Derek Anthony Holland

Your daily practice of documenting small moments—reading, commuting, observing—feels almost ethnographic. How do you decide what moments become material for art?

DEREK ANTHONY HOLLAND: I certainly can see it as ethnographic at times, in that I'm observing the world around me and my response is to document in some fashion: text, video, audio recording, etc. But I don't think I enter into it with a directive or goal as an ethnographer typically would. Usually, things are serendipitously happening around me that register as either uncanny or uncannily mundane, and I (or the world around me) have conditioned myself to document it. I exist in a time that has both reveled in being able to document live and has begun to question and recoil against that. As a product of that, I reflect and attempt to (re)contextualize whatever I document.

So, the short answer is it depends. I typically will start with identifying a material or begin accumulating something intentionally and revisit it later—typically, I'll form a project idea around what's being accumulated and go from there. In contrast, I will develop an idea or a question first and begin to investigate it through both ongoing projects and/or develop something new out of the topics of interest. Two questions have lingered with me since my grad school experience that continue to drive me—"What is essential to your practice?" and "Do you make work for the white people?" Both were posed to me by professors in my program and I feel they address really vast possibilities in my practice. Lose Your Discipline developed out of the first, while the latter has driven me further into process as theory.

A goal in my practice is not to waste any material (tangible or intangible). So, in terms of deciding what moments become material, this is more a matter of time rather than a matter of necessity. I think over time the moments reveal themselves as either something that stands alone to articulate a point or that works with others to do the same as a group.

You work across a range of media: photography, installation, sculpture, performance. What drives your choice of medium for a given idea?

DAH: Necessity. Particularly, depending on if there is already an idea or question(s) developed, that will lead me to explore new materials. Spectacle of Aura (2021) required me to learn about woodworking and carpentry. I built the bedframe that the painting is installed with because it felt required for the subject matter of the work. This piece represents the attempts at rest or peace from an incessantly surveilled figure. The work wants to rest, to be left alone, but it certainly cannot. It wasn't something to be stretched and/or hung from the wall; it was to be positioned in a way that presupposed viewers' desire to surveil and/or interrogate. A key component of the work was both attempt and failure; both a comment on agency and surveillance through form and material.

Conversely, MOB [Moments of Blackness] became a film because the source data was already moving image/audiovisual—not to say I couldn't or wouldn't translate that to a different medium—but the audio and visual components were really potent to me as they were, and what was required there was to edit more so than transpose onto another medium. I had begun documenting the world around me with the intention not to share everything on social media but to revisit and reflect on those moments later privately. While in school, I wanted to take advantage of resources I'd never had access to before, like film and editing equipment, as well as people who could teach me how to use them, so I did there.

You ask, "Who are you to yourself and to others?" How has your understanding of your own identity evolved through your practice?

DAH: Potentially to a fault, or because I see myself as communal, I built an idea of myself in relation to others and categories I was born into. Now, my practice is somewhat focused on the criticism of that idea. I know often people see me in the world and assume my manhood for me, and I question that in myself and the gaze that scaffolds this onto me. I think Black Feminist, afropessimist, and critical theorist writings influenced me a lot here in shaping ideas I want to explore as critic and student.

I wasn't much of a reader, unless it was public health research, until 2020, and then I dove into the most accessible Black authors I could find to challenge myself with beginning the seemingly daunting task of "doing the required reading," which a lot of people in my sphere of the internet were criticized for not having done when commenting on police violence and uprisings of 2020. I started with a Google doc floating around the digital space. In it, there were things like the Combahee River Collective Statement, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Black Feminist Thought, Sister Outsider, Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe, Scenes of Subjection, or at least these were the things I was first drawn to with my background. Public health research told me to question the lack of Black femme and trans visibility in spaces, to look to the margins. My personal predisposition has always been to look for an alternative to the norm and furthermore to question the norm itself. I was and still am unsure of who I am in some ways, and these introductory texts shed light onto what's made the world around me so eerily questionable. This also is likely a reason I began documenting in the ways I do, to leave a trail of things I've done and thoughts I've had, and that is, in a way, maybe who I am—my identity.

Through review of these documentations, I see where I am the same and where I'm different. I'm also quite transparent about it at times because I believe it's okay for people to change and for others to see it happen. Sometimes I feel like it's one of my reasons to be privileged enough to be called an "artist."

Your work explores constructed identities across gender, race, and ability. How do you approach the ethics of representation when working with those deeply personal and collective themes?

DAH: I start from this idea of a site of "self," or selfhood, and the multitudes of geographies I have experienced. My entry into geographies was through a lecture and writing's of Ruth Wilson Gilmore in 2020. Golden Gulag came up a lot when I wanted to understand more about prison abolition. Along with that reading, maroonages and maroon geographies came up. All these different types of landscapes were introduced to me that I'd never thought about, and Dr. Joy James, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter were then brought into my fold, and how I looked at representation specifically in art just was a little decimated(?). I really didn't—and maybe still don't—understand this, but it feels aligned with me now. I grew really uncomfortable and really silent regarding giving my opinions about almost anything on the internet or otherwise, unless with very close friends—speaking or commenting on things that weren't very directly concerning or related to me in terms of politics. So I focused on myself as much as possible in private. I explored painting with a new process and new material. A member of my program told me about some doors thrown in the trash, and a series of doors found and ready-made, one titled Self, got created as case studies. It really challenged me to question figuration and representation through tactile actions. For several reasons, I never really thought about a self-portrait as representation (in the art canonical sense), and moreover never thought about the political or ethical implications of this being deemed "art," publicly shown and read (figuratively) by others. Me, this Black, queer, able-bodied body represented as painting. I was stuck wondering how heavily implicating this could be for my character and for the entire categories placed onto me (something I've now read and heard numerous Black artists have wrestled with differently). That's something I never wrestled with under the title of health researcher; the data spoke for you, as an "objective scientist," you weren't implicated in the conclusions—they simply were facts. I see it as something deeply tied to one's ethics now, but not in the same way at the time. I don't believe in that objectivity today, and building the practice I have now reified that belief in me.

Currently, I feel my body is tied to this practice as an instrument or tool, similar to the camera or paintbrush, and in concert with different types of research techniques, makes this work generalizable or applicable to a broader collective. I think in pushing back to empirical methods, my practice seeks to deploy speculative method(s) for scientific inquiry with care, honor, and respect (as much as I am capable of), and this is how I attempt to confront ethical considerations. My body is both at the beckoning of the world and my "self." I can be taken by the state or another in many questionable ways: arrested, forced to labor, beaten, killed, etc., and with the same body, I am able to paint a portrait. That sort of dichotomy is something I seek to amplify in my work at times.

You reference cultural thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jack Whitten. What kind of inheritance have they offered you, and how do you engage with their influence in your own way?

DAH: So much. I think of these names specifically so often in my reading and daily life. I think about Zora Neale Hurston carrying around a 16mm camera through the South with her notebooks. I think of Du Bois presenting his data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition and surveying the streets of Philadelphia my ancestors walked. I think of Jack Whitten's developer as an artifact of himself. I think of Saidiya Hartman traversing Ghana as a researcher grappling with questions Du Bois may have grappled with when living his last years there.

I wonder often, and I wander often, with so many of my references. I wandered in Blue Whale, a.k.a. #12 (from the Whales Fucking series), by Mary Lovelace O'Neal the first time I saw it in person. It was brand new to me in 2021, though made years before I was born in the '80s. They all offer me a map, hints, clues, answers, questions, comfort, discomfort; time through the eyes, hands, minds, and bodies of another that I could never attempt to know without them making their work. They offer a place to begin and a place to end. They offer themselves and the others around them who influenced their practices. There is so much work that has already been done by these artists and others that makes my attempts at production simultaneously more streamlined and overbearing. I've always felt that finding another artist or researcher that's already done or thought of something for me was a blessing or good fortune, and with that I could move on to the next step (whatever that may be). I can visit and cite their ideas, their work, and build from there. That's how I engage with them and any others I'm introduced to: as reference, collaborator, teacher, citation, elder.

What do you want to pass on—through your art, your research, or your way of seeing the world?

DAH: Ways of knowing and evidence of being. I mean that I want my work to exist as a record of the past and present for others to use as a reference. While also recognizing my work could be destroyed or unpreserved and only exist here, now, and in memory. The objects themselves, without metaphor or context, imbue information, and that might be fruitful or generative for anyone who encounters it. You see embodiment and flesh, but beyond that: questions about the use of the body, the body's meaning and connotations, the deployment of the body, labor, and its connotations. I want to pass on an inquisitive spirit and tools to investigate those questions. I see my work as preservation of others' knowledge and work, particularly with works like Lose Your Discipline. So, I want those texts to be passed on as well.

In respect to the current political landscape, the books I'm choosing to work with now are less than twenty years old because I feel these texts should be cared for and tended to now, as older texts already have been. I also think these texts allow for new explorations of preservation—ergo, various forms and presentations a tarp can exist versus a book sealed in a private section of an archive.

I said earlier I see myself in relation to others, and that is an important perspective to carry on to another time. This era feels increasingly individualized and isolating, and through my work, I hope to counter those forces. I have felt so much pressure on the "me," when there is no "me" without the "other." "We/I" is a poetic gesture, and it is literal for me. There is no "I" without "we," or vice versa; through my work, I consistently focus on speaking to another through gestures, and I would want that conversational, communal effort to persist with my work after I am gone.