Art Practices in Afro-Nordic Landscapes
S2 talks – in conversation with artists Adam and Amina Seid Tahir
In the spring of 2023, I went to Stockholm to see siblings Adam and Amina Seid Tahir’s several attempts at braiding my way home performance at the Moderna Dansteatern.
several attempts at braiding my way home is a collection of strategies for creating home in an afro-nordic landscape. It is a performance where precise rhythm travels like underwater signals in the ocean. Shifting between labour and speculative proposals, several attempts at braiding my way home, insists on fiction as a tool for quaking potential and finding opportunities for recovery and belonging. The performance swims alongside Clymene dolphins, who defy understanding of heritage. It listens to walruses who trust their hair for navigation.
Fast-forward to summer 2024. I had the greatest pleasure of having the siblings perform at Kiasma Theater as part of the URB festival. In our recent Zoom conversation, we explored their creative process, reflected on the performance, and discussed what’s next for the siblings.
Yilin Can you tell me about the thematics of several attempts of braiding my way home, and how the workshop around the performance is put together?
Adam Several attempts at braiding my way home started as a reflection on what home is for us from the perspective of being a person with multiple heritage and living in a diaspora. What does home mean when neither of us feels a true sense of belonging to this geographic location — when neither Eritrea nor Sweden truly feels like home? Neither of us grew up in a house that’s still there today, which is also related to class. So, the idea of a geographic location or a capitalistic asset like a family house was just not for us. So, from this perspective, what is home?
We read quite a bit together, but one book was especially important and helped us a lot with making this work: the book Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Through reading, discussing, and reflecting, we started defining home as more of an action or something you create. So, in the same way that bell hooks speak about love. Home is something you do, something you create with others rather than something that exists on its own. Making it a verb rather than a noun.
Amina In this book, Alexis talks about different marine mammals and how we can learn from them as black people. For example, Gumbs writes about dolphins and how they were land-roaming animals from the beginning, but, throughout evolution, they navigated their way into water. Having to navigate in this new environment, they started to develop fins to balance in this new environment. For me and Adam, that made us imagine practices and possibilities that could help us grow our version of a fin to help us navigate and feel balanced in an environment that can sometimes be hostile and unsafe as afro-nordic people.
Yilin You can rewrite the narrative.
Adam Yes, that’s a big part of how we work together, as well as in our separate artistic practices. It’s such a big part of the way we make art, creating fiction and speculative proposals for other ways of living or being in this world. I guess it is a process of re-imagining and reconstructing this reality rather than creating a distant utopia.
In Alexis’ book, there’s a chapter where she writes about how walruses have whiskers that they use to navigate in the deep, dark waters. They see very badly, so when they are looking for their babies in the water, they use their hair instead of their eyes to find them. Different sensations in their whiskers allow them to tell if the walrus baby is their baby or someone else’s baby. They have a really strong sensitivity in their hair.
This inspired us to think about our hair and black hair—what the magical properties of this hair are, and how we can decolonize our understanding of it. Through this theme, we’ve also developed a workshop where we gather with other BIPOCs to talk about hair.
Amina At the beginning of the piece, Adam unbraids their hair and weaves the hair into this long, long weave in the back of the stage. It’s a long process of almost 15 minutes that, in a sense, becomes a ritual that makes it possible for Adam to connect with themselves as well as get grounded in their body and space. Each performance makes the weave grow longer and longer, just like hair grow,s and becomes a sort of archive that holds space and celebrates all the emotions and memories the hair carries through each performance. In this practice, we´ve been interested in the archiving of black experiences and wanted to explore a way of archiving that is nonlinear and ever-changing and growing.
Adam After I’ve woven my hair into the weave, I go to a sculpture that we call the sun. I do a hair treatment there and then put on a durag as the last preparation before the next section starts. The first part where I’m unbraiding the hair is a preparation ritual to set the energy for the rest of the piece.
In the piece, we work on quite a few movement practices. One of them is bone fusion. This is a score where I reimagine my skeleton and how it can fuse, multiply, melt, and shift inside and outside of my body. I work with fantasies and project them onto my body and around me, which creates the dance I do. We also worked with a facial expression that is said to have started in the US in the 60s. I’ve learned that it started during James Brown’s concerts in the US in the 60s, where he played funky music in poorly ventilated venues. Because the music was so great and funky, people started to dance, and because of the inadequate ventilation, it began to stink of sweat, because of this, James Brown started saying that it was really stinky. Then, the idea of stank became associated with great music, and the facial expression of smelling something bad became associated with something really great. This is how a stank face was born, to my knowledge, at least. We use that facial expression in the piece to sort of reverse the process. Instead of the way it usually occurs, where you appreciate something and then you do the stank face, I use a stank face to give myself and my body pleasure.
Amina Throughout the piece’s creation, it felt very important to connect with our global majority siblings while touring it. As we mentioned before, we created the workshop as a way of connecting with our siblings, and working with a stank face in the piece was another way of doing that. Stank face becomes almost like a coded language and a way for Adam to communicate with our black siblings in the audience. It’s been beautiful for us to have those moments of ‘we see each other, and we appreciate each other.’ with our siblings in the audience.
Yilin I think it’s also quite important and gives another layer to the piece. I think that’s one of the reasons why global-majority-audiences-only is very important, and it offers a different context. Do you feel different when you are performing in a global-majority-only audience?
Adam Yes, the energy is very different. We’re working with experiences from us, from black queer people. So quite early in the process of making this piece, we decided that the piece is directed to a black queer audience. I feel that there’s sometimes pressure when one makes a piece for, in this case, contemporary dance venues, to translate the themes and stories for a white gaze. We were not interested in that; we wanted to make a work that resonated with our community of QTIBIPOCs. We didn’t want to shift our language to cater to a white audience, so some parts of the piece might not be fully understood by someone who is not from this community.
When we perform for a separatistic global majority audience, I often feel a bigger resonance in the space. There’s another kind of attention, and I can feel that the practices and symbols we work with are seen. I really appreciate that. I don’t know how you feel about it.
Amina I mean, since I’m not performing on the stage, I’m often in a position where I can observe the audience in a way that I’m not able to when I do performance work on stage. This has made me pay attention to the audience in a different way than I’m used to. The most significant difference that I’ve found is, I guess, similar to what you’re feeling when you are on the stage, Adam. It’s a shift in the energy of the room. It becomes a space where I feel embraced in a way, where I feel a bit safer and held. It’s been transforming for me to see so many people of the global majority in these theaters together while, taking up that space.
Yilin Since the piece is personal and tells about the personal narrative you have as a member of the global majority, how does it feel to perform it over and over again in different spaces and countries? I’m thinking about the affective way it has on you.
Amina I was thinking a lot about rituals related to the performance. I think that’s important not only after but also before the show. I braid Adam’s hair before each performance, and it’s this very intimate ritual that makes it possible for us to check in with each other and have a moment of heart-to-heart conversations. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and we have implemented strategies along the way that have helped us when we’ve been in environments that maybe haven’t been super great or felt very safe. I think we also decided very early on that we wanted to engage with our community in the places we tour, partly because it’s essential for us to feel that sense of community and safety.
Amina I was thinking a lot about rituals related to the performance. I think that’s important not only after but also before the show. I braid Adam’s hair before each performance, and it’s this very intimate ritual that makes it possible for us to check in with each other and have a moment of heart-to-heart conversations. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and we have implemented strategies along the way that have helped us when we’ve been in environments that maybe haven’t been super great or felt very safe. I think we also decided very early on that we wanted to engage with our community in the places we tour, partly because it’s essential for us to feel that sense of community and safety.
Yilin I’ve been thinking about creating a decolonial curatorial tool and how it can be sustainable. One of the things I think about is emotional labor. It’s very interesting to hear about the ways, rituals, and strategies you have to make this space feel safe and right for you.
Adam There are specific things we need in order to have the right conditions to perform the work. But we’ve also decided not to work with anything that’s traumatic for us explicitly. Because it wouldn’t be possible for me to carry on stage in front of an audience. So there’s all these considerations of what you do, how you do it, and the requirements for that, because yes it’s emotional labor.
Amina I’ve been thinking about ways we can be vulnerable and talk about personal things but still do it in a way that feels healing and respectful toward our journey. I found that using coded language has been a helpful tool in navigating vulnerability without crossing your boundaries. For instance it’s been important in this piece not to feel obligated to make our work digestible for the white gaze and instead not be afraid to speak directly to our community. By doing so, we could be vulnerable within a space that could embrace and hold space for that vulnerability.
Yilin Is this the first time you collaborated as siblings?
Adam It’s the first time we collaborated, as in making a piece together as two authors. But we’ve been supporting each other’s work by offering feedback, reflecting on ideas, etc, throughout, I guess, our entire lives.
Amina It’s interesting because now we’re on our path to creating our second piece from scratch together. We’re going to work with a similar theme to this performance, but this time we will explore home through the lens of darkness and how the Nordic dark winters affect collectivity and communal spaces. This time we will work not only with performance but also with visual art in an installation format.
Yilin How is it to work with your sibling?
Amina I guess what is both a challenge and a blessing is the fact that it’s really difficult to lie to each other! We know each other so well that there is no room for bullshit. This often makes it possible for us to dive deeper into our practice together and be vulnerable with each other, but that can also be challenging at times.
Adam It also felt so clear to work together around the topic of home. Even if home is not always with one’s biological family, I feel like home is with Amina.
Amina Working with you has taught me so many new things because even though we share a lot of history, working together is a different type of relationship than our personal one. We complement each other very well, our interests are similar, but we are different in how we organize and approach our practice, which has taught me a lot. I feel very inspired by working with you, and it’s been and is beautiful. Yeah, I mean, there is a reason we want to continue working with each other.
Adam Yeah, I agree completely. We come from quite different educational backgrounds. Amina is more from a visual arts background, and I’m from a dance background. So, at the beginning of the process, I think Amina came in with a very conceptual approach, and I came in with a quite embodied and intuitive approach. That caused some friction initially, but then we found our way of communicating and articulating things so we could understand each other. We found a method of working together that worked for both of us.
Yilin Are there any other projects you are also working on together?
Amina Together, we are working on a new exhibition that will open at Botkyrka Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden, in November 2025, but we also do our separate work.
Adam I’ll be making a new piece, which for the time being is called “Dawn.” It’s the beginning of a more extended research project on the Nordic runic alphabet, Elder Futhark. I’m interested in these runes because I’ve understood that they’ve been used in similar ways to how I relate to choreography. That is to communicate and to create spells. I will also dive into the practices of engraving, etching, and inscribing through a choreographic perspective. This is a longer research project in which I want to learn more about my ancestors’ practices, especially ones relating to the land on which I live.
Amina I’m going to continue working with seeds of slumber. I’m eager to dive deeper into the potential of lullabies in relation to sleep, sleeplessness, and dreams within the Afro-Nordic community. Exploring the lullaby as a kind of manifesto, examining lullabies and collective singing as a method to create rest and cultivate dream worlds within the Afro-Nordic community. What seeds can we plant in the lullabies that will grow in our siblings’ sleep?
Adam Seid Tahir (they/them) is a choreographer and creative technologist. Their two roles involve crafting performative work and designing/developing websites. These practices also merge and expand into writing texts, making video installations, 3D animation, and crafting sensor-based instruments. Adam uses speculative imagination as a tool of resistance and centers their work around creating loud and immersive black queer fiction. They are interested in mythological figures, daydreaming, and crafting effective machines. These interests often intersect through water, where they take the shape of sirens, waterfalls, and submerged transatlantic communication cables.
They have presented their work in contexts including: Kunstenfestivaldesarts (BE), MDT (SE), Kampnagel Summer Festival (DE), Rakete Festival @ Tanzquartier (AT), Emergentia (CH), Batard (BE) and My Wild Flag (SE). They have worked with other artists including: Amina Seid Tahir, Lydia Östberg Diakité and Meleat Fredriksson.
Amina Seid Tahir (she/her) is a Swedish/Eritrean visual artist and choreographer. She works with imagination as a tool for black queer resistance and repair. Braiding together her interests in ancestral knowledge, oral traditions, and myths, she creates immersive fictional universes. These interests currently intersect through crafting watery practices of homemaking as well as sonic practices of resting. Taking shapes into rituals, lullabies, dream portals, and spells. Seid Tahir has presented work in contexts including: Kunstenfestivaldesarts (BE), MDT (SE), Kampnagel Summer Festival (DE), Rakete Festival @Tanzquartier (AT), New Sh*t @ Dansehallerne (DK), Emergentia (CH), Batard (BE), Botkyrka Konsthall (SE) and My Wild Flag (SE).
Her work is grounded in community and would not be possible without conversations or collaborations with her communities, including people such as Adam Seid Tahir, Ailin Mirlashari, Mini Davarasl, Rebecca Beyene, Lina Alarabi, Nora Seid Tahir, Sara Rad, Dina Said, and many, many more.
Credits
Interview / Yilin Ma
Photography / Benedicte Ramfjord & Sharrat Cherry