Intellectual innings in Innsbruck

The art and theory residency is located in a castle in Innsbruck. Pic/Rosalyn D’mello

In the beginning of October I began a new phase of my intellectual life as a fellow at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, an art and theory residency located in a castle in Innsbruck. I had been excited to apply last year as it was one of few residencies I knew of that enabled art theorists and critics to extend ongoing research, offering residential, logistic, and production support. I was elated to be selected, and to find my name among three other artist-theorists whose proposals are so intriguing and urgent. Because, for the sake of sustaining my livelihood, I am compelled to wear multiple hats, functioning variously as proofreader, editor, art critic, writer, among other callings, I often find it difficult to assert my identity as an intellectual. In any case, women like me, of colour, from minority backgrounds within third-world contexts are not easily considered intellectuals. It is a status we have to claim for ourselves, which involves renouncing shyness and reluctance to wear the mantle, and believing, forcefully, in the immediacy and significance of what we have to contribute in terms of discourse. Especially in India I have been frequently invalidated by the various worlds in which I have operated. The literary world is unable to see the vastness of my oeuvre. Many magazine editors only contact me for my opinion on matters of women's sexual agency, as if my writing was limited to the erotic. The art world has almost no conception of my literary work. Those who invite me as press to art festivals around the world are uninterested in thinking of me as anything other than an arts journalist. All of this is symptomatic of people like me who do not inhabit clear identities, whose practice is metabolic and invested in the slipperiness of discursive boundaries.

Additionally, to have to hold my head high in the absence of institutional validation has been challenging. No matter how much I tell myself that external validation is secondary, I have seen how its absence has affected my career, prevented me from exploring opportunities that are otherwise open to people with more mainstream dispositions. It is not easy to continue to persist when one is aware of how the forces of prejudice work against you. I am quite certain I am not alone in this feeling, that many of you reading this will identify with the kind of strength of will it requires in order to endure. When I say that I am currently thriving, it has a very different resonance because of how much I have had to struggle to arrive at this point, especially when nothing was ever handed to me on a platter, and all the networks of solidarity to which I have had access are the consequence of intersectional feminist sisterhood and goodwill.

I have been reflecting on all the complex circumstances that have ushered me into this new phase as I try to embrace where I am within my ongoing feminist journey. It involves relinquishing the baggage of insecurity I inherited by virtue of being conditioned as woman, the burden of having to constantly prove myself worthy of opportunities. I am sharing this reflection to reassure those of you who may find in my story portions of your truth that there is a lot to be said for learning to hold oneself professionally, believing, unflinchingly, in the authenticity of your voice and what it is hoping to articulate. So many of us have had to find a measure of success as women by having to perform according to the rules that were set for us by the Brahmanical-racist patriarchy. The process of learning to be true to who we are involves a kind of double-work for us, because first we have to un-entangle ourselves from the misogynist-casteist conditioning that was strategised in order to further our oppression. Learning to be kinder to ourselves, inculcating healthy doses of self-confidence, learning not to feel threatened by other women, to instead seek solidarities and help each other takes practice. But the reward is that when you arrive at the point where you feel a sureness of self, you are not alone, because you will have found that you didn't have to hold yourself up single-handedly, you had, along the way, settled into a community of people who will have given you a hand.

Surrendering the insecurities and the fear of rejection allows for an expansion of mind space. You find you can think more clearly, in a level-headed but also passionate way. You internalise that the reasons why you may even be struggling with a particular form is that the right form for you to express your subjectivity hasn't yet been experimented with. Don't believe the lies that patriarchy tells you, about there being no new mediums of expression, only contemporary ways of wrestling with already theorised ideas. Dare to think and dream beyond the binaries they project onto you. The cruellest lie we subscribe to is the one that presses us to believe that our stories are not worth telling. Especially if you come from a marginalised background, your story of survival, resilience, and joy is vital to the spiritual zeitgeist of all times. Don't hold back. Be irrepressible.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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