Form Follows Freedom
In Search of Playgrounds in the Sky of the Black River
I begin with all the thoughts, all the praise, all the anxiousness, all the guilt, all the shame; all the love, all the fear, all the pleasure, all the grace and the refusals. I work my way to distillation. I exhaust the possibilities of the thoughts I’m watching and begin to feel spacious. I empty myself so I can be everywhere and feel the wonder of black inheritance. From there I work in the black expanse and I’m committed to the exercise of living freely in its spaciousness.
— Torkwase Dyson, “A Liquid Belonging”, published in Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging by Pace Gallery (October 3, 2023)
Perhaps the design principle “form follows function”1 is insufficient. What breaks open when we allow form to follow freedom instead? Of course, all binaries are only helpful insofar as they carve out a space2 to fly with a wildness not yet named in between the two “opposing” poles. Last week’s newsletter was a short story about being confronted by my own wildness, and the subsequent grief of refusing its generativity. The terrifying possibility embedded inside indeterminate ways of living is at once ecstatic and asks too damn much of us all. A fear flutters into my belly, the grief of abandonment starts to spread its wings. Usually I would try to control it by caging the illegible, feathered, furriness of it all. But today I’ll dance with it. Let us dance with it. This is the choreography of return. Every week a homecoming. I let the unruly grief flap its wings and sometimes I take off flying too.
The theory and praxis of what I call Black Compositional Thought (BCT) is a structure that anchors my belonging to the black expanse and where I slowly begin to make objects that question sensoria, spatial comprehension, scale, movement, invention, improvisation, syncopation, and perception. Slowness is a liminal space where I demand of myself to hold on to the unknown and k/nowhere space of creativity, until I come up for air and the work is absolutely clean with belonging and new questions ontology.
— Torkwase Dyson, “A Liquid Belonging”, published in Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging by Pace Gallery (October 3, 2023)
If you remember how to play you can learn how to fly. So here I am coasting the river that is the sky, searching the landscape for branches to stick my landing. All play needs a ground. We know frameworks are what makes improvisational jazz possible. It’s Week 5 in the Seed A World Retreat and I’m already vibrating with excited anticipation because Week 6 is when we go in search of our form, in search of our framework, taking flight scanning the terrain below for the grounds of our play. But so often we go searching for the grounds before remembering how to play. Put another way, we go searching for form before we’ve practiced freedom. What’s the fugitive practice, the creative ceremony, that sends you down the river and puts you in a flow, allowing you to finally lose time’s scent?
May our playful collaboration with time always determine the shape our practice takes, the forms we leave behind for others to play inside of. How might our ceremonies in(form) new architectures of belonging where unanticipated paintings, projects, books and ways of being have space to unfold? How might meeting every week in a public park create a sanctuary that undoes property theory? How might visiting the library everyday create a book that smells like a database but sounds like a poem? How might making a new collage every night take the form of a film we’ve never seen?
For my work, composition is the question of critical black freedom. This methodology of meditation-system-improvisation-invention sets me up to work between distillation and expansion, toward a more discursive way of painting. It reminds me of how consequential my senses are and how big black power is. In the making, hereness is the most precious gift this body can give my spiritual existence, and spaciousness is the most precious offering to my ancestors.”
— Torkwase Dyson, “A Liquid Belonging”, published in Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging by Pace Gallery (October 3, 2023)
How might we live if spaciousness was the most precious offering to our ancestors? It is becoming increasingly clear that interdisciplinary study is the only way forward as a way of “living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder”3, as Katherine McKittrick names in Dear Science. The work we need is inside our colliding curiosity. Forget form (the shapes we need don’t exist yet), focus on play instead. Which is to say, focus on practice. Which is to say, focus on ceremony. What’s yours? Daily Seed is mine, the ceremony of gathering one black feminist story and seeding a database with it everyday, trusting a new story to emerge from this practice of composting. Because how else?
I’m writing this from inside the seed shape (in progress) of my next book. I don’t know why I’m so surprised that, similar to Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story, this story is finding its roots in the k/nowhere architecture of the database. Inside the cosmos of that compost tea of mystery staining the river black with its memory. This week I thought a lot about play and form without preemptively caging the emerging wildness. I licked my fingers after feeding on The Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children written by Jamaica Kincaid and illustrated by Kara Walker and had the most nourishing conversation with my co-conspirator Ravon Ruffin Feliz on what the glossary can do that perhaps an essay, map, painting or pot, can not. Our play may introduce us to unnamed comrades in the archive, interlocutors in Walker’s watercolors or Rain and Rover teaching us how to keep the window of our wildness open for unanticipated4 shapes of possibility.
We submit to the playful practice of surrendering to our wildness and take flight in the sky of the Black River trusting form to follow. Instead of abandoning ourselves, we abandon the longing for the only thing in the world that’s impossible for black power/practice/play: doing any bit of this alone. We consent to a liquid (be)longing.
Like a feathered school of metallic fish flocking in mid air, collapsing the binary of sky and sea, we find our form in our freedom.
“Form follows function is a principle of design associated with late 19th- and early 20th-century architecture and industrial design in general, which states that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.” (Source: Wikipedia)
“Writer Toni Morrison once described her writing practice as one that takes standard English and “carve[s] away its accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence so that certain kinds of perceptions [are] not only available but [are] inevitable.” Many theorists have noted the similarities between writing and drawing — both deploy black lines on a white page to articulate subjectivities and power. In much the same way that Morrison does. Dyson “carves away” at the lexicon of architectural drawing to make available and inevitable certain perceptions and spaces. Dyson’s project of unbuilding transmutes the techniques and conceptual teleology of architectural drawing toward other temporalities and places.” — Mabel O. Wilson, “Torkwase Dyson’s Tools for Unbuilding”, published in Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging by Pace Gallery (October 3, 2023), pg. 29
“This is a way of living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder (the desire to know). This is a method that demands openness and is unsatisfied with questions that result in descriptive-data-induced answers. Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive. Black method is therefore not continuously and absolutely undisciplined (invariably without precision, invariably undone). Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. The practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.” — Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2020), pg. 5
“These scalar experiments and mobile laboratories are speculative projects that envision new modalities of relation and offer blueprints for unanticipated existence.” — Saidiya Hartman, “Crawlspace Manifold” (February 12, 2023), published in Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging (October 3, 2023), pg.14
Thank you for writing this piece. Do you know Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message"? In that book he said, that not the content is only important in Media (like what a movie is about or what the newspaper is saying) but more so how they communicate, which shape they use to be visible in and how that looks like when we receive information. I am also currently writing about the theory & practice conundrum, like it is s easy for us to understand, accumulate knowledge and just collect information in our heads, but to transfer them into action, build an everyday-practice seems nearly impossible in this system we are currently living in.
I love this: "form to follow freedom" – because it implies, that the way we understand form is restrictive or limiting. But what if form is born out of freedom, how would it influence our lives? Day you know Fred Moten? I feel like you would love his way of thinking. He wrote a book with Stefano Harvey called "The undercommons" and it follows the same line of thinking.
I could go on writing about everything that comes to mind, I have to stop. Thank you so much again and I feel so inspired!!!!!