Hosting change: porcelain as a tool for liberatory anti-racist practice

Can an art practice using porcelain encourage constructive dialogue about the ongoing role of ideological whiteness in racial injustice? As a precious white commodity so entangled with the material culture and oppressive whiteness of European empires, porcelain is perhaps an apt tool for facilitating discussions of liberatory anti-racism. In collaboration with mixed groups of participants at workshops and events, I use a methodology that draws on the ‘convivial’ (Gilroy 2004; Valluvan 2016) to encourage us to ‘imagine otherwise’ (Sharpe 2016; Olufemi, 2021). Eating and drinking together, using handmade porcelain vessels, if infused with a commitment of care and relationality, can become a praxis of resistance, to envision ‘the marvelous’ (Miller 2016) of a socially just future. These occasions encourage a witnessing of plural perspectives – listening, hearing, holding and embodying others’ voices, experiences and feelings. This illustrated paper focuses on the methods and objects used to lubricate relations of conviviality in such settings, inspired by Fred Moten’s concept (after Denise Ferreira da Silva) of the condition in which we live being one of ‘difference without separability’ (Moten 2014). The aim of this praxis is to centre communion and futurity. The paper discusses the political potential of porcelain used in this way – whether creating such spaces can allow us to begin to digest the unpalatable realities of white supremacy sufficiently to imagine material and structural change.