A Vocabulary of Senses

The video of the performance “Feelings” by Nina Simone begins with an extreme close up of her portrait. The camera’s gaze studies her every expression. She begins: Simone plays a note on the piano, articulating one word: “Feelings”, before pausing. As she continues, her voice registers a moment of doubt. Her brows furrow, albeit she continues. Whilst in performance, Simone abruptly stops. An air of uncertainty pervades the atmosphere. Within this short time of confusion, she gestures to the audience and a statement is uttered: “I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that”. The improvised conversation and the attendant statement set the mood for the rest of the performance. Her performance, untethered from the savagery of propriety, vacillates between a realisation of loss to an understanding of the capacity of “structures of feeling” to impel a (be)coming otherwise. Beginning from Nina Simone’s affective and affected declaration which beckons one to turn elsewhere, the talks programme A Vocabulary of Senses grapples with the question of method. The para-curatorial programme brings together several different positions that think with and alongside exhibition and artistic practice(s), intimations of refusal (both historical and contemporaneous), the politics of the archive and the question of love within a “changing same”. Unfolding not unlike a script and/or rehearsal toward the imminent unknown, the collective assemblage of enunciation works with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s assertion “toward a Black Feminist Poethics”.