Steffani Jemison

Cindy Sissokho [CS]: The project Recitatif has several chapters, and I feel that there needs to be a legacy to each of them, to the conversations that you are allowing through them and importantly the language in them too. It is so key, and we don’t explore language enough, I feel. We don’t necessarily have that collective movement of rethinking utopian languages historically, or envisioning them in the future by asking: where do we position ourselves in relation to language?

As a starting point, could you tell us about Recitatif?

Steffani Jemison [SJ]: I was thinking it might be nice to describe the work by describing how I got into it. Lately I’ve been thinking that the invitation to point to the origin of a work can be misleading; because that work doesn’t come out of nowhere. Some piece of it was always already present, already incubating, before it begins to evolve into a form that is more visible.

And so, with that in mind, I’ll say that Recitatif emerged from several disparate (but related) threads in my practice. On the one hand, much of my research about private and public language is influenced by my study of Nat Turner and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Nat was enslaved in what was called Virginia. In the late 1820s, he witnessed a series of divine signals that a revolution was near and that he was destined to lead his people toward liberation. He described those signals as written in public space, in leaves and on trees.

I’ve thought about this story and have worked with it in a lot of different ways in my practice. In particular, I return often to the observation that the signs Turner experienced were written in public, but using a script that was really legible only to him. In what language was this writing? More importantly, what does it mean to have a language that is private and public at the same time? One of the key signals for Turner was actually the phases of the moon. There was a lunar eclipse that he saw as a signal that was not just revealed to him, but potentially to every slave who saw it at the time. This notion of a writing that is shared, a code hidden in plain sight that can be public and private, is always on my mind.

I have also thought about how, inside and outside the US, perhaps in relation to new experiences of migration and colonization, new forms of intercultural contact, new intelligence and military requirements, new forms of nationalism that coalesced around shared language, writers and thinkers in the early- and mid-nineteenth century conceived ambitious, even utopian, ways of thinking about how people might communicate privately and publicly at the same time.

Because of this interest in codes and shorthand and notation, and also because I am a proudly awful musician, I have also thought a lot about the origin of the system that we use to assign syllables to pitches, to musical notes, and why it is that these particular notes have these labels, how that system is used, and what it would mean to rewrite it or rethink it. I’ve thought about how rigid that system is and how much musical material, how many of our musical utterances, can’t be constrained within it.

Around the time that this research bubbled to the surface, I was traveling a lot. I was living in New York, teaching in Massachusetts, and preparing for exhibitions in Seattle and Bordeaux and Paris and Nottingham. I was thinking about the question, what is it that institutions really want from traveling artists? It feels like, on the one hand, what they want is for the artist’s body to contain everything that’s needed for the work to unfold. There’s a way in which the artist’s body becomes an avatar for the neutral space of the work of art—like it can go anywhere, it can do anything, and it can communicate wherever, it’s consistent and reliable and recognizable wherever it moves. At the same time, institutions are really attached to the idea that their space is different and must be engaged uniquely. This contradiction, I often find, plays out in weird ways in arguments about the nature of—or the limits of—the site-specificity of a presentation.

These conversations can be particularly strange for me, a Black American artist whose work is so rooted in the history of Black American experience, who often works outside of the US, in contexts where people are very quick to say, “actually, we’re not the US. Our legacy of racism is very different, or the history of colonization played itself out very differently here. It has nothing to do with chattel slavery.” So all of this thinking about borders was really on my mind.

I learned about the work of French composer François Sudre and his ambition to create a utopian language—perhaps a highly efficient musical military code for France, or even a universal second language for Europe. In the language he invented, Solresol, each word is composed of a sequence of pitches, a little melody. Solresol can also be communicated through touch—if you assign a part of the body to each of the seven units—or vision, using the colors of the rainbow. I was interested in the ambition of Sudre’s project, but also its inevitable failure. I say inevitable because I don’t know that any artificially constructed language ever has ever succeeded in being adopted? The closest might be languages that are artificially preserved and forced upon citizens, often backed by the coercive force of the state.

I was thinking about Sudre’s dream of communication across borders and how connected it is to a fantasy of the artwork that is endlessly portable that can move across borders, and how both of these intersect with the demand for the artist or art worker, the freelancer, to travel. I was thinking about how the possibilities and failures that were built into Solresol might offer lessons for both the possibilities and failures of this dream of the “freedom” of this particular kind of portable artwork or object or freelance worker.

So I conceived this body of work, Recitatif, that uses Sudre’s Solresol as a musical and linguistic vocabulary, that involves a kind of communication that is public and private, that could be created as installation or as a live exchange among musicians, that would always be renewed for each site, that might require institutions to perform some legwork to find and support local performers who could collaborate with me, that would make it possible for me to play with some longstanding interests in translation and irreducibility and quiet.

CS: Just going back to one of the points you’ve made, I’d like to talk about the format and this idea of the borderless artist and the resonance—because resonance is probably the precise word to talk about—when looking at the performances that you make and also the interpretations that you make through your work. How do we actually understand the kind of resonances that you’re making, whether you’re in France, in the US, anywhere and creating a collaboration with an audience?

I am thinking of the receiver. I was personally so emotional every time I experienced Recitatif. Within Recitatif, what is the kind of responsibility that you are giving or asking for from the viewer and the receiver when experiencing the performance? Could you talk about the format and the choice of the formats, in relation to language, the repetition of words, the repetition of notes, and how that repetition and this contradiction happens visually—the performance and music sheet—and also audibly?

SJ: When I began to work with Solresol, I was particularly interested in the ways that it can be pushed and teased and squeezed beyond its original limits. The first piece in this body of work was a sound installation created for MASS MoCA called What if we need new words [which is featured on this page]. To make it, I worked with two vocalists and a cellist to interpret a score that played with the idiosyncrasies of Solresol as a vocabulary. For example, I experimented with translating specific quotations and text into Solresol, including texts that described the relationship between images, objects, music, and language.

After making that first installation, which was nearly an hour long, I began to create live musical works that use the Solresol vocabulary. The performances at Nottingham Contemporary—where we met, Cindy—were the first of these. The performances are very intimate: it’s me in a musical dialogue with someone else. And so the audience experiences the work as a witness, which is important. I like the audience to think about the things they understand and also what they don’t understand. The work is invitational in the sense that it sounds beautiful and interesting and clearly there’s something musical happening, but there’s also a limit to what a witness can really understand.

Besides Nottingham, I have presented Recitatif works in Kalamazoo, San Francisco, and Paris. I work with Black vocalists and instrumentalists to interpret notated scores that are unique for each site. Sometimes it’s easy to find a performer, and other times, institutions feel challenged by my demand that they do so. The structure of the work requires an (incredibly modest) institutional investment in an artist in the community. These performers are often, but not always, people that the institution hasn’t worked with previously. The work forces the institution to make that connection, do that research, make that kind of financial commitment. And it also creates an avenue for me to create a connection with someone who is living and working in the place where I’m often just traveling through.

The nature of each performance varies a little bit, depending on the interests, skills, and background of each performer. Do they read music? Do they not read music? Can they play by ear or is that difficult for them? Often there’s a sort of dialogue or repetition, as in “So Much Things to Say,” the version that was performed by me and Harleighblu at Nottingham Contemporary. Other times, I’m prompting the performer with language spoken in English, and they follow with an interpretation of the notated Soresol translation. My exchanges with performers are often very quiet. The work is intimate, unfolding in public between the performer and myself.

CS: Within the work itself you use really strong, heavyweight words, like power and freedom. So that’s what I was referring to—the responsibility of the viewer to think about and just welcome those words. And to think about them within the system that is a musically utopian language in relation to their current realities every day. It is heavy.

SJ: Yes, it is. And often in live versions I play a drone that makes the experience even heavier, haha.

I write a new score that serves as the foundation for each iteration of the work. The starting point of the score is usually a Solresol translation of some English language text that I’m thinking about, and those are really varied. For example, for the work presented in Paris, it was a biblical text. I played with slight variations in different English language translations of this biblical text. That version of the work was slow and very repetitive.

The two works that I made in Nottingham both played textually with the dynamic between publicness and quiet. I had been reading the work of Kevin Quashie, who writes about what it means for Black artists to decline to be expressive. The score that I performed with saxophonist Marcus Joseph is derived from the Smokey Robinson song “Quiet Storm,” which inaugurated a radio genre in the US that involves silky smooth R&B—the “storm” in question is romantic, first and foremost. The other score that I performed with Harleighblu derives from a translation of the Lauryn Hill song “So Much Things to Say,” which describes this experience of being constrained from speaking to a beloved because you have so much to say, you can’t even get it out. It was fun to use the work to think through these contemporary cultural expressions of speech and withholding.

CS: Through your work and through Recitatif, what is the relationship of speech and the body? Rethinking about what you have just mentioned about the power of words in themselves, but also the power of words within the institutions and in terms of the people that you choose to work with.

SJ: The relationship between language and writing and the body is one that I return to again and again in my work in a lot of different forms. I can mention a few ways that I’ve been thinking about it recently... Language is always embodied in the sense that the medium of language is our minds, and our minds physically are parts of our bodies. If the medium of language is the mind, then language is irretrievably bound up with the possibilities and limitations of our physical selves and what we can understand and know. Speaking, reading, and writing are time-bound activities that are often accompanied by physical movements—the movement of our eyes—and internal movements and feelings and changes and shifts.

I recently read an essay by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou in which she describes the impossibility of cognition outside of language; in that way, language is a prison, she observes. She describes the etymological relationship between the word “concept” and the notion of captivity or capture. That tension between the concept, which we think of as immaterial, and the experience of capture or captivity, which is physical, adds another dimension to the way that I think about the always embodied experience of language.

You know, even as you and I talk over Zoom—I keep saying things again and again and repeating and rewriting and revising as I speak, and I stutter, and I feel like words are forsaking me—it’s a very physical experience, isn’t it? Getting frustrated. Being tongue tied. I’m also thinking about the word fluency, which I think is connected etymologically to the physical flow of water, as down a stream.

I remember as a student, Roland Barthes’s essay “The Grain of the Voice” was influential for me—the idea that the signal is only ever legible through friction. And that friction is the body. Sometimes we use the words “signal” and “noise” to describe communication and that which impedes communication. But of course, they actually are co-produced. There is no one without the other. Or the idea that there is one without the other is a fantasy. It’s the same kind of desire that incentivizes people like François Sudre to create a utopian language—the desire for an uncorrupted method of communication.

CS: The use of the word uncorrupted is quite interesting. This makes me think about the use of language in itself, in the constructive deconstructing and dismantling of it on an everyday basis, and also the legacy that we have today—just expressing and reusing language and how loaded this is.

I’m also wondering about the choice of using the English language in your work. Were you ever thinking of exploring other languages to kind of blur the lines of understanding, even for yourself, in a more automatic way?

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about this idea of mother tongue, you know, speaking and thinking about “we have only one language however it isn’t mine.” Stemming from this quote from Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism and the Others (1996), I’m thinking about the idea of performance through a language that isn’t yours, but a language that at the end of the day determines you. And a language that is the very first one that you use in order to express yourself, to play with, to subvert, to create a space of possibilities for alternative languages, for other ways to express yourself.

SJ: What an interesting question! It’s funny, even though I often make work about language, it’s rare that English writing or words actually make an appearance. I guess The Meaning of Various Photographs to Tyrand Needham (2010–2011) is about the verbal description, in English, of photographs. But more often, I use symbols and images that evoke the possibility of language or writing while rejecting the actual experience of understanding, for the viewer/spectator and for me as the maker. I often work with material that I myself do not or cannot understand. In that sense, I often work in a language that isn’t “mine.” And if we use “language” more broadly to refer to a vocabulary or system… well, in a lot of ways, writing itself is my creative “mother tongue,” my first form, even as I have often restricted myself from using writing in my work. The form that feels closest to me and easiest for me is one that I have, for the most part, refused to rely on.

CS: And you have a project about writing itself.

SJ: I do! Several. But until recently, I very rarely wrote for publication. In the last year or two, that has begun to shift though. I’m working on a novella right now. Also, the most recent videos I made, Toss and Figure 8 (both 2021), both have a lot of words.

I felt like implicit in your question was also a kind of challenge: “What would happen if you were to work outside of English? How would that inflect your work?” And that’s a really good question. Many of the writers I admire did their most important work in a second or third language. Such beautiful, complex thinking can emerge from a state of alienation.

CS: The performance [Recitatif] is a performance about writing in a different language, speaking in a different language.

In a systemic way, a political way, a social way, there are a lot of different layers that come with talking a different language fluently and being able to express a system of thoughts and knowledge through that language. I am someone who grew up with the French language, which hasn’t allowed me to express myself because of words not being present, erased, or certainly there is a lack of precision to articulate certain concepts. I am referring to critical race theory that could sit outside of the academic realm. For example, most of my Black consciousness happened through the English language. The context that I was in, where I grew up in the French banlieues, didn’t allow for that dialogue, didn’t give me the space in the larger realm of representation in France. The language was so important in that. I realize a lot of people identify with that too, which I connected with in the recent writings of Maboula Soumahoro for example, in Le Triangle et l’Hexagone (potential translation The Triangle and France, 2020).

SJ: Totally. I have a writing group, and we had a conversation a few weeks ago called “Against Clarity,” focusing on how we navigate the demand for legibility. The conversation was partly inspired by an essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist and public intellectual. In the essay Cottom explains why she trusts academic writers—even when they’re a little esoteric—over journalists who think the most important thing writing can do is be clear. Writing is the tool, but the ideas themselves are the point. “Clarity” is ideologically sneaky. My friend Anjuli Raza Kolb quoted Gayatri Spivak: “plain prose cheats.” If we could express everything we need to say with the words we already have, then we wouldn’t need academic language or utopian languages or anything at all beyond what we’ve got.

It’s interesting that you find English so useful in relation to your political formation. In some ways, I think of French as so much more precise.

CS: It is so clear and so specific, but not if you want to talk about yourself, not if you want to talk about the politics of race, et cetera, within the French context. It’s almost not possible, the vocabulary is not necessarily there, the precision is just not there. It’s frustrating.

SJ: The text by Malabou that I referenced earlier begins with an extended quotation from Barthes in which he describes the limitations of language. He was speaking in French, although many languages (including English) are structured in the same way: subject-verb. You can’t have an action without a subject or agent.

In French people don’t take as many liberties with grammar, but in English, a common critique of academic writing and certain forms of formal writing is that actions are expressed without a subject, in what is called the passive voice (which I used several times in this very sentence). Through the use of the passive voice, it is possible to reference an action without assigning it to a subject—with possibly interesting political implications? Even just indirectly, the passive voice challenges the idea that subjects cause effects? I’m not a linguist, but I love thinking about these possibilities.

CS: We don’t need to be linguists in order to question this at all. I think that’s the thing: it’s very much up to everyone, and that’s the kind of magic behind it.

To close our conversation, I’d like to ask—what is the next phase and chapter of Recitatif?

SJ: Last spring, I was scheduled to present the biggest commissioned performance of Recitatif: a translation of the Gnostic gospel, “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” a religious text narrated by a feminine deity whose experience is defined by opposition. Toni Morrison used quotations from different parts of the gospel as epigraphs for several of her novels. I forgot to mention earlier that Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” inspired the title for this ongoing body of work, so “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” has long been on my mind. I may re-stage that work in a different context or for a different audience, but I’m not sure yet. To be honest, the live Recitatif works emerged from a different moment in my life. I used to travel constantly. Even after the pandemic, I have no desire to resume that pace.