FOR ATLANTA EKE:
Radicalizing Babies
It’s all very absurd, possibly for children, or maybe made to radicalize babies.
Quote: Atlanta Eke September 2025
For Atlanta
You create a sense of anticipation. I wait to hear your response, but I know you take time to explore and test a series of actions before you answer. Sometimes that pause feels too much, but it’s the right kind of pause; it creates space that makes what follows more meaningful. Growing up in a state of urgency, when things feel easy, I create difficulty. This isn’t self-reflection; it’s a muscle memory I find useful.
This morning, for example, instead of trying to make my face look better, I drew two vertical lines above each eye with black eyeliner, rather than the usual horizontal. I could sense that some commuters wanted to tell me my eyeliner was off, but they hesitated, confused about its intention. I imagine you encounter a similar tension in your development, beginning with a mixture of distinct prompts, or, to quote Marc Camille Chaimowicz, “activities that inform each other but remain in tangent and opposition.”
I howled at your idea to radicalise babies through musical theatre. Could we please get rid of the theatre and just start singing and dancing? Musical theatre tends to flatten experience into big crescendos, over-signalled emotion, and carefully timed audience responses. It leaves little room for drifting in and out, or for subtle layers of meaning that don’t resolve in applause. My grandmother would jump on the piano in the pub and start singing, a woozy, unselfconscious act, where people weave in and out of attention, participatory but loose, half-real, half-background, part of life. The theatre song is so tightly choreographed, it doesn’t trust you to find your own states of drifting or resonance. Singing and dancing, maybe it’s those two things together, not wrong enough? Like singing and spitting, or dancing and Geoff Kennett. Your question of how to dance without it being dance, or from my end, when something starts looking like art it’s already overstated and recognisable. Stop making art, we shout at the students, wrap something without it looking wrapped.
In her opening speech, Anne Imhoff thanks Hans Ulrich Obrist for his “warm words,” speaking in English rather than proficiently in German. It’s so much better than “kind words,” which now feels smug and patronising. Working in another language that you don’t fully understand creates these beautiful uncorrected gestures. In the same conversation, Imhoff suggests her works are “images that are live moments, it’s easy to say it’s performance because it is not obviously a painting.” An audience’s need for categorisation, a way into understanding.
I see your work, Atlanta, as a conceptual prompt, a political thought beaten into submission for its flaws and failures, it gets challenged. It’s not dance, not art, but a curious act that must find its form, not a well-trained method endlessly repeated. When I create artworks, they become a permanent state of a fleeting moment, fixed in static objects, whereas your performances remain within the fleeting moment itself.
Do you remember when you wanted to make a six-episode mini-TV series from inside the exhibition Mother Holding Something Horrific? This way of operating, parasitically within another form, becomes your mode of corruption, creating a surrogate, alternative place.
Let’s get back to babies. Isn’t bringing up a child the most important job on the planet, the secret key to everything? Yet it’s tedious, the chores, the repetition that is never neutral. Our bodies don’t just adapt, they submit. They call it training, but isn’t it conditioning? Ghislaine Leung, in Bosses, asks: when does “work ethic” stop being a virtue and start functioning as a self-imposed abusive employer? When does discipline become domination? Maybe our radical babies need a constant spotlight, one that follows them through the streets like the weird drones at night, watching the new builds in Brunswick, surveillance as cheap security. Maybe our babies are backstage, flying the drones. Maybe they’ll start singing out of tune, drift toward another genre, or fraternise with the local property developer.
What is truly radical behaviour? Going against societal norms? Or is it radical enough simply to stay fluid, shifting, changing, refusing recognition? Isn’t that our job as artists? I refuse to remain once I’ve mastered something. Stay too long, and it becomes the only thing you’re allowed to do. That’s how options close. That’s how the body stiffens. Your ability to respond to the repetitive patterns of the body is conscious; it’s never bound to any one discipline, politics, gender, or space. You create layers of possibility; each shift caught within the framework of your own instructions. But when does radicalism become performative? There’s a lot of performativity going down, complex human behaviour reduced to the performativity in language; when words don’t describe something, they actually make it happen.
How can I talk about your work without mentioning the body:
When I think about the body, I think about shared bathwater.
I think of Mike Kelly’s Tallulah Hayride, a method of stringing and singing all the titles of his entire artwork catalogue together, utilising yodelling and R&B music genres, dissociated editing, a palette cleanser, CUT, to footage of Kelly walking down the LA highway and the weird talking plants. These two loose cuts are necessary and highlight the difference in art, music, and theatre. Boo yeah.
I think of Edie Sedgwick falling asleep over her dinner, while Warhol keeps the camera going. It’s very moving, as it’s understood this is not fiction, “drug fucked” and vulnerable prey to the auteur. A moment different to Kira Muratova’s directing, a space for the real action of a child nodding off in its highchair. Both bodies differ in their response to sleeping sitting up, sated, one by the innocence of growth and the other by an inability to cope. Making your victim comfortable.
When I think of the body, I think of the consequence of being too brazen.
I think of Jeff Stryker’s voice, I want to lick it.
I forever hold the image of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah in the year 2000.
I think of the pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s diamante hands in Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives. I think of his three-hour performance, Quicksand, a narration of a novel with Ashley’s voice. I lost myself.
I think of the boy next door, who used to shave his eyebrows off on a regular basis.
I think about dancing. I think of the final scene in Beau Travail, a film directed by Claire Denis. I think of the final scene in Mother, directed by Bong Joon Ho. I think of the final scene in Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold. No need to talk it out, write, or make art; the body can deliver a message. I think of the jazz dancers at the Wag Club, Electric Ballroom, London in the early 80s.
When I think about the body, I think about Frances Stark’s video David Bowie I’m Only Dancing. It captures the things that feature films want to but can’t.
I think of being spat on, a sensory violence that inflicts insult rather than pain.
I think about being inside Rudolf Stingel’s carpeted rooms at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2014. I stayed there all day; I couldn’t leave.
I think of cartoon music, “Do ya know what I mean?” It’s actioned, slapstick, overblown, directed, laughing clarinets, screaming horns, sad violas, threatening percussion.
When I think of the body, I love the chase in Dara Friedman’s PLAY, Part One, Amanda and Dakota, a real-life couple (or were they actors) in naked pursuit, squashed against glass, lips out of sync.
I think about “I’ll Take Care of You,” Gil Scott-Heron. Seeing him in Manchester, 1976, and again with John Cooper Clarke, 1984, and again in Camden in the 80s. Massive Attack (Bristol days) Live With Me, 2006. The video was filmed by Jonathan Glazer. Synchronicity, Jung’s word, is just when things line up that shouldn’t. A dream that folds into an event or running into someone you’d been thinking about. No cause, no effect, just the strangeness of connection. Same songs, different times of life.
I think of the music that is a backdrop to our existence. I am not going to list it, that’s another story.
For all the musings, questions and research you sent me, I’m still left with John Lennon’s scream at the end of Mother, over-stretching his vocal cords, releasing the agony, or still holding on to the pain.