Languid Hands is a partnership consisting of Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson. Their curatorial practice is a generative politics of labour and care. Languid Hands use our access, skills and resources to support black artists and create opportunities for them to showcase their work. Languid Hands’ approach is always influenced by a black and queer radical politics, by the liberatory motives of all those artists, curators and activists that have come before us and who make up our communities. Languid Hands’ practice is a survival practice, looking always to lay more groundwork for those who will come afterwards. We leave blueprints made by languid hands. Absent is the disproportionate emphasis on surface-level survey style programmes and representational focus: when we gather, we do so to manifest collaboration, exchange, dialogue, relationships – a sum greater than its individual parts.

Languid Hands’ logo is an abstraction of the routes of the Middle Passage (the routes through which African peoples, and the commodities pillaged from them or produced by them) were shipped as cargo between Europe, The Americas and Africa. Languid Hands’ work is tethered to the Middle Passage as an experience, an ontological and historical break; it is a foundation for much of their curatorial and political intentions. The Middle Passage is the symbiotic currents of history and present, personal and distinct, occurring precisely at the same time.

 

The name Languid Hands comes from a paragraph on page 102 of Caribbean-Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s A Map To The Door of No Return. It is an acknowledgment that we have bodies, that our hands are in labour; languid hands. It is an invitation to rest, to touch, to hold. It is responsibility and possibility and despondency. It is gratitude for the work that these hands do: soft hard dyke black languid hands.