A Mutual Haunting: Zalika U. Ibaorimi’s Ancestral Collaboration

by AGT EDITORS
May 10, 2021

Our Fall 2020 issue featured Good Grief, a series specially commissioned for A Gathering Together. A collection of images featuring artist Zalika U. Ibaorimi, the series is a response to both resonance and absence, an evoking of the presences that remain even when we may not notice or see them. Memory is also feeling. Our editor, Josh Myers, spoke to Ibaorimi via Zoom about her larger artistic vision and the cultural and political contexts driving her work.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.


AGT: How do you see your growth and evolution as an artist?

ZI: I was originally painting and that was more of the medium that I saw fit to use. And I can honestly say that was me being in a spiritual tradition like Ifa. It kind of filled in some gaps for me. I always felt like something was a little missing from what I was trying to do. Early on, my parents were really, really supportive of me being a painter, sculptor, those kinds of things [and] going to local art schools, that kind of thing. But what ended up happening was—I would say some time around or after my mother’s passing— I just felt like every time I tried to do something, the form was changing again…there was like a slight emptiness and a lack of an intention on my part. There was this excitement around Afrofuturism, and I was really, really excited about [it]. And I’m still very much into Afrofuturism. But when I went and had this particular reading, I realized this was a point in my life where everything was changing. Everything that I thought that I understood or knew about myself, I no longer felt that way. I needed to know what it was like to be myself, without my mother’s physical presence. And what it would be like to be myself, with my mother now oriented as a spiritual presence in my life.

There was a way that my work was abstracted from seeing people as they are. So, I think the “seeing people as they are” question or [the] “seeing myself as I am” question was less about making sure it’s realistic, [and more] the whole question of “Who are people? Who am I?” It started to make me realize that this doesn’t mean that it has be exact, but it also made me realize there’s a lack of reality here within these pieces. So, I said, “what can I do now?”

In fact, when I tried to experiment and paint again, I ended up painting a black void. Like, I had these colors. I traditionally like to use reds, yellows, and blues, those are typically my color palettes. And browns, of course. But I could not do it. By the time I finished the piece, in my mind, I just thought it was hideous. It was just a bunch of black. I actually appreciated that after I was finished, but I said this is going to be my last time working with paint. And this was about three years ago.

I started doing my Master’s thesis, where I was working with this method known as Photovoice. I had each of my participants take agency over the images that they would take for some of the questions. And so, one was about this whole idea of what it feels like to live in this existing, sexually shaming world, as Black women, as Black femmes. And then the second question was, “What would a future look like with or without it?” So, those images were so important, because at this point, each person who worked with me used their smartphone. There was an honesty to them.

Even after I finished it, and spoke with everyone, it had me really thinking about… so what does that mean for me? In my own walk and journey with something like sexual shame, or any of those things? I think this was where I took that detour from Afrofuturism. I think I was looking at Afrofuturism as the means to an end. And I felt like I was going about it the wrong way. So, what I said to myself was, “Alright, from this place, what happened before that?” Because each and every last story that these Black women femmes told were actually very traumatic stories. However, they didn’t exactly see it that way for themselves. There was like a whole other character arc or narrative being constructed in the ways that they saw each other. But one thing that was very consistent was that they felt like they had a troubling relationship to what it meant to be human to other Black people.

I decided that instead of trying to work with a new group of people and trying to make them put it all out there, I started speaking to therapists, talking to other people, journaling—as much as I hate journaling because sometimes it’s just like another writing task for me. But I said, “Okay, take it from that place.” So I decided instead [that] if you don’t want to write the journal, just record it with any device that you have, whether it be a voice note, one of your cameras, your cellular device. It ended up turning into a performance that never stopped. And it’s still ongoing. It goes through series and cycles and phases. The first one took about three months of prep and three months of bodily recording. That was The Shame Study. The second one was The Visual Body Journal. I started to not only incorporate still images, but I also started using and recording videos too. Some of them would be confessional kind of videos.

Zalika U. Ibaorimi, I Hope They Remember Me…Just Like This (Shame Study Conclusion), 2018

That ended some time after a surgery I had, where there was a really bizarre disorder that I found out that I had. There was just like a hole that was internalized in my body that was not necessarily caught early on. And it was causing me physical pain, a lot of chronic pain. So here was this big, gigantic hole between my abdomen and my pelvic area. Very curious, very unusual, and very rare. I started thinking a lot about that emptiness that I felt after my mother had passed on and what it meant. I think at that point I realized I’m not really as interested in trying to fill that up anymore. I’m just using it. It’s a space now. So, like a space for what? Even though I now have this mesh enclosure, it’s still kind of there. It just reminds me of just that feeling that I still have to this day, which I think kind of gives me peace now.

This is where I had to get real about my journey as someone who had a lot of secrets. Which is why I made the decision to come out as someone who was a sex worker. I really had to do a lot of negotiations…is this going to be appropriate? Would this be damaging or devastating to a potential academic career? Like, what does this mean? What does this even mean as somebody who’s Christian and practices Ifa, as well? But I decided to come forward, because as I said earlier, I have to see things for what they are. So, I was ready to do that.

The last performance, which is something that I’m still working through, was the Ho Ontology series. I did all of that work as a measure of plasticity, so that I can incorporate it as a method to write a large portion of my dissertation. Instead of constantly trying to imagine certain experiences for people who’ve dealt with a lot of sexual traumas or dealt with this thingly feeling, this othering feeling, I will instead put myself through the process first. Try to understand it. Get acquainted with that feeling. And then write from that place. Not necessarily as myself, but as a mechanism to create an aspect throughout it.

I did it two ways. I wanted to make sure that it not only captured or recorded my corporeality. I wanted to make sure that it was done digitally for a particular purpose. I was mostly concerned about how spectators interacted with it as opposed to just me. I knew how I was going to react to it. I knew how I was feeling. But I wanted to see how spectators reacted, because my dissertation and my work is mostly actually about intercommunal life, Black intercommunal spectatorship. So now I have like all of these pieces. I’m at about five chapters that I’m working through all together to do that work. But so much of it is about thinking about how there’s like a mutual haunting going on. A haunting where there’s me as the person who haunts my spectators. And then my spectators haunt me because of all the things that are wrapped up in identity, all the things that are wrapped up in experience. And also all the things that are wrapped up in these systems, as well. So, I think I would describe myself as an artist who takes into account community organizing. But mostly community. But also an artist that takes scholarship and weaves it into the work. And also one who wants for the performance aspect to be weaved into the scholarship. So it has a symbiotic relationship.

AGT:  The way that you talk about the spiritual aspects and your individual journey and development and sense of yourself. And you never divorce that from community. It is never about your individuality, in other words, which is kind of anathema in the art world, right? Artists are supposed to be unique individuals, because their individuality is attached to their well-being. They set themselves up apart from others. Can you talk about how you see that marking a distinction in your work? Deana Lawson, for instance, talks about how the people that she photographs are in collaboration, in community. Do you see it in that way, or is it even more of a close connection to the folks that you’re collaborating with?

ZI:I think it’s in close collaboration. I think a lot of the time, too, what ends up happening is, there are times where I also will just read the work of others, because I want to get a sense of who did this, or who made might have done something similar. Because I don’t believe that there’s anything necessarily inherently original, per se, about anything that happens anymore. I think it’s just a compilation of ideas—you might be able to put a new spin on it, or do something else, but I do think to a certain extent that there’s always a lineage. I think just as much as there’s a communal, there’s like a spiritual aspect that I talked about before. So someone like Sojourner Truth, I felt like was really essential in studying how she would want to be captured with a statement like, “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” Looking at someone like a Lorna Simpson, who goes from showing Black woman in a particular way, to in some sense, disappearing for a period of time and being a specter over the objects that she would have photographed. Or then later you see these collages coming together—a different kind of collage. And now you see the Black woman’s image reemerged but in a different way, maybe in a more disassembled kind of way. I think I see it as like a large project coming together. Or someone like Adrian Piper, whose Food for the Spirit… the ways that people can metaphysically sort of disconnect in particular ways from themselves.

I think that method was important for why I said I needed to consider community, because there were often times where I just felt so disconnected from myself. I needed a way to embody the various instances or the expressions of community to figure it out. Someone that I was talking to a couple of weeks ago said, “I love the different parts, the different variations of you.” It’s just signaling how I have to look at other people and take that on. I don’t see it as channeling, but I do see it as this whole issue of plasticity. Learning how to bend and mold and do the things that community has always been able to do.

I also think the best teacher for me has been sex work and other sex workers because that is a field where if you are a cam girl like how I was, you always had to figure out a new character. So a lot of it just came from me studying other people, watching other people, and then trying to take that on. Re-embodying it. Just remembering and thinking about this whole issue of desire. That’s a word that I haven’t used yet. But desirability was essential to how this all worked out. Like I said this, is a communal effort. So even clients were a part of that community as well. Because I learned about desire, whether it be from other clients, whether it be from other workers, or whether even it is just someone who’s a non-sex worker, or someone adjacent. Especially since a lot of Black people, particularly those who are read as having the Black female body, move about in the world in a particular way where it’s read so much and so that the relationship that we have with desire is like an entirely different sort of thing in comparison to others.

When I hear these things, even from nonblack sex workers, what I learned was that desirability is very precarious. It can be very expansive. It can also be very limiting. The ways that we have come to understand desire, there’s no safety within this place. There’s no safety within this zone. Which is what I also learned from community, by watching how people react to people that they desire. Or the way that they react to people who they don’t desire, to the person that is in question whether they be the desired person or the undesirable person.

Even someone that is deemed “ugly,” there’s still a desire, there’s still a relationship to desirability in that place. Also learning from someone who was a client about the things that they desire, that they don’t want anyone to know. You learn how to adapt. You learn how to morph and shape into the very thing that can either be the thing that they desire, or the very thing that can mold itself in a different way to hold their secrets and hold their desires, so that people don’t learn or find out. This is why I say it’s always interesting to take those different instances and engage in play, engage in education. It’s exciting, but it’s also dangerous. And it’s dangerous for so many people because of the ways they exist in the world.

I do see this as a communal sort of thing, because of just all of the enactments, and all of the ways that we may perform as people, whether we be the client, whether we be the organizer, whether we be somebody’s Grandma. Everyone performs a particular role and has a particular way that they engage with one another that I try to consume, take in, and see if I can place into the work. Even if you can’t read it there, even if you don’t see it.

AGT: We are told that we should be desired, and that somehow, by being desired that translates into something deeper. You have to be desired before you can be loved. You have to be desired before you can be respected. And I’m wondering if you can imagine love and respect and these deeper relations that we learn from Ifa, you learn from Christianity, if they can happen through desire? And if it can, does desire then become a safe space? Or is desire inherently wild, is it inherently uncontainable? Can we get to that place through desire?

ZI: I don’t think that you can. I think people can try to, or they could imagine or try to construct something that they believe will get you there. But one thing that I think is really, really clear to me…I’ve seen people say that people treat people better when they desire them. And I’m like, I can understand why someone would say that, but then I see all the circumstances that people go through to in order to be desirable or to be desired. A lot of it, I’ve noticed, has resulted in some form of violence. I know some people are like, abolish the desirability industrial complex, or whatever. But I think that some people may be afforded certain privileges because of desirability. That part I do think can happen, but I do not believe that someone can genuinely produce love from desirability. I think desirability for so many people becomes like a synonym for so many different things, when it needs to be taken up as an intense want, it’s an intense feeling of want…that’s it, it’s just wanting something. It’s nothing more, nothing less than that. And I think love—now that’s just something completely different.

I remember growing up, and sometimes I would see somebody and they would be like “you know that’s a really sexy woman.” But when you listen to them, they don’t use the characteristics like beautiful, they said “sexy.” I heard people say, “I don’t think that they’re exactly the most beautiful, but there’s something really sexy about them.” When I’m looking at something like Black sexual economies or just sexual economies in general, I’m seeing a lot of people that we would not traditionally call or deem “beautiful” still be deemed desirable, in some sense. And I think this is why I’m like, “What is love in those instances?” How does one experience being desired, and also love at the same time? And I’m noticing that it’s been a challenge for so many people, particularly in the world where a lot of people, a lot of marginalized folk are truly, truly, truly desiring love. It seems like love has been unattainable to them. Yet desirability… maybe it can be achieved in some way, you know, shape or form. But I don’t there’s anything safe about desirability.

AGT: I don’t know if you can love somebody at first sight.

ZI:I don’t think it’s possible. I do think love is a choice. It takes a certain set of enactments, and patterns, and behaviors, and actions to be able to love someone. So to just say that you just love someone because you looked at them, like all you just told me is…you just desire them, that’s it. You don’t love them because that takes work. I think it’s bell hooks that talks about these words like care and love. You can care for someone and not love them. You can give somebody the basic necessities and still not love someone.

AGT: So, in some of your art, are you trying to play with people’s notions of desire. Are you trying to challenge them?

ZI: Sometimes I’m not really trying to do anything. I think I just want to see what they’re gonna do. How are they going to respond as a spectator? And a lot of times I’m just amazed. Like I said, I’m a former sex worker at this point, these are not things that I do anymore. But I’ve had this experience several times where I’ll post an image that comes from the Ho Ontology, and immediately the response is like, “Can I have these? For myself, like can I buy them?” And it’s like, that’s not what it’s really for. Like, that was never what it was for. But you find yourself in these really awkward positions where for me, it’s becoming porn. And then I had to make a decision on whether or not I wanted to make a distinction between that and porn.

In my mind I wouldn’t necessarily think porn. But other people? They do. Then I have to check myself and ask myself, well, why do I have a problem with porn? Or is it the ways that we’ve grown to define porn over time? We see this as so disgusting, or like, gross, that we can’t accept that part of life, or this part of [the] moving image, or even still image. So I came to the conclusion that if people want to call it porn, call it porn. If they don’t, they don’t. I’m okay with that now.

Zalika U. Ibaorimi, from Ho Ontology, 2020

AGT: Is the idea of spectatorship part of the collaboration?

ZI: Yes, yes, spectatorship is a part of the collaboration. Because once again, I can’t tell people how to engage my work. I can say, listen, please I would love for you to think this thing, but they’re not going to do that.

AGT: In jazz, there’s this conversation around how arranging voids and arranging space and arranging silence is not only generative, but necessary. It’s necessary to the development of a coherent composition, or the production of improvisation. So, nothingness is never nothingness. I wonder if you can elaborate on your feelings and thinking about the void, about space in your art.

ZI: With the pieces you asked for, I was trying to work a lot with the sounds around me. And then there were moments where I also needed to get away from those sounds. The month that we did Good Grief, my stepmother had passed away that same month. But it’s also the same month my mother passed away. So having to navigate these within the same time frame. Not to mention it was the five-year anniversary and commemoration of my mother’s passing. So having to do so much with that and blend those things together. A lot of it was like, “I gotta get out of this room and I need to just listen to quiet.” Sometimes quiet was satisfying, but sometimes quiet was hurting my ears. Because I felt like nothing was just as powerful as the rooms where I would hear the tears and the crying.

Nothing was also what I felt after my mother passed on. For months, I sat in the same space. The only time I left was to go to sleep. For months. And this is something that my godmother and my spiritual family helped me get through. And of course my immediate family. But I would sit in the same chair for a month. Listening to nothing. Nothing was just as powerful because it was reminding me of all the things that were once there. It felt like nothingness was jogging particular memories that I could not deal with.

Even now, I’m back in Philly. All of this time I was in Austin, Texas. So I get back home and I’m back to square one. Like, oh my goodness, now I have to sit with the nothing again. We are in a pandemic, and I am back to nothing. Now obviously, I still had to work on a dissertation. But a good portion of my time, I would just sit here. And on those hours where I couldn’t make a phone call and get somebody on the phone or whatever, I had to just sit there. And really, really say okay, nothingness is actually bringing me a lot right now. It’s bringing me memory. And it’s the kind of memory that will literally break your heart. Because sometimes even thinking about, like, all the good stuff, hurts just as much as anything else. And I thought about that. But there’s also like a time for nothingness. I think voids are important. There’s time for it. But I’m not gonna lie, now it’s time to get out of it! After like a year of being in a pandemic. Like alright, I think I’ve learned a lot. I’m ready for something else.

AGT: People may think that being alone is the same as being in community with yourself. But it’s not.

ZI: It’s not. It’s a relationship. It’s still a partnership that you still have to nurture. We talked about love earlier. I’m constantly falling out of love with myself and then trying to like, figure out how to court yourself again. Or how do you date yourself again? All those kinds of things. Because I mean in a pandemic you definitely get sick of looking at yourself. You know, you got to turn off the camera! I would go to meetings, and there might be that moment, where someone is like “we’d like to see you!” And you’re like, “Are you serious? I don’t wanna see me.” This is a time where some people don’t even want to be with themselves, because of being in a pandemic. Now, there is a hyperawareness and fixation on the self. Mirrors don’t even feel the same to people.

AGT: Imani Perry, in her book Vexy Thing, talks about social media and how people see themselves through those particular lenses. There’s just a different form of representation that happens on social media. Let’s talk about your relationship with social media. You recently left Twitter?

ZI: Social media is so important to me. But I think it’s one of those things where I realized that I didn’t mind taking the time away from it. They all feel different to me. IG feels different than Facebook. And Facebook is different from Twitter. But I think Twitter was that platform. I think it plays with ego a lot. It’s just a very ego-driven kind of app. And if you aren’t being able to watch those numbers go in a particular direction… Years ago, when I was on social media, you would just want to go back and forth with people and fight and argue. And then I got to this place where I was like no, I just want to dedicate my time to make my own threads and saying what I want to say on my little part. And then people will come to you and debate you. But then you kind of got this weird satisfaction out of being like, “Well, I didn’t come to you, you came to me.” It became this weird, egotistical way to still be self-congratulatory, but being able to say, “I’m still humble, because I didn’t even do this thing.” And you realize after a while like, “Wow, what is this really doing?” And I’m not saying that there’s no utility to social media, but what I’ve noticed is that like for so many people, I question what principled struggle looks like when I’m on these platforms.

Like are people genuinely interested in educating others? Or are they just interested in being the one doing the educating, so that people can rely on them to do this thing so that they can make a particular brand? I see social media as like a neoliberal tool, just as much as it could be right-wing, it can be a very much a neoliberal tool. All these things are technologies anyway. The ways that white supremacy is enacted, capitalism, these are all technologies. But social media is one of those technologies where it was like, “Oh, I see Black folk trying to wield this and trying to do stuff too.” But now it’s like people can create an entire brand out of being the person to call out. You can even fake organizing and activism in the platform. So, you could literally not be an organizer, and everyone could think that you are an organizer, and then you get an opportunity to organize, because now people think you’re an organizer. So now you are organizing because you pretended to be an organizer. And everybody will say, “Now why would you say that about someone?” Or “they’re doing great work!” But they don’t know. They saw their tweets. So, good job.

And that’s what I was learning so I was like wow, now that I’m off I kind of feel like I can see things a little bit more clearly. And I realized [that] opinions that maybe I would have had if I was like, in community with everyone on Twitter in particular, I don’t seem to really have always. I think that social media is another way of quantifying spectatorship. And it’s also a great big performance that you can track. It is also one of the most ahistorical devices. I can pretend to be anywhere as long as I have a hashtag. Really incredible tool. Really, really dangerous too.

AGT: Why did you choose to title the series, Good Grief?

ZI: So I chose it for a number of reasons. One reason is because, literally, my family was grieving. Not to even put my father on the spot, but he’s a person that literally experienced like the loss of two wives. Not because of irreconcilable differences or whatever it is, but because of death. Now how do you even begin to have a conversation, or how do you even begin to try to rationalize that? When you’re a person like him who was able to experience great love twice in that way and then such a great loss because of it. But it was also a time where we were forced to reckon with my mom at the same time.

I had not visited my mother’s grave in five years. We were talking about my stepmother’s ashes and things like that, and then the other part of it was that’s like keeping certain remnants of her. And so, I was thinking a lot about this, about my mom. And my dad was like, “I think we should just—we need to go. We need to visit. It’s not exactly her, but we need to visit that site.” My dad is very good with directions. But when we got to the site, we could not find the headstone, we couldn’t find it. And so, I was actually resigned to it and I was like we can figure it out another day, we could come back another time. But he was determined. Grief was also taking over in a way where it was like, demanding us to find the headstone. Even I was getting frustrated internally. Like I am going to lose it if I don’t find it. I wanted to keep calm. But there was something about our grief that felt like it would have been such a failure if we could not find this headstone. Even though my mother is with us spiritually, I felt like this would be such a failure, and I knew that this was our grief. This was our grief. We would not feel relieved. Or well. Or good. Until we found the headstone. Here’s the thing, I could picture it in my mind, I can see it in my mind, and that was even more irritating to me. I’m like, “I know what it looks like.” My dad is like, “no it’s like in this direction over here.” But we just had to… So, when we finally found it, there was such a great relief. Because I think part of it was also like, not wanting to feel like anything was forgotten. So, to forget where the headstone was almost made it like we’re forgetting our person.

Zalika Ibaorimi, Good Grief – VIII, 2020

That is where that good grief came from. Because it was like at least for me, I was like, I’m going to feel like a terrible daughter. It’s so interesting, something like that will suddenly just make you feel like you didn’t do enough. Even after someone goes, because my mom is such a presence that I just felt like, “Oh, she might be on my head.” I also felt like if this was really my mama in real life, she’d be like, “Mmm girl, y’all need to find me.” I just felt like that would be her reaction. And I felt like it was also because of the weight of the grief being so great for two people. We were now offered the challenge of trying to grieve two people at once. Two people of which my father loves very much. But also that we didn’t want anyone spiritually to feel slighted. And that’s where a lot of that came from.

AGT: In Bakongo cosmology, it’s believed that below the kalunga line that separates the living from the dead is the color white. In Yoruba traditions, white is the color that we use for different spiritual rituals of great importance. And that transitioned of course to Africans in the New World. When we wear white, it’s meaningful. Was there an intentional decision to feature that color, or was it just ancestral intervention?

ZI: You know, it would have been an intervention. There’s multiple images you will see. The image of my father and my mother, and then you see the image of my great-grandmother, who is Sallie Mungo, a Black Southern woman, a really commanding presence. I’ve often had a lot of questions, about someone like Sallie Mungo. I’ve heard so many myths about her, like her possible clairvoyance, her possible spiritual intuition, all those kinds of things. And that photo, I mean, every time I go to my grandma’s house, I would snap an image of that photo. My grandma probably would never let me have that photo. But I was just like, snap, snap. So there was something really, really important about that image to me too. I don’t know this woman, never met this woman, but this is the person that I know that I come from. It speaks volumes as somebody who’s from Philly, but I have this Southern lineage. I’m very curious about the last name. But in terms of just the colors, not so much. Sometimes good mistakes happen, or good unintentional things can happen that become intentional over time.

Zalika Ibaorimi, Good Grief – VI, 2020
Zalika Ibaorimi, Good Grief – II, 2020

I’ll say the reason why I definitely used at least the white sheet, I was thinking a lot—here’s me and my little relationship to horror—about how people used to cut out little holes and put the white sheet over their head and they were supposed to represent a ghost. For me, sometimes “ghosts” is a little bit more playful. I think to really identify and recognize someone as a spirit, it really takes into account the seriousness. Like words really are important. So, I don’t see my mother or my ancestors as ghosts, even though they could be. I’m not gonna say they can’t be, but there’s something about the spiritual aspect of that. That was what the white represented; it did represent the ancestor. It took me a second to remember that, but it was literally the exact reason why I did it. And I put it over myself. I just overlaid multiple images and that’s what I kept doing to make that effect, so that I’m covered in this white cloth. That’s also, even like, spiritually, what it is. White is supposed to help shake some of those things off to get us right, get us into a particular way.


Zalika U. Ibaorimi is a multidisciplinary artist, doctoral candidate of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a 2021-2023 Carter G. Woodson predoctoral fellow. She engages Black material and digital publics as the landscape to trace the human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Their relationality is tethered to the logics of shame, desire and pleasure. She uses Black gender and sexuality analytics to engage Visual Culture Studies through the logics of Black Porn/Sex Work Studies. Ibaorimi specializes in haunting, Black queerness, horror, flesh, the human & deviant Blackness. As a scholar, and performance-based photographer, she uses the experimental approaches of research-creation to engage Black Study.
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