Imani Robinson
I’m Imani Robinson, an interdisciplinary writer and artist, editor, curator and abolitionist, and the other half of Languid Hands. I’ve presented work and facilitated projects internationally and my practice combines performance, oration, collaboration, poetry and critical theory, exploring themes of Black geographies, the afterlives of transatlantic slavery, abolition, and radical resistance. I’ve written for various magazines and art publications, and I’m also acting editor of Talking Drugs, an online platform dedicated to providing critical information on drug policy and harm reduction. This year, I initiated @blackabolitionist - a UK based international abolitionist reading group for Black people interested in abolition and Black study, affiliated with @abolitionistfutures.
I often draw on archives in my work; I think about books and radical theory as archives and draw on them in my writing for performance often. I mostly write to read aloud and am extremely interested in different kinds of documentation of radical orators. I think political moments and geographies have a kind of affect and sonic texture that interests me deeply. You can tell the place and time of a particular speech, which is to say a particular urgency or moment, a cultural context, simply by listening. Can you hear it? I think sometimes about what sounds or textures are lost from the archive or don’t appear, and I try to fill them in with my own voice, weaving together fragments of a black aurality, like an embodied form of collaboration through words and other modes of assertion and presence. In a conversation the other day we were thinking about what blackness sounds like. Can you hear it?
Photo by Tarona Leonara, courtesy of Stroom Den Haag.
Video: excerpt from Languid Hands 2019 film Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace, a video essay / experimental documentary / annotated performance exploring the im/possibility of black testimony. Performed by me, illustrated by Rabz, sound mix by Felix Taylor.