MIXED - Our (Spatial) Stories Live in Performative Futures
Soya
Soya’s parents met at university in Casablanca and moved to Portugal because of her mother’s love of the Portuguese language as a result of watching Brazilian telenovelas. Shortly after moving to Lisbon, Soya was born, where she continued to live until she was 8. Her mother was born in Marrakesh and her maternal grandparents were Sudanese and Egyptian. Her father is half Ivorian and half Mauritanian. In her early years she speaks of not actually realising that she was black. Growing up in a majority white neighbourhood the issue never even crossed her mind, she just thought it was strange that some of the kids sometimes treated her differently.
At the age of 8, her father decided to move Soya and her sister to Mauritania with the aim of her getting them in touch with their roots. She describes the time as difficult because of the fact that she was away from her mother, and, as a result of being the older sibling, Soya effectively became mother to her younger sister. Upon moving to Mauritania she immediately became aware of her race as people there would say that she was European and that she had lighter skin, which she took as a compliment at the time, but now realises that it was not. Another huge culture shock was the approach to marriage in Mauritania. Polygamy is common practice there and just as an example Soya has step-sisters that are 6 months apart from two separate mothers. Reflecting on it now, she says that family inbreeding is very common and as a result many children are born with mental health issues. She speaks about the hyper sexualisation of black women and describes Mauritania as being highly misogynistic where women exist to cook, clean and produce offspring. Even at the age of 12, there were grown men interested in marrying her.
After 6 years in Mauritania, Soya and her sister moved to Morocco for 2 years before finally moving back to Portugal at 16. Upon returning to Portugal, she suffered from out and out racism for the first time and due to the level bullying and exclusion from her classmates had to move schools. After moving schools Soya began to come out of her shell and exude the self-confidence that she now clearly shows and after her mother died from ovarian cancer when she was 18, she became fiercely independent and career orientated. She recently finished her degree in International Affairs, is considering a Masters in either Diplomacy or Economic International Affairs and wants to work for the United Nations in Seoul.
Vanessa
Vanessa was born in Portugal and grew up mainly in Sintra. Her mother is Portuguese but she has never met her father. When her mother was about 21, like many Portuguese in late 80's, she decided to go emigrate to Paris in search of work. She became an au-pair for a Japanese family that owned an art gallery and while living there often visited a bar on the nearby Champs-Elysées. She soon met a pianist who used to play at the bar and had a short fling with him, however Vanessa's mother didn't speak very good French and he didn’t speak Portuguese, so they couldn't verbally communicate at length. When she then fell pregnant with Vanessa and told him, he simply disappeared. Vanessa's mother, after searching for him for a while, then returned to Portugal and gave birth.
Her mother describes Vanessa's energy and physical features as being almost a mirror of her father. However, she knows very little about him. She knows that he also spoke a language other than French that she didn’t recognise and also that he was a musician that had emigrated from a non-European country that she had never heard of before. The result being that Vanessa has no real idea where he was/is from, nor his cultural heritage, and therefore her own ethnicity.
Vanessa finds it difficult to put into words the mystery about her ethnicity provokes in herself. She attempts to describe it as a mix of feeling unfulfilled with an open-hearted sense of empathy for various non-European cultures. It is an unconscious natural search for herself and although Vanessa feels more culturally familiar to some African countries through the music, food and her friends, the possibilities of where he might be from are endless. Just by looking at her, one could suppose that her father could be a number of different ethnicities.
When Vanessa was young, she would come home from school and recount the times that other children would ask if she was adopted. She lived until she was 8 with the assumption that her ex-stepfather was her biological father, yet on finding out that he wasn't, even at such young age, she was not surprised. She never had truly felt him to be, due to having different physical features as well as never truly connecting with him.
Vanessa has questioned the theme of race since she began to observe the way in which was she was treated differently and how people used words like ''exotic'' to describe her. A number of these experiences eventually instilled a sense of being an outsider trying to fit in, in a society misaligned to her, something that she didn’t feel was conducive to her personal wellbeing.
Although primarily a singer and performer, Vanessa is a multidisciplinary artist. Her personal work is mainly a hybrid of artistic expressions related to love, union, spirituality which she uses to connect with her ancestors, to explore and reflect on her own potential cultural heritages and to embrace and celebrate the empowerment of BIPOC communities. She allows a diverse set of rhythms, melodies and cadences to manifest within her while creating and even in absence of her father, she feels as though he is within her and that she has inherited his musical sensibilities. The feeling has become so strong that she decided to go look for him geographically. She will document the process and will begin the process by visiting the gallery owned by the Japanese family her mother once worked for.
Vânia
Vânia is a Portuguese born Angolan dance creator and interpreter. Both of her parents are Angolan and traveled to Portugal as teenagers after Angola’s Independence from Portugal in 1975. One of Vânia’s grandparents and great-grandparents on either side was Portuguese and, because only those with direct Portuguese heritage were allowed to earn Portuguese nationality, her parents and family were allowed to leave Angola and move to Portugal. This movement, these Portuguese people leaving Angola were called “Retornados” (those that returned), yet most of her family had never been to Portugal before. Vânia talks about her family having to negotiate where and when to perform their Angolan culture habits in order to fit in with the Portuguese, after all, Angola was left in a Civil War and Portugal was the saviour giving them an opportunity. [Vânia says this with a cynical tone]. There are multiple layers and coping mechanisms one can easily read through such stories. For instance, the duality of behaviour in the home vs social, she laughs saying that her first split in personality that eventually led to her pleasure and interest in performance, happened at the age of 5 when she started ballet training. It included official exams she had to perform annually in front of a British examiner that would address all students by their first name. Until then the only name she was called was Soraia. Her ballet teacher switched to calling her by her first name: Vânia. And from that moment on, Soraia is the daughter, the sister, the niece, the cousin, the granddaughter, and to everyone else: Vânia.
Vânia lived in New York City for 8 years and it was during that period she began to fully embrace her heritage. While there, Vânia would answer “I’m from Portugal” to the inevitable “Where are you from?” question. She soon realised that not mentioning her Angolan side was as good as denying it. Most Black people in the US have no idea where their families originated. This made her realise how much of her racial identity had been denied reflection and how much internalised racism she had inherited from Portuguese culture. This was the very first time Vânia saw herself as privileged and that her African heritage was a thing to be proud of.
Being mixed-raced is constantly being in between, which makes it harder to belong. It often means being constantly asked where you are from and not being recognised as being where you actually are from. The complexity of genetics and the way people look, added to her racial identity conflicts that led to a late realisation of what she may identify as, independently from who is looking back. Because of that and how different people can look even within the same family (like her own), Vânia embraces the fluidity of her identification as it is constantly affected by the context, content and subjects in the conversation. Also a privilege, though with more negotiations, responsibilities and sensitivity towards others to constantly be aware of.
Dance has played a huge part in her life and Vânia talks about instances that at the time seemed unworthy of reflection but in hindsight she can feel their weight. For instance, as she reached puberty, her teachers were shocked suggesting that she go on a diet - which she did, followed by a nutritionist doctor that told her to eat half an apple and half a cracker as an afternoon snack - ignoring the physical differences between naturally slender caucasian bodies and Vânia’s more strongly built and rounder shaped Angolan-Portuguese body. She was told that if she wouldn’t lose weight, she would have to leave dance school as she would never be able to succeed and build a career.
With time, she’s had the chance to gain perspective, realising that her relationship with dance may be more positive than it otherwise might have been. In her practice, she describes the body as limitless. In her current solo project, her aim is to try and interview her body and understand what it may have to say in terms of identity. Perhaps it is independent from Vânia herself and perhaps there are multiple beings. At times her body manifests what she reads as memories from her youth, like dances she watched her family do at weddings or weekend gatherings. Vânia is as interested in learning about what comes out, perhaps unconsciously, as well as understanding how colonised her body may be. It is definitely an ongoing journey.
Simon
Simon was born in France, but has lived in many different corners of the world. His mother is from Martinique and his father is French. He lived the first 6 years of his life in Paris before moving to London for 4 years, and then moving back and forth in between the two. In the years since, Simon has also lived in São Paulo, Venice, London (again) and currently lives in Lisbon.
Simon went to private schools both in Paris and London and says that if he didn’t look at his skin he could have easily been white because everyone else around him was. He would occasionally catch himself in the mirror surprising himself that he didn’t in fact have white skin. He clearly remembers the first time he encountered overt racism when he was with his mother in a McDonalds in Paris. He overheard a conversation between a father and his daughter on the table next to them. The father was saying, “You see those people over there, you should kill them”. Simon’s mother, who also heard the conversation, told him to just ignore them.
Simon is an artist and at present is very interested in sculpture and ceramics. His practice is based on the desire to heal the world and deals with creating new worlds, planets and galaxies. His belief that truth in our present reality is so hidden that it’s almost impossible to find and the only way to discover it is by creating new worlds. He has recently taken up a form of transcendental meditation that really resonates with him. The meditation omits the complications of skin colour by utilising the mantra “I am Light”.
Tessa
Tessa was born in Kingston, Jamaica. Her mother is English and her father is Half Indian and Half Jamaican. Her mother’s family are from an upper middle class family and have a long tradition in medicine. Tessa herself is a doctor. Her father grew up in Rae Town, a particularly tough part of Kingston and was eventually sent to live with an obscure relative in the UK. He met Tessa's mother through the London music scene in the swinging sixties. Her mother, then a young Oxford educated doctor, and her father a Rastafarian who was friends with Bob Marley. Tessa lived in Jamaica until she was 15 playing barefoot in the country side surrounded by nature and the warmth of sun and people. She then moved to London on scholarship to complete her schooling. She had initially been drawn to the London because of the prominence of wide ranging subcultures, which she had seen whilst glued to MTV in her adolescence and which were near impossible to find at the time in Jamaica.
Whilst in Jamaica, Tessa went to a private primary school and then state-run secondary school. The primary school was filled with majority white and mixed children from affluent families and she was teased for being “too black” with her then-strong Patois accent. Later, when she went to secondary school she was teased for being “too white”. She says this is the story of her life, not feeling entirely Jamaican or English. Tessa has a real love of Japanese society which may in part stem from her maternal grandparents having lived and worked in Japan and Singapore. Her model name “Kuragi” is fabricated word that comes from “Kurage”, the Japanese word for jellyfish. The way she has explored this persona she describes as a way of exploring her own personal culture within her mixed heritage. Finding a persona that was possibly the furthest from Jamaica, but yet still an island, and still something 'other' than white. Tessa has since been to Japan many times and has managed to find a place for herself there on the art scene.
Tessa’s mother worked as a doctor for British Airways and, as a perk of the job, the family received first-class tickets to travel back and forth between Jamaica and London. Tessa often would fly back to Jamaica to visit family and return to London. She was frequently subjected to stop and search by the airport security - sometimes up to 6 times on one journey from leaving the plane to passport control. Having naturally curly hair and tanned skin, travelling alone in first-class clearly spelled drug mule to the authorities, so Tessa decided to make an experiment and straighten her hair and wasn’t stopped by the police again. She also noticed that upon straightening her hair she seemed more accepted by other ethnicities. Although she feels guilty about changing her appearance in this way, her hair has now become a key part of her style and model persona. She likes that it leaves her existing in a space somewhere even more difficult to place than before and this for her feels like the identity she’s comfortable with.