The formation forms the former.
"In Incubation" feels different to me than "Incubation"
**If you haven’t read my previous blog post, “In Incubation: The Conception”, that introduces the themes and energetics of my budding art installation, I highly recommend starting there and coming back so these words can seed in a more fertile context**
The “In” is essential although some may find it redundant.
In Incubation in title is a call to practice slowness, maybe to even welcome a pause: “In..Incubation”. That pause could hold so much peace and softness if we allow breath to be there.
What really is the rush to cut it short?
Those who would listen are already listening, those who would stay are already here.
So, I present In Incubation as a love letter1. I am inviting you to be in this moment of intimacy that has the opportunity to take up space (if we let it). In something as seemingly mundane as the space between repetitive “in’s”, we can share a moment of intimacy that gets to be elongated and deepened
In our personal recollection, the pause in which we have the opportunity to gather our personhood into our chest by choosing more breath when dominant culture reprimands us for being long winded
In reception, homage to those who are listening to the in’s and out’s of our breathing2
and again In response, from the lovers who answer our breath with more breath.
In Incubation is an elongated collective ritual of breathing.
The unborn child does not rush their development, it can be dangerous if they do.
The same goes for revolution and freedom dreaming.
“In” places us somewhere.
“In” feels intimate.
With"in” I can feel the walls of my mother’s womb form around me.
With more breath, I can feel her mother’s womb too. To feel the intimacy across time, space, life and death that “in” allows. To feel that the matter of me was inside my grandmother’s womb by way of being an egg inside my mother when she was in incubation.
“In Incubation” naturally has more feeling than “Incubation”.
“Incubation” alone feels elusively theoretical to me. “Incubation”, “the act of.”
“In Incubation” is “to be in formation as the clay and the molder in-forming eachother”
“In Incubation” feels nebulously creative.
“In Incubation” is kin to “in progress”
It is not the achieved product of “progress” that keeps us running in lack.
It is vulnerable in its still developing.
There is still excitement, wonder, and dedication
In the prickly crabgrass
In the phantom tickle of your leg hair
In…
pause, listen, and allow slowness to in-form your breath.
Two things inspired thinking of In Incubation as a love letter.
One was Elleza Kelley’s reponse to the question “whether progressive movements can retool citizenship as a way to reproduce a culture of care?” quoted in the introduction of Freedom Dreams :
Better ships than citizenship include friendship, relationship, or even a pirate ship, where unauthorized, motley formations are bound together to disrupt notions of the private, of property, of wealth and its concentration…I think one of the worst aspects of citizenship is that it needs authorization, or that its expression is tied to what is given by a governing (or ruling, more precisely) body. The kind of citizenship I dream of is one where we acknowledge our attachment to each other, desire to be attached to one another, in relations other than property relations. Where serving the other is a way of serving the self. It sounds very romantic, but isn’t that the origin of all things we want to make and bring into the world? The power of the love letter is that is is written without the gurantee of a response.
Kamanzi, Brian and Kelley, Elleza. “Close Reading: Rooftops, Love Letters & the Classroom,” Pathways to a Free Education 4 (2019): 29.
“And what are radical social movements if not love letters?”
Kelley, Robin D.G.. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2022.
The other source of inspiration is a video of Ismatu Gwendolyn on building friendship and The Care Manifesto: Politics of Interdependence by the Care Collective
“In my breathing, I am balancing the seen and the unseen, learning to cultivate a graceful way to be both ocean and sky. I am studying how to be in school with you. I time my breathing to your heart to find the ocean. My heart will race to meet your laughter: you are sky.
As below, so above.
Choreographic presence, circumpolar hold, deep listening, coordination. Call back the school that fear untaught me. Give me the heartbeat I remember. Call it love.”
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Chico, Edinburgh: AK Press, 2020.