Name and Year: Levi M. Gikandi Hometown: Mombasa, Kenya Major: Fine Arts and African Studies (Double Major) Website: http://levigikandi.sites.livebooks.com (soon migrating to http://levigikandi.com)
Street: How did you first get into video and photography? Levi M. Gikandi: At some point, that seems distant from tangible memory now. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I think the main reason why I did was because I always identified with a non–conformist ideal. I also always liked to create things that held the attention of others.
I discovered photography before I knew what I wanted to say. It’s not like I know exactly what I want to say now, nor is what I want to say ever something that feels static or “in hand,” but I am definitely more self-aware now than I was taking my first photography class with Gabriel Martinez in the spring of Sophomore year. I owe everything to that class, to the students and to Gabe, who has been a nurturing mentor and powerful force in my evolution and, I am sure, in the growth of a variety of my talented peers at Penn.
Street: What have been your most formative experiences as an artist? LMG: I’ll speak about a recent one. This past summer I attended a residency at Yale’s Summer School of Art (Yale/Norfolk).
It was a very frustrating experience. So much talent and artistic proficiency, both from students and mentors, surrounded me. However, I was at a place where I felt frustrated with photography because it felt like I was “faking it.” This really bothered me because I felt that I needed art to validate my academic schizophrenia.
I am an international student from Kenya, and I feel that at this moment I am trying to explore what it means to be “disconnected” from a “homeland,” even though both terms for me are created outside of my experience. I am confused about what both the terms mean at any given time, especially in relation to my current spatial existence, and yet I feel compelled to force myself to deal with them. I feel a buoyancy and simultaneously a suspended atrophy. Until now, in retrospect I feel that I have been trying to learn the socio-political/economic circumstances that would cause me to feel this way, but the residency pushed me to a point where I began to question the arbitrariness of theories/mediums/art discourse disconnected from that vital personal impetus, because I find that often in framing the way that I have interacted with the impetus, they have all but disguised it completely. So I have been meditating instead on how I can channel my feelings, unmediated as possible, into work, and that’s where I am now.
Street: Who or what do you see as influences on your work? LMG: Art is both seductive and distasteful as a self-aggrandizing enterprise. It borrows from the poverty of the world but rarely gives back. It does its fair share of ineffective whistleblowing from within the paper castles of its self-mythology. However, art does not need feedback from the marginalized; it is structurally isolated from many of the issues it pretends to champion. At the same time, it is a powerful mythology that conditionally accepts of my life goals that fall somewhere between activism, academia and visual arts.
My influences are artists who do not care about art. These are visible and invisible individuals who do work to learn more about themselves, and to respond to their consciences. These are innovators who re-imagine space, history and humanity, and create experiences for audiences to share in their utopias. These can be real people, some artists (Ai Wei Wei and Teddy Cruz are prolific examples), but more often than not are ideals that live in my head and constantly challenge me to live up to my own expectations.
The African Diaspora as a personal experience and sociopolitical concept is the crux of my work and my process of self-investigation. Using my own body as context, I first discovered photography for myself as a way to address the fetishization of the black body in art history and the history of ethnography, which I encountered for the first time as an African student in the USA.
Street: How has being at Penn affected your work--inspired, stifled or taught you? LMG: I owe everything that my work is today to Penn, its amazing educators, its institutional generosity in terms of financial aid and travel stipends and to the community I have found for myself here.
Street: When you’re not working on your art, how do you spend time on campus? LMG: I am a new member of African Rhythms, and was an active member of Onda Latina before coursework and other commitments limited my time. Outside of these two activities, I spend all of my free time with my family at 4103 Chestnut St.
Street: Favorite FNAR class you’ve taken at Penn? Favorite non-FNAR class? LMG: TIVOLI STORIES, a Participatory Arts and Social Science Project with Kenneth Lum (Penn Design) and Deborah A. Thomas (SAS, Anthropology and Africana Studies)
This class was my second “documentary” immersion into an even more personally controversial and politically smoldering situation than Istanbul 2013, in which I was supposed to respond artistically. It challenged, and still challenges, me ethically, but I was able to learn and overcome through experience and by making concessions with myself and testing “plans of action” that I developed in my head for certain conflicts. It was challenging and exciting to experience the “real,” outside of the academic armchair, and have to come back to the armchair and work with what I have.
Being in Tivoli Gardens was a powerful visual experience that involved all of my senses and invoked and challenged my beliefs and memory. Created in the 60s as an idyllic, self-contained community space, Tivoli gardens is now a garrison community with many good, kindhearted people who constantly face the threat of death from gang warfare and police violence. The visuals of the community still retain the optimism of the 60s public planners, with a dark realism of physical degradation and evidence of ongoing violence.
Street: Where do you see your artwork taking you in the future? LMG: I cannot really say at this point. However, I am excited to work with an artist who has had an impact on my work, Renee Cox, as her studio assistant starting next week.
