When we try to look up celebrities (modern day gods and goddesses) with our astrological Sun sign, most of the people who turn up are white and cis-gendered. However, the signs don't look the same on everyone. They change according to the identities that impact how we experience the world and how the world perceives us. This is why I am interviewing twelve people of color and queer people of each Sun sign.
Hannah Black is a visual artist and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance and draws on Communism, feminist, and Afro-pessimist theory, autobiographical fragments and pop music.
i really love scorpio artists because scorpio art sometimes feels like a multi layered series of boxes that you keep opening and opening. when looking at scorpio art you never find the core meaning but know that all the boxes are affected by the core. as a scorpio artist, is art making the boxes or the core?
the boxes thing was just an image i got in my head when you talk about different layers that go into a work (commercial, technical, material, collaborative). somehow i imagined all these layers as different boxes. was thinking about scorpio as entangling and disentangling all these different layers. idk if that makes sense!
I asked you to clarify this question but I still can’t really relate to it so I’m just going to talk around it.
I think an exhibition or piece of writing is just a knot of all the things that happened while I was making it. I assume they’re all connected because they all had to pass through my judgment and my feeling, so in that sense they express a core, but perhaps not one I can get far away enough to see. It’s like the meme, “it’s all cake”—it’s all core.
My work is conceptual and intellectual, but it’s predominantly emotional. People who don’t know this about me or my work sometimes approach me or it as if I want to intellectualize. But my intellect is one of the ways my desire operates; it’s a way I reach out to touch the world, not an end in itself. I have a kind of conspiracy-theorist structure of thought, which I think a lot of people would think of as classically Scorpio, and it’s mostly oriented towards figuring out relationships in some way.
I have to be really strict with myself because associative thinking can be too easy. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to me to think about class struggle and history. I love beautiful things but in terms of my own art I want it to be a process of figuring out something real, as in something shared.
In my work I’m very interested in how the individual and the collective, or the experiential and the historical, unfold together. It’s probably because both my parents were in different ways obsessed with the catastrophes that had shaped their lineages and that ended up standing in for other things. Sometimes the supposed deep truth was actually hiding a more pertinent reality, like using historical trauma as an excuse for abusive ways of relating. Of course these things really are interconnected, it’s just that you can’t take the connections for granted, they’re very messy and unpredictable.
you’re a scorpio sun and taurus moon. this polarity is about form and meaning. in your work, death and love and social consumption comes up again and again. can you talk about social consumption and material consumption?
It’s sometimes hard for me to hold onto how meaning is not given but something you create and co-create. I used to be afraid that if I couldn’t find an objective anchor for meaning, it would float away and I would be empty. But now I accept that it’s more active and intersubjective than that. You’re not fed just by the fact of food existing, you’re fed because you put the food in your mouth and eat it.
Eating, literal consumption, is for me an image of the total intimacy between creation and destruction. In art that’s often literally the case because usually there’s some material thing, like you rework a material. But in writing it’s less clear, because language is so elastic and immaterial, like perhaps writing is a way we preserve or recreate what we believe to be already destroyed.
Destruction never leaves just a hole, it creates a new situation. On the other hand creation implies a kind of emptiness. At some point, it’s unavoidable, life began from nothing. To me that means you don’t have to have faith, you have to live.
I’m not good at staying on the topic of my work because I have a Pisces 6th house and always have the impression that my work happens by accident in between other things I was supposed to be doing instead.
you’re also a libra rising with a libra heavy chart! in your essay the loves of others, you talk about wishing, when in a couple, for an imaginary third person to witness the couple. in your performance with juliana huxtable, you stage a trial between animals and humans. can you talk about what witnessing (or representation) does to a relationship or conflict? what makes it possible for a relationship or conflict to become witnessed? what happens when a relationship or conflict cannot be witnessed?
The defendant was a live frog, who was representing all the animals in the world. The charges were: being disgusting, making others feel disgusting, and the murder of everything. Juliana was the defender and I was the prosecutor. We had a good time working together. We both have Taurus moons—we hung out in her studio and smoked weed and ordered food and wrote. I love to be one on one with someone and come up with a form or a shape for them. I also have Mars in Virgo in the 12th so it’s important to me to be of service to someone or something, and that feels mystical and transcendent to me. I loved that performance because I made the shape of it inspired by what I was getting from Juliana, and then we filled in the shape together.
My expression of love is oriented toward witnessing, it’s true. The gift I hope to give to people I love is to see them as they really are. But witnessing can be as much about how I avoid relating as how I move towards it. At the end of the trial, in that performance, the animals reject the terms of the trial and run away and then I, the prosecutor, turn into an animal. Some things don’t have to be seen, don’t want to be seen. You have to wait for them to reveal themselves or accept that they won't. That’s something I have to remind myself.
The relationship I wrote about in the essay you mention was hard partly because I didn’t know how to be loved. In a very Libra way I got tangled up in searching for someone who could reflect me back to myself. I don’t think it’s as brutal or simple as “you have to love yourself”, but you do have to come to believe that someone could love you and also that the love you give might be wanted and true. That’s easy to say and hard to enact.
both your moon and your saturn are exalted. a lot of the time, exalted planets have to do with visibility and perception. you talk about how commodification changes art. at the same time, most of your planets are in the hidden houses. how do you decide what to show, when to show, and when do these decisions change?
Commodification and showing are related in terms of art, like the moment of exhibition and the moment of commodification can be seen as happening together. Marx talks about the commodity as a form, as an appearance or something spectral.
Sometimes it feels like form is a wandering line walked between what is and isn’t bearable. I experience a lot of shame around my work, which I’m trying to get over, because I would like to share myself with others in a more sustainable way. It’s not all angst—I have abundant belief in my own intuition. I welcome all intensities of feeling because that's a way to make decisions.
can you give any advice to other scorpio artists who might be reading this?
This is a really fun question!
You will never be able to hide your intensity, but that’s fine, it’s probably not as destructive as you imagine it to be. Scorpio is only the eighth sign—right after there’s Sagittarius, which is all about adventure and play and higher knowledge, so you could say that being playful is actually more powerful than being powerful. Individual power isn’t very powerful.
People who can’t deal with Scorpios can’t deal with themselves, but a lot of people can’t deal with themselves, and that might include you. Don’t use your capacity to perceive people’s deepest truths as a way of avoiding your own: that’s how you get exhausted or paranoid or resentful.
To keep our intuition sharp we have to respect that we don’t have a monopoly on truth. Not everyone dies and gets reborn every day like us, but everyone does it sometimes, in their own way.
