Ama Josephine Budge - Writer / Artist / Curator
Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist who explores the kinships between Blackness, feminism, decolonial aesthetics, queer erotics and ecology to form a praxis she has named Intimate Ecologies, working toward liberatory interspecies futures.
Usually based in London, Ama can also be found loitering around the fried egg stalls of Accra, or gallery bookshops in New York City.
published Work
Well Hung: reflections on Gray Wielebinski’s Shaved in Opposite Directions (commission)
Watching the Channel (fiction)
Consented Magazine, Issue 7: Environmentalism, 2019
A Shoal of Lovers Leads me Home (fiction)
Anathema Spec from the Margins, Issue 5, Canada, 2018
Rupturous Desires: Queer Bodies Are Made from Mountains (commission)
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Aperture, 2018
Just Like Us: Queer Intimacies Familiar
Chew Magazine, Issue 1, Toronto, 2018
Wet and Blue
Consented Magazine, Issue 5: Love & Desire, 2018
Feeder (fiction)
Skin Deep Magazine, Issue 7: The Food Issue, 2017
Wodo Nublanuito - Last One Correct
Mixed-Race, Queer, Feminist(MRQF) Zine, Issue 3: I am a bridge // I am not your bridge, 2017
The Future Belongs to Gastropods
Consented Magazine, Issue 3: Gender, 2017
Seeing in colour
HYSTERIA RADICAL FEMINIST PERIODICAL, issues 3,4,5 (2015 - 2016)
a selection of writing available online
Honey, Born in Flames
All images courtesy of Lizzie Borden and Anthology Film Archives, New York.
“Wage Love.” — Charity Hicks
“Hold on to love, let its light be your guide. My people, hold on.” - Eddie Kendricks
The first time I watched Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames, was as part of a film series I co-convened with international curator Chandra Frank at Goldsmiths University. It’s often described as a science-fiction revolution film, a paradoxical documentary, a post-socialist dystopia, a feminist “cult classic”. I hate the term cult classic. It implies a group of electively marginalised people; trendily misunderstood rich kids, who aren’t into the “mainstream”. For me, Born In Flames is not a cult classic. It is a call to wage love.
The series: Queer Feminism’s on Film worked to highlight the often underrepresented nuanced narratives of black and brown queer womxn, trans and non-binary community. It was an odd, yet somehow perfect experience to be presenting the film, the first time I saw it. Chandra and I had been co-curating screenings, each trying to pick titles the other hadn’t seen, so as I led the post-screening discussion it was all I could do not to jump out of my seat in excitement. “Let’s go!” I wanted to cry! “Shotguns all round! Let’s start training to arm the revolution in Fordham Park, New Cross!”
‘We need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most’ - Samuel R Delany
Over a weekend at the beginning of June, an ‘anti-conference’ of black, brown, POC, queer, trans, non-binary, intersex, agender, differently-abled and feminist activists, artists, organisers, techies, teachers and researchers filled the Professor Stuart Hall Building at Goldsmiths University. The ‘I/Mages of Tomorrow’ gathering was an attempt to discuss and envision what our futures could be, if built upon non-reactionary foundations. Keynotes included Gail Lewis with respondent Yasmin Gunaratnam, Evan Ifekoya and Ain Bailey in conversation with Kodwo Eshun, and Raju Rage and Kuchenga on trans-feminist futures...
Photo credit: Alexander Lijka
Live projection painting by Estabrak Al Ansari
Photo Credit Leslie Farah Marem
HYSTERIA:
Reviewing Travis Alabanza at Housmans: A Conversation With The Queer Brown Muddy Kid, with SA Smythe
26 March 2016
On Sunday 22nd March, 2016 I got in a cab from A&E where I’d been with a close family member to Kings Cross St Pancreas station in London. I then walked to Housemans radical bookshop for a night of what I expected to be enveloping brown queerness. It was hailed as the last ever performance of Stories of a Queer Brown Muddy Kid and there was an energy of transition in the atmosphere, tangible, tasteable. As though we had all come together for a rite of passage ritual, and everyone would be asked to sacrifice some small treasure, a sliver of their own-ness. Knowing something of the work of Travis Alabanza and SA Smythe, who would be in-conversation with Travis later in the evening, I considered attending this event to be a part of my radical self-care policy. I was not disappointed...
The squeak of my bicycle pauses - “S’cuse me, are you mixed race?”
I am not in the mood, and have heard this too often. Something about his loping gait puts my guard up right away. “It’s none of your fucking business,” I reply. A little hostile perhaps, but learned, from experience – short and sharp causes the least collateral damage.
“Ah, it’s just you look like you’re mixed-race, you’re so sexy, you got a big ass, yeah, you look like you’re mixed race with your big ass, mmmm, your ass be spreading. Your. Ass. Be. Spread. Like…”
It tumbles out of him: layer upon layer of judgment. His eyes and his words creeping underneath my dress to paw me all over. Leaving dirty fingerprints on my thighs and teeth marks on my stomach. Writing over my body, my evening and my “spreading ass”.
Photo Credit Yasmine Akim
‘Homosexuality is not an African thing’
My mother tells me that when first they met, my father used to put on her dresses and high heels, and dance about in their bedroom. Luckily all the women in my family have fairly large feet. True, he was a musician. And yes, my mother was a lesbian when he met her. Yet still, this comes as quite a shock for me now, looking at my pointedly heterosexual, born and raised West African father, conservatively re-situating himself in the Ghanaian home I half-grew up in. But then, I didn’t even think that there were gay people in Ghana until my late teens. Between evangelical damnation and a seemingly total cultural denouncement of homosexuality, I could see no place for queer culture in the ‘Africa’ I knew, or in fact in Black heritage at all.
HYSTERIA collects feminist voices from a range of demographics the world over. Through visual art, essays and interviews, their bi-annual magazine asks the important questions surrounding feminism today.
HYSTERIA creates space for marginalised opinions and experiences online, on paper and in their launches. The collective isn't afraid to offend – opposing opinions are often printed in the same magazine issue, moving discussion forward at a rate that is hard to find elsewhere.
Begun as a sleek zine by students of London's SOAS University, it has grown in size and scope. The 50-strong collective spans the globe; readers and artists distribute the magazine to stockists on their travels. Thanks to fans and artists filling their suitcases with copies, HYSTERIA can be found in every continent.
We talked to two members of the collective, Ama Josephine Budge and Jago Rackham on the philosophies that inspire HYSTERIA's team and contributors.
