Interdisciplinary Permission

You have a right to your wildness

Cykofa Artifacts (2022), Ayana Zaire Cotton. Annual Residents Exhibition (2022-23): Time Machines at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Photography by David Hale.

It was there, in the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong. 

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), pg. 59

While in conversation with an old colleague, no. Fellow teacher, yes, and... Fellow sojourner? Closer. Fellow artist? Yes. Last week, while in conversation with fellow artist, Rishikesh Tirumalai, we talked about our paths leading up to giving ourselves permission to claim that word, artist. I talked about how, with the benefit of hindsight, I can safely say my hesitancy was rooted in a full body distrust and fear of what stepping into and embodying that word meant. Trembling at the door, hands shaking as I struggled to grip the key, terrified of the wildness it would unlock and the uncertainty that was waiting on the other side…for years I stood at the portal, frozen with terror, unable to surrender and walk through.

Being an artist is a commitment to indeterminacy.

It asks, “are you prepared for a life long practice of improvisation?” In many ways, the word asks you to consent not to be a single being¹. Upon surrender, you join the beyond human swarm in an emergent choreography, a commitment to interdisciplinary practice and collective study. When you release control, another energetic current has room to flow in.

It wasn’t until I stepped into the electricity of that word, artist…it wasn’t until I surrendered to the  vibration of that noun that I gave myself permission to return to my coding practice with a completely different set of values and commitments. A practice seeded on MySpace where I was engaged in a self-expression that fell from me like sweat. The kind of self-expression that didn’t wait for permission. This was middle school and I was a child, so, of course. And just like the airbrushed baby tees from Forestville Mall of course I tried on HTML just to see how it felt, without pretense, because it was about self-fashioning, because it was about play, because it was about dancing, not getting it “right”.

Interdisciplinary permission thrusts us into a child-like curiosity that feels as emergent and alive as the forest after the rain. We owe it everything. And we pay up in our commitment to our practices. The creative ecosystems we tend to every day, back bent loosening the soil and spreading the compost as we weave found data into nonlinear narratives, seeding a school in the process. On hands and knees making sure the practice is getting enough sunlight, enough time to rest and write in between the hair braiding appointments on your calendar. While tending to the garden of your cooking practice, you aerate the soil and rediscover the zine project you abandoned titled “Cosmic Slop”. This is us. And how beautiful, we are children again. Dancing with uncertainty. Still afraid, but we don’t stop because the dancing feels better than the fear. We know this now, the dancing feels better than the fear.

In discordant assembly, they found a hearing in one another (2022), Ayana Zaire Cotton, 22in. (w) x 74 1/2in. (h) x 14in. (d). Annual Residents Exhibition  (2022-23): Time Machines at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Photography by David Hale.

What does interdisciplinary permission look like for you? For me it looks like picking up a ceramic practice during a pandemic to compost grief and trauma, only to release it without guilt after a break up because you realized the clay was a medicine you no longer needed. It looks like returning to my zine practice to help me vision the school I desperately wanted to be a student of. It looks like seeding a teaching practice practice while simultaneously making abstract paintings on leather scraps with copper, cotton twine and glitter. It looks like establishing a coding practice by developing software to algorithmically generate poetry to write alongside. What’s next? Maybe a series of oil pastel drawings, an EP of wild ambiance perhaps? What does interdisciplinary permission feel like for you? For me, it feels magnetic — connections suddenly appearing everywhere making room for transcendent attraction. It feels like what Toni Cade Bambara might have meant when she talked about making the revolution irresistible². It feels irresistible, because we can’t stop dancing and we find ourselves needing permission less and less these days. Righteous wildness, magnetic and fertile, finally the dancing feels better than the fear.

What does interdisciplinary permission look/feel like for you? Let me know in the comments and I’ll respond to it in the upcoming podcast episode on Wednesday. <3

If you want to give yourself interdisciplinary permission to tend to your childhood curiosity in code, book a free, no obligation discovery call with me where we will talk about how code might fit into your existing ecosystem of creative practice.

Until Next Time,

1. Check out last week’s podcast episode where I respond to the comments/reflections left by Shanté Nixon who writes “Shante’s Newsletter”, Rob Cobb who writes “CS Education” and Ada Okere who writes “Data Without Context”.

2. Subscribe to Seeda School’s YouTube Channel.

3. Follow Seeda School on Instagram.

With care,

Ayana

1. The line is broken; the passage is overtaken, become detour; it is, again as Glissant says, unknown; it bears a non-violent, unavoidably violent overturning, a contrapuntal swerve, a voluntary submergence way on the outskirts of assent; it performs a rhizomatic voluntarity, roots escaping from themselves without schedule into the outer depths. This involuntary consent of the volunteer is our descent, our inheritance, should we choose to accept it, claim it, assent to it: forced by ourselves, against force, to a paraontological attendance upon being-sent, we are given to discover how being-sent turns to glide, glissando, fractured and incomplete releasement of and from the scale, into the immeasurable. —  “to consent not to be a single being” (2010) By Fred Moten who is elaborating on the inviation from Edouard Glissant to consent not to be a single being.

2. “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” ― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara. Rishikesh re-introduced this quote to my consciousness while we were in conversation. We bonded over this Bambara quote as a boundless framework and liberating unit of measurement for the immeasurable.