In “Grounding Conversations, Part 6: Archives as Storytelling,” Dev travels to the future in an audio adaptation of a short documentary they created with Helen Lee with production assistance from the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers Toronto (LIFT).
In “Grounding Conversations, Part 6: Archives as Storytelling,” Dev travels to the future in an audio adaptation of a short documentary they created with Helen Lee with production assistance from the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers Toronto (LIFT).
Dev Ramsawakh:
This is Grounding Conversations with Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI. This six-part segment series will lay the groundwork for the conversations that'll be happening on our broadcast during Luminato 2023 and provide a background on the frameworks with which our audio experiences attempt to engage. Many performance shows and arts festivals begin their programming with your typical land acknowledgement. However, many indigenous peoples have criticized the practice for relegating their relationship with the land to the past, which does more to alleviate settler guilt and discomfort than to demonstrate real solidarity and progressive action.
In my relationship to Radio LUMI, I want to acknowledge these criticisms as a way to use my platform responsibly. I don't want to just acknowledge the trauma indigenous peoples from all over have had inflicted on them, but to address how our society collectively is hurt by the mechanics of colonialism. I want to try to offer a demonstration of ways to actively engage with decolonial concepts in a practice to move forward on an interconnected journey towards collective liberation.
In Grounding Conversations, I reveal myself as a time traveler, as I embark on a journey that weaves in and out of the past, presents and futures that are rooted in the festival's programming and our city's arts culture tying them to the themes that the host here at Radio LUMI will be addressing from their own perspectives. This journey will be created using excerpts from my body of work to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism on our collective society and the underlying principles of disability justice that the San Francisco-based disabled arts collective, Sins Invalid, imbued into the term when they coined it in 2005 in order to teach us how to resist our interlocking systems of oppression.
It's now time to embark on the final part of our journey, Archives: A Storytelling. The following segment is an audio adaptation of a short documentary written, directed, and produced by Dev Ramsawakh and Helen Lee, which was produced with the assistance of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto or LIFT as part of transformations across generational commissioning project.
I've traveled to the future for the final stop on our journey together. I walk along a dimly lit concrete hallway passing through the threshold of a hulking ominous black metal door until I arrive outside of the underground bunker that I'm making into my new home. The bunker has dim overhead lighting, but there's a soft pink glow emanating from thin, bright lights brightly juxtaposed against the rest of the muted room. It's sparsely furnished with a small desk and office chair, a floor lamp with small shelves spotlit with pink light and a small daybed. There are plants growing out of the walls from futuristic planters that glow with teal light.
On the daybed, a small purple suitcase lays open already half unpacked with a black suit bag strewn over it. I remove my respirator with a sigh and discard the mask onto the desk with a thunk. I peel off my thick protective jacket and hang it on the back of the chair.
As a storyteller, the stories I collect are what I carry with me into the future. My memories, conversations I've had what I've heard and seen and felt, even the things I've tasted, both sweet and gut-wrenchingly bitter. To have a history we can recall, recount, recite is a privilege that so many of our ancestors and ourselves have fought to hang on to even a few threads of. Our histories give us more than just roots to ground ourselves in and learn from, but brings proof to our existence. Our impacts will always be felt, but to cite our knowledges back to the perspectives that were repeatedly attempted to be erased from our collective memories is a radical tool of potential transformation.
Colonialism has worked relentlessly to try to discredit our history and experiences from the ways we've been taught to care for the land we subsist off of to the ways we relate and love and care for each other. It attempted to restrict knowledge sharing through colonial institutions while trivializing pre-colonial methods like the oral tradition as anecdotal gossip and hearsay. But the breadth and depth of my knowledge didn't come from professors and textbooks. They came from earnestly asking questions and both making and consuming art. This is why I began to refer to myself as a living archive or an aggregator of knowledge.
As Alice Wong wrote in her anthology Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, "Storytelling can be more than a blog post, essay or book. It can be an emoji, a meme, a selfie or a tweet. It can become a movement for social change." So before I left the present one final time, I returned to the source of my stories, my community, to ask them what they would carry into the future as I prepared for my own journey.
Theodore Walker Robinson:
I'd have to bring with me a helmet mask. It would be an item of protection for myself going to the future. I wouldn't know what to expect, whoever I'm meeting, whatever I'm doing. That's just like a totem, a representation of who I am, my culture, about representations of ourselves that can't always be seen. It represents transformation and the ability to always change one state no matter what it is.
In West African tradition, masks, especially helmet masks not only are they used to represent warriors and warriorship, but also in ceremonies and rites of passage where an individual is going through a state of change or transformation.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Theodore Walker Robinson is both a Radio LUMI host and the executive director of Lakeshore Arts. I met them during my first year producing Radio LUMI when I interviewed them for a disability spotlight on their work featured in the third issue of CRIP COLLAB. While Theo and I share a Caribbean background, we don't share the same ancestors, so instead of a tribal mask, I unzip the suit bag on the daybed to reveal a black and red contemporary Indian outfit I've worn a few times over the last few years.
Theodore Walker Robinson:
Definitely hope for healing for my community, especially coming from a black trans disabled community, I see us going through so much right now, the throes of it, of this pandemic, which is still not over, and we're feeling the financial and economic fallout of all of that. And everyone is so unsettled right now and going through a lot of health issues on top of the complications of COVID, and so I just want to see folks get what they need to live so that they can be free in other ways as well.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I pull the shawl off the hanger and drape it across my shoulders as I think about Theo's words.
Theodore Walker Robinson:
I think we need to realize that we have the ability to change and sort of transform the situation in our system and how we distribute resources to one another. There's more than enough for everyone to make sure that everyone eats every day as they require to at least survive. How do we do that in a creative way, in a transformative way, using our power, using our resources to help distribute something that helps people feel inspired to think about what the future can look like if we each use our own potential power to transform? And I think a lot of us haven't had that realization that everyone has some kind of potential for power to change. I guess I'm one of those hopeless romantic optimists for social change.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I hear a small mewl cry out from the corner of the room and see my black cat named Shiva still waiting to be released from her carrier. As I go to open the small crate door for her, I think of Kate Welsh, the other co-founder of our collective named Chris.
Kate Welsh:
If I could take anything into the future with me, I think I would take my dog. He gives me so much love and support, but one of the best things he does is he's like an ableism deterrent because people come up to me and they don't say, "Why are you in a wheelchair," or, "Why do you use a walker?" They just talk to me about my dog.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I sit on the hard dark floor and pull Shiva into my lap to gently pet her.
Kate Welsh:
We know that disability is becoming more and more common because of how the world is working, climate change, the pandemic. So I'm really hopeful that there is more disability community things, more disability dance parties and more disability gatherings and more disability craft nights and more disability peer support lines. Like other marginalized groups like shared experience of oppression, which doesn't sound great, but I think that there's something really special about the shared experience of how we navigate the world together especially as a young, queer, disabled person. It's hard to find other people like us. I'm very glad that I've been able to find people like me and it's really changed my life in a really validating way.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I let Shiva slip out of my lap and slink off to explore her new environment.
Kate Welsh:
I think that we need to learn that disabled people are valuable, that we have things to offer, that our lived experience matters, that having different bodies and minds is part of diversity. If I'm really dreaming, dismantle capitalism and get rid of the medical model and have ways to participate and be with each other in community that are not production based or exploitative. And my dog teaches me, he doesn't need to be working or earning his value in order for me to want to give him food and water and housing. Just by being his little cuddly self, he has value. Yeah, I feel like pets can teach us a lot about compassion, empathy, community.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I turn to the desk to find my green satchel sitting on the chair and begin to rummage inside it. I start to pull out a collection of different kinds of art like prints, scenes, knickknacks and graphic tees, organizing them onto the desk and chair as I do. Many of them were given to me by Sherry Austin Null, whom I also met through the Radio LUMI disability spotlight series.
Sherry Austin Null:
I would bring bead work. I was thinking of why I want to bring bead work to the future and bring it with me rather than in a museum or something is because that's the way that bead work didn't get to come to the present from a hundred or 150 years ago. So a lot of that's in museums and away from community right now, and I want it to be with us, on our being, in our families and treasured.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I pull on a black sweatshirt as I think about them. It's my own design with simple purple texts that reads, "We're already surviving our dystopias".
Sherry Austin Null:
I think I hope to see community in general more than anything, people being present and caring for each other. I think we've been so disconnected from that through capitalism and colonialism and that folks are really pushing right back right now and I'm glad.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I take some of the prints and walk over to a bare wall of the bunker and start to arrange and stick them on in a grid-like collage.
Sherry Austin Null:
I think the biggest focal values for me are care and care that extends across species and beings and entities that have being, whether they're something western mainstream society perceives as living or something that's kind of otherwise like a piece of bead work can be an entity and a being that we care for and either way. A plastic cup in some ways should be because then we react to it in a way that makes us want to enact responsibility, and so care toward all of the beings around us, I think is how that could be achieved.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Returning back to my bag and reaching inside, I pull out a thin orange envelope of photos. On top is a selfie with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jasmine Patterson, who's been guiding teaching and learning with me for as long as I can remember.
Jasmine Patterson:
We've been friends for 22 years, something like that. It would be my photos, whether I've taken them myself or the people have, they are very important to me. They're a means of storytelling and sharing who I love, what I love, things I find interesting or funny with those I may meet in the future, and also to look back on my life.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I begin to flip through the photos. They're in different sizes, some of them small Polaroid strips from photo booths, old film photographs from my childhood, and some even printed on paper now wrinkled and creased with age.
Jasmine Patterson:
I hope for Toronto community does become more important. That caring becomes more, I guess regular people think caring is just, oh, buying your friend a thing or whatever, but showing care for a community, those who are struggling or marginalized. I really think that when there's a little more care and love, it's just benefits everyone. And when everyone is benefiting, they feel better. Things are better. Just want everyone to be happy and good. That's what I want. No more stress and sadness about people having to go through tough things on their own, essentially.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I gather up the photos again and slide them back into their envelope and leave it on the desk to come back to later.
Jasmine Patterson:
I think there needs to be a lot of structural changes and a lot less focus on the individual and lining big business pockets. A lot of the way that everything is built and how it goes on is not focusing on the collective. It's focusing on the individuals. And so we need to get rid of systems that benefit those above where those below can work their asses off and still might even have half the things that those few at the top have. And that's a very hard thing to change when so many of those people who have the most are the ones in power. So that's kind of the tough part.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Reaching into my bag one last time, I begin to pull out different sized and colored journals, their covers worn and pages bloated to stack them on the desk. Documenting ourselves isn't an act of vanity. Our histories don't just legitimize us, but value us and learn from us and ground our future and our very beings.
I hope to see a future in which we can all be chasing dreams and soulmates and passions instead of grinding ourselves back to the dirt we came from just to survive, many of us questioning why we even want to survive. I want to live in a future where we flourish and thrive rather than wondering if we'll make it to the end of the year, the month, the week, the day.
I want to live in a future Toronto that's as diverse as we claim we are, and we care for each other unquestioningly, one where we carry the weight of our failures with us to remind ourselves why we do it when things aren't easy or simple or unilaterally consistent.
In order for us to get there, we have to seek out storytellers and stargazers and find where we fit in the middle. We all exist as multiplicities, and the truths we can honestly claim can only be derived from exchanging our perspectives until we can understand it from every dimension.
That was the final part of the six-part segment series, Grounding Conversations: Archives as Storytelling. This segment was produced by Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI as part of Luminato 2023, adapted from their short documentary film What We Carry, which they wrote, directed and produced with Helen Lee, featuring interviews with Theodore Walker Robinson, Kate Welsh, Sherry Austin Null, and Jasmine Patterson.
The music used in the segment is by G.R. Gritt. Sound effects were fully produced by Dev Ramsawakh.