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Masks + Mirrors,
conversation with L.Akinyi and V for 5

V: When and where you made Masks + Mirrors, and who was involved in the creation of it.

L: Masks + Mirrors is a short, experimental film completed while in residence at Estudio Aire (funded through the Arts Connection Network) in San Bernardino, California in collaboration with poets/artists from the Inland Empire, Nairobi and the UK.

I am not entirely sure how the idea to make a film project came to me, but I wanted a way to work with the community at the Garcia Center for the Arts since I was new there and didn’t really know anyone at the time. I reached out to some of my art peers and talked to the creative director at Estudio Aire about a call for community poetry submissions and out of the few, chose the ones that fit the theme.

Masks + Mirrors features poems by: Ona Adhiambo, Aries Jordan, Marie Montano, Yoojin Oh, La Toro, Beth Benson, Lotus Loet, Ismael Gonzalez and Susan Rukeyser.

For “Black Girls Don’t Cry in Public”, written and read by Aries Jordan, I worked with some existing footage from a collaborative project with local artist Jina Imani, who has been super supportive and a generous guide in my art journey, and was so happy to be able to include music by The Jehovas to close the film.

V: How has technology been a part of your art practice?

L: I’ve been thinking about this question for a few days, and I realized I needed a definition to work from because the way we use the language now… “technology” feels like this loose, abstract thing to me that connects, mystifies and somehow displaces us. As far as the tools I currently use to gather, process and create… I do a lot of unsolicited research on the internet, chasing quick flashes of ideas or, for things like masks + mirrors, obsessively and repetitively (because I forget) dissecting symbols, mythology and human relationships for months. From there, it feels like finding the appropriate medium to bridge things into our physical reality. I enjoy how poetry and film play together and had been experimenting with gif art and really rough micro animations on social media before completing my first film.

The film itself was a very diy/ jua kali experience, using what was available to me in terms of donated art material and minimal technology (just my phone, laptop to create and a projector for screenings). I have no film experience outside of one “new-genres” class over 10 years ago and wanted to see what was possible with the tools and skills I had at the time. I combined old footage, animated sketches, very rudimentary stop motion with scenes I shot at the arts center and for audio, used submitted readings, recorded and modified my own voice, and played with different accents in the text-to-speech generator on my laptop.

If we’re talking about ancestral technologies though, I think something started to change right around the time you and I collaborated on some rock paintings that we digitized for “Familiar Voices”. That felt like a different type of bridge to me and I’m so grateful for our seemingly random connection because I don’t know if I would have opened up to tree or rock intelligence the way we guided each other there. There was a permission I felt, to really identify with the non-human and to remember that I am part of that as well. I’m currently doing some work with water- sometimes being online feels like swimming deep in the ocean, so I'm curious what is available to me in bridging that experience back to earth through physical art or performance. I also love the possibilities for documenting and archiving my process through photography, writing, audio recordings… and feel ready for new ways to connect my projects to the human ideasphere.

Outside of the day to day communication and mundane tasks, technology bridges my multiple experiences (material and spirit), allows for some really interesting collaborations and partnerships within different communities and teaches me to be an observer of self in a really wild, immediate way which is wonderful and horrifying for an artist! Also, if you’re an introvert… it's actually useful as a way to test ideas and yourself for failing publicly. If you care about that sort of thing 😅

V:I think of Ancestral Technologies as a framework for indigenising the internet. I admire the ways that you manipulate digital tools to attempt to depict fragments of your multidimensional experiences, specifically on instagram, which is where we met. I think there's a way that we try to convey to others who we really are through editing and collage, I think of this medium as the ancestral body having digital mastery or access to digital tools that make its embodiment more visible to others.

Maybe connecting it to masks, the digital interpretation of self through collage and editing can either be the spirit mask one wears as they channel information from the non-physical realm. On the other hand it can be a revealing of who is behind the mask, the mask being the disguises we wear to conform. Thinking of this was the main reason I invited you, Nerima and Kabi to be a part of Ancestral Technologies, because I felt that in some ways and at some point each of you had used the technology/the internet/digital tools to convey your multiplicitous ancient selves.

L: For me, it happened pretty intuitively. I was using instagram to document my art process primarily (simple photos with a descriptive caption) for a long time. I’m not sure when I started to sense the potential for crossing self-imposed and inherited boundaries… or when I started to recognize it as a bridging tool in the ways you’re describing. I'm still learning a lot about the way I use digital media/the internet and I'm so grateful for access to existing archives and information that is available for me to reclaim, study and maybe reimagine some indigenous practices like masquerade, divination and mythologizing within this digital landscape. I think it’s an exciting time to witness this language evolve and I am just as curious to see how artists and culture workers continue to tap into and carry their ancestral knowledge within these spaces.

V:I want to share something that Kabi wrote on the walls of their installation:

There was a time when I thought containing multitudes was untrue. Theres a very thin line between killing yourself to appease people and taking up different forms to express multitudes of your being. The ‘other’ faces would feel abandoned if I wasn’t embodying them, like they can only live and breathe if im wearing their face constantly. I realised those faces were untrue; they were not mine. They were the masks of programming and conformity— the masks that represent the safety of being like everyone else they covered my mouth and spoke for mr, their plastic creating a hard exoskeleton trying to dissolve me from the inside. They tried to kill me so I killed them. I killed them and remained with my multitudes.

Kabi created a video installation for their animated clip ‘why are you performing for these mortals’. The video was projected on a wall behind 3 mounds of soil which invited people to write down something they wanted to kill and bury it in the soil. 1 mound of soil was shaped like a star and had a large mirror reflecting out of its soil.

I found a lot of similarities between your works. Not just the similarities of masks but the similarities of mirrors too. What is a mask and a mirror to you?

L: I’ve been thinking about mimicry in childhood and the process of learning how to be by observing others. I think it is a natural part of development to look externally for some cues and try on certain roles to see what fits. I believe that the social structures and hierarchies we have adopted in “developed” and developing parts of the globe have given us limited blueprints that serve to control our behaviors (for power/profit). From my observations and experience, we are indoctrinated into very specific roles within our familial, tribal, cultural and colonial contexts … and taught that “this is the way”.

It’s been a few years of examining my own behaviors and performative tendencies in social settings and relationships. Masks + Mirrors really started as a post-breakup mask-making project when I realized how much I morph to please others. When you begin to respond to the invitations to live in ways that are different from the bounds you originate from (through exposure to new information, cultures, locations etc), it can be disorienting and similar to Kabi, I have battled the anxiety of “am I existing correctly?” for many years. I am uncertain that it is possible to be a “self” completely independent from or unaffected by the “other” but I do feel there is a quiet knowing that comes from looking internally and taking cues from my own intuiton. With Masks + Mirrors, I was curious about how others experience the dance of obscuring and reflecting the interconnected self and what I noticed was most of the submitted poems drew from intimate relationships… this for me, is the micro level of human theater and where we learn to participate in agreements that shape us on a macro level.

I call myself a shapeshifting thing when I am attempting to sum-up my experience of multiplicity. Part of the invisible inquiry that has gone into the process of Masks + Mirrors is around being spirit in a flesh body that is connected to spirit in other bodies (human, animal, plant, light, the elements…). What is it exactly to find myself reflected in a tree or a bird or a creek? I feel like I am in a body to experience my unique way of being a part of spirit (observable or not) and I feel more expressive when I can relate to the world that way instead of being concerned only with human culture and the performance attached to that. To ground spirit in my body means I can bring water element into my role as sibling or friend. I can bring fire element into my role as artist or informal educator. I can channel tortoise spirit to move through my days or be as a rock … however I experience these elements (fluid, passionate, slow, still in the moment…).

When I am separated from this, as many of us have through western industrialization and idealization, then I feel I must put on appearances to be something defined for me by someone else and I take on roles that do not necessarily fit me, feel good or sustain a fulfilling life. I trust that I am learning to discern which human agreements to participate in from an awareness of interconnectedness and full alignment between spirit, my mind, heart and my nervous system. It has been helpful for me to begin learning from different people in communities that employ ancient and modern technologies that are attuned to nature and spirit.

V:My favourite thing about the internet growing up was the space it gave me to be my unmasked self. It felt much easier to show up as me through the anonymity of the web, there was also something reassuring about conversing with people who didn't know me. Has the web ever given you the space to show up in your multiplicities?

L:Yes! The internet is a wild place… it’s taken years to develop a somewhat healthy relationship with it which is so weird to say. A part of me feels like I would love to be unshackled from it. I remember when I was first introduced to the internet, email and then social media… I couldn’t have anticipated how much it would affect me or change the ways I engage with the world. It’s kind of like traveling to a new city where no one knows you and there’s so much to witness and learn… the anonymity is really freeing, yet I've had an increased awareness of the loneliness of being in a sea of faceless people I want to connect with in a real way. In a day, I get to see all these different people in the world and their ways of being, overcoming and living and when I approach it with my humanity, it makes me feel so honored to be a part of the experiment. On the other hand, I have a lot of frustration around representation (I have to work to curate a diverse feed) and the feeling of being a consumable product especially on social media. I struggle with the way we use each other to gratify whatever dopamine hungers, though I have built some wonderful friendships and partnerships online, which is incredible to me.

I do love that I’ve become this observer of myself in a way that I previously accessed through maybe journaling, art or travel.There’s something about being a stranger on the internet… being able to interact with people across cultures and worlds I sometimes didn’t know existed, opens me up to parts of myself I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I’ve come to a better understanding of my queerness through the internet, realized there were parts of me I had been unwilling to meet out of shame. I am unlearning shame online, where I do experiment with expressing myself and taking up space in ways I may not be so willing to in the 3D.

The ethereal nature of the internet also somehow helps me see the invisible connections between us and come to my own understanding of the constant flow of energy through and between matter. I think I have felt permission to access a more fluid way of thinking and being because of this. There is no need, for example, to compartmentalize the Kenyan self from the Americanized self if I choose* to identify that way (*more culturally than patriotic plisss!), the playful self from the intellectual self, or the “spiritual self” from the material- I used to be very black or white in my thinking and would often feel I had to betray parts of myself to fit into this very small, limited idea of L.

The internet is my favorite mystery school, though I have to practice discernment with the information I find. There’s vast, vast information out there and while I don’t retain most of it, discovering indigenous, decolonial, interdisciplinary art, philosophy and practice has had the biggest impact on me… which is a trip when I consider that the internet is also weaponized to maintain colonial and capitalist systems. I am reconnecting with indigenous cosmology, Luo history and traditions and giving myself permission to introduce or reinterpret some of that knowledge in my life. Sometimes I'll dive into esoterica and philosophy and I find that indigenous knowledge that is rooted in nature and the sacredness of life keeps me grounded/sane.