Complaint, complicity and the residual trauma of institutional harm
In March's newsletter, I reflect on my experiences of institutional harm, how I am processing the trauma and the contradictory bind of wanting to publicly complain while being prevented from doing so.
I have been circling how to write this month’s newsletter. Thoughts swilling around my mind refusing to land. A half-baked idea, lodged at the back of my throat. Then on a Friday night around 1am, just as I am going to bed, sentences start to press on me. In spite of my desire to follow my own advice, carve out space in the weekend for rest, I find myself on a Saturday with the faint buzz of anxiety beneath my skin and the outline of words which refuse to leave me. So I’ve decided to resist rest, in favour of trying to get the words down.
My reasons for struggling with this month’s newsletter aren’t due to writer’s block, or a lack of things to say. Instead, I am caught somewhere in the web of the inability to articulate that which I find difficult. That difficulty is something I became re-acquainted with when I listened back to episode two of “Collective Imaginings” with my friend Jemma Desai, and could hear a catch in my throat, my voice coated with unresolved emotion. I noticed it again, when a few weeks ago an old workplace re-shared the podcast series on their social media calling it ‘timely’. Somewhere between a fleeting rage, and re-surfacing trauma, sat a disbelief, a potential misremembering of my time there which often comes hand-in-hand with institutional gaslighting. Is that not the same workplace that made me irreversibly ill? Which exacerbated and flared-up a disability I have likely had for most my life – though often nameless, often (and still in part) undiagnosed. A job I was signed off from for a total of around two months in the final half a year of working there, and after handing in my termination, for the duration of my notice period.
I think of the wonderful GP I had at the time, attached to a flat I had to leave due to an inability to pay my rent, who told me that mental health and physical health should be treated the same, who handed me the sick note with a recommendation that I be put on leave and gifted me a degree of respite I could not find elsewhere. I think of my mum and partner, the former who I eventually moved back in with, and both of whom interchangeably act as my carer at the points when I have been too unwell to look after myself over the last couple of years. I think of Lighthouse, who commissioned “Collective Imaginings”, and their compassionate team who have learnt and adapted around my access needs continually, and held a space for me to be both sick and creating in tandem.
The reason this month’s newsletter has been hard to write is because it’s near impossible to find the words for that which you cannot name. Following that first traumatising work experience, last summer in the height of the BLM uprisings I started a curatorial role at a leading UK institution, before leaving after only a couple of months as a result of institutional racism which flared-up my impairment in a way that still has a residual impact. There is no record that I ever worked for said institution – we never got to the stage of publicly announcing my appointment and thus there is no documentation that I was ever on their payroll. In both instances, as is so routinely common practice in arts institutions, I am contractually prohibited from publicly disclosing anything that occurred during my employment.
When I left the second post, I had the conflicting knowledge that I wanted to share my experience so as to prevent other people from having to go through the same oppressive forces I had, whilst simultaneously finding that all the fight had left my body. I was bedbound, my panic disorder exacerbated to the point where I was regularly having panic attacks which could last for much of the day. In the weekly sessions with my therapist all I could do was sit on a video call and emit an involuntary guttural cry.
I found respite in private conversations with friends, with people who had been through similar experiences, who generously and carefully guided me through how to leave, how to reconnect with myself. I slowly sat with the research of Jemma Desai and Sara Ahmed, finding refuge in their words. Ahmed’s blogpost “Why Complain?” illuminated the internal conflict I was experiencing.
‘The point of a complaint can be to intervene in the reproduction of something. […] If you complain because a culture is being reproduced you complain in order to stop that culture from being reproduced. A complaint can come out of a sense that the culture will be reproduced unless you do what you can to try and stop it.’
Simultaneously, Ahmed has written extensively on what we lose when we complain. About the potential hindrances and barriers which prevent so many of us from coming forward. Whether these are contractual clauses, a fear of being black-listed or losing future work, or quite simply that there is no fight left in you, preoccupied with the solitary processing of trauma and unable to risk anything further. In the words of Ahmed, ‘There is no doubt: complaint is made costly.’ Yet, in "Why Complain?” Ahmed also explores the cost of not complaining, stating, ‘the costs of not complaining can be the same costs as the costs of having to put up with what makes it difficult to do your work.’
The post my old workplace re-shared a few weeks ago included an audio clip from the opening of “Collective Imaginings” in which I say ‘as cultural workers we are routinely bound and compromised in what we can share publicly. Although in this series, I was given free creative control - a rare thing - many of us are still bound by contractual clauses. Even as I make a series about our embodied experiences of harm, I cannot explicitly name the beast I refer to.’ It still amazes me how wantonly an institution can publicly condone harmful practices, while internally upholding those very practices. The dissonance between the public/private structuring of institutions has been brilliantly and extensively written about by the likes of Morgan Quaintance and The White Pube (hyperlinks out to relevant texts included).
Yet, I am also complicit. Complicit in my silence and failure to publicly share my experiences of harm. Complicit in still working for institutions, while simultaneously critiquing their structures. Just yesterday, I accepted freelance work from an institution I feel very sticky about, because the fee was too good to pass up (I then experienced a flare-up in anxiety, and pulled out of the project two days after writing this, but the internal conflict definitely still stands). As a sick person, I now weigh up work opportunities by the bar of will this work make me sick-er vs. will this work alleviate future financial pressure and instability which will make me sick-er. The reality is, as a freelancer I maintain some degree of distance from internal institutional practices, while my fluctuating workload can make it hard to turn down work. I have my limits, we all do, but often I feel mine get blurred; that I can intellectually oppose who an organisation are in the same breath that I receive a paycheck from them.
But what happens when we unknowingly enter an institution, before being slowly made aware of the full violence of their internal structuring? When we are then unable to share what we have learnt? How do we protect each other from repeatedly entering into that same culture of violence? Sometimes I think we should just burn it all down and start again, redistribute the money directly to communities and artists. In the words of Desai:
‘I am no longer grateful.
I no longer believe in reform.
I call for abolition.’
Sometimes, I hope for collective support systems where we can protect one another, and create pressure for harmful, violent, racist and ableist practices to be opposed and dismantled. I don’t know that I believe in reform, but I want to believe in community run groups and unions where we – in the words of Desai again - ‘help each other to ask for more’. Perhaps, touching on some of the union models outlined by Industria, in their publication last June (see a PDF version here). Unions which centre the needs of BIPOC and disabled workers, which demand fair pay alongside equitable, fair working practices, and collectively refuse to give labour to any workplace not meeting these standards. All I know is in the last few years, at the points where I’ve wanted to scream out – to expose the hypocrisy of institutions who claim to be one thing, while doing the exact opposite – I’ve found there is nowhere to go. Except into the private and selective conversations of liberatory gossip and hushed tones. Or in the case of this newsletter, breadcrumbs, nameless allusions, and a paper trail so slight, you might just miss it.
A few days after originally writing this post, I encountered another whispering of institutional harm. Nowhere feels safe. No one seems to be holding these publicly funded institutions to a standard, ensuring the safeguarding of artists and art workers. Everytime I begin working somewhere, I learn of new examples of institutional harm. I am reaching the point of once again feeling there is nowhere safe to go. Of wanting to take my time and labour and put it into something that doesn’t feel so laden with rot. I’m left wondering how to make ends meet as a sick person in a strained economy, within a state which fails to condone violent, oppressive structures. How can we be free?
P.S. I said these newsletters would be short, I think I probably lied.
A photo I took at a gallery in 2019, which started me thinking about the ways we open and close doors in the arts. N.B. this is not a breadcrumb, I just couldn’t think of a photo to include.
[ID: Photo of the door of a gallery, reading ‘AMP’ in large black font on a white background. The door is held open by a gallon water-bottle, on to a light summers day. A dog stands directly outside looking in, with their owners feet visible in a dress and sandles.]
February updates
💫 The final two episodes of “Collective Imaginings” are now available to listen back to. In episode two I speak to Jemma Desai about our experiences of navigating hostile and inhospitable institutions, and ways we have found to protect our imagination and resist capitalist productivity. In episode three I speak to Deborah Joyce Holman and Rabz Lansiquot about collectivising, care and the limits of representation.
💫 I wrote an article close to my heart, on the organisations and art workers building new ecosystems in the arts, with interviews from Ronan Mckenzie of HOME, Lucy Lopez and Alba Colomo of la Sala and Lindsey Mendick and Guy Oliver of Quench.
💫 I contributed some thoughts to Rea McNamara’s piece for HyperAllergic on Boundary setting (in some very good company).
💫 From 18 January – 5 April 2021 I am one of four studio residency artists at Gasworks. I will be spending the time working on an autoethnographic film about my late father, around absence and heritage (more on that in the coming months). More info on my residency here.
My slow list of recommendations 🐌
My not-so-up-to-date list of things I’ve been listening to, reading and watching, for you to peruse at your own pace.
The podcast edition
💫 The ever-insightful Lola Olufemi talking abolition, activism and her book Feminism, Interrpupted (hard recommend to-read) on Surviving Society podcast. Listen here.
💫 I’ve been enjoying listening to Russell Tovey and Robert Diament interviewing artists on “Talk Art”, particularly the episodes with Lindsey Mendick and Ronan Mckenzie and Joy Yamusangie.
💫 Bella Milroy considering mobility shops, aids and devices in the three-part series “MOB-SHOP” (originally produced as part of Milroy’s The White Pube online residency). Episode one with wonderful Claudia Rose Walder here.
💫 Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck’s series unpacking issues around work, care and parenthood, '“True Currency: About Feminist Economics”. Epiosde one here.
💫 Nwando Ebizie’s 5-part series reimagining care and healing through art, health and science “For All I Care” (thanks for the recommendation Olivia). Episode one with one of my favourite thinkers, Johanna Hedva here.
💫 Artist Shannon Finnegan – whose series of museum benches, “Do you want us to sit here or not” compelling us to sit down and consider rest in public spaces, I can’t stop thinking about – on “Crip Times” podcast. Listen here.
💫 The White Pube’s podcast, particularly this episode on funding, where Zarina and Gabrielle continue their work demystifying the fundraising process for artists (hello, their brilliant successful funding application library).
See you next time…
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Jamila Prowse seeks to interrogate and dismantle the colonialist, racist and ableist structuring of the art sector through art making, writing, and collective organising. Her practice is engaged in collaborating with art workers, as an antithetical method to the alienation of being a BIPOC working within, alongside and adjacent to white institutional settings. To find out more about Jamila’s work visit her website.