Raji

There’s a couple of responses to you. One, you must be around some great white folks that are thinking like this because there are so many people that don’t.

Shary

What kind of white people are you guys hanging out with because I hear this stuff from my friends all the time. Ha. Maybe most white people only talk to other white people about it?

Raji

Let’s just say Shary, they’re no longer people I hang out with. There was a mass exodus over COVID where I realized how many people in my circle were racist. They don’t know it. And I certainly didn’t want to continue to spend time educating them on it. So with a prayer, I released these relationships. And I had to do that a lot over the course of the last few years as we observed George Floyd take his last breaths or uproot unmarked graves of Indigenous children, or see white supremacy convoy to Ottawa.

That idea of belonging and identity is something that I think about so much. I have the privilege to reference conversations with other artists. Hungama Amiri is an artist from Afghanistan who had to show at Cooper Cole during our previous issue. We asked her this question of how she couldn’t return to Afghanistan, especially when the Taliban seized the country. She graduated from Yale and was stuck in Cambridge during the pandemic.

She said she likes living in the margins now. And I was like whoa, what does that look like because so much of what we assumed to be belonging is physical. An attempt to conceive a space of belonging that’s spiritual or metaphysical somewhere else in a different way is interesting.

Shary

The artists that are working in futurism, like yourself Raji, are actually trying to conceive what that looks like. I firmly believe that identity is land based. You’re separated from your geography, your seasons, your landscape, plants, animals, the day-to-day living specific to geography. You’re disconnected from that place and you’re disconnected from this place. We’re urban creatures and very few of us are connected with our environment and our natural surroundings. We are rootless. We are living in the margins. We’re living in futurisms and fantasies…

Howie

It is a spaceship thing. I’ve given up on this idea of feeling that I need to feel I belong somewhere or there’s actually a home. I felt that way when I frequently went back to Hong Kong. I have to double check that. It’s actually an elemental thing. It’s the smell of the sea, landscape, and the environment that made me feel extremely comforted. But since we’re here, I’m carving out my own sense of home or belonging which only exists within the parameters of my house, under this roof. And you’re trying to bring richness to it with the family and objects. We’re writing our own story or establishing your own environment. You’re floating again once you go outside and that’s why I see it as a pod…a bit of a space pod at home.

Shary

That’s a beautifully put way and often the best we can do is just make our little environments. COVID messed with us even further because we concentrated on this sense of it’s just us in our pods.

I also will flag a worry that I yearn for collectivity. I yearn for more of a connection with community and a sense of interconnectedness between people who have shared morality, ethics, values, and cultures where something can be learned and respected. Values and ethics could be shared while curiosity brings distinction amongst us. That could make us feel so much less lonely and scared?

Raji

Yeah, no, that’s a real thing. It’s been important to me to archive our existence, these dialogues, for future citizens of this new and digital world that has been designed with imperialist residue. For me, a collaboration between Howie Tsui and Shary Boyle should be written about beyond the art specifically or a Western critique of it. I was quite interested in the human experience of being reflexive and in relation. It felt important to have this conversation live for a future world that we may not ever understand or see.

Shary

Howie and I haven’t even met in the same room since we did all of this. I value this global and internet experience. We also had a beautiful snail mail part where I got to see his handwriting. This was my favourite thing because I used to be a big correspondent. We went back and forth where we broke down into the real letters. This is old school. It is the best. Irrespective of the artwork- which in the end was super interesting to share generously on the same page- we got to have conversations. I learned so much and that’s what we can put into the future.

Howie

Then circling back on your question around collaboration Raji, our collaboration was pretty comfortable. Collaboration, at times, can become a big activity that requires project management and stuff like that. It’s not a jam. We had our little orbit jam. It had some throwback vibes of good, old school collaboration, where you’re just like, we’re just gonna play in this toy box thing.

Shary

You’ve nailed that because it is almost coming out of more of a musical language than a formalized approach. It goes south when you get too formal and somehow the art world forces practitioners into these super professional- uptight practices. It’s way better to be casual and have some humour. You have to have humour. You have to have playfulness. This might suck. I might suck. You might suck. This might be a terrible combination.

It’s like that 70s TV show on PBS Kids in the Kitchen where they basically give kids ten ingredients to make something that their parents will have to eat. It’s super weird. But the kids are just in fucking chaos and they’re having so much fun. That’s how you have to approach it, like musicians jamming and improvising in creating music.

Howie

It’s sort of just throwing ideas out there and you want to see what’s going to happen. You let go of what it is or what it’s going to be. Music is so temporal and there’s this responsiveness to it.

Shary

That’s the beautiful thing about collaboration. I first started to do it with other artists, mostly musicians, so visual art wasn’t the only language. It was me responding to music and interpreting it into visual art and vice versa. We had two different languages that weren’t spoken. We were listening to each other. It was the act of closely listening, feeling and observing with the generosity of returning it to the person as a translation, of what you see and how you feel.

The music and the visuals together create a third thing that’s even better than us individually. It’s a beautiful communion. Then when I work with visual artists, it becomes more like a way of un-speaking language. It’s a game with an image and colour. A playful game that just involves care, I guess.

Howie

Game and puzzle. It’s like a puzzle design.

Shary

An improvised puzzle game where you have to be responsive and let go of your own control.