Kaleidoscopic No. 15: Helina Metaferia
Kaleidoscopic No. 15: Helina Metaferia
a conversation around change and empowerment
Leonardo Bravo:
Hello, and good morning. I'm here with Helina Metaferia. Helina you are in New York at this moment and this is a wonderful opportunity to have a conversation with you about your practice. Thank you so much and welcome to Kaleidoscopic
Helina Metaferia:
Thanks for having me.
Leonardo Bravo:
I thought we would start a broad framing of your work from your perspective.
Helina Metaferia:
My practice is interdisciplinary. I work across mediums and I choose the medium that I think would best execute the idea that I am interrogating. I work in performance, video, collage, assemblage, installation, and sometimes social practice. For me it's a hybrid between the visual art and the experiential performance or socially engaged work. And one begins to inform the other. The art objects usually are these sort of relics of an experience, and the experiences sometimes produce art objects. My interests and the themes in my work have to do with liberation movements and resistance movements, particularly pertaining to the African diaspora, but also in BIPOC communities. I'm also interested in this idea of belonging and notions of citizenship and how that plays out on a practical human scale. Of course it deals with issues of identity. I'm interested in gender and how that shapes our perspective and our experiences. And I'm interested in postcolonial theory.
Leonardo Bravo:
It seems that with all those tools at your disposal that you are able to analyze and respond to issues that are of primacy at this moment. Perhaps we can discuss this body of work, By Way of Revolution, which I think is an ongoing series.
Helina Metaferia:
I began By Way of Revolution in 2018. And it's one of those series that I think is gonna just take a while to find its completion. Sometimes, I work on a project for a few months or a few years, and I feel like I'm full. I feel like I've digested the project and I'm good. This project, because it is so relevant to what's happening in our current American society, and even on a global scale, has some resonance. It is inspired by activist legacies and particularly the overlooked labor of women within archives of those legacies and those histories. I'm interested in change as a phenomenon. Personal change, social change, political, economic change, global change. I know I myself, even with my art or my work, cannot change another. I think I can inspire and influence, but I'm curious as to what happens when groups move towards change and what happens when we organize. I look at organizing and political organizing as another art form.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's beautiful and powerful.
Helina Metaferia:
My practice involves research and organizing of bodies and social justice movements. I think it's so powerful when people can concentrate and congregate to speak truth to power, to overturn systems, to change our culture. It's a progression that I know takes generations to occur. Because some of these systemic, institutionalized fear-based systems that we exist in, it took generations to form. And these things aren't gonna go away. I would think it's very naive for me to think it'll go away at the whim of an art project or even a political election cycle or any of those things. Whatever I do artistically, I feel very rooted and connected to this idea of service as as a form of making. There is some service-based aspects to my practice. I don't think of this experiential part of my work as being this one-off thing. I believe in having relics, having art objects that hold testimony to those experiences. Nothing is truly archival, nothing will last forever, but I hope these objects can serve as archives and document this moment and inspire future generations.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm really intrigued by this sense of the unit of change and scale, because as you said change can be very incremental. There's a time-based quality to it and the history of organizational movements, liberation movements that tend to scale or reach an apex and then dissolve, and then maybe reorganize. I'm interested in how you're looking at this, the unit or the calibration of change itself, and what that can do at a personal and at a collective level.
Helina Metaferia:
They're so related. The personal being, the individual within the collective is going through a certain change within their own psyche, within their own self to either assimilate and to acclimate to society or to resist conformity and to produce a different kind of outcome. It takes an internal sort of dialogue and coming to terms with self in society. I love James Baldwin as someone who writes prolifically about this. He talks about the artist's relationship to society as being one where we kind of exist on the fringes so that we can examine society from a non-attached way. There's a bit of loneliness that comes with that, a bit of isolation.
Leonardo Bravo:
A bit of the blues sometimes!
Helina Metaferia:
Right? But that is the intellectual, the academic, the creative life, like all of those things. Because I think in those roles there is some sort of power and privilege because there's a platform embedded to it. Then with that platform there's an ability to amplify, amplify a voice. When I receive a platform as an artist and academic, I start thinking, how much noise can I freaking make? I can't make a lot on my own, but if I galvanize and organize and help to bring other Black women, BIPOC women, people of color together, maybe we can just provide a dent in these institutional spaces, and maybe we can also inspire others to take on that baton. Because I know it's generational. I know it's going to continue beyond my existence.
Leonardo Bravo:
Where does this grounding come from for you? You have a very solid conceptual, theoretical framing. From your own lived experience, how did you begin to embody and kind of sort of be inside, these ideas, these concepts that drive you?
Helina Metaferia:
I think like with everyone in life, that just comes from chance encounters and upbringings. It comes from all kinds of these things that form in our adulthood, our personhood, our perspective.
I come from an activist family. Actually seven years ago this coming Sunday, on a super personal level, my mother passed away. There's a seven year religious ritual in Orthodox Christianity that my family will be doing. When she passed, she was in the middle of writing a memoir about her activism work since the seventies. We've since as a family published it posthumously. I was thinking about women's labor and how that often doesn't get made into archives. I grew up with a very strong feminist, Ethiopian expat — a woman who worked to help free political prisoners in Ethiopia with her privilege living in Washington, DC.
My father taught political science at Morgan State University, a Historically Black College. My household was deep! That made me kind of super aware about structures and how that informs people's individual human rights and liberties. And I grew up in DC which is inherently a political space. I could just trip over a protest when I walk out the door. So I feel like that was kind of the tone of my upbringing. And I think I kind of resisted that stuff because as a person who grew up with academics in the household, and people who are activists, you don't want to associate with a thing that feels so heavy. I wanna do other things. And for me, the other thing..
Leonardo Bravo:
You want pop culture, you want silly!
Helina Metaferia:
… is to have a normal life, you know? But, I went into art because I was like, oh this is the thing that's about the emotional. I was exposed to art in public school. When you’re in high school and you're making art, you're just making things that feel good. Slowly, the political stuff, even at a very young age, started to creep in because that was the lens that I was trained to see the world. I was thinking about injustices that I had seen in Ethiopia where women were treated a certain way, but men were treated a different way. And so I would make art about that. And I realize in these past decades of making, I'm making the same story. I just have more visual vocabulary around it. Yes. And I have more intellectual language to associate with it.But it's all from this vantage point.
I think what's interesting now about being an artist is there's a responsibility of what I put into the world. But then there's also a responsibility around how I participate in the world. And I'm really interested in seeing how other people, how other makers, can make from their vantage points. As an artist you want to find these intersections. I think I'm just really interested in the ways in which my vantage point can meet the vantage point of others. Then there's this discourse around change that I am interested in, and there's this discourse around empowerment for those who are embodied as cis and trans women, those who are embodied as people of color.
I’m a professor as well, and with my students I see this impulse to make art about the self. And maybe there's a little bit of like healing that can come through that. And then you graduate from that and you start thinking about, well, if I'm going through this, maybe others are going through this. What can we do as makers and as thinkers and as creatives to help bridge our stories and create something even more powerful? I'm an artist and I'm making from my vantage point, but I'm also trying to enter a more global discourse and position my work in a way that can amplify some of the interests of a collective.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's fascinating because inherently in this society and in this system we're part of, it tends to be about isolation. It tends to be about separating us into categories, divisions, differences. You know, putting people in their silos, either professional silos or identity silos, rather than bringing forth the things that connect us at a human level. At the heart and soul level. So that we can have a sense of agency so that these concepts and ideas can function at a lived experience in communities, as well as in the academy, as well as in institutions.
Helina Metaferia:
Yes. I think I want a level of accessibility and legibility with my work. The more education I get, the more I realize you are part of this elite system where only few people can understand conceptual work, and then that's how the art market functions. This idea, this myth of greatness, this myth of exceptionalism, and genius. I try to demystify that as much as possible. I work with bodies and people that exist in the real world. I work with the notions of a public, and archives in the public domain, that are accessible. I am working with collage, which on some level has a pedestrian aspect to it. Everybody has access to maybe scissors or glue sticks from a young age. I'm not trying to work outside of what is familiar. I'm working with what's iconic.
The reason I'm doing all that stuff is it'll reach a broader audience. Although I love my art world community, and I love teaching at an Ivy League school and all this great stuff, I don't want it to be art just for the ivory tower, for the white cube. I work with public art forms and I make social practice or public performances intentionally to disrupt what's happening in those spaces, and to bring people into art as a methodology for inspiration and for change. We don't have the big built in audience in the art world that the music industry or film industry does, where a lot of people consume that on a regular basis. The art world functions very elite and closed off, and I feel it’s intentional. People can't always have access to it, and funding for the arts in the United States is often cut, or it’s often being cut from public education programs.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's right.
Helina Metaferia:
I think with my work, it took me a while to have the language and the education to understand the Western canon of art history and all that. I can understand a piece of "deep" work. And so I want to be able to speak to those audiences that are, I would say trained and sophisticated on all of those things. But I also want to bring in that little girl, that little brown girl, that little black girl! The young person who is thinking, hey I'm trying to make sense of the world. I'm trying to figure out how I can have a place in society that recognizes and respects me. I was that girl. And so if that girl can see my work and say, hey there's space for me here. I've done my job. Yes. Since she's my audience too!
Leonardo Bravo:
Oh yes! When I've taught in the academy, with my students we always end up getting into this conversation about what does it mean to reimagine the world, create a space of world making, of possibilities around liberation, around resistance. But ultimately we encounter this paradox that we're talking within a space that represents the deep seated conditions of oppression, represents the conditions of white supremacy. So again it's that paradox and ultimately how do you chip away at it? And it has to do with creating models that represent this intersectional imaginary and primarily models of people that look like us that represent the communities that can see their potential and possibility for change. And you know, to step into that space.
Helina Metaferia:
Yes. Absolutely. We take on that work a little bit more as artists of color. Those who feel marginalized who are now in these institutional spaces. In my collages, there's a burden with this regal crown. Heaviness, you know, heavy. There is this responsibility attached to activism, and not everyone is able to walk around that way.
Leonardo Bravo:
I also wanted to talk a little bit about The Call, which is a video work.
Helina Metaferia:
The Call is a video piece that can be shown as a standalone, single channel video project, but it's also part of the By Way of Revolution series. So I started the whole series with The Call. It was an oral history project. There are many forms of archiving in my practice. There's archiving of what's in the libraries, the indexing of knowledge through documents. Then there's also archiving that's embodied, like epigenetic knowledge and passing them through our DNA over generations. And then there's archiving through memory. There's also story sharing.
I love story sharing because that's how I grew up. I grew up with my aunties talking on the kitchen table, talking with my mom, or hearing things from my grandmother. That was medicine for me. They were teaching me how to survive in this world in a very kitchen table conversation. In The Call I organized space for female descendants of significant male civil rights and abolition leaders to discuss the matriarchs in their family. I gathered James Baldwin's sister, Ms. Paula Whaley, Dick Gregory's daughter, Ariana Gregory, and Melanie Douglass and Ashera Douglass, who are descendants of Frederick Douglass.
The women all bring in photographs of their ancestors. And I love looking at images and archives in that way. I’m interested in what the photograph says and what it doesn't say. They fill in some of the missing pieces about their mothers the wives of these famous male luminaries. The conversations begin to feel like a family is formed, even though the four of them are not related. They came together in this really beautiful, synergistic way. They also offered song and poetry. Ms. Paula Whaley is a sculptor and she offered her art as a backdrop, and invited us all over to her home to film this. They are artists in their own rights.
Again, it's about amplifying with my platform, amplifying the voices of others, and I'm interested in listening as a creative practice. What happens when we listen from an open space. Can that lead to transformation? And so the dialogue becomes a little bit of a communal possibility. They also talk about our current political moment, and give their own empowering perspective on how we can meet the moment. All my work has this uplift element to it. I can be a pessimist about the world, but I can also be an optimist. I live on that edge. I need, almost on a spiritual level, these moments of connection and community. And that's what these women offer in that video.
Helina Metaferia:
I think my artistic process, especially as an artist who works within an academy, has a critical aspect. There’s that voice in my head that will say, well, is this a good balance of composition? There's all of these technical and formal and intellectual sort of ideas like, am I being cliche? Is this being obvious? And so you have to kind of get into that trained voice, you have to listen to it. But then I think I also work from also a very intuitive place. So I have to balance that with well, where am I in my soul? Where am I in my spirit? What still needs to happen? And the way that I've bridged that sort of meditative or like more intuitive practice, with the sort of trained western practices is I realize I'm a hyphenated American.
I'm an Ethiopian-American. I was born in Washington, DC with family that not too far ago grew up in a totally different culture with a totally different language and history. And also a different form of art making. I've had to do my own independent research to other ways of making that are from either a different cultural or global perspective. I look at Ethiopian art and African art, particularly in the intersection of visual and performance art, and the way that it collapses with ritualistic practices as one avenue to make. There is this attachment with spirituality around the object. There is this idea of activating and touching objects and not making them precious. And then I'm also operating in a western cannon. As I'm thinking about all of that, in the same breath, I'm also thinking about lHappenings and the Fluxus movement, and like all of those sorts of performance art legacies.
That starts to germinate in my body. And I start to make peace with the embodied practices which contribute more towards an African philosophy of living, and the more intellectualized “higher thought" practices, which the west emphasizes. And so it took me years to kind of make sense of that, and how colonial, racist, and sexist the split between body and mind can be. I understand that we live in a racist and patriarchal society, where naming either matrilineal histories or African-based practices or body-based practices in art is considered unintellectual. I mean there's a modern day witch hunt for that stuff. So I feel like that becomes a little difficult. So I understand how to form language around my work so that I can move in certain spaces.
In the studio, all that goes out the window and I just focus on what do I really need to feel full. I know that if I'm reaching that full potential, then my ultimate quest is a certain artistic mastery. I'm not saying I'm there, but when I’m in the studio, I’m reaching for that full actualization, self realization in the studio. When I get there, I know that others will feel the work. They'll be more connected to the work. They'll come into the work, they'll lean into it. Maybe they'll be inspired to make their own work, or maybe they'll be inspired to make some other action. And that to me that is incredibly powerful.
Leonardo Bravo:
Your work is so relevant to what is happening socially. Are you involved with social justice initiatives or organizations? How does that play out in the more external space of actual organizational movements and change?
Helina Metaferia:
I actually think of myself not as a frontline person. I think of myself as an amplifier. So I work with those who are on the frontline and everyday people in my practice. And I think it's a good use of my kind of selfhood, like where I think I'm stronger at supporting the movements. But I want the heavy lifters to have energy to move forward. So I do work with artists and activist communities like the Wide Awakes and that's a community that I'm a part of and that I feel committed to. Through them and through other people I've met and worked with and amplified Black Lives Matter chapter leaders and founders who are often under a lot of scrutiny.
I just saw something on my social media today with one of the members who was really dragged by white supremacists publicly again for the millionth time. So when I worked with her and did this collage of her, I feel she felt seen. And in a world right now where she doesn't feel safe to walk out her home, I thought that was the kind of thing I can do because I have a sort of autonomy, like I'm not as invested in the organization as herself. What I do see is that historically, anyone who advocates for change is a threat. The common day that we live in Black women are protected the least. So within my role, I try to provide the tiniest little ripple in the direction where BIPOC femme activists can feel safe because they have sacrificed so much in their personal life and their professional life. They're gaining a lot, but they're also experiencing a lot of backlash. So that's how I use my time.
In terms of like my own personal politics or how I feel, I'm like many people who are very deeply concerned and empathetic around the world, in the world, who try to keep aware, read, and who vote and who do all the things. And sometimes I will join a protest, and sometimes I'll be on the frontline, but oftentimes I'm trying to figure out ways in which those who did the work, like my mother, find themselves celebrated.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm interested in this notion of hybridity and how we embody these sort of in between spaces. I was born in Chile and I got to the US when I was twelve years old. I still have a fairly clear sense of that identity, that reality and upbringing, and embodying a different cultural identity and having to navigate the two. You identify as Ethiopian American. How do you center yourself around that? And when you go back, if you go back to Ethiopia, how do you embody that when you're there and those legacies as well?
Helina Metaferia:
Well, we all wear many hats, roles, we're always kind of navigating…
Leonardo Bravo:
Multiplicities?
Helina Metaferia:
Exactly. Now that I'm getting a little bit more perspective and a little older, I actually feel like my upbringing wasn't totally unique. I was one of the first waves of Ethiopian-Americans. Now there's a lot more. The way my parents came to this country, they didn't come as refugees. They didn't come because of the politics, they came as students.
My mom came in 1969 right after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, the Black Power Movement was taking place, and she was in those protests, as well as from the Ethiopian student movement protests. When she came as a student and that was the nature of the time. My father came in 1973. And so they have this romantic idea of Ethiopia before Emperor Haile Selassai was overthrown in 1974, before Red Terror, before the Derg, and they couldn't go back because anyone who was educated would've been killed for a period of time. Then of course, there's a lot of devastation that happened in Ethiopia since then. So I have this like romantic time capsule version of Ethiopia that I inherited but never lived in.
I grew up in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, which was like Chocolate City, and this relationship with the African-American community in a very positive way. I grew up going to Sankofa, Haile Gerima's bookstore. Haile is a legendary Ethiopian filmmaker from LA Rebellion, and was influential with Spike Lee and other generations. He taught at Howard University. Watching Haile’s work modeled a seamless way for me to integrate African-American culture and society with my Ethiopian heritage. I know there can be a tension between African and African-American communities, but I didn't experienced that.
As a Black person born and raised in America, I had to understand for survival the politics here. I was seeing and witnessing the sexism, the patriarchy, the racism, like all of those things against my body. I just went back to Ethiopian a month ago for the first time in eight years, and I saw how American I was. I also thought about how American my art was. I realize that maybe other Ethiopians wouldn't be able to make the work that I make because they would've came to the US under different circumstance. They may not feel they understand the African-American story to the degree that I do.
I realize I have this privilege as an African-American person of recent African descent whose parents came to this country voluntarily, and under healthy circumstance. I have this privilege of knowing Ethiopia without experiencing the trauma of its revolution. This really healthy, almost romantic notion is a place where I access that culture for my art. I grew up in that culture, but then I also have this other thing which maybe some Ethiopians don't have, which is legibility of the American cast system, and the American privileges, and all the nuances of American culture.
Leonardo Bravo:
Finally what's something joyful that inspiring you? What's giving you uplift right now?
Helina Metaferia:
Well, there’s been a lot going on in our world for a long time. I have a practice that's synonymous with my art practice. I am practicing pleasure every day and joy every day. I know I'm not in isolation. There is now a new social justice movement that is about rest, that is about care, that is about the personal sort of wellbeing that this really toxic culture, the society that we live in requires of us for survival.
I'm not equating this to the kind of capitalistic, sort of extractive exploitative form of care where it's like, go to this yoga class or go to this thing and then you'll feel better. ‘Cause you're always like needing to buy and pay for more.
Instead I am focusing on the simple meditative moments, like savoring a meal or connecting and being present with a friend. That is my revolution right now. That is my everyday tapping in. I’m trying to bring that into my work life, into my home life, into my solitude. That's an act of defiance.
I'm glad that's being recognized right now in this moment, especially with Black women and with all people as valuable. I think our bodies were made to be this extractive workforce. We’re all made to be that in capitalism, within the caste system. For us to reclaim our bodies and our time, that is so revolutionary.
Leonardo Bravo:
So with that, I thank you for this moment. This is really joyful and special moment to be in conversation with you and I hope we can continue to be in conversation. I hope at some point we get to meet and get to see your work in person, and at some moment we see each other in Berlin as well.
Helina Metaferia:
Thanks for your thoughtful questions. This is really great. Beautiful. Thank you so much.
https://www.helinametaferia.com/
IG: @helina.metaferia