Putting the Cooker on Low

'Putting the Cooker on Low' explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises.

'Putting the Cooker on Low' intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black women artists internalise value-(as)-labour-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses and slippages these anti-erotic modes of survival engender – as felt by both human and non-human ecologies – remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.

This work was commissioned by the Center for Human Rights and Arts at Bard College.

• https://chra.bard.edu/commission/budge/