A discourse on feeling otherwise through materials: their whole body of arts regularly digested

Croydon, then, becomes a microcosm of the British nation-state, a starting point for discussing race, class, colour, labour, gender, property relations, borders. While I retain the art historical instinct to ask what narratives are being constructed, my current art practice also allows for something playful to happen—what Guy Debord terms the 'rather pleasing vagueness' of psychogeography. Although not exclusively focused on Croydon, I use it as a framework to think through the questions about my place in the world, "placed" as in Stuart Hall's tender explanation for his preoccupation with displacement: 'I have lived all my adult life in England, in the shadow of the black diaspora - 'in the belly of the beast'. [...] [I]t is worth remembering that all discourse is 'placed', and the heart has its reasons.'. I push even further than Hall; it sometimes feels as if my academic and political knowledges are human garments are a civilising constraint on the animal of my self, which at times feels like a creature made of clay and dreamstuff bursting out of the floorboards, escaping into the woods where I do not have to politely explain myself. Instead you will find me wading through the bog, trying to get to where I want through all the Croydons that were, are, and will be.