She was in her special time of creation, narration and hibernation. When the dark cover of night slowly reveals the day before seeping back under the cover again. Weaving words together to make new associations and meanings. She had become deeply concerned about her kind. In her time in Montreal she wanted to seek a space of self-care, to gather women together of all kinds. To find a confluence of ideas between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinking. Her thoughts raced as she tried to imagine a space for self-care, the utterance of inner thoughts and feelings made public. The Modern had failed to find the solution within its architecture to speak to the future, to create a social public, instead it created a kind of cannibalizing act. A consumption of one’s own voice but also a consumption of the other. The social seemed to only belong to media, to non-commitment of being present in the same time and space. It was first phase, to think space differently. But their voices were lost. Hidden to the outside world and buried deep within the darkness of the web. She had to find their voices again to create counsel within a shared ecology. A counsel between those who had passed, those present and those who were yet to come. She sought advice from these women who had weaved the word to show possible futures, to waken us from our daily realities and who found comfort in finding their voices to write themselves into the story.

All good things must begin: A conversation between Audre Lorde and Octavia E. Butler takes place at SBC gallery as a space for reading, writing, screening, reflection & conversation on the topic of intersectional feminism, modernist architecture and science fiction, and forms part of Her Imaginary, the BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) research fellowship of Sepake Angiama.