ARTIST & WRITER TO KNOW: ANISA OLUFEMI
ANISA OLUFEMI
Anisa Olufemi M. is a Washington, D.C. based curator, writer, multidisciplinary artist, and art related programming coordinator of Afro-Trinidadian and Black American descent. Anisa’s curatorial, writing, and studio practices are each deeply rooted in the study of post-colonial critical theory, trans-national oral histories, land and labor politics, Black queer abolitionist pedagogies, and legacies of Black Feminist Thought liberation praxis.
SHEER: You’ve said that you approach your work as both a historian and an artist. How do you feel the two perspectives coincide? How do they clash?
ANISA OLUFEMI: What made me fall in love with art history was seeing the way that culture insists on showing up in it — how upon close examination, art historical movements so often reveal the ethos of the eras they occur in. Learning about other periods, people, and cultures through an entirely expressive, conceptual, interpretation-based lens was such a game-changer for me.
In my experience, art and history frequently operate in tandem. Maybe if I was more of a purist, those two vantage points might come up against each other more often. But because my intentions as an artist and as a historian are, at their core, the same — the two are always in fluid conversation. My historical research inspiring my art, art informing the historical research.
Anisa Olufemi. I Am but a Reflection of You, 2018. Book excerpt.
SHEER: How do these approaches influence your work with experimental storytelling?
AO: I have always had a love for the arts, visual and literary, and a keen interest in history. Not necessarily the white, patriarchal, and imperialist histories taught in grade school. Rather, the Black American and Diasporic oral histories that I was exposed to through conversations with my family's matriarchs, elders in my community, and my 12th grade African Studies teacher. When I think of historic preservation, I think of intergenerational storytelling, legacy building.
There's so much magic in word of mouth. When it comes to my creative writing, right now, I'm very interested in playing with that — teasing out the possibilities of the speculative. Lately, I've been weaving my lived experiences into those of my foremothers to create nonlinear narratives. By projecting my perspective and imaginings into the gaps created over time, be it by the fickleness of memory or the unreliability of the grapevine, these stories serve as amalgamations of our collective legacy.
Growing up, my grandma Louise always used to say, "you know your momma got a habit of putting yeast in everything." Which is to say, my mother has a habit of blowing stories out of proportion. When we recount history and tell stories, edits, erasures, and translations play such an active role in shaping audience interpretations.
Anisa Olufemi. Vanity; framed photo of my cousin Angela playing mas. Year unknown. 2018.
Shot on FujiFilm disposable camera.
SHEER: You identify primarily as a writer – what ways do you feel writing frameworks determine your self-expression?
AO: For me, writing is profoundly intimate and liberatory. I’m always in awe of how powerful writing can be, almost to the point where I am overwhelmed by it. When it comes to its limitations, my primary concern is navigating the barriers created by language itself, because legibility is so hit or miss.
I’m very early into my career as a writer. Over time, I hope to amass an audience that reflects my kin and those with whom I find myself in community — people who come from a wide range of cultural, professional, educational, and economic backgrounds. I want the discourse around my work to exist far beyond the bounds of the contemporary art / Black Studies academic sphere.
That’s why writing in a variety of forms, from lyric essays and narrative poetry to cultural criticism and art historical analysis, is so critical to me. Even in my most academic writing, I tend to break away from the traditional approach and lean into poetic or anecdotal meditations.
SHEER: Who or what are some of your inspirations?
AO: My great-grandmother Margaret Lopez is my biggest inspiration by far. Her life and the legacy she left behind have taught me so much about integrity, love, care, and community. When it comes to my practice, I am inspired by Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Kelis, Jill Scott, Simone Browne, Saidiya Hartman, Jackie Wang, Ruha Benjamin, Martine Syms, Mandy Harris Williams, Krista Franklin, Staceyann Chin, Tourmaline, Jada Amina, Imani Love, Jamilah Malika Adu-Bakare, Johari Osayi Idusuyi, and so many mor
Anisa Olufemi. I Am but a Reflection of You, 2018. Video still. Link to full video here.
SHEER: Could you unpack the motivations behind I Am but a Reflection of You, the chapbook and video you developed in 2018?
AO: At the time, I had just returned to the states from Trinidad. It was only my second time visiting my mother's country. I was thinking a lot about her, her foremothers, and all the ways that they helped to instill Trinidad's culture, values, and pride in me from such an early age. I thought about how the "American Dream" becomes complicated by the realities of Black American life. Then I decided to write a coming of age story.
I Am, but a Reflection of You explores the nuances of being a Black American second-generation immigrant. The accompanying video features a photo of my maternal grandparent's wedding, a photo that followed my mother and I through every childhood home, and Franz Schubert's version of Ave Maria played by my grandfather on steel plan. I wanted to distill the chapbook's contents into an audiovisual loop that embodied the dissonance I faced over the years as I attempted to better understand my mother's lineage and my relationship to our transnational history.
SHEER: What are you currently working on?
AO: I am currently developing an essay series called Watching Me: On Being A Black Woman In A Surveillance State. In it, I attempt to gauge the affect that 21st-century surveillance tactics and technologies produce within contemporary Black consciousness, centering the lived experiences of Black women and gender marginalized folks. I’m looking to interrogate the ways in which the modalities of modern state surveillance, so deeply embedded in public and private spaces, give rise to carceral logics within our personal gaze — leading us to police ourselves and one another.
How does the commodification of our privacy and the rise of surveillance, from the analog CCTV to AI, impact us subconsciously? How does it shape the way we see ourselves, the people who look like us, and those who do not? How does my awareness of being watched, and my relationship to the who or what doing the watching, determine how I choose to take up space?
Like Jill Scott in her 2001 song Watching Me, I’m interested in the “call-out” or explicit naming of the surveillance occupation’s mechanisms. Mainly, for its potential to serve as a vehicle to unpack the social consequences of hyper optics awareness, that dilemma of being clocked, watched, and perceived by onlookers at all times — doubling as subject and spectator. That kind of paranoid relationship to looking and being seen has seeded our predisposition to operate in responsive, performative ways tailored to the observer or the environment of observation. I’m wondering what it might look like for Black gender marginalized folks to resist and transcend that vicious circle.
“How does the commodification of our privacy and the rise of surveillance, from the analog CCTV to AI, impact us subconsciously? How does it shape the way we see ourselves, the people who look like us, and those who do not? How does my awareness of being watched, and my relationship to the who or what doing the watching, determine how I choose to take up space?”
SHEER: How have these unprecedented times shaped your work, if at all?
AO: I’m blessed to say that 2020 offered me the time and space necessary to reimagine what a fulfilling practice looks like for me at this moment. Quarantine helped me reclaim my time, and I’m grateful for how it brought me back to writing and allowed me to make more room for it in my life. That being said, the past year has also been incredibly challenging. I have spent a lot of time grieving and thinking about loss in a variety of contexts.
This line of thought is what I intend to expand upon in my next body of poetry, which will be a meditation on living with loss and making space for mourning through a tender, and bittersweet, Black Feminist lens.
Slide featuring text from Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls, excerpted from Anisa Olufemi’s Watching Me: On Being a Black Woman in a Surveillance State Virtual Artist Talk at University of Oregon. 2020.
SHEER: How do you anticipate the future in your present work?
AO: My work is as much about the future as it is about the past/present. I maintain a practice of contemplating the possibilities of Black futurity, and actively seeking out a life otherwise. In all of my work, from writing and visual arts to public programming, I try to underscore the notion that the future isn’t this distant neverland that’s totally out of reach.
I often consider the phrase “abolition in our lifetime,” and the power that lies in asserting that level of urgency. It’s not just about our children’s children or even our own — it’s about everything that has yet to come. The future is tomorrow. So, what do we do with that? How do we prepare ourselves?
Like It Is with Gil Noble: Assata Shakur Documentary. Aired: 1987. Location: Havana, Cuba.
Full video here.
SHEER: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers and creatives?
AO: Write as often as possible, read as much as you can, and never take your idle time for granted.
Check out more of Anisa’s work below.