Taylor Le Melle and Derica Shields
Wednesday 31 July, 19.00–21.00
Rijksakademie Reading Room
Entrance free, RSVP via publicprogramme@rijksakademie.nl
Le Melle and Shields previously explored together a mutual interest in Spillers’ theorisation of how, for racialised women, property law falls down on the flesh, on sex and on intimacy. During a 2019 exhibition in Cambridgeshire, England, Le Melle commissioned Shields to do two days’ research into an 18th century English court case which debated whether the legal rights of an owner by way of marriage superseded the rights of an owner by way of purchase. Marriage won.
This conversation at the Rijksakademie picks up on this thread. Le Melle is still rooting around in that murky swamp of an era where the hierarchies of property ownership that we still live with today were being established; and is now using plant material to reconcile a few debts owed to our bodies. Shields got stuck on the continuations made possible by (not despite!) legal change, and emerged by studying how enslaved West Indians recuperated when they no longer believed that the law that enslaved them was a vehicle to freedom. She wrote a book in the process and qualified as a massage therapist, in part, to integrate its lessons.
Derica Shields is a writer and editor from South London working across disciplines with a particular focus on Black aesthetics, cultures and epistemologies. Her criticism and essays appear in Art Review, Frieze, Flash Art, and Girls Like Us, and in catalogue and gallery publications. She is a former contributing editor at the New Inquiry and LIES journal, and former Features Editor at Rookie.
Derica has programmed film screenings and taught classes internationally. Between 2013 and 2015, she co-ran The Future Weird, a screening and discussion series that placed experimental shorts and features by Black and Global South directors alongside clips from the news, archive film, and blockbusters. In 2017, she co-taught Cinema in Black with Fanta Sylla, a nine-week class on Black auteurs and experimentalists. She has also given talks, lectures and workshops at Light Work, the New School, and BAM, New York; the ICA, Frieze Art Fair, South London Gallery and Somerset House, London; and RCMC and Metro54 in Amsterdam.
Over the past several years, she has experimented with schematic writing and orality through commissions from Cell Project Space (2019), Wysing Art Centre (2019) and Turf Projects (2021). Her oral history project A Heavy Nonpresence (Triple Canopy, 2021) gathers seven Black Londoners’ accounts of the British welfare state. She was a 2022–23 resident at Jan Van Eyck Academie where she developed 'Given to Cottons and No Silk', a two-channel video installation. In 2023, she gave the second annual Sylvia Wynter Lecture at King’s College London. Her book Bad Practice, which considers the potentials of Black failure, is forthcoming from Book Works.
Taylor Le Melle works as a curator (of sorts) and certainly as a writer of ante-modern and anti-modern criticism; off-kilter catalog essays and more artistic subgenres of fiction; as an editor and publisher of several collections of science fantasy, theory and poetry; as a researcher into plants, property and physical experience — bodies, the social kind with reluctance, and the flesh kind with enthusiasm — cultivating perception and proprioception through experimentation.
Taylor Le Melle is one of several co-directors of London-based workers cooperative not/nowhere, whose primary occupation is with building a just infrastructure for artistic practice via the circulation and distribution of 8mm and 16mm moving image formats.
Previous presentations include: Deviant Research, Van Abbe Museum (cur. Yolande van der Heide, N Aikens); Research Fellowship (org. F Dodzan/A Groten), Sandberg Instituut; Amant Foundation Residency, Brooklyn (cur. J Berrios); Text Exercises, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna (cur. Richard Birkett); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (cur. Amanprit Sandhu).
Recent Writing: Anthea Hamilton: Mash Up, Triangle Books; Otobong Nkanga: Unearthed, Kunsthaus Bregenz; Renee Green: Inevitable Distances, Hatje Cantz; DNA6: Carrier Bag Fiction, Spector.
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