Carolyn Lazard: For me, your work has always felt like it is about the persistence of Black life; pointing us to look at what is still here: moments of care, embodiment and leisure; just being here, or maybe just being. The three series [There (Yankee); Untitled or Again, And Again, And Again, And Again; Untitled Part II & III (We all have to make compromises)] that make up the new book span varied contexts and sites. The subjects’ age, gender and citizenship vary. Yet, as vast as they are, the bodies of work seem to focus on the interiority of your subjects. Is this question of interiority critical for you?
Sasha Phyars-Burgess: The interior is very important. The second series [Untitled or Again, And Again, And Again, And Again] is perhaps more about the external expression of the interior. The Frantz Fanon quote that starts that chapter is essential because it acts as a kind of setup. The dance circle becomes a way to express the interior in these brief, intense moments of dance. The first series in Trinidad is my interiority, looking and searching into other people’s exteriors. The third series is that more banal-like, ‘woke up this morning and gotta put my pants on, somebody just died, got to brush my teeth, my mum is making a joke, now I’m thinking about a dead family member’. All of these daily happenings filter through diaspora, gender and age. This is important to the work too.
CL: I’ve been thinking about the mundane aspects of your work too. What does it mean to experience the fullness of one’s life, even while the sanctity of one’s life is threatened at every turn: whether you are just sitting in the car, or you are at the grocery store, or you are at the swing set, or you are resting in bed. In your work, all these unremarkable repeated moments in life hold the joy and precarity of Black life simultaneously.
SPB: I was thinking about the coup d’etat [the storming of the US Capitol on 06 January 2021] that we all saw. I was on the couch, watching with my mum. It was a moment of extreme violence by white people against white people. But, of course, it affects Black people in so many ways. However, the experience of watching it on the couch with my mother was super banal. That is what violence is like, for me. A lot of the time I am walking down the street, or sitting in my car. How do I portray the actual mundanity of something, of an event that is not necessarily directly happening to me, but that I am a part of? How do I still try and show that life is going on? For Black people that violence is supermundane. We are used to thinking about people lying in the street, which is a direct form of violence; it is horrifying violence; it is the sensational pornographic violence, which titillates people. But there is also another kind of violence: the super mundane. It is just us living. I’m not as interested in the sensationalism of the moment, but the fleetingness. Living is what I am trying to show. Look at all these Black people living. Now you understand the conditions in which Black people live, right? But look at how fully we live anyway.