An interview for Sixty Inches From Center
October 2020

I don’t have the words to introduce this conversation in the way that it requires and deserves. When we spoke back in August, artist Tricia Hersey was generous and relentless in her call to us, making it absolutely clear that at the heart of liberation is rest. With that in mind, how do I frame or contextualize the totality and service of her work? Given the expansiveness of her practice, which includes and extends far beyond and deep into the beloved Nap Ministry, how do I communicate how her work has offered a salve, an abrupt reawakening, and a thread that, if pulled, may lead to our individual and collective unbinding? Sparks fly, visions manifest organically, and energies shift on a molecular level in the space between her praxis as a transdisciplinary artist, activist, theologian, community healer, and creator of The Nap Ministry. How do you synthesize something like that when it contains enough seed and substance from which to generate the future we are bold enough to imagine?

I want to do right by our exchange. I want to talk about my own experience with rest, or the lack of it, due to the systems and circumstances I inherited. Then, I want to pull back and ask that we all take a moment to imagine new ways of living, a different and more nourishing daily life, that doesn’t have us bound to a clock, a grind, or an archaic definition of work, life, and living. I want to talk about the conversations I’ve had about what it feels like to crumble under the weight of what we’ve been taught or the institutions we’ve been forced into and resisted, but also how we still somehow remain intact simply because we know there’s another way that holds high the more embodied, potent, and ancestral progenitors of ‘self-care’ and ‘wellness.’ We’ve seen them in waves and glimpses. We can taste the sustenance they have for us.

I want to talk about how it hit my bone marrow when Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote on Instagram days after Tricia and I spoke:

“Stress will make [B]lack bodies cyborgs and that’s exactly what slavery fashioned us into. Doesn’t seem right to have odds my people didn’t have just [to] be what my people fought becoming.

…don’t trade your parts for cash. They never give you enough trade-in value.”

I want to quote Alice Walker who said, “You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.” I want to feel that, incarnate that idea, and believe it fully through the lenses of all of who I am—and make that belief strong enough to not be shaken daily, hourly.

Everything that Tricia has done, from her origin story to the latest mantra she whispered into the Twitterverse or Instaverse, conveys everything I want to say. So, I’m going to forgo poetics because we all need to get this word.

Instead, and in honor of Tricia, I’m going to take this time to dream. Of new ways to live. More liberated and self-defined ways of making, contributing, and resting. I’m going to dream of how to learn, make, and model the pathways to this kind of living for everyone I know and love, and all of you.

So, as part of the Testimony series, I offer you this conversation between me and the artist, the truth-sayer, the Nap Bishop, a lighthouse in this storm—Tricia Hersey.

This interview was published as part of the Testimony series.

Read the full interview here….

Photo Credits:
[1] Zoom portrait of Tricia Hersey from a computer screen. Photo shows Tricia seated, looking directly in the camera, wearing a gray off-the-shoulder sweater and a blue, yellow, and green head wrap. Within the screen, she is seated in front of a bookshelf and some plants. Outside of the computer screen, you can see a plant and view from a window in the background. Photo by Ireashia Bennett.

[2] A person dressed in all white is laying on a bed with a canopy, opened to reveal them sleeping. The bed is placed outdoors and surrounded by plants and buildings in the distance to the left. Photo from “A Resting Place” a Sound and Site Installation for Flux Projects, Atlanta, September 2019. Photo by Tabia Lisenbee-Parker.

[3] Three people sit in the middle of a grassy area, seated and reclined, leaning against one another, eyes closed. Photo from an ongoing photography project curated by Tricia Hersey. Photo by Charlie Watts.

[4] Zoom portrait of Tricia Hersey from a computer screen. Photo shows Tricia seated far from the screen, looking directly in the camera, wearing a gray off-the-shoulder sweater and a blue, yellow, and green head wrap. Within the screen and in the room next to her is a bookshelf, an artwork on the all above her, and some plants. Outside of the computer screen, you can see a plant and view outside a window in the background. Photo by Ireashia Bennett.