Yewande YoYo Odunubi and Orsod Malik in Conversation

In 2021-2 Yewande YoYo Odunubi was appointed ICF’s first Diasporic Animateur Curatorial Fellow, a year-long post to our team aimed at creating space and time for a curator to conduct research into our archive. In addition to exploring material produced through ICF’s programme over the past 15 years, Yewande held conversations with ICF alumni and other creative practitioners, and explored a series of questions that resonate with her practice. The final manifestation of her engagement with those questions and surrounding threads of enquiry is her first solo exhibition Calling the Body to attention, which features new performance, moving image and sound works.

In this interview between friends and ICF colleagues, Yewande and Orsod Malik (Curator & Digital Strategist) reflect on her fellowship, trace some of her research trajectories and discuss developments in her practice.

Yewande’s exhibition Calling the Body to attention (7-11 December 2022) is presented at Block 366 in Brixton as of part a residency that ICF is undertaking, ICF @ Block 336.

This interview, which was recorded in November 2022, has been edited and abridged for clarity and length. Edited by Sukayna Powell.

Orsod Malik: We’ve had many, many chats over the last year, talking about the fellowship, your practice, and also just getting to know each other. So, I’m really excited to actually be interviewing you. Can you talk a little bit about your practice before the fellowship?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: I had been working in spaces like the V&A and the Wellcome Collection, where I had been doing a lot of live programming. I had also been working with different collectives, working to put on club nights and art exhibitions, as well as hybrid art and music events. That practice was largely about facilitation, gathering people, bringing people together.

I decided that I wasn’t really centring my own conversations and questions, so it felt imperative to expand my practice. To ask: what does it mean for my body to produce, hold, and facilitate? What is my body doing in that space? What is the dance happening there? That led me to think a lot around movement. I’ve always had this connection with movement and dancing in social spaces, and I was really interested in asking: is there a language there? Is it communicating something and should I listen to it a bit more deeply?

I became really interested in this question: what does the body need to dream? And that opened this door into thinking about where imagination is located in my body. What does that look like in space? And what’s the connection to dreams? And dreaming in sleep? Also, wakefulness? What does it mean to manifest those in space?

Orsod Malik: Can you say a bit more about those earlier days, working with different collectives?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: Music was a big thing in terms of gathering people and moving together, and our bodies holding space. I just love to dance and that’s the way I share with people quite organically. I think that had a really big impact on me when thinking about what my language is. When we’re in spaces together, we’re often not talking but moving. That is so powerful because it brings up an openness – an expanse of space that is non-verbal. For me, that is really interesting. I’m always interested in what can facilitate that space of ‘being’ where you see someone being alive.

Orsod Malik: That’s a beautiful way to come to any practice – to come to it intuitively. I wonder, as your practice developed, what were some of your influences?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: There are so many influences that I draw inspiration from. When I was a producer at the V&A, I produced a lot of dance programmes. I remember watching ‘Balance’ performed by Rowdy SS, who I’ve been fortunate enough to work with again, and watching Rowdy move in space was just illuminating to me because they were just so expansive in their movement – just the fact that you can do that. You can take up space in that way, your body can command space. I think that’s always stayed with me and why I always love ‘Balance’, that performance. It really allowed me to think more about what performance could be. There are people like Zinzi Minott, and SERAFINE1369 and other peers and contemporaries – specifically b/Black practitioners – and what they’re doing and in space. I love being able to tap into those works.

So yeah, those are, I think, a few different influences. I love house dance and I love hip hop. I love waacking. And I love watching battles – thinking about how people are dreaming and imagining movement in space in real-time. They’re able to bring up movements that exist in the past and the future, and the present, all in this moment of the now. It’s fascinating.

Orsod Malik: I think it’s really interesting in your work, because there’s all of these experiments in so many different areas and themes; things like time and temporality and ideas around the past and the present or the future, all folding in on themselves at a particular moment when you are dancing and moving. This idea that, between movements, the body already knows what’s coming. The next movement is always on the way. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: I was really pondering on this premise that the body knows. Often when we think about the body or have conversations around the body, in relation to the mind and the spirit, it’s always in terms of these separate categories. But for me, the body is such a capacious realm, that it’s not disentangled from the mind and the spirit and the soul. It’s connected with everything that’s connected.

Movement and dance are really material examples of the body knowing, because when you’re in freestyle – in flow – when you’re trusting yourself, the movement that you’re making is able to communicate the now. Like it’s a conscious/unconscious happening. It’s like magic in space. The body holds movement like it’s already programmed in there. And there’s going to be a variation of it that’s going to come out. That might be something you have trained in, or you’ve just seen, or it could be ancestral or genetic.

That’s what, for me, really cemented why I love being in that space of movement. The aliveness that you’re able to imagine from what you have within you – a vast space of information that constantly gets added to and reshaped and mutates. When we talk about the body, it’s not one fixed thing. It’s many things, like a body of water. We understand that to be vast and to be capacious and to have many things inside it. If we reframe it in that way, then we think about the vastness of identities, the vastness of beings.

Orsod Malik: You describe it so beautifully. I wanted to ask, also, about how movement was a point of departure. Perhaps your thinking has changed around some things or has been reaffirmed by movement. Can you say a bit about that?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: Movement, or empathic movement, reminds me to come back to my body and to listen to my body. Often, I’ve neglected my body in the name of being productive, being a good worker. I was doing a job, and I was so hell-bent on delivery, I got injuries in my back and my knees, which I still have now. The restriction of movement meant a restriction of myself. A restriction of what it meant for me to really be joyous and exist in the world and be with other people. It made me realise how important my body is to doing everything. It made me think: how am I practising care in terms of the body that I also work with, collaborate with, to do all of these things?

When I’m thinking about my body and I’m moving in space, I’m also thinking about how the centring of my body means centring another language and another way of processing and another way of communicating. I’m de-centring verbal language and written language as the main means of understanding each other, and the main means of us being in translation with different concepts and ideas.

Orsod Malik: You’ve described the way that we labour and how, actually, society dictates how we value our body, how we see it, how we use it. So, movement practice, in the way that you deploy it, feels like a reclaiming of what’s been gifted to you. Do you know what I mean? There’s a vastness to what the body is capable of, that we barely tap into because we’re pushed to make use of it in ways that are sometimes detrimental to our own lives.

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: That was really important to me because I’m thinking through bodies in general, but also my body. How do I understand my body and what I’m experiencing? Partly by being in dialogue with what people have known it to be before – different academics, curators, artists, how they are navigating the body, particularly b/Black practitioners coming from the b/Black diaspora. If I’m trying to find a language for my body that’s intuitive, I want to speak and read with other people who are exploring similar bodies to mine, that might connect me to other lineages that exist within my own personal line. This idea of the body-as-site became really important to me.

In the ICF archive, there is a keynote from Stuart Hall. One of the things he said that really struck me was: often we think of the body “as the container of identity”, and it’s not . He’s really understanding identity to be much more fluid than fixed, and he talks about racism being preoccupied with the body with caricatures and stereotypes. And it made me think about all these things that are placed on a physical body as a means of control. I really want to free the body from those notions because that’s not how I experience my body, my body is not fixed.

That notion of the body not being a container of identity reaffirmed this idea I had that the body is site, the body is space, the body is capacious. All that makes ‘you’ is not just your racial identity or gender identity or your disability or neurodivergence, any single category. It’s many things, many timelines, many spaces.

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: That was really important to me because I’m thinking through bodies in general, but also my body. How do I understand my body and what I’m experiencing? Partly by being in dialogue with what people have known it to be before – different academics, curators, artists, how they are navigating the body, particularly b/Black practitioners coming from the b/Black diaspora. If I’m trying to find a language for my body that’s intuitive, I want to speak and read with other people who are exploring similar bodies to mine, that might connect me to other lineages that exist within my own personal line. This idea of the body-as-site became really important to me.

In the ICF archive, there is a keynote from Stuart Hall. One of the things he said that really struck me was: often we think of the body “as the container of identity”, and it’s not. (1) He’s really understanding identity to be much more fluid than fixed, and he talks about racism being preoccupied with the body with caricatures and stereotypes. And it made me think about all these things that are placed on a physical body as a means of control. I really want to free the body from those notions because that’s not how I experience my body, my body is not fixed.

That notion of the body not being a container of identity reaffirmed this idea I had that the body is site, the body is space, the body is capacious. All that makes ‘you’ is not just your racial identity or gender identity or your disability or neurodivergence, any single category. It’s many things, many timelines, many spaces.

Orsod Malik: Identity is made up of so many different things and infinite variables and degrees of these different categories that society places on us, but it can never explain everything about a person, even though it tries to.

I think what you’re describing with movement is that it’s what happens when all of these variables express themselves the way that only one person can. Even if you’re related to that person, you’re totally different, what’s being expressed is something that can only be expressed by you and the ways these different things concocted themselves up in you. I think that’s a really incredible way to think. How did you arrive at the ICF fellowship as something you’d like to do?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: I’ve come to love the title of the fellowship: Diasporic Curatorial Animateur. I arrived at it because, number one, it still fits under my cultural producer hat, and I’ve always just really been interested in the process of developing a person, developing a body. What does it mean to nurture oneself, especially in the space of the arts? I’ve been interested in the ICF programme in terms of nurturing emerging producing practitioners, but also the space they hold in conversation with other artists, thinking through a diasporic lens in relation to art and life, internationally.

I really wanted to learn about their archive and learn about their journey up until now, and to think about that in relation to the question ‘what does the body need to dream?’ I felt like maybe there were junctures between my own practice and their journey. Art for me has always been that space where I’ve been able to have conversations about the world, myself, and my perspective. It’s not fixed. There’s movement in there. It can be physical movement, it’s also just movement between things, between ideas, between people, about how you facilitate space. Everything can be a dance in some way.

Orsod Malik: In terms of the development of your practice, how does an environment like ICF differ from other cultural environments with a very set way of doing things? What did this last year in the fellowship afford you?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: It was a journey of learning to trust myself and trust my voice. And to recognise that that is an important factor in making decisions and processing things, and that I should be honouring that more. And recognising also, that the journey is not perfect. I can have a tendency to perfectionism, which is kind of connected to this historical way of working. Learning to trust my own voice, and also, to trust other people as well, especially people who are actually there to really support you and actually are true to their word and what they’re saying.

To trust that energy and also, be in that collegiate spirit and energy with others who actually really believe in that and are practising what they believe. I don’t think if I hadn’t done this fellowship I would be here right now – being able to actually show all of this work in the way that I have. Being in dialogue, trusting myself in that process, and actually allowing myself to centre that trust – what does it mean, whenever I’m leaning into that? What can I produce? And what is that energy? How is that generative?

Orsod Malik: Something that’s been so admirable about witnessing you in this process is that you have taken everything apart to then put it all back together again, and that takes a lot of courage. It’s something that I’ve really wanted to try and emulate in my own practice.

I want to explore this point that you were making about making work. Coming in first, like thinking “what can I programme?” And then it becoming: “actually, I want to make something, I want to create something.” Can you talk me through that?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: I was entering this period of research and it became increasingly evident that it was important to me to think of a way of translating it in a way that felt true to me, and also, allowed me to process what I was reading.

It wasn’t enough for me to just read a bunch of books or texts, or take in work, and then maybe produce a programme that spoke to those ideas. I wanted to have a different sort of relationship with these materials. Making work that meditated on the things I was ingesting, felt really important. Originally, there was a plan of making a small sketch of a performance and being in dialogue with other people around that. And then after a while, I just thought, actually, that’s not where it feels the most generative.

I actually really thought when I was doing this fellowship that I was going to talk a lot about curatorial practice. What does that look like in this day and age? Thinking about my peers and the ways people are creating space. How it’s not looking like what you see in a museum and not centring, like particular narratives, histories or ways of working, it’s more collective, care-focused. Thinking about what space can be, any space – and how one can change that. I thought I was going to do a project breaking open curatorial practice – breaking open this black box space, breaking open the exhibition space, and I’m still holding those ideas. But then it just changed. And I allowed myself to listen to the texts and be a bit more open and find other ways that I was connecting.

Orsod Malik: You have read so much that you were kind of like “okay, now I need to decide what to make of all of this reading.” Can you say a bit more about that particular stage?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: I remember a conversation we had. I was asking you about researching, how to research. Something that you said to me that I really hold dear – you were talking about the way you edit and notate in your books, finding yourself and your voice in the text. That really stuck with me. And I still hold that now, because I think even the show is about me inserting myself into the text, this is me being in conversation and being in play with the things that I’m holding. And I wanted to find a way to be able to do that which felt authentic and true to myself, and actually, in my voice.

Often, we can just be quoting, but where are we in relation to that? Where can we find our voice, and add it in and amongst the conversation; widen the pool of voices and join the dots, and make more connections, make more networks – so we can all be drawing from it.

Orsod Malik: What have been some of the challenges of translating this work into space, and also, what are some of the things that you’ve discovered whilst translating the work into space?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: It’s been a journey. Thinking about selecting works and really having to think about how each work that I’m showing – not necessarily represents a moment in time – but represents particular ways of translating moments of ideas or moments of thought.

The piece in the bigger spaces is, I would say, definitely the most challenging one because it includes writing and it’s been a while since I’ve shown any writing, performed in that way. But I challenged myself to lean into my voice as an instrument, and words as an instrument and as soundscape, and working with Auclair to create an energy or rhythm in the space with words and with sound. They’ll also be the visuals in that piece, which is called ‘What I hide by my language my body utters’. That’s a quote from Ronald Barthes, which speaks to language also being sound, also being rhythm. And also, being in conversation with the body or being an addition to the language of the body.

Trying to play with that in space will also be enlivened by live performance. And that’s an even bigger challenge because it’s not something that I’ve done. Working with Auclair on the sound has also been really new to me, because I’m often just moving to what already exists and what moves me. So, there’s a lot of firsts here.

Orsod Malik: And can you say a bit more about the title of the exhibition and how you came to the title?

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: The title of the exhibition is ‘Calling the Body to attention’. Originally, when I conceived of the title, I was asking what does it mean to be attentive? What does it mean to really listen in, and like, how to be listening to our bodies, and this whole conversation, I’ve been talking a lot about, you know, the spaciousness and the vastness of our bodies and our society. This title can really speak to the different ways that these works are calling the body to its attention. Sometimes in very direct, obvious ways, or sometimes, making you work a little harder to kind of really think about the layers of the sites of the body, and about a body and space and your body in space. So, I felt like the title worked for this exhibition, and I felt like it was a nice little summary of my time on the fellowship.

Orsod Malik: To end the conversation, I wanted to ask you what this exhibition means to you and what it means to your practice.

Yewande YoYo Odunubi: To me, it’s a testament to my determination to sit in discomfort and manifest something for myself. It feels like it’s a moment to reflect on these ideas that I’ve been holding and wanting to play with and allow myself to be brave and confident. It’s a testament to the trust that I’m building for myself, and I hope to continue to build alongside other people. I think it’s a moment of my voice and my body opening, not just as something that’s known to me, but to be shared with other people in moments of connection.

And I think it’s also given me some frameworks and ways that I want to continue practising and sharing work. b/Black, expansive imagination is a term I’ve spoken about. We individually want to find our own b/Black expansive imagination and come from that space, but also show it as a wider site outside of ourselves. That there is a power there, especially thinking about, you know, like, b/Black diasporic power in re-shifting narratives and understandings of what is available to b/Black bodies and b/Black beings.

References:
(1) Paraphrased from Stuart Hall’s keynote address at ‘Black Diaspora Visual Art Symposium’ curated by International Curators Forum (ICF)

About the Editor: Sukayna Powell is a writer, editor, and idea-wrangler-for-hire, helping artists, makers, and advocates brainstorm and communicate.

Yewande’s Diasporic Animateur Curatorial Fellowship was made possible with support from Paul Hamlyn Foundation.