I read artist and writer Hannah Black’s collection of texts published in Dark Pool Party when they came out in 2016. I admire her writing a lot – ‘Atlantis’ (from page 12 onwards) has stuck with me ever since. Black is generously sharing a PDF of this book as a download link over on her Twitter. I highly recommended it.

Like Steve, I recently returned to Hannah Black’s writings. Hannah so eloquently combines often personal experiences with scholarly discourse to address the messy conditions of our existence. Courage can sometimes sound so patronising, but, seen in the context of both her work for exhibitions and her activism, her writing points courageously, yet poetically and tenderly to the often oxymoronic conditions that – let’s face it – constitute our lives.

For today, I’ve selected curator Cédric Fauq’s recently published essay ‘Transactional Objects Full of Contexts in Voided Sites’ in Mousse Magazine, which takes its starting point from a previous essay titled ‘Curating for the Age of Blackness’ (2018–19). It reflects their personal encounters with works by Carolyn Lazard, Ima-Abasi Okon, Cameron Rowland,​ and Abbas Zahedi. Through a consideration of the affinities and tensions between these works, Fauq draws observations on what he calls an ‘updated conceptualism’ that is ultimately invested in a process of ‘unworlding’. Fauq gestures towards a practice that uses the institution in its favour, highlighting so-called neutrality employed in order to recalibrate.

In this engaging talk with journalist and constitutional lawyer and co-editor of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald speaks with Freedom of the Press Foundation’s President, Edward Snowden, about the dangers of Covid-19 in relation to civil rights. Snowden spoke at the ICA in 2016. The two are joined by journalist Andray Domise and investigator Cassie King who address the impact of the pandemic on the social fabric and the correlation between industrial animal farming and new diseases.

Zora Neale Hurston is perhaps best-known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and the recent publication of the non-fiction work Baracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (2018). Hurston was also a filmmaker and an anthropologist who travelled the American South and parts of the Caribbean researching black folklore. As part of the Federal Writers Project, Hurston recorded and performed a collection of folk songs, including this one, which formed the basis of her first publication, the non-fiction anthology Mules and Men (1935). In the first part of the recording, Hurston describes the song’s origins and many variations, calling it ‘the most widely distributed work song in the United States’.

Small grants for new writing in the time of the pandemic from the brilliant Montez Press, with applications encouraged from unpublished artists and writers (deadline 17 April!) Montez publish expanded forms of contemporary art writing and their output include books by the likes of Hannah Regel and Huw Lemmey, and an alternative broadcasting offshoot Montez Radio – listen out for Ruth Angel Edwards on 20 April.