Interview #192 — Sab D'Souza

by Jinghua Qian

Sab D’Souza is an artist and researcher living and working on Gadigal-Wangal land. Their work documents the emergent social media practices of marginalised users and the materiality of their (web)site-specific intimacies.

Borrowing the language and semiotics of queer and diasporic digital cultures, they consider how users negotiate and challenge normative infrastructures of the internet.

Sab spoke to Jinghua about feelings, the materiality of digital spaces, and joy.

There’s a bit in your video work Garburator (2021) that says ‘this is not an artwork about being brown and trans’. How do you resist the reading of your work as being ‘about’ these things? Or is there no escape?

I don’t think you can, it’s inescapable. That work was made the week after my top surgery, so I was feeling a lot. At the same time, I’ve addressed these ideas in previous works, more towards identity formation as a racialised and gendered subject, like ~my motherland is a mouthful~ (2016) or 22/f/aus, (2017). Often I approach these works with the intention of making the audience aware of their active participation as spectators. As I am too. How we all contribute to this spectacle of being/becoming. I try to acknowledge that I can’t control how people perceive or interpret the work or myself. This happens not just in the confines of my practice, but interpersonally, with peers, friends, crushes and family. It’s a painful process of not knowing how or who you are without others.

The title refers to an intimate experience of feeling, identity, and grief. The way I push things down into almost a metaphorical trash compactor. Squishing them into this receptacle becomes a way to protect myself, to put off feeling. However, when I want to retrieve, hold and understand these emotions, they come back as mangled garbage. A mess of different concepts, so torn and entangled it’s impossible to separate them and know where to begin. I think that’s sort of what I mean when I say ‘this is not an artwork about being brown and/or trans, fuck you’ because I can’t retrieve those identities without locating myself within so many different contexts, as a settler, invader, migrant, person of colour, queer, trans, brown, indian, pakeha, upper-middle class, the child of two doctors, the economic privilege that comes with my career as an artist. These are all parts of me that are inseparable and impact how I make work and essentially how I am understood.

I’m so delighted by the way you play with language, especially the grammar of gender and digital culture. What draws you to these forms and platforms?

Aw thank you! I feel very online. I know a lot of people say that, but I mean in how we are affected by digital encounters and the cultures of emotion that drive our movement online and pop up around us. Sad posts, subtweets, the rapid sharing of mutual aid stories across Instagram. They are driven by emotions, whether that be anger, joy, grief, guilt and shame. All these emotions serve a purpose and the language we use can help us locate it. Feeling is a bodily sensation but online it’s often removed from the body, and I’m interested in that porous movement from body to digital space. It’s intertwined, inseparable. I’m drawn to that both in my academic and artistic practice.

Is there any delineation between making art and just being online?

For me, no. I started making art about/around/for digital spaces because I was enamoured by friends who made work so fluidly to their lives if that makes sense? Like their practices were something they participated in on a daily basis. I spent so much of childhood and teenage years entranced by online encounters, I figured, why not make that a practice and site of research? I already do it. Like Close Friends (2020, 2021) which looked at how I used Instagram stories as a way of communicating passively to my peers. Lately I’ve been really into making TikToks (@dloser) which I’ve seen as entirely separate to my ‘art’ practice. A friend pointed out that it makes sense that I’m drawn to a video-based platform. So, I’m still figuring out how to tie that into my work at the moment. I feel close to locating it within my practice but I’m not quite there yet.

Has the pandemic changed or influenced your work?

Kind of and also not really. I think the pandemic has made me aware of how text-based my practice is, which has drawn me to making more physical objects in a time where digital work is in such high demand. I made a work with a friend Lill Colgan that was a durational text-message performance, but even that was an idea I had before the pandemic. I’ve certainly gotten more requests to make work lol. But I’ve also had the privilege of witnessing how other artists who previously hadn’t worked in digital spaces approach online works. That’s been really cool to see and has influenced how I approach my own work.

I’ve also been quite critical of digital programming from institutions or galleries who want to ‘continue as normal’. For instance, the replacement of panels with Zoom lectures. I think these programs really miss a fundamental purpose of these events, which was being with others, the minute conversations and connecting in a shared space. I don’t have an answer or alternative, but I’d really like to create something that considers the significant loss of casual encounters and intimacy.

I also think they fail to address the material aspects of digital space. It’s not exactly…. liminal haha. Digital space is connected and influenced by the routers we connect from, aka the land. Alongside the infrastructure of the platforms we use, which are predominantly U.S.-based and carry a legacy of on-going imperialism that seeps into our work and online programs. I believe that always needs to be considered when making digital work. The platform is just as important as the content.

I’m definitely missing those moments of casual intimacy and being together in space. How does land—and particularly the Gadigal land you live on—come into your work and your practice?

I’m actually in Naarm at this precise moment, on Wurundjeri land, with a compassionate travel exemption due to health reasons. It’s been a rough year. I began studying and working on Gadigal land about 7 years ago. I would say any work created on any land is influenced by the privilege to work and make on that land, it’s just whether people acknowledge or choose to address and locate themselves within the ongoing colonial history. I can only make work from my perspective and position, and I think if you asked me this a couple years ago, I would have said space is what I’m interested in, as in sharing space, being in a space, having space.

But essentially space is also land. I think that’s where I contest this differentiation between ‘IRL and URL’ digital and physical space. They aren’t separate. There’s no third space that we occupy online. It feels false. Our government dictates how we access digital spaces and connections, and infrastructures are imbued by the people who made them. So I’m passionate about people who fight to circumvent those barriers, who locate themselves within local movements that have inherent ties to global movements.

Take for instance, the work I’m making for Hyphenated Biennial. It explores the emotional dialogues of anti-racist work, and how they have been taking place predominantly mediated by technology. It’s about how texting is a muddy, imperfect form of communication we’re still unfurling. It’s a local movement, and a global one. We can see that in mutual aid, from fundraising to PayID donations. We should be building this vocabulary and understanding on an interpersonal level first. How we treat one another in those very close spaces reflects something greater than a political gesture. Not everyone is an organiser, but everyone has a role they can play to one another. On a technical scale, my work looks at how phone/mobile networks don’t actually speak to global wifi channels, they are connected and rooted nationally, and by arbitrary ‘states’ and borders. I use emulators and SMS-broadcasting websites to connect those networks in the way we connect with broader movements of anti-racist work.

Are there any platforms you don’t touch at all? Or boundaries you’ve set for yourself in engaging with platforms like Instagram/Facebook, Twitter, TikTok?

I deleted my timeline on Facebook when I was writing my honours thesis on Facebook surprisingly! But I do manage a Facebook group for Sydney-based Artists of Colour so I do go on there occasionally. I set limits on how I admin a group but other than that I spend probably too much time on social media. I know most people try to put limits on their use but at the moment, with everything going on… it’s just not in my nature and constraining myself by even saying ‘I should spend less time on XYZ” carries with it a lot of guilt that feels unproductive to what I want to do when so little of what I want to do is available. Oh! I banned myself from my Instagram Explore feed because I hate the algorithm and the amount of therapy infographics about attachment styles is exhausting. I’m really interested in psychology and the psychiatric/medical-industrial complex and how that intersects with healing and trauma from a FN, Bla(c)k and POC perspective. So I’m very careful with what content I consume in regards to those areas. It’s less about limiting my time on platforms and more about being mindful of the people and content I engage with because that informs what I’ll see next, which inevitably will inform how I feel. I try to avoid binary and dichotomous content, or pathologising every behaviour, because for me, that feeds into harmful understandings of the self and leaves little nuance for how ~normal~ it is for us to cope in ways others might not understand.

Yeah totally—my phone has this Digital Wellbeing feature so when I first got it, I set up a bunch of timers for different apps. But I would keep exceeding the time limits, then feeling guilty about it, until eventually I realised it was creating this kind of calorie-counting mentality that just made me more stressed. Maybe a better question (if it’s not too big) is: what would make the internet more just?

That is a big question! I think there needs to be more transparency around the regulations currently in place. Sure, we say algorithms created by people and expanded upon by stakeholders determine who gets seen. Then there’s the sanitisation of digital spaces, like Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, even Only Fans briefly. This strategic removal of sex workers, trans people, First Nations people, Black people are driven not just by the platforms’ stakeholders themselves, but by government legislation (like FOSTA/SESTA which still impacts today) that further targets these communities. Platforms attempt to get ahead of these laws by removing all content that they deem a violation. That’s mediated further by another moderator and it plays into the history of the U.S. from which a lot of digital platforms are governed.

I could say there needs to be more digital literacy, but that puts the onus back on the individual which doesn’t feel fair. Maybe it needs to be taught in school, but I also don’t want to say that the internet is this big, horrible place that divides us or flattens our identities. There’s still a lot of joy here. There are these unique, ephemeral ways we build literal worlds online. I want to make space for that in my work too. There’s joy and pain and one doesn’t negate the other.

What are you craving when it comes to art?

I’d love to see more digital art that integrates the platforms it uses, that really looks at the medium itself as something that comes with its own context and not just a blank space. Digital art like any has a history and though you can just put something online and call it digital art, there’s so much you can explore when you start unpacking the platforms and digital vernaculars you’re borrowing from. I want digital programming to reflect this more, to encourage artists, to guide them more. I want curators to build more lasting relationships with artists. I want institutions to back off or start branching out of their bubble. I crave for digital art to be fairly compensated. The lack of production budgets is a systematic devaluation for digital art without taking into consideration the skills and materials it costs to produce something (I mean it’s $900 dollars a year for an Adobe subscription alone). I’d like to see structural changes in pay that adequately reflect the labour, skill, knowledge and time of artists at any level.

I miss attending panels and catching the eye of a friend and knowing exactly what they are thinking. I like how we build little worlds through interpersonal dynamics, and yes, they exist online and I can still miss the other intimacy of sharing physical space together. Duality etc.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists?

Don’t be afraid to approach artists you admire and ask for advice. Many are more than happy to share their grant proposals, or opportunities they’ve seen, with emerging artists as you get to know them. I think connecting with artists further along in their careers can help you situate yourself and help not compare yourself to others. Peer-based learning is something I’m really passionate about, I think artists at any stage can learn from one another and seeking out those opportunities was and still is a vital part of my own growth as an artist. Even if it’s just an Instagram DM.

Obviously don’t cross personal boundaries, or expect others to do the work for you, and be prepared for people to not have the capacity. But don’t be discouraged by where other people are at, the times you are knocked back for a grant or show, because you’re going to run in to a lot of noes before you get a yes, and those noes can really help you get a chance to reflect on your proposal and make it stronger. So remember you have a resource, which are the reciprocal relationships around you.

Who inspires you?

I do a lot of qualitative research, so I speak with a lot of people about their lived experiences across a broad spectrum of identities, contexts and intersections. Personally, what they have to say inspires me the most in my practice and daily life. I learn a lot from the mundane everyday conversations I have with my friends and peers. There’s no singular person I think that inspires my work or practice. It’s a plethora of people I get to connect with through my work, research and daily life.

What have you been reading and listening to?

I’ve been reading My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, and listening to Once A Panther which looks at the Pasifika and Polynesian Black Panther movement in Aotearoa.

How do you practise self-care?

Learning the difference between shame and guilt has been a huge practice in self-care—understanding emotions and the way they show up in the body. Maybe I over rationalise my emotions instead of feeling them, but it’s a step towards feeling them, I guess. Also, make-up is a meditative practice for me, I find literal meditation or yoga complicated to my identity and at times my brain feels too busy to sit down and be aware of my body. So the act of sitting down and having nothing else to focus on but drawing on my face really helps ground me, as silly as that sounds.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

Complicated—I was born in Aotearoa. Grew up in Naarm and living and working on Gadigal land for the last seven years. Now back in Naarm briefly. I think Asian-Australian doesn’t encompass my identity but it certainly is one description of it.