Underbelly, 2024
Solo exhibition at Patel Brown - Toronto, ON
Decolonization asks us to employ different tactics, methodologies and approaches to undo the so-called finitude and linearity that colonialism insisted and insists upon. Colonialism violently states, “there is only one world, there is only one time, only one direction.” Anique Jordan’s refusal to accept this worldview is why she invites us to the Underbelly and develops what I am calling a decolonial grammar of other worlds.
Underbelly: the invitation
Jordan invites us to experience the power of the Underbelly. The power that is made visible when other worlds are seen. Underbelly is not a place and so Jordan’s invitation isn’t to somewhere. Rather, it is an invitation to nowhere; an invitation to practice seeing what we cannot see; an invitation to be haunted by other worlds. Jordan wants us to be curious about the political possibilities that become available when we lean into spaces that we have been told are not for “humans”. We are warned, don’t go there! It’s voodoo, it’s witchcraft. These spaces are for spirits or ghosts or the mad, so we are told to abandon them and fear them. We are told, “if you go there, you may not return, in fact you will not return”. Underbelly invites us to betray this thinking and remember that the Underbelly, the otherworlds, were part of this world and still are. Jordan suggests, maybe we want to go to these other places and offer them space in this one- for the exact reason that we do not want to return to this world as it currently is.
Underbelly: (a) methodology of seeing
If colonization insists that what is real is only what we can see, then decolonization is about making real what we might not see. Jordan asks, how we might catch glimpses of these worlds through the glitches, the surreal, in dreams and in rituals that are relegated to hidden spaces for their protection and survival… what can we see in the glimpses, in the Black Nowhere (Mohammed, 2022), in the Shoal (King, 2019), in J’ouvert, in the “Falling, Floating, Flickering” (Young, 2023), in the meantime (Amponsah, 2023), in the break (Moten, 2003), in the Underbelly (Jordan, 2023). Jordan’s Underbelly joins a history, a pattern, a chorus and a tradition of knowledge-making that is concerned with the liminal. It is an intentional betrayal of colonial, white supremacist logics. It betrays colonial logic which in turn challenges the state and our current socio-political structures. What does the shoal or j’ouvert, or the break mean to the state? What does it mean that in its liminality, it cannot be fully grasped by those who seek to control the linear by insisting linear is the only way? This is the threat of the Underbelly that is demonized and requires elimination.
Underbelly: the offering
By offering the Underbelly, through glitches, shadows, blurs, blurs, shadows, glitches and repetition, Jordan gives us space to be disrupters and offers visual clues for how to do this. In moments of crisis that see no way out, Jordan makes visible that we can seek refuge in what the Underbelly offers us. There are solutions there because it is what sustained our ancestors and it can be what sustains us as well. Jordan says “let’s look for and to the Underbelly,” as a solution-oriented praxis. It is not that the Underbelly is the solution but that it can offer us space to see/think about solutions that our current structures make invisible.
Underbelly: The vulnerable part of something which is often unnoticed or concealed
Previously Jordan instructed us to Ban yuh belly (2019)- a Trinidadian expression meaning to hold onto something. The phrase (used by Jordan to think about living in a constant state of grief and mourning caused by anti-Blackness), now feels like Jordan’s way of preparing us to lean into the space, method, and power of the Underbelly. There is power in our ability to hold ourselves as ban yuh belly told us and there is power in our ability to see the Underbelly. Taken together, I suggest we ban the underbelly as some attempt to guard it, we should attempt to protect it.
– Evelyn Amponsah
