Ancestral Magic

Volvo truck. Don Christian talked with me about his connection with cars and car culture and how those connect to his greater identity as a black person, as well as our collective consciousness, something he calls black quantum physics, which connects us all. He also recognized the role of black women in his life and how we as a society owe a great debt to the black women who have come before us ancestral magic. Here is the first half

of my conversation with Don Christian Jones. Let's start off with your exhibit and why you're so excited to share this work with folks. It is a multimedia and I kind of want you to walk through, like describe it to us for folks that are listening, walk us through this kind of multimedia exhibit that is upcoming. I'm trying to put words to it myself every day as as as this evolves. It's really meant to be a living

breathing installation. So it's performative. It's performance based in that you know, there are people enacting and moving, but it's also sculpture in so many ways. And really, more than anything, I wanted to be a monument, like a living breathing monument that is up, that is erected for you know, two days, two nights, that people can experience in the round and can kind of also encapsulate people as audience. So the title of the exhibit is Volvo Truck. Is

that right? It is? Yeah, talk to me about that and why cars are so important and what folks can expect as they walk into this installation. Because as I was watching a previous interview of yours and understanding the fact that you said you didn't play with toys as a kid. You played with matchbook cars and trucks, and that that was very much a part of your growing up, and it reminded me of my younger cousin who I remember from when he was two or three years old.

The only thing that he ever wanted every time that we went to a store were those little cars and trucks, and his fascination with cars just developed as he got older. So I was very endeared as I was learning more about this exhibit. But why I work cars and trucks so important to you and what's the significance of it

in this installation? Sure? And I think I've been kind of grappling with and coming to terms with what, you know, cars kind of symbolized for me in a broader sense, but also in this piece, and I think coming to to terms like over the years, because I've been so inundated almost into this culture of cars, and I've started to ask a lot of questions, you know, with regard to what they what they mean as symbol especially like in a capitalist in a Western world, what they mean

with relation to blackness and kind of like a very black American preoccupation with nice cars or fancy rides, and then the ways in which sound and music intersect with

cars and our experiences growing up in them. Um, I think was hugely formative for me, Like I feel like so much of my growing up and like realizations made and light bulb moments took place in cars, whether I was in the backseat with one of my aunts and one of their cars, or my grandfather or my dad, and there was always music, and there was always some sound skips, some sound score or landscape provided by outside

the windows, you know. So I just remember I can recall conversations had in passing or like sirens or other cars with you know, booming basses rattling. So I think I just have had this longing for a really long time to try and reenact that that feeling. You know.

It's funny because as I as I was looking at your work and listening to your prior interviews and thinking about my own experience with my family, with my aunts and uncles in their cars, and that experience of kind of growing up in the backseat or actually before you were supposed to have children sit in the front seat in between two adults in cars, and kind of the

joy of that experience. Every time a car door opened, as a young person, I felt like we were headed for an adventure because the world was so fresh and so bright through the eyes of my youth. Was there a sense of adventure and experience and exposure that riding around in Philadelphia, which is where you were from, provided

for you. Definitely. I think about like the ways in which black people occupy urban space, American space, like and and the access to car and car culture, and the ways that can really change or like reshape one's adolescents

or just to a broader world. Because I surely had met and grown out with some folks that you know, they grew up in like a five black radius and never and maybe never have experienced the beach before they were a teenager or an adult, or made it down to you know, the Parkway from South Philly to go

to the Art Museum. And I think I've grown to understand the immense privilege that I was afforded in having people around me that were raising me, that could take me places, and then hear stories about how they grew up, how my grandfather maybe taught them how to drive, or my dad taught me how to drive, and these really like visceral moments where it's like they just put you out on the road in the way that they put

me in a pool and said swim. So formative. So yeah, so there's a gratitude I remember, you know, just hearing from my aunts, like their access to the beach, their access to Atlantic City and Chicken Bone Beach growing up in the sixties, that widen broadened their landscape and I imagine the boundaries to which they could dream right or

see a world outside of what they lived in. You know, there's a sense of freedom that I here right, and independence from being able to have access to cars and vehicles.

Like you talk about your aunts, which I want you to be able to get into, and your and your mother and the fact that they were so influential in your life, these different beautiful black women with varied experience and access and opportunity, and you speak about them being you know, born at these different times which are actual really critical points in our history as black people in

the United States. So I want you to be able to speak about how your aunts, how your family are wrapped into this installation and this work that is going to be presented, and why you think it was important to tell their stories great hard questions. Yea. In my adulthood, I've been able to kind of step back and really regard them as individuals, as human beings, and in so many ways almost take them off of this pedestal that

I once put them on. For having raised me, and to be able to find correlation between my own life or experience and them and maybe their mother or their father, and just a greater reverence for like my own personal lineage and ancestry. I think we're living in a time like this time is so crazy, and more than anything, for me, it's been shadow work. It's been a spiritual reckoning. This feels more like spiritual warfare than anything. And I say that as an a religious a non religious person,

but who grew up in religion. So I'm remembering ritual, I'm remembering tradition, I'm remembering the power in like ancestral magic. And I think this is like a conversation that is

swelling and almost like breaching this collective consciousness. You know, you look at some of the media out today, like these movies, these films, Lovecraft, m HBO, random acts of flyness that are really verging on like this conversation about it's like it's black quantum physics and the realities of such and and tapping into this magic that has been really relegated in the way we're taught. It's relegated to like folklore or like voodoo, or like zombies, on TV,

But like, what makes that any less tech? High tech? What makes our power any less profound, any less scientific? You know, I think that's been a part of our undoing that they try to implement on us, is to make us for you know, we forget where we come from. So this past year and maybe a little more, I've been really trying to remind myself of where I come

from through them. So you just blew my mind with a couple of things, Black quantum physics, like I want to delve into that, and then spiritual warfare and the idea of what it means to reconnect to your beginning, right, like our beginning, your beginning meaning where your family, where we originate from in our family, but then our beginning as a community as a people, and ties to our

land and our ancestry. And I think, you know, Woke AF is a political show, right, It is a progressive political show where I try and infuse different aspects of what it means to show up consciously right, and that being conscious is a part of everyday work and exercise

and practice. I talk about being woke as not something that just happens once, like you hid an alarm and then you're forever awake, right that it is a constant awakening that happens every day, and it's a constant expansion that happens when we talk about black consciousness in the grand scheme of things. For me, it is about awake to what has been lost, or rather what has been robbed.

So for you, when you are looking at your family lineage and how it positions itself within the greater sense of blackness, what comes up for you as you've been

journeying through the development of this work. I mean, surely, I think fundamentally it's this a pure reverence for the black woman and has having experienced or seen or witnessed them as being the scapegoat for the world while simultaneously being like the impetus for the world, and to be able to see that and witness that through these these very real people that are my aunts and my mom, their resilience, their creativity, their fortitude, their independence, their sheer

ability to you know, transcend time and space through their work and the people that they've touched over the years. You know, I think about well, I'll go into this when you talk about black women being both the scapegoat and the impetus for the world, the creation of it for you. How has your understanding of the kind of journeys that your aunts and your mother have taken, How has that kind of I guess maybe shifted your thinking about black women, or how has it deepened your understanding

of how the world experiences black women. I'm thinking of how you said it's this daily practice, right so to never to really like approach every day from this place of critical pedagogy, like this is going to be a

practice I'm going to learn in this day. I'm going to ask, and like I was saying, in so many ways, I've taken them off this pedestal or these tropes of archetype which I've I've realized maybe so much as my own projection onto them who I think them to be, who I've made who I associated them to out in the world, and kind of like wanting to provide space for us to just be, to simply just be, to dance, to make music, to eat as commune in a political

way that it will inevitably be politicized. M What has their experience with your art been, as I'm assuming you have had conversation with family and connected with them because They're such an inspiration for this particular project, this particular installation. What has their feeling been as kind of seeing themselves through your lens? I think much of this project, or the meat of it, really has been getting to know

them again or through new lens. The past year, you know, COVID and everything, Well, this was the first time in over a decade that they were all on the East Coast at the same time. And in having my own car for the first time in my life, I was now afforded the ability to see them at greater length and more often. You know, now at thirty one, it's like I'm almost having this reunion with them, which has

been remarkable. And then going through all of their personal archives and documents and photos and letters and their wardrobe, you know, being able to touch this stuff that I remember from you know, twenty years ago, so much comes up. So all this stuff comes up, So we're having conversations that I've never had before, Like I'm learning histories about

my family that were never shared. And then I'm left to really think about what does this mean like for the shed or for the audience watching this, And it almost doesn't matter anymore because, you know, I'm I'm already experiencing this work. So much of this work has already been done. In the second half of our conversation, Don Christian and I got deep into his relationship with art and his role as a creator and how it has

evolved during the pandemic. It was an honest, raw conversation and you can hear the rest right now by supporting me at patreon dot com, slash Woke app and you can see Don Christian perform Volvo Truck on June seventeenth at the Shed dot org slash Open Dash Call Dash live stream, or if you're in New York, you can visit the Shed four free. I will be shocked up there this summer checking out all of the amazing artists

in the open Call program. Whether I see you next week in the tweets at D two cents or over on Patreon. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.