Angela Davis On Radical Self

“ ANYONE WHO’S INTERESTED IN MAKING CHANGE IN THE WORLD, ALSO HAS TO LEARN HOW TO TAKE CARE OF HERSELF, HIMSELF, THEIRSELVES. ”

Angela Davis during a speech in Northern California. Spring, 1981. Photo by Ilka Hartmann.

Angela Davis on radical self-care:

For a long time, activists did not necessarily think that it mattered to take care of themselves; in terms of what they eat, in terms of mental self-care, corporal self-care, spiritual self-care…

I know that there were some people who emphasised it. I’m thinking about one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party, Ericka Huggins, who began to practice yoga and meditation in the 70s, and she encouraged many people including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to join that practice.

I think they did a little bit of it, but I think that movement would have been very different, had we understood the importance of that kind of self-care. Personally, I started practicing yoga and meditation when I was in jail. But it was more of an individual practice; later I had to recognize the importance of emphasizing the collective character, of that work, on the self.

Why is it important for activists and organizers to practice radical self-care?

Well, it means that we’re able to bring our entire selves into the movement. It means that we incorporate into our work as activists, ways of acknowledging and hopefully also moving beyond trauma. It means a holistic approach.

What impact can radical self-care have on the sustainability of our movements?

I think longevity is important, and not simply individual longevity, it is equally important to recognize that as we develop our movement today we’re creating a terrain for the emergence of new activists and what we do today has an impact on what younger people will be able to do tomorrow. I think we have to imagine ourselves as connected to people who came before us, and those who will come after us.

When practiced by Black people, how can self-care become a radical act?

Black people all over the world have been subjected to the most unimaginable forms of violence: slavery, and torture. But at the same time, black people have also offered the world, we’ve also produced beauty, music, and art. And I think that the self-care that gets produced by Black people, recognizes the connection between struggle and art and beauty and the imagination.

What role does radical self-care play in our collective liberation as a people?

It’s very dangerous not to recognize that as we struggle we are attempting to precise the world to come. And the world to come should be one in which we acknowledge collectivity and connections and relations and joy. And if we don’t start practicing collective self-care now, there is no way to imagine, much less reach, a time of freedom.

Transcript from Angela Davis Interview with Afro Punk, 2018.

Watch in full, here.

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) - Creativity + Mental Health

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) uses art to curb the anguish of her hallucinations. She seeks to immerse her spectators in the infinite exuberance of the colourful forms of her childhood.

Yayoi Kusama was born into a conservative and prosperous family. At the age of 10, she began to suffer from hallucinations. She used drawing as a means of navigating her fear of disintegration at the hands of an invisible world threatening to spread and swallow her up. From the very beginning, her mental illness took center stage in her creative process.

She studied at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, where she was introduced to Nihonga painting. In the 1950s, she explored more abstract forms, which were well received by both the artistic and psychiatric communities.

The subjects of her childhood drawings (the cosmos, the heart, flowers…) are repeated in an infinite and uniform pattern.

In the late 1950s, she moved to New York and studied at the Art Students League. It was during this time that she created her Infinity Net series, whose larger and larger compositions, exhibited for the first time at the Brata Gallery in 1959, seem to submerge the viewer in a network of dots and lines. According to critic Lucy Lippard*, this work placed her within the Eccentric Abstraction movement, which is defined by a rejection of strict minimalism, and the inclusion of emotion, sensuality, and the use of synthetic materials endowed with organic shapes and a certain sexual resonance.

YAYOI KUSAMA 1960 WHITE.NO.28' Painted in 1960, White No. 28 is an early work in Kusama’s groundbreaking series of Infinity Nets, and dates to a formative period in the artist’s career when she first developed the motifs and themes that would come to define her oeuvre.

Unica Zürn (1916-1970) - Female Self, Mental Health & Artworks

Immersed in the study and reflection of a seemed perception of different realities, Unica Zürn, questioned her female self from external perspectives reflected as an extension of herself, in her texts and artworks.

As a source of creation and inspiration, she observed and staged herself amongst chimeric animals, from a distance, taken from her own body, betraying the schizophrenia with which she lived.

LEFT: UNICA ZÜRN, UNTITLED, 1965. RIGHT: UNICA ZÜRN. © VERLAG BRINKMANN & BOSE, BERLIN.

Unica Zürn is best known as the author of anagrammatic poetry — poetry with the constrained form that either each line of each verse is an anagram of all other lines or verses in the poem— and the semi-biographical novellas Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, but she was also a visual artist. She had a preternatural and ethereal gifted skill for creating phantasmagorical worlds. Her drawings were exhibited at galleries throughout Paris and Berlin.

In 1950 she participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition.

In 1970, after over a decade of intermittent hospitalization for mental illness, Unica Zürn committed suicide by jumping out the window of the apartment of her longtime companion, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer.

UNTITLED, 1959.