Kameelah Janan Rasheed: The Edge of Legibility | Art21 "New York Close Up"

(suspenseful music)

- I think so, but what does done mean?

(laughs)
- Yeah.

- Text has this illusion
of comprehensiveness.

(paper flipping)

Even if you've read something once,

it doesn't mean that you understand it.

So I sort of like to play with language

and making something
either very, very legible

or making something very, very opaque.

And encouraging people to do
the work of understanding it,

it's really an invitation,

come think with me.

(paper rustling)
- Oh yeah.

Of all the family members,

I'm the most organizationally inclined.

So I have taken, whenever I go home,

steal a few more photos each time.

So my dad was converted to
Islam in the early 1980s.

He basically was learning Islam
by typewriting these notes.

(typewriter keyboard thumping)

He would photocopy pieces
of religious texts,

and he would then paste
them on a sheet of paper,

and they he would annotate them.

He came to make sense
of things through this

repeated reading and rereading process.

I thought this was so lovely
because I was thinking

about this idea of talking back to a text.

A text itself is never finished,

each time we read something new,

we're either annotating on the page

or annotating in our brain,

and we're creating what
literally are new texts.

This active collaboration between
the reader and the writer,

the text is there not to
offer us a final meaning,

but it's actually there as an invitation

for us to actively engage with it.

(papers rustling)

If you look at (laughs)
my dad and I's notes,

what he did as a study tool
is basically my art practice.

(suspenseful music building)

(papers rustling)

Huh, that's literally exactly what I do
now, I read a lot and do arts. (laughs)

Feel like our young selves
know exactly what we wanna do.

(bright electronic music)

There's nothing that I've done in my life

that hasn't been focused on text.

I'm really interested
in what words convey,

but also how they appear on the page,

on walls,

and public space.

What might it mean to see this

every Tuesday when you walk by?

What it means to sort
of engage with the text

over and over and over?

Rereading as this ritual.

I'm really interested in
the concept of the word

and what it carries,

as well it's actually trying to say or do.

(papers rustling)

When I'm looking for texts,

I'm usually not looking
for a particular sentence.

I'm looking for a
particular shape of a letter

or a shape of a word.

So I'll flip through any
texts on my bookshelf

looking for the perfect
A or the perfect B.

In a lot of ways I'm trying to figure out

the individual letter and
then start piecing letters

and words together from there.

(suspenseful music)

So the one that I'm writing
now from all these pieces

is "Should they be circling the echo mouth

that's sloped upward?"

Do I know what that means
at this particular moment?

No, but there is something
interesting to me

about the idea of circling an echo.

How do I take something that could be said

very, very plainly, and
code it or use cryptography

to make it harder to understand?

We circle ambulate the
affiliate's solution.

Sort of inviting people to go slow

instead of trying to
rush to understanding.

If you read a sentence that
immediately doesn't make sense,

you have two options, right?

You can ignore the sentence and move on,

or you can spend a bit
of time unpacking it.

(gentle music)

It's almost a proxy for thinking

about how we can move through other ways

of reading the world with a
bit more care and slowness.

Would ask that we spend a
bit more time with things

that are confusing instead
of writing them off.

I think a lot about what it actually means

to make myself legible, invisible.

When am I being intentionally opaque

and ensuring that not everyone can get in,

and when am I being very open and wanting

for more people to have access?

How you present yourself
to the world that's legible

and appeasing to people,

versus I'm not gonna make
myself known until I'm ready?

(gentle music)