Blog Post: Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Hello, I’m Rosa and I was the recipient of the SPACE x New Contemporaries Studio Residency from April 2022- end of March 2023 😊.

My practice is very interdisciplinary, so the studio has really seen some things this year. First thing was to get all my stuff out of the storage centre it had been in since 2019. This was very exciting as I got to be with my old work again – hey Meghan Markle tunic, hello 13-metre-long scrolls, welcome back 100s of terracotta tiles made on the thighs of Black women and non-binary people! Next to the studio came my rotating cast of collaborators – Louis Brown, Jos Bitelli, Ebun Sodipo, Nasra Abdullahi. Together we made even more stuff to fill the space with – a Match of the Day parody film (hard drives actually take up a lot of space), glitter-covered ship-shaped hats, floppy silhouettes of the nation of Nigeria, glossy wood panels covered in stickers of Catholic saints.
This year, I’ve been thinking about ‘ye olde’. ‘Ye olde’ as in ‘the olden days’ –the time in the past that is way before anyone we know was born, a long, long time ago. Not to be confused with ‘back in the day’, which everyone knows refers to a very specific period of time, that is, the 1980s. No – the ‘ye olde’ is my period. A time that exists in our collective imaginations; ye olde is ‘History’ as in the picture that comes up in your mind when you sing certain Christmas carols that have the words ‘yuletide’ and refer to ‘times of yore’.

Comparable is the ‘medieval’ – another vague and large period of time. Though ye olde and medieval (whatever that really means) are often associated, pesky historians regularly try to pin down the medieval to more specific dates, whereas with ye olde they don’t even try it. Ye olde is an unwieldy mythical beast, expansive and flexible enough that, eventually, it might even envelop our contemporary moment. Consider that school children, my main artistic reference for this research, will indiscriminately daub water-logged tea bags on both hand-written calligraphy in the style of a Tudor maiden, and a word-processed essay on the Victorian period. Indeed, in Year 8 I was commissioned by a white teacher, for my homework, to write a diary entry from the point of view of ‘an African slave girl’. To my father’s horror, I proceeded to write this in ye olde English in looping cursive script, then stained it with coffee granules and finally burned the edges, to make her story seem as ‘authentic’ as possible. The slave diaries me and my classmates were tasked with writing were not supported by any ‘knowledge’ of the history of the transatlantic slave trade (there was no Black history taught in my school’s curriculum), or accounts from the life of formerly enslaved people (these do exist). Rather, the historical period to which this seminal piece of homework refers is ‘ye olde’. The diaries document the interlocking Black historical fantasies of a teacher and us children, as they were in the early noughties.

Ye olde doesn’t tell us anything about history, but it tells us about what people think or know or think they know about history, in the moment ye olde is being discussed. Ye olde is where projection and prejudice run wild. Ye olde is a fictional place where ‘romantic’, fascist notions of the white and pleasant England ‘before immigration’ roam free. The olden days never ‘existed’ but loom large in our present like a heavy ye olde tapestry. And that’s why I think it’s so important to grab ye olde by the horns. To interrogate ye olde from a Black feminist perspective. We Black feminists have our own ye olde too. This year I’ve started to flesh mine out from my initial attempt as a 12-year-old. I want to make sure I exist in my ye olde.

My focus on ye olde coincides with the year I’ve turned 30. This, the year of our lord 2023, is the year I’ve started to admit to people that my favourite film is Shrek. And I’ve started to write a Black feminist pantomime.


^{All images: 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance', 2022. Photo by Tom Carter.}