Gabrielle Goliath, Beloved (Saidiya), 2023, oil stick & chalk pastel on paper, 80 x 71cm
. . .
Saidiya Hartman, academic and author
“Wayward, related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, wilful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild. To inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable, to be deeply aware of the gulf between where you stayed and how you might live. Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis that sustains the dispossessed. Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free. The attempt to elude capture by never settling. Not the master’s tools, but the ex-slave’s fugitive gestures, her traveling shoes.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, 2019