Re-visioning #6: A conversation with Marcy Saude
This is the sixth in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Marcy Saude’s practice in time-based media involves subjects such as marginal histories, speculative fiction, the landscape, counterculture, radical politics and text(s). Their moving image work has screened at venues and festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Torino Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, artist-run labs and DIY project spaces internationally. Saude is a member of the Filmwerkplaats collective moving image lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as well as BEEF in Bristol, UK. A Portuguese national raised in California, they currently work in Plymouth, UK.
IN: So, to introduce this conversation, Marcy, you and I have been aware of each other’s work for quite a while since we* screened your two works ‘Alternative Strategies #1: Handmade Home’ and ‘Sangre De Cristo’ back in 2015, finally meeting in person on a collective residency organised by artist Paul Chaney at his End Of the World Garden in Cornwall in the summer of 2019. Last year, you invited me to share a conversation with you for your regular show ‘The Wax Paper Hour’ on Sound Art Radio out of Totnes, on the subject of ‘holding onto utopias’. So maybe the best place to start is by asking you what you mean by that phrase.
MS: Sure. So we’re living in what can feel like pretty dystopian times, which can be overwhelming. We’ve also spent large parts of the last year being at least partially cut off from the modes of collectivism and togetherness that are to me the best ways forward and through many of the dystopian elements of our current world, whether that be political, economic or care systems. I guess I just like to hold in my head the idea that things can be better.
IN: But what’s the difference, then, between imagining the possibility for things to be better, and imagining utopias? What is it about the notion of utopias that is, one the one hand so appealing, but on the other hand so impossibly distant as to be constrained to the realm of ideas?
MS: I had a great conversation recently — for Soundart Radio’s project Tomorrow’s Transmissions — with the activist, political theorist and science fiction writer Michelle O’Brien, who is based in New York City. One of the things she emphasised was that there’s a really good reason for political theory to be suspicious of utopias, because the problem is that the political project becomes defined by the ‘best utopia’ and uses that as a specific road map to work towards. So then all you’ve got to do then is to convince everybody of which is the best utopia to work towards. But of course it doesn’t really work like that; social structures arise in response to specific historical conditions and peoples’ collective needs and struggles, rather than emerging fully born out of the imagination of a single author. So I get where the scepticism towards thinking about utopias is, but at the same time, I think that we’ve sunk so far into this incredibly depressing realm of capitalist realism, that it’s really necessary to break out of that. People really need to be able to express their desires, and what they want out of life, in order to feel like there’s something worth fighting for. I think that utopian fiction, and specifically science fiction and feminist utopias, can free our imaginations to confront our desires, to not be ashamed by them, and to not have our real desires constrained by what we feel may or may not be realistic. I think that political pragmatism is what delivered into this hellscape of neoliberalism, and what destroyed the capacity of the Left to be effective. Instead of boldly pursuing human desires for what the world could be, they decided to follow a completely inadequate mode of pragmatism that is ultimately a complete capitulation to the forces of conservatism. I’m thinking of New Labour, for example.
IN: There’s so much there, but I’d just like to backtrack for a moment to this idea you mentioned early on relating to the removal of the potential for collectivism that is the naturally opposing force to the divisive power of capitalism. I’m interested particularly in whether you have found any particular models of digital gathering useful?
MS: Well I was pregnant throughout the first lockdown in the UK, which put me on the vulnerable list, so I took lockdown quite seriously. My anxiety became quite overwhelming so that I didn’t even want to go out for my daily walk at one point. To be honest, what I faced during the first lockdown, when nurseries and schools shut, was a lack of time to be involved, and a lack of childcare, so the reality is that I wasn’t able to participate in virtual events and gatherings. And often in the time I do have, I’m so exhausted that I’ve just wanted to zone out to Charlize Theron action films. One of the great appeals of action films, even though they can be ideologically abhorrent, is this idea that an individual, given sufficient firepower or muscles or perhaps superpowers, can radically alter the course of the world. So that, and listening to science fiction audio books because I don’t have the brain capacity for reading. At least that allows a mental if not physical escape into more utopian worlds. That’s been my reality through much of the last year.
One thing I do find encouraging is in how the conditions that a lot of people have been in has highlighted the inadequacy of the privatised, nuclear, heterosexual family as a place that’s expected to fulfil all of our needs for care. The nuclear family is just too small to provide the collective care that we all really need. I’m encouraged that a lot of the amazing work that’s been done by communists, feminists and trans-feminists over the last few years has come back to the fore in terms of thinking about how we might reconfigure caring relationships. It was left out of the conversation for a long time, while struggles like the rights to gay marriage fought for a wider group of people to have access to this idea of the nuclear family. I think that as we struggle through and eventually move past these oppressive economic and political conditions, we need to ask the same question more widely than in relation to our living conditions: this model doesn’t work for us anymore — how do we supersede and replace it with something better?
IN: Yes, you’re right — that is the question that’s being asked, and needs to be asked. The challenge is to maintain the volume and frequency which the question is being asked. We’ve been in contact a bit over the last year, aside from preparing for this conversation, because you’re a US national and we had an exchange about the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests. How was it experiencing that moment in Plymouth? I’m guessing Plymouth has some historical connections to the slave trade, for example.
MS: My first real foray back out into the world was the Black Lives Matter solidarity protest in Plymouth and it just felt like such an incredible moment of relief and joy. It was during lockdown but everyone was just so conscientious and it was such a powerful experience. I’m from the States, so a lot of my friends have been involved in uprisings there not just against police violence and murder, but also against the larger systems of racism and white supremacy that basically underpin the societal structure of the US and the UK. During those first few weeks, nothing else mattered — I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. The experience of witnessing online the emergence of a diverse group of young people from Plymouth, where I live, and the surrounding area, really felt like a utopian moment. Even though it came out of such darkness, the power of being together in space was really overwhelming. And the power of not just being in a group, but a group held together by strong ideas of care, so much so that they found ways of physically coming together and at the same time being incredibly mindful of this viral pandemic that we’re living through, was a wonderful experience. But of course, that was ultimately against the guidelines at the time.
I’ve also been involved with a group in Plymouth called the North Star Study Group for the last year or two, which is a self-organised adult education project. We’re seeking to educate ourselves about legacies of British Colonialism, so part of that has been investigating Plymouth’s connections to trans-Atlantic slave trade. We did a history walk last year, looking at the ways that colonialism is memorialised throughout the city with artists Sophie Mellor and Rachel Dobbs. The 16th century naval commander John Hawkins basically started the trans-Atlantic slave trade from Plymouth, so it’s actually kind of ground zero in that respect. There is a square named after him, and we had previously had discussions with the council to rename it, that ultimately didn’t go anywhere, but in the wake of BLM, and the toppling of the Colston statue, Plymouth City Council very quickly stripped the name of the square, which is now being renamed Jack Leslie Square after a Plymouth Argyle football player who should have become the first black player to play for England, but wasn’t because of racist attitudes of the time.
IN: One of the points of convergence between our practices I think is in the way that both your work and mine has these many points of connection between radical politics and working as an artist. I often find it difficult, and possibly unnecessary, to distinguish between the two, but it does lead to a lack of understanding of what I produce. I mention this because you told me before we started the conversation that you hadn’t been ‘making’ anything. Given the range of things we’ve already discussed, I’m wondering whether what you mean is that you haven’t been active as an artist, within the frame of artistic activity that you understand as being ‘work’? And does that just mean the actual production of artworks?
MS: My feeling is that even if you’re an artist whose work is a critique of capitalism, you get absolutely railroaded into this rat race of productivity, and if you extract yourself from that, then you’re just completely irrelevant. Like, I make 16mm film, which takes a long time, because the films are either self- or part-funded. For example, the one that I’m making now has taken me three years, and the funding in no way covers what goes into them. And it’s not a practice that’s particularly conducive to whacking your art up on Instagram every day, so mostly people just forget that you exist. Likewise in the experimental film world, if you don’t have a new short out every year on the festival circuit, then you very quickly sink into irrelevance. I mean, I did document some of the BLM protest on my 16mm camera, so I am making work. That has been incorporated into the end sequence of this film I’m making. It’s an experimental essay film about the question of the immigrant experience here in Plymouth, in this landscape that very much valorises overseas colonial adventure, and very much underplays its own role in the violence of colonialism, and the violence of the transatlantic trade in enslaved humans that started here. So it’s really about Britishness and national identity.
IN: If you don’t mind, I’d like to take that as an opportunity to ask you to talk about your own experience of Britishness, because I know that there’s a precarity there for you, and an ongoing uncertainty regarding your own status.
MS: Overall I find the rules in this country are mostly unstated, and whether you’ve fulfilled them or not is left completely to the discretion of individual bureaucrats, without any transparency, and no possibility to contest the decision. So every time I think that I might be about to qualify for British citizenship, these rules change and shift and I’m back to square one and I need to start my five years to qualify as a resident all over again. It’s so boring.
IN: Yes. You find it everywhere, this casual but deliberate obfuscation of what it is exactly that you have to do to get along, the aim of which is to make it more difficult and slow to get the support or advice or status that you need.
MS: There’s this ‘Life in the UK’ test we all have to do to get citizenship. I have the books to study for, and its startling how the reality that immigrants face in this country is so radically at odds with the British self-conception as manifested in this test. Fair play, for example, is one of the core Britsh values that the test trumpets. It also completely mis-characterises the British role in Empire.
IN: There’s something there, that you’re articulating much better than me, that runs so deep through everything in this country, that most recently reared its head in response to the Black Lives Matter actions in people here looking at events in America and saying ‘Well that would never happen here’ — a denial that is built into our national psyche.
MS: There is definitely a refusal to confront the uglier aspects of British society and history. The elite, those who dominate both politics and culture in this country, have a self-conception that they deserve their positions, and that the rest of us should fall in line. These national myths, like fair play, that are endlessly propagated through the media, definitely help to prop up that class system.
IN: Without wanting to take the focus away from everything you’re talking about, I would like to get back to utopias for a bit before we end the conversation. It feels like a good moment to do that. What gives you solace right now?
MS: These moments where the desire of the collective to overturn white supremacy, even if just in the way it symbolically dominates our landscape through these oppressive statues, bubbles over, and spontaneous action overcomes the ‘right way to do things’, the proper channels so to speak. Electoral and legal systems, supported by policing, are designed to disempower us, so those moments have been beautiful and utopian, even as you know there are going to be the inevitable waves of backlash, like the Policing Bill. Those instances of collective power are really food and nourishment for the soul, and provide a glimpse of what the way forward could be.
*The ‘we’ here is Annexinema, a former collaboration with Emily Wilczek, screening experimental and artists’ film in non-institutional settings. The website is now defunct.
