Paul Goodwin is a curator, researcher, urbanist, educator and director of TrAIN Research Centre (Transnational Art Identity and Nation) at University of the Arts London. Goodwin has a multidisciplinary research and curatorial practice, current projects include: W.E.B. DuBois: Charting Black Lives (House of Illustration, London, UK, 2019), We Will Walk: Art and Resistance from the American South (Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2020) and Untitled: Art on the Conditions of Our Time, Chapter 2 (touring, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, 2021). He studied Marxist urban geography and developed the field of study, Black Urbanism. Goodwin is a passionate jazz enthusiast and in his misguided youth he was a scratch DJ who occasionally played with UK Old School legends Freshski & MoRock.
Tumi Mogorosi is an artist, jazz musician, researcher and activist-theorist in the realm of Black Studies and Jazz studies. The publication Deaesthetic: writing with and from the Black Sonic anthologises his writing on the black sonic as it pertains to critical theory and emancipatory practices. Working at the intersection of art, music and theory, his practice is often collaborative and collective, recording Project Elo in 2014, producing albums with Gabi Motuba, Pule Pheto, The Wretched, Group Theory and forming part of Shabaka and the Ancestors band. Mogorosi is based in Johannesburg.
In a rendition of words attributed to Miles Davis, “music is the space between the notes,” Goodwin and Mogorosi meditate on the in-between spaces of jazz, geography and urbanism. Sade and the song Jezebel forms the opening to contemplate the poetics and politics of sexuality underpinning black radicalism. Reflecting on the notion of improvisation, they discuss black creative practice in the production of space and making of place, collapsing geographies across SA, UK, France and the Atlantic. Together they examine ruptures in humanism, the role of black revolution in the global project of freedom and ways to think the world anew.
