case. But that doesn't mean that artists and people who engage in institutions can't find ways to pry that open or challenge power or withhold labor.

DS

But we’ve also recently witnessed people get fired for expressing political views or demanding accountability from institutions. And artists have been censored.

SS

There's a real terrifying neo-McCarthyism that is truly chilling. I think everyone's been saying this, but it is truly terrifying that for expressing solidarity with some of the most vulnerable people on this planet, people who are suffering, that would then mean that you no longer can have a life, that you no longer can have a career. And by life, I mean career. Like people's careers are actively being burned to the ground. So engagements with institutions that are so conditioned under the rubric of white supremacy and capitalism, the weight of these massive forces that are in different ways tied to military apparatuses, one must be cautious. One must weigh the benefit. We're all complicit, but it doesn't stop you from having power and sovereignty over what you choose to do and what you don't choose to do. Do I think me not having a show at the Brooklyn Museum is gonna do anything? No. I think that there's value in engaging with institutions discrepantly and not blindly, but being intentional about what it is you want to do with this. I made a statement that we worked on in which I very much challenged the museum to return all of their stolen artifacts. I just wanted it to be two sentences at first. [Laughs.] You tell the story.

DS

You reached out at some point over the summer, after we'd been working on the show for a little while. I think most of the in-gallery didactic texts were already written. You said that you’d like to write a statement, connecting some of the themes of the show to the present and the physical space of the museum as well as what it means for artists to navigate these contradictions.  I don't remember exactly what the original statement was, but it was short.

SS

It was fairly short.

DS

It was very short [Laughs.]. I was prepared for what would happen once I passed it along.  I knew that there would be a lot of questions and a desire for some of your points to be more fleshed out and explained, especially for visitors who would be encountering it in the museum. I remember asking you very specifically for whom did you write the text. Was this an opportunity to bring long-standing professional discourses around repatriation and the colonial legacies of museums to a general public or was this a way for you to think through or even try to minimize your own complicity within the system? Of course, it could be both.  So we worked together in advance knowing that there would be questions and edits.

SS

When you asked me to go further, you were like, oh, can you say more? I'm like, oh yeah, let's look at all the board directors. This person has real estate holdings that are displacing black and brown people. This person has deforestation blood on their hands.

DS

You really went for it. [Laughs.]

SS

I mean, you were like can you say more? I was like, oh yeah. [Laughs.] Yeah, it was a whole thing. I remember I sent it to some people and they were like, good luck. The museum kind of gutted it, they took the statement and watered it down so significantly that I was like this isn't even my statement anymore. I was like I don't agree with this at this point. And so we tried to make it a bit more assertive at certain points. I'm glad that we still have that in there. I've heard from several people that thought it was a good move. I was kind of wondering at a certain point if it was becoming more trouble than it was worth. I'm glad that we ended up sticking with it. So thank you for all of your work. 'Cause I knew that was gonna be a pain in the ass for you, but I think you had already told me that you left the Brooklyn Museum at that point, and I was like alright, I think I'm gonna ask you to do this. [Laughs.]

Questions from the Audience:

Q1

I have a question. Thank you. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the figure of encounter? Because you talked about Derrida's hauntology, and at the beginning of the essay, he quotes Hamlet. Hamlet says that “time is out of joint.” You mentioned the collapsing of time in historical events so many times, and I was wondering if you could talk about the possibility of encounter, how you open Golden Jubilee with encounter, how there is an encounter in the practice through this affiliation. And how there's also an encounter through the reproduction of the images as a thumb. And also even with Bandung, the idea of a failed encounter. But I think people are still drawn to it because it's weird to see this kind of collage of people who you would never assume to have met each other and it's like an encounter comes back up.

SS

Thank you so much for your question. That's brilliant. I think about that idea a lot. There's multiple registers at which that idea of encounter could be read. Quite literally the idea of Bandung is the idea of the encounter, those meeting points. One could also say the entire idea of colonialism is the encounter. People call the advent of colonialism the first globalization. There was a lot of talk about globalization in the '90s and people were like, if you wanna talk about globalization, it started in 1492. The idea of the encounter is about this meeting point between cultures.

Not that I'm saying that colonialism was a good encounter, but it was an encounter. The encounter, also, is in relation to an encounter with an image or an encounter with a particular history or subject matter. But for me, a lot of it is encounters with images. The way in which those encounters have an affect over me and have an affective quality that then sparks a line of questioning. There's the idea of the encounter in relationship to, as you pointed out in Golden Jubilee, when my father at a very young age encountered this spirit called Devchar, which is this folkloric spirit that came out of indigenous practices, in histories, and in Goa, which I won't go into, but so at a young age, my father had this encounter with the spirit, which is how the film Golden Jubilee opens up in this kind of 3D rendering.

So many, many different forms of encounter. All of the implications I'm interested in. It's a way in which these encounters encounter each other, visually and sonically, and when we think about film, we think about the cut. A cut is an encounter between two images. It is inherent, and the medium of film itself is the encounter. You have the audience encounter in these images as well. There's multiple registers in ‘encounter’ every step of the way, all the implications of which I'm interested in combining.

Q2

Thank you for the talk. You talk a little about world-building, and I think I'm always interested in queer world-building, but my question is: does world building always have to come from a place of toil or oppression?

SS

I think that is, for many people, the question. I also think about why we are forced to mobilize in times of emergency. Why so much movement work gets done in times of crisis, and why are we waiting until times of emergency or in times of crisis, or in times of deep, deep pain and horror to do something different or to put pressure on a system? That's not to say that people aren't constantly doing this work because they are, but right now we're seeing the largest mobilization of pro-Palestinian sentiment that we've ever seen in history, or at least in the U.S. Why did we wait until Gazans are being murdered by the tens of thousands to try and build a world in which Gazans are not forced to die and Palestinians are not forced to die all the time. It's an essential question. It's a question I don't have an answer to, but I think it's very related to this idea of why we seemingly wait until there's a crisis or an emergency to mobilize. It's something I'm thinking about too, so I wish I had a better answer.