Terms & Conditions: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on archiving the Black trans experience

What would it mean if we lived in a world that continuously altered itself to ensure that Black trans people could survive?

AAG What has your collaboration with Black trans artists and coders on the production, testing, and character design processes for We’re Here Because Of Those That Are Not taught you about the expansiveness of Black trans digital existence?

DBS Something that we sought out purposefully was that those that were involved didn’t have to be tech savvy or even artists. The only thing they had to bring was being Black and trans. They didn’t have to bring any particular conversations, any trauma, none of that. The first thing I did was create terms and conditions for us. Everything you say has to center Black trans people, but we will not recreate any trauma within this archive. Conversations around trauma could happen, but our aim was not to make something that we see often, which is a trauma-filled experience based upon Black trans people. Instead, we were interested in making something that actually reflects us.

In bringing all these people together and starting the process, we realized that we’ve never had a space to think about what we want to archive. It was sad, in a way, that when we started thinking—“Right, we’re going to make a Black trans archive. It’s going to be interactive. What do we put in it?”—we didn’t know. We didn’t know because we weren’t using our faces. The ways in which we’re used to archiving ourselves now are quick snaps on Instagram.

Making something that’s more of a character, that tries to represent a deeper thing than a picture can, that tries to hold an experience and tell the experience—that was really difficult. Having not been given any opportunities like this before, we were even out of practice in having a space, or being paid to talk with and about each other and how we would make a Black trans story.

What I learned about digital Black transness, or Black trans identity in the realm of online, is that though there’s a lot of it present, there’s not a lot of it taking up large amounts of real estate. And, often, the internet real estate it does take up is governed by a larger entity like Facebook and Instagram, or YouTube, which has its own rules, terms, and conditions, which we abide by, and its own aesthetic, which we also abide by.

Centering us from the foundation is a lot harder for us to figure out. But, once we started, we couldn’t stop. Seeing people who had never designed a game begin to design a game, just from instinct, really enlightened me to this idea. You don’t need to know about video games. You don’t need to know about the industry in order to start making something that could reflect an interactive experience.

That’s when I started seeing a kind of archive being formed by the participants. A lot of the decisions we made stemmed exclusively from the worries we had. For example, identity choices exist in all of my works because we had a conversation about what we were making being accessible to everyone, but still ensuring that it be a requirement to center Black trans people and not be a touristic experience. Now, how do we do that? The first thing we came up with was that you must identify yourself when you play the game. That had an effect on how we narrated the story, and on how we pushed people through it or pushed people out.

Black Trans History, 2021. Teaser image for BLACKTRANSSEA.COM.

AAG There’s so much there that is rich and abundant. First of all, a group of Black trans people being paid to sit around and think about the archive and what they want in it needs to happen more. But, also, thinking about that instinct, that intuition, and coming back to this bowl of tools—there’s something so beautiful about people who don’t consider themselves“experts” recognizing the value of their own embodiment and experience. All the infrastructure falls away.

What I really loved about the game Resurrection Lands were the hymns of the Black trans ancestors in different parts of the environment, particularly in the exhibition. Lyrics like, “Outside my gender roles, I suffocate you. Please allow me to rest. I’m learning to love me. You consume me like a milkshake.” How do you approach producing the soundscapes for your work to reflect the environment in which it’s interacted with? 

DBS That’s a really good question. I’ll start with the one that you mentioned. When I was making Resurrection Lands, I was thinking a lot about my upbringing in Christianity and spirituality.

There was a day I was staring in the mirror and I wanted praise music, but music that praised Black transness. One of the things I remember the most is singing in church and feeling that sense of everyone singing together. A lot of the music in Resurrection Lands came from this idea of praising transness, praising these people who aren’t often praised, and having music that they could listen to in the morning to make them feel good, like really, really good. For that particular sketch, I was thinking about a Black trans radio show for which a Black trans person came on to sing, to promote their album. But, at the same time, they’re tired of it being called a Black trans album, or Black trans praise music, because it’s supposed to praise all those around them. They’re getting boxed in, even from people who are also Black and trans. That’s where there’s the line saying,“I’m Black and trans. The movie that’s going to come out is Black and trans. I just want to make some music. I’m not purposely trying to make it Black and trans. I am Black and trans, so that’s how the music comes out.” So, at the same time, we’re talking about the limitations of our identity, as having distance from it feels very difficult to obtain socially.

We’re proud of our Black trans identity, yet when we don’t want that conversation to be at the forefront, we don’t get the jobs we want, or we aren’t seen as visible enough, or representative enough. Resurrection Lands is about the story of this space. In the game, technology has been designed to scan the earth, bring back Black trans ancestors, and digitally store them so that they become sentient. People come and visit them, but, then, these Black trans ancestors get co-opted into an esports game where they’re, again, being taken advantage of by society at large. A lot of Resurrection Lands is really beautiful, trying to praise trans people and uplift them, but with this somber sadness that comes from being aware that when certain transpeople are benefited in this world, those outside of the community sometimes benefit even more. Those benefits are often unseen, untalked about. I couldn’t even list them. But we know that someone is gaining monetary value from allowing us to be seen next to them.

For me, making music is a very similar process to archiving a person. It comes from feeling and knowing an emotion and then trying to meet that with sound. In the program I use, the track has to be completed in one sitting. I can’t save it. If my computer shuts down, I lose everything. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but if it works, it works and then that’s it. You don’t edit it. You don’t do anything. A lot of these tracks feel raw because at the moment I was making them, I was feeling a lot. If I’m not feeling anything, it’s very hard for me to make a track.

“In bringing all these people together and starting the process, we realized that we’ve never had a space to think about what we want to archive.”

AAG The fallacy of an archive is that it’s an objective and neutral record. But to enter your archives, you’ve created terms and conditions that center and support Black trans people. The visiting avatar must abide by the rules and cannot remain passive in the narrative. Choice is a common engine to move video games forward, but there aren’t many games, let alone archives, that uphold accountability, self-reflection, and action like yours do, and that upload the player’s consciousness into an avatar alongside their empathy and lived experience as conditions of entry. How have the concepts of choice and access evolved in your body of work?

DBS Before I made anything interactive, I obviously didn’t know how to do it. I taught myself animation and made animated concept films for archives because I was trying to locate Black trans people within history and having a really difficult time finding any, apart from Mary Jones. The poster of her warns people away. Having that as the only form of a Black trans archived body was horrible. I made this film called Unarchived Adventures, which is a point-and-click film that details how you would play this fake archive game to upload your own experience. When I showed it, people would be like, “Oh, great. I can just watch this film and that’s it. Then I can ask you questions.”

There were moments where I found myself thinking,“This is a bit weird, this is a bit strange,” because every time I think that something’s very clear in the film, the person watching seems to want to bring it to me, as if I was a teacher, and have an exchange about what they saw in the film versus what they see in me. I’m performing even though I’m not supposed to be.

It wasn’t until my next film—a 40-minute animation/performance called Digging For Black Trans Life that I took those choices and moments from Unarchived Adventures and blew them out. There was a battle scene similar to Pokémon. There was an inventory system which, at times, the video would pause so you could see what it was equipped with. But that was the final work I’d made that wasn’t literally interactive, because I realized people will always come and put their own things on top of these trans people’s stories.

After that, I said, “I’m not making any more passive work. I’m tired of people being able to sit down and enjoy it and not feel anything, not really take into account what’s happening in their position within this world that we’re all living in.” I was tired of trans bodies being seen as performance items. Every person has to perform their own identity in entering the work, and they have to decide in front of everyone else. Maybe they haven’t even thought about their identity, but, within this room, they’re going to have to. That choice will then affect everything that they are allowed to see, how long they can be here, when they can leave, if they feel comfortable in the room. Once we implemented that, it was interesting to see the respect the space actually got and how people started thinking about their own experiences, the choices that they had made, and the people they have lost, without obscuring the trans people in the room.

Making the viewer the most active participant in the work really started shifting my aim around why I’m doing this. I want Black trans people to not only feel represented in the work, but also that their choices mattered within the space, and that with each choice they made, the work would hold them further and further. The whole point—“how can we center Black trans people within spaces that don’t usually center them?”—was boiled down to these choices, these interactions, this ability to no longer be passive.

AAG When you’re passive, you don’t have to de-center yourself.

DBS Exactly.

AAG I’ve seen some work-in-progress footage from a play you’re creating. Can you tell us about what you’re working on and how the format is holding your work in new or unexpected ways?

DBS I’ve always wanted to work on a play. I’ve worked on soundscapes for plays. I’ve been in the room when plays are being made, but I’ve never been the one who’s actually had the chance to write the script, speak with the people, and tell the stories I want to tell. When I was approached by Sculptors Theater to make a play using YouTube as the stage, I was like,“Yes, absolutely. This is right up my alley.” 

Lately, I’ve been looking at stuff that influenced me during my childhood—shows that I hated and loved at the same time, like Family Guy, South Park, The Simpsons, BoJack Horseman. I want something like that to be the play. At the same time, I have been making these three games that are all about the sea and a world-ending, or world-changing, event that comes from the sea. These huge wounds in the sea open up and they hold the history of Black trans people across the ocean—the history of people who are waiting to have their space within the world because their space was removed. The event becomes the replacement of certain people’s spaces in the world, and those who had those spaces entering the void.

The shift is: you erased a Black trans person, so now you must erase yourself for us to come back. That’s where the play started. Then I did two workshops for the script, recorded audio clips from our conversation, and put those into the play. There are Black trans people speaking about the story of the play as you’re watching the play at the same time.

It’s a really interesting dichotomy; I’ve never made something with this much conversation in it. It feels very exciting, also because I’m a mother and there’s a character of a mother and her child. At certain points, you get to choose whether to follow Black trans TV or the mother and her child. Both experiences happen at the same time.

“I was tired of trans bodies being seen as performance items. Every person has to perform their own identity in entering the work, and they have to decide in front of everyone else.”

AAG I’m wondering a little bit more about your relationship with the sea, especially these three games that you’re creating. How has its expansiveness held you?

DBS It’s strange because before this, I hadn’t really made much about the sea, except this one VR called The Black Sea. The Black Sea was an imaginary place that stored all of Black history. Nothing was lost in the Black Sea. You could find anything to do with Black history there. The Black Sea also had an island, and only certain people could travel on or to it.

Then, recently, I was doing research into piracy and who pirates were. I didn’t realize that a lot of the British pirates were actually courtly gentlemen sent by the queen as colonizers. I looked at the history of Black people on water, because the only relations I’d found were all traumatic and very painful, but it turns out that often Black people were hired as sailors because of their knowledge of the sea, how they moved on the sea, and their ability to swim and catch fish. They had a history of how they used and navigated the ocean’s waves in order to feed their families. This is something that the colonizers didn’t have. Just knowing that small bit, I was like, “Right, we do have a history of the sea that has now been overshadowed and overwritten by colonialism.”

Also, when swimming pools started becoming popular, Black people were no longer allowed to swim because water became more of a luxury than a boundary. There’s this newer narrative that Black people are afraid of water and don’t know how to swim, but that comes directly from this other history of white people making sure we don’t get access to water, whether that’s clean drinking water, swimming pool water, or swimming lessons.

I wanted to make this game called Black Trans Sea, in which the first question you’re asked is: are your ancestors colonizers or are your ancestors those who were taken across the sea? Depending on your answer, you will either make it to land, or you won’t. That’s coming out in September 2021.

Then I thought, “I want to create the experience of someone waking up in the sea.” They awake at the moment the world is about to change. They can swim to different parts of the sea and what they do determines what has changed and what hasn’t. That’s the second game, which is entirely text-based.

The third one is more of a live performance in which I’m the game dungeon master. This whole narrative of the sea, what we can and can’t do on it, and how we see it, is something I really want to change, because when I think about the sea and Black trans people, nothing good comes to mind. I don’t have any stories of a Black trans person having fun on a boat—something as silly as that! I write alternative histories in which Black transness could be one with water—the water could hold us, literally hold our bodies, stop us from drowning, give air for us to breathe so that we can be pushed back up once it’s a better place for us.

AAG Thank you so much for sharing that. I think, too, about the fog you created in one of your archives. It’s helping Black trans people breathe, but it’s something that obscures, also. Thinking about nature and the environment as supportive of Black transness is so beautiful and necessary in combating these histories of violence and erasure.

DBS The environment currently makes it harder to breathe. What does an environment look like that makes it easier for a Black trans person to breathe? What would it mean if a Black trans person fell off a boat and tried to breathe in the ocean and the sea separated so that they could? What does that mean? What would it mean if we lived in a world that changed itself just to make sure we could survive? 

AAG Yes. It’s in the very weather. It’s the objective of the world. How has working on archives centering Black trans people helped you envision a more equitable future for Black trans people?

DBS This is going to sound so basic, but it’s being able to have a space to sit down and talk about ideas we want to make and things we want to do, and know that we’re not losing money in that space. One of the most valuable things is being in a room for and with Black trans people, and everyone’s being paid for their time. You suddenly see how rare that is. You see big buildings with rooms for conversations, strategy, what people want to do, where they’re going to go for dinner, if things are selling or not. But Black trans people, we don’t ever have that space. There’s never a time when we have that space and we’re being paid to have those conversations. Just starting there is so important because often we’re rushed to produce something which will be consumed by people who are not us. When we’re taking our time to produce something for ourselves, you start to see things that come out that we really need. You start to see how the process impacts what’s being made.

For me, an equitable process requires long-term payment. Black trans people need to be paid a yearly salary to come in and talk to you, to come in and help you design this stuff. I want to see a Black trans CEO. I need to see buildings owned by Black trans people. There’s nothing that makes us the income that allows us to buy buildings. I don’t know a single Black trans person that owns a building. That’s so important: having real estate to allocate to other Black trans people, having actual tools so that you don’t have to go ask a white person to care about you. Otherwise we’re going to keep hitting this limit where only a couple of Black trans people are doing very well, instead of the resources expanding for other Black trans people. I don’t know what to call it, but I know we need to start it. That’s my vision for the future. I want to see Black trans people being able to get to the top, while also bringing the community to the top, too.●

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a UK-based artist working predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black trans person.