Tender therefore names a vital posture and orientation toward a type of sovereignty: one unlike the formations of dispossession and seizure, but rather an openness to the irresistible charge of the interdependent channels of relation. Within interlocking structural enclosures, tender is the technology to bear witness to wounds, and in tending to them, to read the systemising codes of antiblack structure and steer toward a more unruly way of knowing.

Tumika has spoken at several points and in several ways of the “longstanding hereness of Black life in Scotland,” and I am interested in the announcement and character of being here: the ways this inhabits the eternal, the promise of survival and the sacredness of everyday. The presence of here registers vibrationally as what the artist has called, elaborating from Paul Gilroy's metaphor of sonic reverberation, the Black Atlantic Hum > a particularly potent proposition that both demonstrates the artist's inherently collaborative dis/position to make with and alongside critical and creative Afrodiasporic cultures; and, also, performs the hum of the Black Atlantic in the performance of remix and re/composition. The hum is to be felt, sensed and performed, within ancestral rhythms and scores the everyday grammar of Black life.

The artist’s recurring assertion of the hereness of Black life in Scotland is not an appeal for inclusion, nor a reification of the taxonomy of  nation-state identity. Rather, the suggestion arrives as a quake, trembling the stability of the ground and moistening the soil upon which the claims of nations rest, opening holes for such structures to sink, collapse, and be swallowed.

Tumika’s cosmological tending asks how questions might be formed through gesture, and how one might remain open to the answerability of those gestures. How can imagination become a means of constructing realities beyond the edges of speculation? How might the everyday become a sheet for the music?

Tender is the blur that holds each of your cells, your matter and your dreams, to the highest of regard. Tender imports significance to the details of your living by way of your attention. 


Compelled by the tendernetically induced hum, I have scored the gestural manifestations of Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika and Zoë Guthrie's practice across three inseparable acts: naming, disobedience and attention.