Speaking Ourselves Into Being

In 2014, Andrea Fatona initiated The State of Blackness conference to congregate artists, curators, academics and students around the conditions of the production, presentation and dissemination of Black art in Canada. Using the conference as a catalyst to continue a public discourse and to create an archive of Black artistic production, The State of Blackness has continued in various forms. Fatona remains a guiding voice and devoted advocate for practising care through considered critique, while she supports her students and mentees in producing the in-depth scholarship and criticism that was significantly lacking in Canada.

Fatona heads the Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University, with decades of scholarship on the contemporary art of the Black diaspora. When I joined the program in 2016, I was certain there was no other person I would want to study under. But, due to circumstances beyond our control, our work together was quite limited at the time. While notions of urgency can force all of us to move too quickly, and can limit the required depth of research and discourse, within marginalized communities this notion of urgency can be particularly challenging, as the time of the beacons of our communities is in constant demand.

This sense of urgency again came into play in the time carved out for our interview, and by addressing this, I hope to present this engagement as the unfolding of a longer discussion that needs continuation. In order to halt a cycle of erasure that is prevalent in Canada, intersections like this one must be seen as contributing to a rich pool of Black creative production that has existed long before us, across regions, and which will continue to develop into our varied futures.

Taking The State of Blackness as our starting point, five years after Fatona initiated it, we sat down to