Awate – Who Are We? Notes and Research for Hip Hop Pedagogy and Power: Reclaim the Archive residency

Meeting 1 (Tate): Awate, Dijana, Hassan, Shay, Peter, Hossam.

Think about how to document what we’re doing. Maybe through video blogs, written articles, screen recordings or photos.

Show artifacts and explain how we feel about them, any contextual information.

1m items from 900 collections.

Use #ReimagineArchives.

Looking through Donald Rodney’s notebooks.

Idea: infinite sampling. Samples collapsing within themselves.

Crate digging and sampling as archeology.

Keeping artifacts alive by building upon the foundations of previous generations. Renovation.

MySpace and Hotmail servers, CDs, old computers = lost music and art. Not archived.

Format obsolescence. Increasingly difficult to play or retrieve things from old formats. Machines no longer being made, rare servicing.

Excavate early UK black music? Posters, flyers, releases.

Meeting 2 (Zoom): Awate, Hassan, Shay, Big Zuu. Dijana and Peter for parts.

Tate online as. 80 collections.

Tate archive catalogue.

Look at artist postcards in the archive. They often write about art they’ve just seen.

Barbara Hepworth.

Music through the decades. Make one blues song, then sample for jazz, then rock, then funk, then disco, then pop etc.

Base each song around an artifact in the archive.

Meeting 3 (Zoom): Awate, Hassan, Shay, Big Zuu. Dijana for start.

Do the infinite sampling of songs, basing each one on a subject or artifact in the archive.

Edward Colston statue being thrown in the sea.

Problematic, hateful mass murderers on display as art everywhere. Colonial celebration.

Take inspiration from things that you would not want in the archive. Super racist, colonial things.

Satirical attacks on the problematic art within the lyrics of the songs I’ll write.

Research Links

Eddie Chambers - Destruction of the National Front 1979–80: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/chambers-destruction-of-the-national-front-t13887

Eddie Chambers - Àsìkò Goes Outernational (2017): http://www.eddiechambers.com/asiko-book/

Eddie Chambers - A DIY aesthetic (Red Pepper #214 June July 2017): https://www.redpepper.org.uk/eddie-chambers-black-artists-and-the-diy-aesthetic/

Eddie Chambers - Black British Art in Space (published online by Architectural Review, London, January 2016): http://www.eddiechambers.com/walter-rodney-bookshop/

“Eddie Chambers: Destruction of the NF” written by Rasheed Araeen appeared in Third Text, Number 5, Winter 1988/89: 45: http://www.eddiechambers.com/archive/destruction/

Emory Douglas - Legendary Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas on How Digital Media Can Be Harnessed to Make Protest Art Far More Effective Than Ever: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/emory-douglas-interview-1889924

- OSPAAAL - Public relations – solidarity posters from Castro’s Cuba: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/cold-war-cuba-ospaaal-posters/

“The work of the black artist should be seen as having specific positive functions: a tool to assist us in our struggle for our liberation, both at home and abroad, as opposed to simply reflecting the moral bankruptcy of modern times… Black Art at the very least, should indicate and/or document change. It should seek to effect such change by aiming to help create an alternative set of values necessary to better living. Otherwise it fails to be legitimate art.”