Grace Ndiritu moves between performance art, activism, shamanism, ethical fashion, publishing, and filmmaking with the central concern of finding moments for the transformation of our contemporary world. Ndiritu is a prolific filmmaker who has created an impressive archive of over forty “hand-crafted” videos alongside experimental photography, what she describes as “Post-Hippie Pop-Abstraction collages,” and shamanic performances. Along with showing widely at arts institutions, biennials, and film festivals, her recent publication with Bergen Kunsthall titled “Dissent Without Modification”is a collection of sprawling conversations with uncompromising and unconventional women recorded between 2013 and 2016. These conversations helped inspire “COVERSLUT©,“ Ndiritu’s fashion and economic research project founded in 2018 that reflects on youth culture, the 1990s, and the politics of today. Grace proposes alternative forms of communality by seeking out ways of being and living amid a world where the entanglements between capitalism and racism continue to be overlooked.
Jareh Das: Your work is encyclopedic and ranges across disciplines at the same time that it includes life experiences which are extensive and unconventional. What led you to the decision to find other ways for being in the world through alternative community living?
Grace Ndiritu: Since I was young, I have always had a curiosity about the larger world. My mother was a feminist and an activist, so I grew up in a pluralistic household going to anti-racist and anti-apartheid marches. She was also a bit of a hippie and had a boyfriend who had a caravan and took her to Findhorn Ecovillage which was a bit unusual for an African woman at that time. Also because some of my childhood was spent in Kenya I understood that the world was a bigger place than just my own house or neighborhood in Birmingham, and I naturally wanted to meet new people and have new experiences. This expanded when I started travelling independently as a teenager to Europe and India and then to the rest of the world later on. You could say that I am fundamentally interested in what we have in common as human beings rather than what divides or makes us different. And that’s where my love of nature and also esoteric subjects comes into play. I am always examining what shared beliefs we have as humans. Shamanism, for example, is the first “world religion,” and therefore as a practitioner of it I find that it connects me not only through time but also geography to many different cultures and peoples. This has led me to get interested more and more in issues of environmental justice and Indigenous land rights.
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JD: In your film, BLACK BEAUTY: FOR A SHAMANIC CINEMA (2021), a time-warp unites modernism with the contemporary by bringing fashion model Alexandra Cartier (aka Black Beauty) in conversation with the writer Jorge Luis Borges to debate climate change, pandemics, migration, and time. How was this film informed by your interest in shamanism as a critical tool to address the alarming rate at which Indigenous eco-cosmological systems continue to be threatened by national and transnational policies?
GN: For the last four years, I have been involved in doing research for my ongoing shamanic performance art series, “Healing the Museum” (2012–present), which started with the idea that museums are dying because they are so out of touch with what’s going on in the real world. My practice involves introducing nonrational methodologies such as meditation and shamanism into museums as a way to find new answers to socio-political problem solving by accessing the right brain. Some of these have had successful real-world effects. For example, in “A Meal for Ancestors: Healing the Museum” in 2018 in Brussels, I created two separate groups and gave free meditation sessions to refugees and activists while providing creative visualization workshops to staff members of the European Parliament, UN, and NATO. After four months I brought both groups together to do a shamanic performance, focused on finding a solution for healing trauma around the Syrian refugee crisis and terrorist attacks in Europe. This culminated in one participant publishing a paper seeking to define the concept of a climate refugee, which now forms part of the EU Parliamentary Research Services.
This also spurred me to keep working on climate topics, and this evolved into being invited by the British Council in Argentina to do a residency there, which was co-organized with Arts Catalyst in Sheffield. I used the residency in Buenos Aires to write the screenplay for BLACK BEAUTY which I had been wanting to do for a very long time. So after travelling through Patagonia and meeting different Indigenous groups and organizing a workshop with climate scientists, anthropologists, and geneticists to answer various questions at the beginning of 2020 just before the pandemic hit, I felt I was ready to do so.
Questions such as, “Who were the first people in Patagonia? Were they African, and where do we see Patagonia in one thousand years in the future with climate change? How will nature and mankind genetically evolve because of climate change?” This led me to create a speculative fiction in which a late-night talk show host called Karen Roberts interviewed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about climate change, pandemics, migration, and time in 1983.
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Jareh Das is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Nigeria and the UK. She holds a PhD in Curating Art and Science from Royal Holloway, University of London, for her thesis, “Bearing Witness: On Pain in Performance Art” (2018).
This interview, “Grace Ndiritu by Jareh Das,” was commissioned by and first published in BOMB Daily on January 5, 2022. © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. The BOMB Digital Archive can be viewed at www.bombmagazine.org.
