Intimate ecologies

Aditya Singh, Undergraduate Student, Jindal School of Art and Architecture, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat in conversation with Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, researcher, speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist, London.

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, curator, researcher, and pleasure activist. Her practice navigates race, art, queerness, and Blackness, through performing Intimate explorations and crafts a new vocabulary for these ecological worlds. She is working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queer identities. Her academic practice mobilizes a queer, decolonial approach to challenge climate colonialism through a focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices across the Black diaspora. Through this interview, we engage with her knowledge-making practices that take form as loitering or shoaling; we ask her about how speculative works perform new languaging; and how she negotiates the space of creation, exhaustion, appropriation and regalvanisation through her world of ‘Intimate Ecologies’.

Aditya Singh: Ama, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I’m very excited to hear from you. Having gone through your work, whether it’s your article on Speculative Fabulations for the Feminist Review titled ‘Beneath Yaba’s Garden’, the exhibition film Putting the Cooker on Low at the Centre for Human Rights and Arts (CHRA) at Bard College, or the various other projects that you’ve worked on, it’s been quite fascinating to see how you are situated within these different worlds.

What remains at the very core of these multiple worlds that you move between, not just in terms of themes, but also personae, platforms and mediums. Also, how do these worlds become entangled with one another as you move across them?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: First of all, I’m so incredibly honoured to be a part of this amazing project, to contribute to the incredible legacy of Seminar, particularly at this moment of crisis, and the collective insistence on persevering. And also, within this particular issue, which has this amazing title, ‘Carnival of Ecologies’, alongside so many other amazing collectives and individuals who are thinking through Ecologies in a whole plethora of ways.

I’m also really touched by the level of research, Aditya, that you’ve done into my practice. It’s really a great gift to feel that someone is really trying to delve into a range of what I do, because often people only encounter one part, one aspect of my work. They know me as an academic, they know me as an artist or they know me through my films or through my fiction, you know. So I feel not many people really get to see that kind of holistic framework of practice. I’m just incredibly grateful with the time that you’ve spent going through my work.

For me, my work is a kind of holistic framework for thinking – being – dreaming. It’s very much an entangled and enmeshed mode of practice, whether or not I’m working through mediums of film or speculative fiction or the essay or art writing, or indeed my pedagogical practice.

I’m really trying to consistently trouble the relationships between the human and the more-than-human, between what this kind of research can look like and most importantly, feel like. Can this work feel pleasurable, sustainable, nourishing, collaborative? Or does it have to consistently feel exhausting, desperate, in crisis, urgent, isolated, unsustainable? I think very often that’s how the work feels. Is that the only way it can feel? Can it feel different? Can we feel different doing it, and in feeling different whilst doing and continuing this work, can we continue dreaming, building and sharing for longer?

I really came to, I suppose, a kind of moment of fracturing or a schism within my practice at the end of my master’s, before I started my PhD, where I felt completely crushed by the weight of thinking through climate colonialism and Blackness together. Just overwhelmingly distressed and distraught, at our realities. It’s the kind of hole that the deeper you go into it, the blacker it becomes, and not in a good way. And so, I really needed to find different ways to keep thinking and working with this question of, what do, or can, Black futures look like? What could Black climate changed futures look like or Black adaptive futures look like? Particularly for those of us who are queer, and female identified, and disabled, and racialised, and trans, and children, and working class, and incarcerated, and those of us who are inevitably at the front end of the front lines. How can those futures be liberatory for all of us?

And it really became a question of – how can I keep doing this work and still sustain myself and my mental health? Because my mental health really was severely affected by the research. And then, how can I find ways to communicate this thinking and the importance of staying with the hard edges of climate colonialism, without reinscribing that violence into the audiences that I’m speaking to, because that was also happening. I was also regurgitating this language of statistics and numbers and dates and deadlines and timelines, and it was a really violent process, particularly when I was talking to Black audiences. I would see them feel this sense of affront and a kind of invasion of their sense of possibility.

So, pleasure became this way of me staying with these hard questions while sustaining my practice – whilst thinking across non-linear timelines, transoceanically and intra-disciplinarily. And pleasure enabled me to begin communicating in these unexpected ways, whether that is through film or through my erotic breath workshops – which engage ideas around queer Ecologies, bodies, trauma, energy genitals and the different kinds of ideas that reconnect us to thinking our bodies differently with those bodies are more-than-human as they exist now, and in the future. And those bodies exist in flesh, and they exist in the imagination. And then suddenly you have this much wider toolkit and language to reckon with what being might mean now, and in the future, which then shifts what feels possible.

I don’t see these boundaries between discipline, medium, practice, and institution, as finite or fixed. I very much adhere to Octavia Butler’s insistence that people only called her work science fiction in order to know where to place it in the bookshops so her audiences could find it. That it was a marketing strategy more than a box that could contain her, her work, and her thinking.

And so, for me, it’s very much about – how can people find me? How can people engage with these ideas in a way that feels capacious and empowering and possible for them? That lights the fire of possibility. Sometimes that’s through an essay. Sometimes that’s through a story. More often than not, it’s through my more creative and fictitious practices more than it is through academia.

Aditya Singh: Thank you so much. This definitely hints at a lot of other threads of this conversation, and we will get into that. You mention on your website that you are usually based in London but move all across the world, loitering around fried egg stalls in Accra to gallery bookstores in New York.

Could you give us more of an idea about where you come from – what cities, spaces, and corners you inhabit presently or have inhabited previously? Additionally, how has your movement (your loitering, wandering, etc.) across various geographies informed your work, your practice, and your ideas?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: I think that being in different spaces, particularly within different Black Ecologies or communities within these spaces, has been absolutely central – pivotal to how I think about myself, my identity, my family, chosen family, and my sustainability as a practitioner.

I was born in London, in a house full of lesbians, and my dad – who is a Ghanaian musician, and that kind of strange, one might say a carnival, of a family really kind of began this rather odd and hybridized way that I would go on to view family, life, and place. I grew up in London until I was nine, and then moved with my mom to Ghana and we lived there for three and a half years. And my mom kind of never really left, although we did come back to the UK for a while, and we were kind of back and forth a lot from the age of 13. We ended up living in Cornwall for a while. We came back to our house in London quite often. When I was 18, I went over and did my first stint in North America, including Canada. And that was really a moment of arriving in, I would say particularly a Black North American, conceptualization of Blackness. That really informed how I saw my body, how I saw my identity.

And I was really also a part of maybe the first really large wave of mixed-race young people in London, which really created a huge identity crisis in the UK. I think this is changing now interracial couples are becoming more normalised (unless you’re in the Royal family of course ha ha), and colourism is becoming more obscured, but in the 80’s and 90’s it was still politically dangerous to British Nationalism. Many of us who are mixed, and especially those of us that are Black identified, our mothers could’ve lost their families for having mixed race children – although mine didn’t. But I would say that the newness of discussions about being mixed Black British (we are only now starting to read books on the topic) really informed a kind of identity dysphoria around my understanding of myself in the world, the ways that I’m racialised, and the politics that I grew up in. Not least because I was raised by a lot of white lesbians.

So, when I first went to North America, it really bizarrely felt like a kind of coming home. And I really started to find a community of artists, because that was not a community of Black people I had had access to here – artists, queer artists and lesbian artists – who were thinking about identity differently. And were thinking about things that Black people are so often told they’re not allowed to think about: making art, ecology, alternative family models, thinking, writing, being an academic. They were living these lives!

Then I came back and I started to find those people here, and I started to forge those communities at home in Ghana as well. There was a kind of access to a whole different way of being in the world, I would say that did not feel available to me before. I mean, when I lived in Ghana, I thought there were no gay people in Ghana. As a child I firmly believed there weren’t. Which is insane. It’s insane. But I firmly believed there could not be any gay people in Ghana because I had never met a Black gay person. Of course, I had almost definitely met many Black gay people, but in my mind, I did not know that I’d ever met any Black gay or queer people, which is a very distressing and traumatizing thing to tell a young queer child, right? That queerness, gayness can only exist within the realms of whiteness.

So despite being raised in such a politically engaged setting, I came to my Black, queer, lesbian identity quite late, and then did all my retrospective research into people like Audre Lorde, Maude Sulter, Alice Walker, the amazing Gail Lewis, who is my PhD supervisor, and the various kind of Black lesbian activist movements that have happened consistently throughout history and that continue today.

So, I guess all of these different ways of thinking about gender, gender representation, sexuality, kinship models, and Blackness specifically, have really informed the way that I relate to my body and my positionality within the world, that I relate to power, privilege, proximity to whiteness, class. All these kinds of huge questions that are informed not only through a Black British lens, I guess, is the point. And that’s why it feels really important to, I suppose, name that in my biography that I really rely on being able to leave the UK regularly in order to be able to continue living in this extremely right wing, white supremacist, homophobic, and transphobic country. Not that anywhere else is ‘better’ on these issues – just different. Different flavours of oppression and different flavours of liberatory possibility.

I was at Bard College for the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, in 2020, which was amazing, and that time really shifted and developed my thinking because the Black eco-feminist intellectual movement in the United States in particular is in a really different place than in the UK, where in many cases we’re still trying to explain why climate change and race are connected at all. In a country that, you know, last year we were told isn’t systemically racist at all, sometimes it feels like we are 10, 20 years behind.

So, I think experiencing the anglophonic frontline of the Black eco-feminist intellectual political movement through the work of people like Vanessa Agard-Jones, Chelsea M Frazier, Tiffany Lethabo King, adrienne maree brown, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs really informed my intellectual and pedagogical political praxis.

And then, of course I try to go back to Accra regularly. It’s really important for me not to be subsumed into the Black American discourse, to keep a steady barefoot in the sand of Ghana, whilst holding on to that intellectual, political and geo-political space that straddles continental Europe and the States. I think it’s really important to insist on the many Blacknesses that exist trans-oceanically.

Ishita Jain: You are also describing multiple pathways that you’re building across geographies, intellectual networks, and intergenerational knowledge systems. And you are doing it simultaneously when Blackness and Black futures are becoming trendy within academia, where there is a problematic appropriation of these knowledge systems by western philosophical systems, or the Global North knowledge mafia, so to say.

How do you negotiate this space of appropriation which ought to be unnerving and frustrating?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: I think this is such an important point. I’ve actually been writing a lot about it in the last year, in relationship to my curatorial practice, but in general, I spend a lot of time thinking about what not to say, what not to share, what not to make visible, or available.

I was saying the other day I feel I’m consistently armouring my work. Or attempting to armour my work – because it’s not possible to keep out whiteness, it’s everywhere, it’s in me, it’s in all of us, but well it’s in me in a different way. It’s not possible to keep out the white gaze. The white gaze, for me, very much lives in my head.

I went to this talk by the writer and artist Hannah Black at Goldsmiths about six years ago. It was right after she’d written the Artforum piece, ‘The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic’, which brought up a lot of really important conversations around who gets to comment on art, and who is seen as an ‘unbiased critic’. Black probably doesn’t even remember saying this, but she said at one point, ‘I’m always writing for the White man in my head’, and those words have haunted me so profoundly. I continue to think about them, and I continue to think about them differently. I feel that I wasn’t sure if I understood them at the time, and now I often pause to think, is this me or is this the White man in my head? And is there actually a distinction?

So, I think I really am always armouring my work against the extractive capacities of Whiteness. I definitely feel consistently infuriated by the way that ideas or theories such as Christina Sharpe’s ‘Wake Work’ have been taken up by White scholars and transposed into a lot of contexts that don’t work, because it’s born within a particular socio-political context. The wake specifically relates to the afterlives of slavery in settler-colonial North America, with all of its wider global socio-political, economic and cultural entanglements.

And of course, this is not just happening within Black theory. Spivak obviously has spoken extensively on this, the way that everybody tried to pick up ‘subaltern’ and say, well, these people are subaltern and I’m subaltern. And she insisted: ‘No, you’re not, you could be oppressed, but that doesn’t mean you’re subaltern’ – right? And so, I think this kind of desire to almost be included or to monopolize a conversation is incredibly dangerous and it is very distressing when you are someone who works hard to generate & contribute to discourses.

While Intimate Ecologies are entangled with and heavily indebted to non-Black scholarly and cosmological work, in particular indigenous Pacific Islander and indigenous North American and Canadian, or Turtle Island in general, the point of Intimate Ecologies at its root are the knowledges and cosmologies that come out of the way that Blackness has been specifically severed, or forcibly removed from a sense of itself in Intimate relationship to the more-than human. It’s very particular. And I don’t think that can be transposed.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what not to say, what not to write, and what not to make visible and accessible. And I am consistently frustrated. And that often means that I don’t do the work I want to do. Basically, I don’t do the work I need to do because I’m worrying about the ethics of the work.

We also have to acknowledge that we are not thinking and creating an isolation. There is a huge collaborative indebtedness within Black studies, for example, to native scholarship, to Asian American scholarship, to diaspora thinking in general. So how do craft an entangled solidarity and allyship with one another, whilst also acknowledging that there is difference; there are distinctive histories and lived experiences; relationships to state and identity that can’t just be layered over each other, or swapped out and swapped in because a word or a term or a scholar has become popular and sexy. It can’t just be about getting funding and staying relevant.

I keep thinking about the first question that you asked me why it’s important to name the different places and the ways that I move, right? You brought up this point around loitering, and I think the ways that I’m thinking and making and moving and being in the world are as informed by the conversations that I have with the incredible matriarchal fried egg sellers on the side of the road in Accra, and artists who I end up meeting unexpectedly, having deeply epistemological conversations in unexpected moments and places, as they are by who I’m reading, and the kind of academic frameworks that I operate in. So, I really am both indebted to and committed to that practice of loitering, or drifting, or shoaling actually, to use Tiffany Lethabo King’s framework, shoaling across knowledge systems.

Aditya Singh: Thank you so much. It is fascinating to see how your work has been informed by your lived experience, not just across geographies, but cultural spaces, discourses, and conversations. I think your work also highlights a certain indifference that you feel towards the existing vocabulary that refers to the ecological worlds that address Blackness, queerness, pleasure, etc. You mentioned in your talk titled ‘Intimate Ecologies: Queer Speculations on Pleasure, Blackness and Art’ at the University of London Institute in Paris last year, that there is perhaps even a perceived inarticulability to these Ecologies within wider discourses caused by the hegemonic colonial legacies they are constructed within.

How would you say your work crafts a new vocabulary and articulation of Intimate Ecologies?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: I wouldn’t actually say that I have an indifference to these various terminologies, because I think that language is really important. I think there’s language that I choose to use, and language that I deliberately choose not to use.

So, I stopped talking about Anthropocene in 2017-18, unless it was extremely necessary for me to acknowledge that area of thinking. I know what it is, I know what it’s about. I don’t find it interesting. I find it reductive, and redactive actually.

But I really love the term climate colonialism. I think it’s really useful. As far as I’m aware, it comes out of global majority of climate activists. Particularly the context that I learned of it was at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, when a group of global majority African leaders came forward and said – This plan for a two degree rise climate agreement that you’re talking about is ‘a death sentence for Africa’ – and began speaking about climate fascism and climate colonialism. I also think it calls a spade, a spade, right? It says what the thing is. It says climate change is a direct descendant of colonial invasion extraction and the mass movement of peoples, resources, and Ecologies across the planet for the profit of the 1%, and that it continues today.

So, I think I’m quite deliberate around the language that I use, but I also really believe in playing with language. I keep having these ongoing debates with my supervisors who are like – ‘You have to stop inventing terms, tell us what the research is’ – But the research is also about the fact that the language that is available feels inadequate.

For example, I started talking about ‘liquid landscapes’ in my thesis, to try and find a way to talk about the porous and tidal nature of the way that place operates in my thinking. Because when I started my research, I really wanted to do a field research specific piece of a scholarly work that was rooted in Ghana, and it was actually a proposal on thinking about Ghana, Kenya and South Africa within a triangular network, almost like a pyramid of thinking around Blackness, ecology, and pleasure and, and queerness essentially. But it just became not possible. Every time I tried to root my practice in place, it was interrupted. There was static… I mean literal and figurative white noise which disturbed the clear signal.

I was being asked to look at Trinidad and Tobago, at Minnesota, and Glasgow – these different kinds of interruptions coming from known academic frameworks – kept coming up in the work. So, I think there is a real necessity to try and forge languages and frameworks for thinking that fail inevitably. It is also crucial to remember that contemporary academic English is a language built on binarization, domination, and possession. These are not the frameworks I’m kind of trying to use when I’m thinking about Intimate Ecologies.

So, there is always a failing. There is always a complicity and there is always a slippage between meaning or intention and what is heard, sounded, articulated, and printed on page. But I think that far from being an inadequacy, that slippage is in and of itself the decolonial action at play.

It is the right to opacity. It is the resistance to be pinned down. It is the resistance to be appropriated that we talked about earlier. I talk about the spiralling theory, it’s something that you are always in movement with. You can’t pin it down. You can’t say, I have it in my hands. I know what it is. Which is really, really hard when you’re trying to write a PhD about a thing. But it’s kept me deeply present with it because it requires you to be in movement with it and to trust. I talk about how this work has required me to suspend disbelief, which is this theatrical term where in the theatre, an audience will believe the performers, right? Believe that they are holding a cup or believe that they’re on a train or believe that someone has died, for example. So, it’s been necessary for me to believe my body, to believe this somatic, ancestral, spiritual knowledge, which as someone who was really raised in a secular society and family, has been very difficult.

What has been really important to this aspect of my work is to believe this form of knowledge creation and believe that there is a reason why it is inarticulatable, and that the articulatability is in fact the active present, sentient force or movement within the thinking and practice. It is more capacious than anything I could actually conceive or articulate in my brain. And in the words of M. Jacqui Alexander, this agility enables it to ‘evade capture’.

Aditya Singh: I also want to tie in your work as a speculative writer into this, and on this articulation through slippages.

How does speculation and speculative thinking, which is strongly a part of your work, aid in the crafting of this new vocabulary?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: The speculative essentially blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined, because it draws our attention to the fact that many things we consider real are in fact imagined.

The idea that, for example, you might live somewhere where you believe that to terminate a pregnancy is wrong, right? It is impossible. It shouldn’t and cannot be done. It is not accessible legally. Right now, for example, many places in the world, it is an impossibility to terminate a pregnancy safely, that’s an impossible thing. But we know it’s a possible thing. So suddenly, what’s impossible and what’s possible becomes rooted in place, privilege, power, religious, and ontological understandings. The speculative suddenly gives us this incredible power to shape what is real around us.

And when I’m working with an idea or a practice like ‘Intimate Ecologies’, which is ephemeral by nature, the speculative becomes a landscape in which intelligibility doesn’t appear, but leaks through. There are moments of absolute clarity for me in the work. And then there are many moments of dissonance and – ‘What am I doing?’

So when I wrote ‘Beneath Yaba’s Garden’, the speculative fabulations piece, that was a moment of complete clarity. I know what the work is, and I know why it’s important. And the more that people would read that work and talk to me about it, the more they’d go, ‘I finally understand what you are doing.’ When I asked them to tell me what I was doing, their responses would sound like – ‘Well, you’re kind of, um, and then it’s kind of like, you know…’ They couldn’t actually tell me what it was, but they understood it in their bodies, which is really, really interesting. So, through speculation, this kind of somatic, spiritual, psychosocial, and political meaning was imparted, somehow transcending articulation. It can move from my body to yours, but then it can’t be spoken back in the language of the colonizer. What a fascinating form of resistant, cosmological, inter-generational, and trans-oceanic perseverance! What an amazing adaptive framework for resistance! That that’s what keeps me with the work.

Leaning into the speculative allows me to lean into pleasure, because within the speculative world that I’m writing into – I really don’t think I’m writing them but writing into them – the way that the researcher moves through the garden, is just as sensual as the interaction that she has with the security guard with the leather boots, for example. It’s really what is sensual and Intimate; who are the conscious or sentient actors at play. When the mosquito is taking this tribute of blood from her at the end, it is a really ritualistic, almost penetrative moment. There’s a real mini climax for me in this moment, when this mosquito comes at the very end of the piece, creating interspecies queer Ecologies and interdependent modes of knowledge transmission.

Because arguably, the kind of ritual the researcher finds in this archive is then being a piece of that knowledge being carried on by this mosquito, which may then go on to bite someone else. And pieces and fragments of that knowledge then get transmitted. And so, I’m really interested in how there are various pieces of our knowledge and history scattered.

When I talk about my methodology of pollination as praxis, it’s this idea that there are different pieces of marginal understanding in different spatial and geospatial locations. And it’s necessary to be in dialogue to gather some of those pieces. I don’t know if the puzzle can actually be put back together, because we can’t turn back time and undo the violence of colonization and epistemicide, but we can refine these fragments and transpose them into contemporary reality maybe.

We see this in the amazing scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, who is enlisting critical fabulation to really breathe a sense of compassionate and accountable care into the work that she is doing with archives in ‘Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments’, of turn of the century Black lives in Harlem, across North America. M. Jacqui Alexander talks about this as well in her work, ‘Pedagogies of Crossing’, where she’s looking at the archive of the enslaved Black woman. They realized that the person they’re looking for is not present in the photograph, or in the archive of when the enslaved woman was arrested, of how she was beaten, of how she was oppressed, of the states and conditions of her dehumanization, the person is not present in those records. The person must be found elsewhere, in a different way, with different means. And it’s in the elsewhere and the otherwise, in the speculative possibility that some kind of reparative, liberatory record keeping, archive making or storytelling.

Hartman talks about storytelling as sometimes the only form of reparation that’s available to us. So I think that within that critical fabulation, that speculative fabulation, a different language, often a non-linguistic language, even though we are reading it in a language, becomes available for us to understand what is real and possible, and what can be imagined and manifested, and the fact that the ancestors that we need to exist in order to understand our own existences as real, valued, and important, do not need to be named in the history books to have existed for us. And that’s the kind of author’s note that finished Yaba’s Garden, which says that the ancestor that is found is speculated, is fabulated in piece, but that the act of fabulation in no way means that she didn’t exist.

Aditya Singh: I see speculation in your article on Speculative Fabulations for the Feminist Review, your short story essay titled ‘No Home Left Behind’ for The Architectural Review, and across several other works.

How does the act or performance of speculation change forms across the different disciplines, mediums, and worlds that you traverse?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: There’s a different way, as you said, that I do it in Yaba’s Garden than in the more explicitly science fictional piece ‘No Home Left Behind’, and even in ‘Putting the Cooker on Low’, which to me is also a speculative film, although it’s less explicitly so.

If you think through a western ontological, white, patriarchal framework, the real is defined by what is scientifically proven or provable under a western understanding of what science is. That there have been a certain number of studies, essays, and a certain number of cis-white men who said this is real, right? Whereas within a Black feminist speculative framework of value system of what is real, what is the most real, are the things that are felt.

Then the different kind of performances or presences of the speculative in those three works are not within the value system of – this is more real or less real than anything else, right? This is more speculative because ‘No home left behind’ is set in futuristic Akan Basin, which is a flooded geography of current day West Africa. And because that’s more explicitly science fiction, it doesn’t mean that it’s more or less speculative than ‘Putting the Cooker on Low’, which really engages the speculative for me, as it creates a state I’m insisting on, an impossible thing, which is a world in which Black women are resting. So, the impossibilities are no more or less present in any of those three forms, they’re just the forms in which speculation happened or needed to appear in that particular narrative or context.

I call myself a speculative writer and artist rather than a science fiction writer and artist. I also do that because speculation for me is a way of being and thinking and politicking in the world, and it has this wonderful capaciousness to appear in all these different ways and forms, and none of them are less speculative than the other if we’re operating within this Black feminist value system as opposed to this White, patriarchal, western value system.

Aditya Singh: Thank you so much. I also think that there is a question of scale that emerges from what you said on the possibilities that speculation allows when you’re talking about Intimate Ecologies.

In your work, you talk about pleasure, care, and the body. I find it quite fascinating that you call yourself a Pleasure Activist. For me, at first it sounded very oxymoronic for pleasure and activism to exist parallelly, because the way we generally understand care, pleasure, and intimacy, is at very personal levels and scales. But through your work, it is also operating on a larger scale, as it moves to a wider audience.

How does your work on Intimate Ecologies expand beyond conventionally understood intimacy (as being private, sensual, and sexual)? And why does it become important for you to advocate for pleasure within public discourses?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: When I say Intimate Ecologies, it denotes or gestures towards Intimate, sensual relationships between Black bodies, Black subjectivities, and the more-than-human bodies of water, bodies of gas, mammals, birds, mushrooms, mycelial networks, and also, spirit and ancestry.

It’s about forging a language in which to articulate these sensual modes of relation, with an understanding that the relationship between Black bodies and the more-than-human, particularly water and land, have been really severed cosmologically and epistemologically and then fractured by colonialism and White supremacy in a number of ways. This has happened through the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Plantation life, but also through the settler colonial eradication of indigenous modes of farming, harvesting, and living on and with various Ecologies on the continent. This has been intensified through making taboo and sinful, indigenous practices the world over – the practices that understood the more-than-human as sentient, and in many cases as kin, that people were descended from particulate rivers or crops, that people could not fish on certain days, that people needed to pour libations, that they couldn’t work for the land when there was a birth, death, or celebration, that certain forests should not be entered apart from on certain days, etc. This was done predominantly for the missionary project, but also through mass deforestation, monocropping, mining, etc.

What I find really interesting is that across a huge variety of indigenous native peoples, from the Pacific Islands or in settled North America, there is a consistent languaging of that Intimate relationship. We might think about the indigenous Hawaiian term Âina as a perfect example of this. It is kind of a cosmology or an ontology as a term that is about how one relates to the Earth, to a land mass, or to the ocean, that is rooted in intimacy. That has been very, very difficult to trace, not impossible, but very difficult to trace on the African continent. I was really compelled by there being something particular about the way that Black bodies were turned into, not just a labour force, but spiritually mined community that made that kind of interspecies relation feel in so many ways impossible.

This doesn’t need to be dependent on any kind of ethnographic study, which is the piece that’s been incredibly difficult for me to navigate. It also opens up intimacy, in a very queer way that collapses hierarchies of a romantic partners, sexual partners, familial partners. So if you understand the river that you live by to be a member of your family, then you would not pollute that river. Not because if I pollute that river, I will not have fresh water, but because that’s my sister. It’s a very different kind of mentality. Even the role of a sister as a desexualized form becomes queered because there’s a lot of sister, mother, lover, sibling, parent, partner blurring that happens in these interspecies relationships. This leads to real, sensual, orgasmic, ritualistic practices.

There’s a wonderful queering of the heterosexual family model, and of hierarchies – for example – ‘My singular monogamous partner is the most important person in my life.’ Those kinds of frameworks that are so yummy for Christianity and capitalism to explore, exploit, sell to, capitalize off of, becomes far more ephemeral because you cannot sell a river a washing machine. So it blurs what intimacy can be and feel like.

Anecdotally, a colleague of mine was reading ‘Beneath Yaba’s Garden’ and he asked – ‘Why is it so sexy? She’s just walking through a garden, but it’s like so hot, you know? I was getting hot under the collar’ – and I was like – ‘Yes! Success!’ That is what Intimate Ecologies is about.

I trace into mythologies, predominantly through aesthetics, through artworks, and also at times through literature such as Junauda Petrus-Nasah’s ‘The Stars and the Blackness Between Them’, but predominantly through the visual arts, through the work of Eric Gyamfi, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Wangechu Mutu, and Alberta Whittle, because I’m interested in that evasion of capture, or that unarticulatability being present in the visual, and actually able to exist in the visual in a way that it has not been able to exist in language. Some of the stories, narratives, and ontologies embodied by words, such as Âina for example, that I believe would have had sister terms or sister cosmologies in many Ghanaian contexts, have been, if not lost – I don’t believe in things being completely lost – but forced from view.

These visualities seem to do the same echoing, or if it’s a call and response, they kind of call back to us through these cross-temporal rivers, these trees, these rhythms that our bodies go – ‘Oh yes, I know what that feels like!’ In that feeling, there is some kind of erotic energy that regalvanises our ability to resist climate colonialism, and to reimagine Black climate changed or adaptive futures.

Aditya Singh: What projects are you working on, and what can we look forward to seeing from you?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: I’m currently working on a few things. I’m working on a new version of my ‘Apocalypse Reading Room’ installation at the Kampnagel Feminist Book Fair in Hamburg, which will be a very small version of it called the ‘Apocalypse Reading Nook’, which I’m really looking forward to in May 2023.

I have an ongoing project, which has been very slow, but I think it’s needed to be slow, called ‘Acts of Love’, which was originally commissioned by PUNOS, a Helsinki based curatorial platform. This project is about reframing the way that Black artists in Europe deal with arts institutions and request workable conditions, and political working conditions, and how those requests, or the feedback when that has transpired is often received as an act of violence and the institutional partners are victimized themselves. I’m trying to reframe these consistent insistences on making the arts a place that Black artists can survive in, through acts of love in commitment to the industry.

I am putting together a new project at the end of the year into next year, around cultural reforesting, thinking about building on the work of my first film ‘DeComposure’, which looks at the way that the decomposition of Whiteness in Britain, in the UK, is flailing around, and violating everybody else. There doesn’t seem to be any deep graceful move away from White supremacy. This project aims to think about histories of climate colonialism, and how white people can reckon with those histories in ways that are generative and move – away from the kind of immovability of guilt that seems to be overwhelming Whiteness – into a place of active, compassionate, and anti-racist existence. It is also about building a reparative garden and thinking about what grows, what can be planted in winter, in seemingly hostile environments, and actually needs the time to grow, and be nurtured, and then erupt in unexpected ways, as a kind of way of thinking through how we as an island with a very violent history and present, might think about moving into the future with a sense of grace.

I’m trying very hard to finish my PhD, which I’m hoping to submit in March. So I’m working on my final draft this summer. I am also developing a project with the Institute of Postnatural Studies.

Aditya Singh: I want us to end with the exhibition film ‘Putting the Cooker on Low’. Having watched it, I think the film beautifully illustrates ‘the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes, and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises’ as introduced in its description.

Why does it become important for you to keep creating? What role does the act of creating play, and why does it become so pivotal?

Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone: What I’m interested in, in ‘Putting the Cooker on Low’ is whether or not we can keep creating without it costing our lives or the long longevity of our lives and our health and well-being.

The act of creating is important because it is a continued insistence on, and commitment to, living. So there is something still to live for, to create, to change, to insist on, to manifest, and to dream. If we stop creating, we’ve lost.