Interview #228
Lucy Van in conversation with Elena Gomez

“Be hypervigilant of popular discourse, seductive ‘progressive’ language, seemingly neutral and ‘inclusive’ policies, and other co-optation measures that blunt our consciousness, silence us into obedience, seduce us into cooperation, and conscript us to keep the racial machinery going. ”

“Art that conforms to cultures of repression is not neutral. It becomes a tool for reinforcing the status quo, an instrument and extension of state power.”

“I believe that if you’re going to take the past seriously as a setting for fictional work, you have to try your best to bracket out the present and let the story play out in its own terms.”

“I often say that music is my mirror. In the beginning, it reflected all the intensity of my emotions—the sadness, the longing—but over time, it has shifted and become more flexible, helping me find a sense of belonging.”

“Certain words carried reverence, certain scenes needed to be dealt with in the spirit of sacredness, and for those I let the Arabic stand, because of the power I perceive in it. I wanted the English text to bear that haunting, [for it] to be ghosted by other languages, allowing their turns of phrase to slip in with all their awkwardness. At some point you ask yourself: what do we write for, if not to say, this is how it felt to me—can you see it?”

“If we’re trying to reflect the truth and question of how we live now in our art, the urgent thing right now for me is for us to sense in an embodied way how our attention and viewing of ‘others’ are being captured, distracted and gamified.”