It’s About Being Held: Invisible Flock interview

Nwando was interviewed by Invisible Flock on Creative Responses to Sustainability, for a feature piece titled ‘It’s About Being Held’.

The feature is available to read in their latest edition, here.

I'm unsatisfied with the way things are. We have an insane impact on this planet and that is very much to do with the inherent way we've evolved as humans, the way that our species works, the way our brains work. Art and culture is a way in, of making an impact on the way we do things, and the way we think, the way we perceive reality. I'm interested in behaviour change, in a phenomenological kind of cognitive sense. I'm interested in perception, I'm interested in the inner world; inside the perceptive bubble, which is the human and the brain, and I'm interested in the outside of that, the wider world, and all the interconnections between those things. 

I'm Igbo, which is a people from what is called Nigeria. I didn't grow up in Nigeria. When I first went back to my village I saw my grandfather's house that he built, which was the first concrete house in the village (so very impressive when it was first built). But it represents the progress that was sold to the people - this is the next step, this is evolution, this is progress, this is civilization. The village is this beautiful place, with pineapple trees, banana trees, and palms everywhere. But when you tear down all the forest that's there and you get these disgusting materials, you put them in the earth and you teach people to forget, forget not only about their original ways of building houses, but also to disregard them, to disparage them. Original houses were like cob houses and my parents were taught to call them mud huts - “cob house” sounds really different from “mud hut”. This is a way of colonising people; to remove their culture, to make their culture lesser than and to impress upon them that your culture is superior. And then you get them to buy into that culture, to forget about and not pass on; to cut off the limbs of their ancestry.

I'm interested in what's been lost as well as what's not been lost and what we can still connect to. One of the flaws in our global minority culture and the separation of science and technology from arts and culture and ritual practice, is that when you look at certain cultures, where those have stayed intertwined there's an inherent understanding and working with the nonhuman world in a sustainable way. The Khasis, an indegnous hill tribe from the state of Meghalaya live in the monsoon region in India. They build living root bridges which are the only bridges able to withstand monsoon rains, are a good example. The technology is generational, it doesn't work just in your single generation, there's an expanding and understanding of the importance of things working over time. Understanding more about timescales seems to be a real problem for us, we can't even think about if you do austerity now; in five years, obviously people are going to be fucked. Let alone if I plant this seed now; in 200 years, my great grandchildren will have a bridge; working on non human timescales.

So there's the technology, but there's also the culture, the storytelling. The living root bridge is connected within their myths. I think we've got a bit of a problem in our culture with focussing on religion being real or not real, rather than what is the important knowledge that's being passed down in the myth. Whether or not you literally believe it or not, there is this important knowledge being passed down, knowledge of how to behave and how to treat the ecosystem. From there, you get the rituals connected to the myths; the rituals about sustaining the ecological system and sustaining the people. That's something that we've lost and that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in communal rituals; the technology, the myth, the ritual and the culture and how that's all connected. 

Reflecting on my neurodiversity I can see why ritual is something that really works for me, embodied practice is really fundamental because concepts, ideas, feelings are physicalized in three dimensional space and physicalized within my body. 

As an artist, I'm interested in creating an effect and moving people. I'm interested in creating intimacy. It's something that in our society we don't have enough of. There's a real porntification of intimacy in our society and a fear of intimacy on the other side, intimacy is really confused with sex. There's lots of reasons why people are afraid of intimacy but we need more of it. I think it can work towards creating sympathy and empathy, and can improve our daily lives and our societies and our culture. That's what I want to create in my work and I think that might be one of the reasons why I do what I do; to create intimate experiences and to create numinous experiences. Numinous experiences which can help people experience something outside of themselves, regardless of their belief system. Creating connections in a disconnected world, creating great feelings. 

I'm interested in transformation ritual, in the life - death - life cycle, as opposed to the phallic straight line idea of life and advancement. I think that we're disconnected from death in an unhealthy way, in the same way that we're disconnected from intimacy. And that makes death a taboo. The kind of rituals that deal with death are renewing and connect back to a biophilic perspective on things. You have to understand the cyclical nature of the ecosystem you're living in and work with that. 

I have built structures and processes, learning from ritual cultures and visual cultures around myself. My main interests are the ancestral ritual cultures of the black Atlantic; Vodou in Haiti, Candomblé in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Benin and many others. They have built within them structures of care and Vodou is a very misunderstood spiritual practice. I think the only way to research is to engage with them and it makes sense to me, because I feel an ancestral link. One of the main concepts is called Yanvalou which has a rhythm and a dance, and is part of many ceremonies. It's the enacting of a wave, the universal wave that connects everything; the infinite serpent and the movement that opens Vodou ceremonies. It's a movement that is very health giving, undulating the spine.  

I spent a lot of time researching practices that hold me and heal me. Again, thinking about the Vodou ceremonies, they have openings and closings and the idea of opening and closing in my practice is really important so that it doesn't spill out into everything else, which it does, but just because it does doesn't mean I can't still keep on trying. All of these ritual cultures are very connected to the earth and the elements. The idea of ritual rather than performance holds me because as a black femme woman, being onstage, quite often for an all white audiences, thinking of it as a performance feels quite othering and what I'm more interested in is creating a space where there's celebrant and participants. So that holds me and helps me keep it within a safer space for myself. But fundamentally, it's about being held.