I was invited by artist Maria Johansson and Sujy Lee to write a short text in response to “Object One Hundred Nine: would not have written that itself”, a work by Maria from her Object series. The object lived in my apartment for a week, became my companion for a brief moment. At the time, I had been reading and thinking about brokenness through “The Undercommons” from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, James Baldwin speaking, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” from Ursula K. LeGuin, “Sing with the Birds” from Lumumba, and “Hana” from Asa-Chang & Junray among many others in my periphery of that particular present.

Brown Island was invited by curators Malin Arnell and Mar Fjell to participate in Konsthall C’s Cirkelträning, the institution’s 15th anniversary retrospective exhibition, to address the theme of decoloniality within the space. We used the space and our duration in the exhibition for actively surfacing questions and issues regarding community and collectivity in practice. In constant dialogue, we negotiated time, energy, space, responsibility, nourishment, abundance, and absence. We asked what breaks community, and what sustains it, and opened up our own practice to articulate responses. Three of us wrote a letter, and three of us read it to a visiting public.

What we didn’t know at the time, was that there were unresolved conflicts within the institution itself. A conflictedness that involved a lack of sensitivity, responsibility, and solidarity toward black and brown bodies. We decided to exit the exhibition at that time, but not before speaking with those involved, to articulate this break, to be in support and solidarity, to begin to formulate what was lacking or what ought to have been—attempting to understand responsibility.