The works in Business As Usual depict the need to manoeuvre as well as Whittle’s nimble skills at that playful and dreaded labour of manoeuvres, all in relation to ever-shifting contemporary terms of violence and captivity. In history as in daily life, often enough the only welcome messages from the racially subjected are exactly those most violently compelled. Whittle’s series in Business As Usual swaps out the historical for the galactical as the backdrop for our viewing and listening. Her Afro-futuristic ‘expanding spatiality’ in mind, as for example in Business as Usual, with its twin diamonds resting in twin palms. Diamonds, forever, so we are told: historically a key symbol of colonial economics in extractive capitalist design. Elsewhere, however, even – galactically speaking, quite nearby – in our own solar system, massive lightning strikes burn through frozen gases leaving clouds of carbon. Under pressures beyond earthly possibilities, these clouds release hailstorms of diamonds, which themselves ‘fall’ toward centres where, under pressures even more extreme, they’re emulsified into plasma-like substances.

Alberta Whittle’s playful and pressurised collages welcome and compel rhythms of repeated viewings, and listenings. In this tidalectic work our stories collide and combine into brackish images of ourselves and others. At times, and at their best, these works produce glimpses, moments when we’re other to – and therefore newly – ourselves. In such an insoluble solution, the substance – both practical and speculative – of what we can mean to each other itself becomes an ‘expanding spatiality’. (6)