Jemma Desai & Barby Asante, 'As We Are Giving We Are Receiving*' | 12 Hour Sit-in Revel

What happens when we hold questions that cannot be answered?

Inspired by the work of Bayo Akamalafe who emphasises that “good questions transcend the answers we can give them”, we gather as friends and kin, mothers and artists, learners and unlearners. Full of questions that rarely receive answers, we wonder together how we might practice the receiving and embracing of our shared questions without any need to make sense, or fix, or ‘progress’ to understanding. In this forty-minute interlude we will practice being dialogic containers for one another, seeking not to build an argument or to come to a shared conclusion, but to fill up with the receipt and embrace of the question, to integrate the power of seeking without the entitlement to find. How might this giving and receiving overflow into an abundance of possibility, imagination and presence?

* The title of the in-conversation paraphrases Barby Asante in Jemma Desai’s essay ‘M/Othering for Liberation: a Declaration of Independence’ in SEEN Issue 002, 2021. .