Phanuel Antwi is a son, a lucky brother of two handsome, loving sisters, Agnes and Clara, a blessed uncle to a beautiful boy, Ezekiel, and niece, Chelsea. He works with dance, is a poet, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. He has been active in organizing around a range of issues, including anti-immigration laws and practices, anti-racism and anti-capitalism, and labour rights within the university. He spends loads of time exploring questions of desire, the poetics of identity and the intimacies of archives and everyday living.
Our archive is not the silent storage room of Truth or History or Reality or Anything Real, for that matter. The aesthetic and language of archive and refusal open realism’s grip on art. Refusal speaks as if its desires have already manifested themselves in the present. We discuss the radical imaginative as a means of orientation, for moving and positioning oneself elsewhere to create new centres, foci and spaces. For us who live the frequencies and fiction of empires and self-creation, the archive requires poesis and abstraction; for us archival refusal is an act of pressing our ears to the image peephole through to the somewhere score of the said and unsaid things of our everyday lives. Neighbouring London and Vancouver, we reinterpret each other’s practice and sense of place.
For the Record is a diasporic archive which embraces this rich tone and texture of diasporic romance. The romance, for the record, is not a move away from the difficult complexity of living in diaspora; the diasporic romance that For the Record captures is the unseen, unvoiced, undoing tenderness of Black kinship.
The project is part of the culture program related to Canada’s Guest of Honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2020 and is supported by the Government of Canada / Embassy of Canada to Germany.
