Episode 1: “Commit to Keep Fighting” by Amir Khadar

Transcription:

I do think the system that creates racism is also the system that allows environmental racism to occur and a lot of the environmental issues that we talk about are impacting directly people of color. And then when we talk about some forms of like gender based marginalization, it's mostly impacting specific demographics of women that are also impacted by racial marginalization. {MUSIC STARTS} 

So I do find it very hard to separate an issue and label it as belonging to like one group. {MUSIC CONTINUES}

My name is Amir Khadar. I use they/them pronouns. I am currently in Philadelphia, um or Lenape Territory. I can start with my, my favorite color is green because I really like trees and like foliage and I go on bike rides basically every day {SOUNDS OF BIRDS CHIRPING} and just sit around by rivers and in forests and kind of get like bit up by creatures, like little mosquitoes, but I really enjoy it just because I get to stare at trees and like different shades of green flowing around and I take a lot of photos of them on my phone and a lot of the times those photos become the basis of my color schemes.

My artwork is mostly digital but I definitely take a multi-disciplinary approach to everything and I really like doing handmade techniques and disciplines just because I feel like they connect to Indigenous roots and older ways of making. So things like weaving, crocheting, beading, jewelry, all that stuff.

I try to make everything that I do incorporate racial justice, gender justice, gender/sexuality justice, and environmental justice simultaneously because the power system that creates those marginalizations and oppression is the same thing. So I try to have them simultaneously present at all times just because I also feel like dividing the approach to solving these problems is also lessening the potency of solutions.

I think I would say a major theme that runs through all my work is just embracing the power of dreaming and imagination. When it's grounded in the movements all of our liberation and justice movements right now. If we were to rebuild a new world with the materials that we have right now, we would just recreate the same thing and I think imagination and dreaming is the only thing that interrupts that cycle of recreation, so instead of dreaming with what we have physically, we’re starting to think like, “hmm in the future, what if we could create a completely new world.”

There's been a lot of white supremacist storytelling in mythology that's made us believe that we don't have access to liberation, or that our ancestors weren't free people, or that we don't even have ancestors in general. So I like a lot of my work to be a counter narrative.

I think that in terms of like when we're looking for sustainable ways to live in the future that are equitable, those systems already existed in the past, so I'm trying to think of ways to creatively imagine them in the future, um, just because there is a disconnect and we can't recreate exactly what used to be, but we can start imagining ways to incorporate ways of living that aren't extractive and aren't inherently violent. Um, like I really do like all the work around Solidarity Economies right now just because it is again speaking to like that ancestral way of living where there was, where everyone was able to have what they needed, um, and I’m speaking like ancestrally vaguely just because again, we don't know specifics, we don't know details, and every society had its problems and I don't want to like over idealize it but i think they definitely had less problems. {MUSIC}

Creative Wildfire Series which is the three images that go together, um, I, they were created like through the Creative Wildfire Grant which I really loved. I love any project that creates funding and opportunities for artists to create what they need or create what they want to and still be supported for that without like too much, what's the word, I guess too much editing in the process because that experience is really rare, so I had a lot of control over those three pieces and the other one as well. But, I basically was thinking of ways to describe— again, what I was talking about like when my art is about ancestry and systems that don't exist— um, I was like wanting to depict the journey of someone understanding something and then putting it into physically manifesting that. So that one starts with someone with like a representation of ancestors and the Earth guiding them is putting hands on them and I have connected braids because I think writing is a really good example of like embodied knowledge that's just been passed down for generations. Doing my hair and expressing myself through my hair was one of the first ways I felt a type of liberation and that's something I like to have show up in my artwork as well, just like people with more expressive hair types. I think like again having access to hair which is like a textile growing outside of our head, it allows me to practice a lot of techniques I learned, like you learn rope making from hair, there's like a little bit of weaving with hair in terms of like braiding. It became a part of my, like, daily artistic practice. I think it's very magical how a lot of Black people know how to braid and maybe just don't know how we all learn to do it. Some people can't, like I can’t cornrow, but that's another topic. 

Um, and then it moves into “shift to economies of care” where i was thinking about how to depict a system or a transaction that wasn't exploitative just because i don't think transactions are inherently bad, i just think because we're in a context that's white supremacist and violent, they become an extractive moment that people have used to create oppression out of. So I just want to show immediate goods being transferred, like someone being given marigolds, which I think of as like a medicinal flower, and then also the other person being given seeds to grow more marigold, so they have like a circular relationship that will continuously give and yield. Um, and then the last one is just people farming. I'm really inspired by community farms. I used to live in Baltimore and there was a lot of community farms where people were just growing food and giving it out for like lower prices just because there's a lot of food insecurity there so sometimes those farms were people's, not only way to get fresh food, but it was a very accessible and easy way for people to get fresh food. And I just loved talking to people who started those farms and understanding their vision just because it was like a real act of community care, um, and they're really fighting to keep those farms around.

As an artist, specifically as an artist who works in like two dimensional mediums, I don’t, sometimes it doesn't feel like the impact of that type of art is as grand as other things. So I do find it hard to approach really really big issues just because I know most of the people that interact with my art on social media they're looking at it for 15 seconds maximum so a lot of the times I end up having to break things down or create some scaffolding for people to understand larger issues and I feel like that's a good positionality for me as an artist. Like I’m enhancing other forms of information or I am creating some like artifact of information but it's not necessarily the full story um, so it feels like I’m making little puzzle pieces that are being like put into this giant tapestry that illustrates a lot of grand issues and because of that because like i don't try to tackle the full issue in like one illustration, I think it allows me to be a little bit more playful with the ways I choose to depict things in the artwork that I feel like is most representative of me. I normally embrace fantasy imagery and more whimsical things and again like I have people turning into trees just because I feel like that metaphor is more fun than depicting the world as we live in it right now. I definitely try to step past or look through contemporary traumatic images, like instead of depicting a forest being destroyed I would choose to depict what would grow from that destroyed land or how that area could be like revitalized {MUSIC}.

I definitely am like deeply inspired by again like a more broad conception of ancestry. I definitely feel like a lot of my personal connections have been like greatly greatly more impactful than like what I imagined my ancestors as. Of course like my grandma was a very important person because she taught me how to sew and she is an ancestor now too so I would consider her a very big influence just because she was the first person to teach me how to use my hands and I feel like she got me into art making as like a very very young person. 

In terms of like, wanting to illustrate and wanting to create images, that could be taken back to like the, just West African storytelling traditions. The reason I gravitated towards illustration was just because of its capacity and association with storytelling be it through children's books or graphic novels or whatever. It just allows you to very clearly create a narrative and convey it and a lot of the lessons I was given as a child were just through like very interesting fun fairy tales that my parents and like all my elders would tell me. Um, sometimes it would be like, they were funny, I'm laughing because like they were always funny. There was just always a gag at the end of them, which I kind of wish I incorporated more into my art work but I think that did start my love for storytelling. {MUSIC}

MUSIC & SOUNDS USED:
Theme music : Water Fluid - Music by ItsWatR from Pixabay

Small river in the forest - Sound Effect from Pixabay

Full of Hope - Sound Effect by SamuelFrancisJohnson from Pixabay