Live Art as Research
My research is a decolonial method that refuses the finished object and dismantles colonial aesthetics.
My right to opacity and fugitivity was being denied. I realised through this denied access how the PhD and my own humanity were in conflict and how much, even at the PhD level, education was limited by colonial expectations and Rankean hierarchies and colonial technologies. It is not writing that is inherently colonial, but the right to speak in one’s language being denied is. I communicate through live art. I won’t be adhering to photographs to serve as “evidence”, just as a pinned butterfly only serves for display. When the knowledge/s is made through encounter.
My question is: can knowledge be rethought as moving, in constant motion, unbound? Or does the institution deny another way of thinking? Or, more precisely, does it deny my way of thinking, a neurodivergent, working-class woman?
My refusal to recentralise whiteness with photography is a methodological resistance to colonial logics.
I had to give myself that right.