Structured as a series of three lessons: ‘Reparable Impulses under conditions of anticipatory grief’ , ‘everyday Ululations’ and ‘August 1st 2020 Emancipation Day’ the work calls for an urgent re-education. The work was developed not long after the murder of George Floyd by US police officers and about 5 months since the Covid-19 pandemic became impossible to ignore. During the first few weeks of the pandemic we witnessed disproportionate numbers of Black deaths in the UK – the first ten doctors to die from Covid-19 in the UK were people of colour. During the next couple of months we witnessed rebellion on a global stage. To borrow from Christina Sharpe, we live in a climate of “antiblackness” that is all-encompassing and seemingly impossible to escape from.
The “Luxury of Amnesia” is a pedagogical framework, built around “Other” ways of resisting the misremembering and obliteration of Black lives through the denial and erasure that bulwark White supremacy. RESET insists on fracturing this amnesia by calling on audiences to be more than passive viewers and asking them to be witnesses, to be active, to remember, to think critically about and reflexively examine alternative and contested timelines that have led to our current socio-political and epidemiological catastrophes. This alternative pedagogy entangles healing, rest and respite, while ensuring that we sit in occasional discomfort. And that discomfort demands a recognition of the climate of antiblackness.
RESET was produced as a proposition to reconsider “Other” ways of knowing, “Other” ways of recognising intersubjective relationships and “Other” ways of formulating individual and collective forms of resistance. The philosophical and political considerations that ‘RESET is embedded in are situated within transnational relationships of collaborative thinking, amongst a network of the artists collaborators (‘accomplices’) who are attentive to de-colonial thought and praxis. The accomplices are all situated within different diasporic perspectives, and RESET provides entry-points to discover these “Other” ways of resisting the social pandemic and the panic that promotes racist thought.