BJP: You mention that particular emphasis was placed on inclusivity and the presentation of different perspectives. Could you elaborate on this, and why it is important?
JEC: I am interested in building ‘communities of practice’. My practice and interests circle around lens-based work (filmmaking and photography), curation, performance and poetry.
For example, I selected three images that focus on an indigenous-run mine. Indigenous communities are involved in small-scale mining of the lands that they care for. I am interested in learning about how these community mining sites are different from industrial approaches to mining, including how the profits are spent – are they reinvested in the miners and their families or are they divided up between invisible shareholders?
Aida Silvestri’s work addresses how families are implicated in the practice of extraction – the taking away of sexual pleasure, the cutting and extraction from young female bodies – also known as female genital mutilation (FGM). Young people, after all, are unable to protect themselves against the influential control and power of decision-making that they have within their households. The project was commissioned by the human rights and social justice organisation Autograph and the project involved educating NHS workers and the public. Aida’s work, in that sense, is working with industry – that is if we may describe the NHS as a form of industry.
My project Beneath Us is an example of the reverse. A decommissioned site where people are giving back to the land. It is also a place worthy of commemoration as the oil sourced from that woodland went a long way towards the fight against fascism in the UK, as Texan oil drillers were flown in undercover to exploit and drill that oil for military purposes. Some 70 years later, activists and ordinary people are demanding that fossil fuels be kept in the ground.
So in this sense, I place inclusivity centre stage, perhaps though I interpreted the word in a nonconventional way.
BJP: What do you hope the viewers will take away from this exhibition?
JEC. Photography and poetry are in many ways sibling practices; at times I turn to photography and at other moments to poetry – here are the final lines of a poem by Dorianne Laux:
We know we are doomed,
Done for, damned, and still
The light reaches us, falls
On our shoulders even now,
Even here where the moon is
Hidden from us, even though
the stars are so far away.