AF: How did you find your way to performance? Was performing always the plan?

JF: No doubt I’ve always had the desire to perform (I’m a Leo?) but I had very little exposure to art growing up and probably even less to dance and performance, so it wasn’t until much later that I even understood the possibility of doing these things in a visual arts context. Having the resources to manifest your desires is a privilege and having a plan necessitates self-assurance. You need a sense that things are possible for you, that the world was made to support your ambitions. You need to see yourself reflected in something and that was never really my experience.

We’ve spoken a bit before about what it means to grow up in small, almost exclusively white, towns in the UK. Performing is a hard thing to negotiate when you are already framed as hyper-visible and invisible at the same time, more so when you are indoctrinated with a whole lot of queer shame on top of that. It’s taken me a long time to flip this and utilize it after making some choices that didn’t serve me. First I studied Art History at Oxford because I was desperate for some kind of intellectual validation and I was drawn to the prestige. At the time I didn’t have the critical tools to question the foundations of that prestige.

JF: Equally I should give a shout out to clubbing with respects to the latter. While I was still working in purgatory, I also met Alex Baczynski-Jenkins who was looking for a performer at the time. We were both late for a performance at Chisenhale Gallery and they wouldn’t let us in so we got talking about how I wanted to get back into performance. He invited me to be part of the second iteration of a work that we presented at the Whitechapel Gallery and have shown for several years since.

When I finally left the auction house and New York – where I had somehow wangled a transfer to – I began working more closely with Alex and even moved to Warsaw for a bit where the curatorial collective, Kem, were doing great things at the time. Over the next few years, I performed for / collaborated with more and more artists and after a while I began to make solo work. 

*Of course, like the art industry, the yoga industry has completely commodified a societal good with all the tried and tested force of settler colonial logics. As such, I try not to engage with it too much but I like to share my practice with friends and collaborators on a small scale.

JF: I like collaboration because it begins to dispel the myth of the singular (namely white, bourgeois, cis-male…) artist genius that has been the cornerstone of the canon for centuries, and moves towards a model of collectivity and communality. Especially in dance, it’s no secret that branding a performance with one choreographer or artist’s name often misrepresents the division of creative labor involved but we are still so wedded to this paradigm.

I think collaboration is also really important amongst queers and people of colour because institutions actively pit us against each other to fill those token diversity spots. We need to resist the counterproductive narratives of exceptionalism that underpin diversity initiatives, especially given their new prevalence after last year when institutions remembered that the movement for black lives is still going on… I guess we’ll see if they remember to keep remembering but in any case, throwing one person of colour half a bone every quarter so an institution can bolster its own image is just kind of insulting to me. 

Nothing really compares to a process that accumulates traces of each participant's corporeal and conceptual offerings, where you collectively birth something you didn't know could exist prior. Even if there is tension or disagreement this is where we learn and grow, and it has been imperative for me given my indirect route to performance. 

JF: The project Hurakan Caress with Atabey was first developed during lockdown so it was interesting to create something together for months whilst spending the majority of time in separate spaces. We had to find rhythms of gathering material separately, sharing and discussing digitally, and then finding moments to move, film and edit together as the circumstances changed later in the year. The intentions and outcomes were consciously not performative however. 

We wanted to create a resource for communal healing and empowerment of queer and POC communities through somatic practices based around self-intimacy and feeling sexy for yourself. We first did online workshops for Metro charity and then later for Cell Project Space, specifically for the Caribbean diaspora for the latter. For Cell, we also created an accompanying pedagogical resource of video experiments that acted as prompts to consider aspects of embodiment in relation to the proposal of what it might mean to try and decolonize the camera. We used body cams similar to those used by the police in order to explore this. The workshops are really the heart of this project though, so Atabey and I are not just collaborating with each other as artists, but as facilitators we collaborate with the participants. As micro-communities we all end up contributing to the refinement of a practice that we will continue to share to empower the wider community.

AF: The ways you research really resonate with me, especially when I see you try to deal with the representation, fetishisation and policing of black, brown and queer bodies in your movement practice. How do you approach your solo practice? What would you say your concerns are and have you kept up with writing?

JF: It’s an interesting question to try and answer right now as I’m thinking a lot about the limitations of addressing concerns that appear largely reactionary. Having inhabited many different kinds of spaces in the art ‘world’/ industry, I’ve been privy to a myriad of insidious ways whereby blackness and queerness are so brazenly commodified and extracted from bodies that remain fully marginalized in order to produce cultural, social and financial capital for a set of privileged gatekeeping vampires.

Of course, you don’t need to work at a blue chip gallery to see this everywhere. It’s an entrenched feature of western consumer society, which is itself clearly a logical continuation of the colonial impulse. But along with fashion, the art industry is a particularly visible arena where black and, perhaps more recently, queer bodies become a coveted yet structurally (and symbolically) disempowered fetish. 

JF: In a durational work Brown Paintings for Renaissance Masters for example, I use mirrors and props to build tableaus around viewers that recall British Baroque portraits where black ‘attendants’ (slaves) were depicted alongside their masters and various other wealth signifying objects to flaunt worldliness and power. Here I’m thinking about how we can actively use dance and somatic practices to play with subject/ object positionalities. But also, it’s just a bit of a crude comment on how I’ve felt my image can be used – being put on display like an accessory by artists or institutions because I’m black mixed-race with cute hair – and ultimately how these racialised tropes and tendencies don’t die but mutate.

In this work and others, I am keen to consider blackness outside of the dominant frame which often equates blackness solely with the African American experience. I look to histories of the black subject in Britain and the lands it colonized, picking out smaller details that carry some weight. For a site specific work at Ashton Court in Bristol as part of In Between Time’s Creative Exchange Lab, I found that the former proprietors (the Smyth family) had built much of the estate through wealth generated on the Spring Plantation in Jamaica, where enslaved people and livestock were given the same names. 

JF: From the perspective of the marginalized body who is implicated, it’s always precarious because you are still inhabiting an image you don’t fully own. Images, representation - it is a shared language. There are real limits to an individual’s efficacy within this. Identity is important but the identity politics we now know are largely a neoliberal substitute for culture, community and collective action.

It’s the influencer industrial complex, based on clout and relentless individualism where identity is commodified and otherwise weaponized to breed division amongst marginalized groups as part of a wider culture war. We just need to look at Tory MPs like Kemi Badenoch or Priti Patel to see that there will always be minorities or people of colour who are so deeply in denial that they willingly replicate oppressive violence against people who look like them, and often to the most extreme degree.

Hurt people hurt people and I try to practice compassion. It’s just depressing that as a society we are so inept in our discussions around race that it's legitimate for these individuals to be used as human shields to deter criticism from what is ultimately a deeply racist political party, currently led by one of its most racist members.

AF: Ok, as this conversation is for QUEERCIRCLE and it's a word I've wrestled with, let's talk about the word 'queer;' how do you deal with it and what does it mean to you?

JF: I've said a lot so I will try and keep this short. For me there is a lot of appeal to a term that evades definition. In its purest form, I see 'queer' as open and expansive rather than limiting and definitive. A base acknowledgement that identity is an unfinished conversation, as Stuart Hall says in one of my fav definitions. I use queer because it can cover a lot of things about my identity that I'm still processing and that ultimately I don't feel like I really owe anyone an explanation of. It is kind of a catch all term that acknowledges the infinite subtleties and complexities of personhood that are beyond the scope of language. 

AF: Knowing that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, what are you working on now and what ideas are getting you through?

JF: So, at the end of last year I was preparing to adapt my piece Brown Paintings for Les Urbaines in Lausanne but sadly the festival was cancelled. I was really disappointed but also it made me think about what it is I am doing through this solo work and I became a bit turned off – by the narcissism, by treating it as low-key therapy, by having to sell identity within a framework of institutional critique when black institutional critique will never work because Audre Lorde tells us we will never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

Since then, the main thing I’ve been doing is actually utilizing this lull in activity to actually take time to genuinely focus on healing, on looking inwards and rewiring neurological pathways with meditation, self-study, journaling and yoga. I got a lot of inspiration on how to navigate this from an amazing online residency I took part in led by Raju Rage on intimacy in December/January. Last year, I was developing this self-intimacy practice with Atabey but I feel like it’s only in the past couple of months that I have really been able to fully tap into self-intimacy and take the pandemic as an opportunity to integrate it into my life.