Evading Capture
These interviews we conducted by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich with Rachel Scott, marion eames white, Ilze Wolff,Sinnamon Love. Interview production and assistance by Analise Samantha Delphine Sesay
As a part of her Cinema Residency at the Walker, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich conducted a series of interviews with Black women to reflect on and extend themes in her work. Anchored by her film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, an “anti-biopic” about the writer and anti-colonial activist from Martinique, Hunt-Ehrlich’s conversations with these women dig into questions of dreams, desire, and refusal in their work.
Rachel Scott, Designer & Founder of Diotima
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Do you feel like material is imbued with a philosophical function?
Rachel Scott
A material can be philosophical through the technique of making it or have a political meaning. In other cases, materials can have historical meaning that has formed over time.
For me, craft is super important. If something is made by hand, someone’s knowledge and also the history of that knowledge is creating precedence in an object.
I’m interested in crochet because it can’t be replicated by a machine. For me, there is a spirit and energy to something when it’s made by hand—that’s what luxury actually is.
But sometimes I do think there are historical meanings to things. For example, Harris Tweed is something I use a lot. When Jamaica and other islands in the Caribbean gained independence from England, families immigrated to the UK and would often send barrels back home with fabric for clothes. And that’s how something like a Harris Tweed would end up in Jamaica. So I’m using that material very intentionally to point to moments in history.
It’s quite subtle, but I do hope that I’m creating a kind of subversion by using these materials. Because when I use them, instead of using, for example, the Harris Tweed in a suit, I’ll deconstruct it in some way.
MHE
What’s interesting is that, rather than the colonial dictating to the subject—which is the political reality—in your clothes, with the Harris Tweed, the encounter transforms it.
RS
That’s what I’m hoping. I think that’s what I mean by the subversive move. How can you change the idea of where the value is placed?
MHE
Do you have a sense of characters in your design practice? Is there a narrative to your clothing?
RS
There is this figure that I think about a lot in different ways, and she manifests differently each season. She is a middle-class woman in the Caribbean. She’s quite proper and buttoned up in most cases, but then becomes extremely liberated in other places. And it just depends on the time of day or the time of the week that you catch her. There’s this internal tension for her to perform a set of expectations for women in society. At the same time, there are all these other levels to her. Maybe she’s come undone, I don’t know. And she changes every time.
Last season, I was thinking about the idea of the matriarch, and it was very much in response to the elections. And I was also thinking about your work, actually, and how it connects to research I’ve done. I’m always trying to find different images of women in the Caribbean across time, but it’s just really hard, nearly impossible. What I find are the same kinds of images over and over. Oftentimes it’s this strong woman, and she’s in a very proper dress with this stoic expression. So for my most recent collection, I reached out to my small community around me, and asked, “Can you send me images of your grandmother?” I ended up getting images of all sorts—from the Caribbean, from Canada, all different races. And it was just so funny because, yes, I received some of those very proper images, but others were very personal, intimate photos of a grandmother on a bed, a range of images that came from the ’80s, or the ’20s, or present day. There was just so much more complexity to them: moments where there was some unease about them or images that were super sensual.
MHE
That embodies one of my questions: what is the difference between history and memory? The thing you were looking for was invisible in the official archive, but then, when you opened it up to the personal or familial memory, there’s so much more evidence.
There’s this line I have written down in my notes for this conversation: “Ecstasy is a call to the not yet there.” I thought that was an idea that complements this interpretation of desire as radical. In the case of the object or the image, externalizing desire is what we do with form; form is making desire visual.
I wanted to talk to you about the namesake for your work, Diotima. When did you first encounter the narrative of Diotima? She’s a sex worker with this prophetic voice.
RS
In Plato’s Symposium, she’s the only female figure. She explains love to Socrates, what we understand as platonic love, I guess. But what really stuck with me is that it’s not clear if she’s real or invented. The mythology was interesting to me, and this idea of desire as something that could educate.
MHE
What are your hopes for the garments you make? What do they do for the person who wears them?
RS
In my designs, there are some things that are very covered up, and other aspects that are very open. Your body is totally covered, but you’re still completely naked. Sometimes, things are quite fitted and stretchy, but they have weight to them, and you can feel that weight move with you. Sometimes, things are very structured and tailored, and they’ll have a very strong shoulder. There’s the feeling you have of being powerful when you’re in something tailored, but there’s still room for your body. There’s volume that you wouldn’t normally find in something tailored, to allow for this fluidity within something structured. I play with what’s concealed and what’s revealed, and I think a lot about how things feel on the body, the physical sensation of it.
Being an outsider as a Black woman, I think about codes a lot. What is the code of good taste? What is the code of bad taste? What is the code of power? What is the code of overt sexuality? And I’m repositioning these things in conversation with each other in a way that I hope can change ideas of what they are.
marion eames white, Poet & Theologian
MHE
Do you have a theory or definition of desire that is useful to you?
marion eames white
I think of desire in a Deleuzian sense, so less of a formulation or conception of want of something that we lack, and more of an innate state of being that we naturally inhabit. I wonder a lot about whether that is a more helpful way of thinking about being alive, as opposed to consciousness or memory.
I think of desire as a kind of activator. Desire is always there. It’s what locomotes us from point A to point B, whether that’s collectively as a society or as individuals. It’s how we’re physiologically hardwired.
MHE
Desire can be defined in relation to absence, or wanting something that doesn’t exist yet. But in your description desire is something that is of the present.
Maybe the absence is not that it doesn’t exist; it’s the way we deny it. The inclination toward something means it’s already there. Desire is about wrestling with denial, rather than with the desire itself.
MEW
From my personal experience, I haven’t always understood my desires. They operate outside of me, so I’m not always sure why I am moving toward certain things. I think on a larger scale, we don’t always understand why we’re on certain paths. Desire isn’t always going to make sense to us in that way.
MHE
Can nature and culture be harmonious?
MEW
I learned to see and appreciate the world through existing forms and structures. All of us have. And so even when I am trying to make space for something new to unfold, even that feels a little reactionary. Maybe in a similar way to a revolutionary impulse, where there is always going to be this kind of tension in moving against, as opposed to just letting something be. That’s not bad tension.
MHE
“What locomotes us,” as you said. Is it possible to experience that untouched, or outside of, these structures that weren’t built for us Black women? Or is everything touched, and we’re in too deep?
MEW
Yeah, this is what I’m thinking about all the time, unfortunately. Firstly, I lived the early part of my life as hyper-feminine. It’s an experience that I spent a lot of work trying to figure out, even during that period of my life: what my desires were versus how other people’s desires were projected onto me. I make a serious habit of interrogating my desires, trying to figure out if what I’m feeling is, if not genuine, at least something I can understand where it’s coming from.
I see all the practices I engage with as tools as opposed to endpoints. I’m very much using structures or forms in a spirit of active discovery. I try not to put the pressure of a destination on my work, whether it’s a poem or theological research. A destination curbs the possibilities for what I might find, and it also takes the surprise out of it, which, at the end of the day, is the part you feel—the surprise.
In terms of what authenticity means for me, I can’t know what that is in advance. So I’m using all these tools, but I can’t expect any of them to actually give me the complete answer. I’m letting it inform me a little bit more every time.
MHE
So form is a facilitator then?
MEW
I think different forms can facilitate different things or enact different realizations or realities. I will even visit or consume certain types of media when I want to experience a certain type of thing, or if I crave a certain type of sadness or revelation.
MHE
Say more about sadness.
MEW
I’ve always been a very sensitive crybaby. It’s not that I enjoy crying, but I do like to let it happen, and watching sad things lets it happen really easily. When I was a kid, up through adolescence, my favorite type of media to consume was stuff that would make me cry. I loved sad stories in literature, but especially in movies and TV. On the one hand, it was a safe way to express some kind of deep internal sadness and discomfort that I didn’t understand. Having this external outlet that wasn’t related to me but still let me express my emotions, it was very easy to use.
MHE
I think it’s interesting to think of sadness or crying as a kind of ecstasy. You can perform it, but there’s a difference between performing it and the involuntary impulse, the embodied impulse to cry. And that can be a revelatory experience.
The second thing I’m thinking about is sadness and a kind of radical Black politics: there’s a tension there. So much of Black survival has been articulated through ways of coping that don’t necessarily leave a lot of space for sadness, right? It’s like we move straight through the sadness to joy, action, our relation to others, the political, the commons, to anger. That’s how we’ll deal with sadness.
But the indulgence of crying is about the needs of the individual, which are not always convenient politically.
MEW
Yeah, convenient is a great word there. I think the tension there is if maybe there’s a fear of being overwhelmed; with everything that’s happened, how could you ever stop crying? Or perhaps, within that is a distraction from the needs of the larger political goals of the collective. So yeah, tension, indeed.
MHE
It’s almost like the involuntary power of ecstasy, in this case, that crying could unlock is dangerous. It threatens stasis. But what if instead it is productive?
MEW
Maybe that’s why I like doing it so much. The small revolutionary in me just crying all the time.
MHE
You don’t know where it will take you.
MEW
Or if it’ll ever stop.
I’ve been reading a lot about nature and animals and their perspectives as we can intuit them. It’s been really transformative for my work, to push myself to think about things like desire and authenticity outside of the scale of the human being. That’s my next step, to break out of my own small human-being scale.
My new manuscript deals mostly with navigating desire and whatever is opposite of that, through different scales of life and perspectives, both human, animal, and divine.
MHE
It all sounds like you think that these authentic truths exist in spite of all these mythologies or structures that we live in.
MEW
Yeah, I think that’s what faith is, or at least for me: it is having an ongoing thread that you are forced to negotiate with again and again, regardless of context. Faith is the negotiation.
Ilze Wolff, Architect
MHE
I wanted to think about desire in terms of how we interpret space: how we build space, how we use it, and how we experience it. I thought of you immediately as someone who could speak from a position of both theory and practice.
Ilze Wolff
Desire is one of the things that really fuels everything I do. And desire really is that thing, this wanting for what we don’t actually have, which for me is liberation.
MHE
How does freedom interact with space or how a space is made?
IW
There’s a project I worked on, the Hophuis. Initially the building was financed by a mining company as a parting gift to the community that they had extracted so much from over the decades. When the mining company realized there were no more diamonds, they moved on. The building was meant to be fully funded by the company, but the architect who designed it overshot the budget. And then, lo and behold, the mining company claims it can’t afford it.
In the end, 30 years later, the building enters a complete state of ruin, during which the walls go away, the doors go away. And the actual architecture left is literally just this roof, some arches, a gesture toward an entrance. It’s still very much there, but it’s also not there in its original state. But in that state, the building becomes this open public space. It’s uncontrolled. And it operates better than what it was imagined to be. Through its ruin state, it actually indicates another form of free space. There’s no wall, there’s nothing holding anything. But at the same time, people are using it in ways that are, for me, an expression of freedom. When I saw this building, I realized that’s what we all want. We all want spaces that shelter, that hold but don’t contain us.
The conventional desire is: Okay, let’s fix this building up. Let’s get it back to where it used to be. But I’m thinking, actually the building is already where it’s supposed to be.
In the South African context, we’re living under mining, corporate paternalism, and institutional religious oppression. People were afraid of the devil, you know? They were afraid to dance because dance was seen as ungodly; this is what the missionaries told them.
MHE
One of the questions I have been asking is, can there be a harmonious relationship between culture and nature? When you say ruins or you talk about the way that these design choices were made by neglect or weather, it feels like an affirmation that this can take place formally.
I also am curious about the materials of this liberated form. Are openings in a structure how a space can be experienced as liberated or free?
IW
That’s architecture for me. We come together and we are already making space. We don’t need materiality to form a kind of architectural spatial moment. Often when there’s a consciousness around Black gathering, it is emancipatory. You think about that scene in Beloved in the woods. The clearing—that’s architectural, right? We don’t need buildings to tell us what’s nature and what’s culture. We just need our bodies.
MHE
I wonder, too, how you think about this tension between a sense of what’s desired by a collective or community, and the experiences of the individual. Sometimes the individual’s desires are in conflict, especially if an identity is marginal in the collective context. I understand that architecture probably is in part a practice of thinking about groups.
IW
With architecture, it’s a constant negotiation between the individual sensibility and the collective. And often there’s so much focus on the individual desire of the architect or the client. These buildings transcend that, they go beyond those kinds of individuals over time. We know that about space: it has legacies of generations and use over time. So one can’t focus too much on that individual moment.
MHE
Another question I’ve been asking is, what is the difference between history and memory?
IW
There’s memories of emancipatory spatial practices that are embedded in certain spaces. And I’m looking for that. I’m looking for those moments where we can be reminded we are free sometimes. You know we need to remind ourselves, right? And those memories I want to hang on to.
Sinnamon Love, Professional Dominatrix, Writer, and Advocate
MHE
I’m curious about how Black women exist within a racialized capitalist context. We have a sense of ourselves within that context and we work with that, and we can also have pleasure within that. But I’m curious what it would look like if Black women could start from scratch. What situations would be erotic to us if the propaganda didn’t always marginalize us?
Sinnamon Love
It’s really hard for Black women to divorce desire from racial capitalism because so much of our desire has been historically sold, in terms of our bodies, and our desire has been squashed as a form of protection from racial and sexual violence. I think a lot about how we are taught as children mixed messaging around both abstinence and the value that’s placed on our bodies and our sexuality with partnership. Your sexual behavior as a girl is pathologized—“She’s fast.” How do we come into the fullness of who we are if no one has ever given us permission to be who we are?
Something that I’ve been thinking about for myself is, how do I claim the things that are ultimately for me in life, in work, in my ambitions, if I’ve never been given permission to have desire, if my needs have always been suppressed as something that takes a back burner to the collective good?
One of the earliest places where I remember not being given permission to have desire was wanting to be a writer and being told, “It’s nice that you can write, but you have to have something to fall back on.” And so at this stage, at this big age, I’m still trying to unlearn the harm that was done around the permission I needed to do the thing that was most important to me.
MHE
I work with actors a lot in my work, and I really respect what actors and performers do. When you’re directing actors in narrative filmmaking, the work or the thing you cultivate or rehearse could be completely different from the text of the performance. You are connecting a visceral or sensory experience or memory to a scripted scene. So I’m curious how you use performance in your work. Does performing for the benefit of someone else’s desire allow you to understand better what is truly, authentically your own?
SL
There’s always this argument that sex workers have sex with people they wouldn’t normally have sex with, and that money blurs consent. That’s the anti-sex-work argument. For me, I was always able to tap into something about the person so that I was able to be present, so that I was not disconnected from the act. On camera, because consent and autonomy is at the core of that work, the work itself helped me to shore up my boundaries around sex in general.
There’s a transition that I go through when I’m performing desire, and part of that is the getting ready, putting on my makeup, doing my hair. It helps me to transition from mother and grandmother and activist and caregiver to this sexual being. That was always a part of how I transition from one part of my life to the other.
MHE
What I hear you saying is that you find a way to believe it.
SL
Yeah, and it’s very similar to method actors in any film. When I look back at my career, it’s like the character I played was myself. I got into the business because of the money as a young, divorced single mom, but also I was actively exploring my sexuality. I often don’t think of myself as having fantasies because anything that I’ve ever thought I might want to experience, I had the permission to experience it. Being able to have that kind of reclamation of my survivorship, of my desire outside of religious dogma, allowed me to know the fullness of myself without constraints.
MHE
It sounds like what actors say about why they do what they do: to get to experience all these registers of life, all these spectrums of human behavior, to not be limited to circumstance.
On film, there’s the experience of the performance, but then it gets edited. There’s the image of yourself. Have you watched yourself? How do you understand yourself in relationship to that image?
SL
That also has shifted with time and age and understanding of racial capitalism. I’ve begun archiving my career now at Northeastern University. When I go back and look at these early images of me from 1993 or 1994, they were produced by cis-het white men who had their own idea of what Blackness, or Black sexuality, looked like—images of me outside on a street by a car, you know what I mean? Or in the things that I would be put into, the clothes I would wear that placed me in a particular type of sexual labor that may not necessarily have been true to my story and my circumstances.
There was a point when I rebranded my image because I saw a photo of me from my first Hustler magazine shoot that had been sold to a film. It appeared in the movie Freeway with Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, a Red Riding Hood adaptation where Witherspoon plays a sex worker and Sutherland plays a serial killer that’s targeting teenage runaways on the freeway. There’s this scene in the movie where they cut the lock on a shed and all this child sexual exploitation material falls out, including this giant picture of me that came floating out of the shed. I had no idea my image had been sold. It was shocking and disturbing to see my image and the way that I was presenting on camera being used that way. After that, I started to seek out glamour photographers. I was able to produce images of myself looking like what I knew I could look like.
One of the complaints we as performers often have is the way that a film can be a great film, great performance, and even with no problematic racialized themes, yet when the movie comes out it’s titled Ghetto Sisters Number 12.
I preferred being an in-person sex workeron so many levels, not just because of the money versus the exposure, but also the control over what I’m willing to do, how I want to be perceived in the world. Because of images on film, people think that I’m five-foot-eight and that my body proportions are much bigger than they actually are. When they meet me in person, they’re like, “I thought you were so tall.” And I’m like, “I’m literally five-two.” But because of how I’m presented on camera with the fish-eye lenses and close-ups, there’s a misrepresentation of who I am that’s created in the viewer’s mind.
MHE
What I’ve been hearing you say is that, even in a performance of desire, there is space for the authentic, but the image is divorced from the spiritual, and it can’t be protected from a distortion through capitalism.
SL
As you were talking, I was thinking about a woman who reached out to me a couple years ago. She was saying that she first came across a movie that I did when she was in her late teens. She had experienced sexual violence, and through the movie and the way that I perform authenticity in my work, it allowed her to see herself. I still have a very natural-looking body and, because of that image, she saw herself in me, and it allowed her to unlock a type of ownership of her body and her sexuality that she didn’t have because of the sexual assaults. I think that’s where pornography has definitely become sex education, and in a way it was never intended for. And while I have concerns about access, I also understand that that access has always been the case. And I think that allows people to see themselves and, in some cases, to find a new possibility.
MHE
It’s worth the risk.▪︎
marion eames white is a Black, trans poet from New York whose writing combines translation theory with biblical genealogy to subvert hegemonic Western traditions.
Rachel Scott is a Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based designer who is the founder and creative director of Diotima, a brand that brings Jamaican/Afro-Caribbean style into fashion.
Ilze Wolff is a South African author and architect who co-directs Wolff Architects, a practice concerned with an architecture of consequence. Their built work includes public infrastructure projects, cultural educational buildings, exhibition architecture, and urban interventions of repair and restoration
Sinnamon Love is an actor and director, professional Dominatrix, writer, and advocate.
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich makes films concerned with the inner worlds of Black women.
Analise Samantha Delphine Sesay is a Sierra Leonean-American producer and artist working across print, film, and sound.
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