REST HOUSE

“You can’t predict anything at all,” says Jordan Anderson, the Jamaica-born, Milan-based writer, creative strategist, and founder of MQBMBQ (short for My Queer Blackness, My Black Queerness). When Anderson first launched MQBMBQ in June 2020, during the first months of the COVID lockdowns, it was a “digital project in exploration of the multiple existing facets of Black queer identity.” He may have hoped for what it could become, and was certainly working toward it, but he couldn’t have known that six years later, the “link in bio” project would expand far beyond the virtual realm into an artist residency program now on its sixth edition.

After hosting its first five residencies in Tuscan villas, including Villa Lena, this summer MQBMBQ traveled to Matarraña, in northeastern Spain, to be hosted by Solo Houses, the experimental architectural project founded by gallerists Eva Albarrán and Christian Bourdais. There, three artists were invited to disconnect, exchange, rest, and experiment away from the pressures of rigid productivity: British Congolese visual artist Joy Yamusangie from London, New York-based American photographer and filmmaker Clifford Prince King, and Brazilian writer and playwright Yhuri Cruz, who’s usually based in Rio de Janeiro. The two-week stay was organized in partnership with Jean Paul Gaultier, who has supported the residency for the last three years as part of a broader cultural initiative supporting queer communities. During their time there, the artists switched off their phones, danced, communed, and sank into the drone of local cicadas. In late July, invited by Anderson, I headed down from London with a small group of international editors, curators, cultural programmers, and organizers to learn about the artists’ experiences and, for an evening, witness the residency for ourselves.

For Yhuri Cruz, whose performance, film, and installation work creates spaces to confront structures of power, the residency offered a way out of creative block after the intense process of preparing his upcoming ICA San Diego show, Revenguê: The Penal Chapter. “This residency,” he told me, “was really about healing and resting.” He spent a week “doing nothing but reading” before he started to write. Reflecting on the role the house played, Cruz said, “The space invites you to a more introspective mode in your head … There is a spontaneity that only nature can offer if you are close to it, and we were inside of it.”

As for Clifford Prince King, who captures the intimate lives of queer Black men, the residency offered a renewed way of seeing himself, his work, and his own stamina and patience. “It’s allowed me to think about doing things in more than one way,” he explains. “Sometimes work feels really overwhelming but things are going to happen as fast or as slow as they need to, and the day will end. So you can just slow down.

These ideas of space, pace, and time are what the residency keeps returning to. “As creatives, there’s this constant pressure to create new work,” says Anderson. “But in most cases, the most interesting, beautiful works, and the works I’ve felt the most proud of, were born from conversations with someone at dinner that I really liked and wanted to keep talking to.” For him, then, the point was not to create the “ideal space” for work to be made, but a setting where those bonds could occur.

Just before the dinner, in a poolside conversation with Serpentine Arts Technologies curator Tamar Clarke-Brown, Anderson reflected on space as a “potential for people,” where one can feel reflected, respected, and protected. That process, he explained, does not begin only on site, but with the careful composition of the group itself.

After six years of programming ambitious international residencies, he has come to lean not just on the advice of jurors who help select the artists, but also on astrological chart synastry to ensure compatibility and chemistry. (Some of MQBMBQ’s earlier residents include artists Precious Okoyomon, Elliot Jerome Brown Jr., Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Justen Leroy, and Jordan Ali Boucicaut, to name but a few.) The effect was visible between Yamusangie, Cruz, and King. As I watched, spoke, and listened to them during candid moments around Solo Pezo, their bonds seemed marked by care, regard, and consideration. Even among the guest list, strangers barely hours before, we ate, danced, and laughed, exchanging jokes, phone numbers, and promises to connect in one another’s cities.

In a cultural landscape where opportunities for Black queer artists across the diaspora remain scarce, the sixth edition of MQBMBQ at Solo Pezo became one answer to the question Anderson posed in conversation with Clarke-Brown: “If you’re not trying to tear apart structures that don’t work for you, what are you working for?”