Hana Miletić

Hana Miletić is an artist based in Brussels.

What artworks would you have/do you have in your drawing room?

I am not much of an art collector. I do not own a lot of stuff, except for books - that is my Achilles. In my drawing room I do have one artwork, which was a gift of my partner to both of us for a recent anniversary. The artwork is a signed, limited-edition print of a self-portrait of Nan Goldin, entitled Self-portrait in blue dress, New York City, 1985. The print was produced by Aperture as part of a benefit for the grassroots organizations VOCAL-NY (Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders) and P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). P.A.I.N is Goldin’s activist group which fights the Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical company developed OxyContin, the drug which ignited the opioid epidemic. P.A.I.N. exposes the Sacklers’ toxic philanthropy through direct action and court intervention.

This is one of the self-portraits in Goldin’s famous book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first published in 1986. She says the following about it: “This is a picture of me in the 1980s at a friend’s after the bar. The dress was my uniform at that time. These were the days of the night life.” We have installed the picture in the drawing room’s adjacent hallway space, next to where we keep our coats and shoes. Goldin’s image is the first and the last thing we see in the house when leaving or coming back home - almost like the image of a kinship member of sorts. 

Due to the violent history of photography, embedded in racial capitalism, I have a complicated relationship with the medium although I studied it at art school. But I do really love this image of Goldin. In it the artist stares directly and intimately at me through a lock of her hair. Like she explained the situation leading up to this image, Goldin has photographed herself sitting on a sofa in the home of a friend. The image feels situated in our home, despite and across the many differences between Goldin’s friend’s place, depicted in the photo, and ours, where Goldin’s photo hangs.  

What books would you read/are you reading in your drawing room?

I am currently reading or re-reading the following books:
Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest
Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women
Etel Adnan, Life is a Weaving

These artists and writers narrate the various relationships between human and more-than-human life under the regime of capital. Their writing helps me in noticing the entanglements with other species, and provides language to name these relationships. Anna L. Tsing and Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, write about sustaining life, and world-making in forests; they tell stories of technology and progress that repattern the ones that we already know, and, in doing so, they expand realities. These books not only guide me in imagining world-making and give examples of how to contribute to it, they are also intellectual and material works of care and repair. And moreover, in these books, like in Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer or Life is a Weaving by Etel Adnan, textiles and weaving - the technologies that I work with - are put into practice.

All this writing supports me in different ways to sit with the question that I am grappling with: How to repair (in) the world that is ending as we know it? When facing the uncertain future, and in the current difficult and insecure moment, when a lot of structures are being, and still need to be undone and unlearned, this writing brings a sense of urgency, and also a much-needed companionship, comfort and joy.

What movies would you watch/are you watching in your drawing room?

I recently watched the documentary Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992. The film was directed by Dagmar Schultz, a close friend of the feminist writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. It chronicles a lesser known period in Lorde’s life when she empowered Afro-German women to challenge white women to acknowledge the significance of their privilege. Although Lorde’s conversations in Berlin that are documented in the film are a few decades old, they are incredibly timely. The documentary shows real, beautiful examples of how to give and make space for difficult conversations. In it, Lorde, her friends, and allies work with difference through care and without making separations.

What music would you listen to/are you listening to in your drawing room?

I do not listen to music often in this room, but rather to podcasts and the radio. Recently I have been listening to lectures and readings that I could not attend physically. On some days, I want to study, for example by listening to Karen Barad trouble time, Isabelle Stengers entangle magic and ecology, or Audre Lorde read her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” On other days, I want to listen to another artist’s language, and simply sit with that. Last week, for example, I listened to Anne Boyer reading poems, and fragments from The Undying, her recent memoir about pain, vulnerability, care, and more.

Just to be clear, I love listening to music. I always listen to music while walking, on my way to or from the drawing room.

Who would you/do you invite into your drawing room?

I would invite Cecilia Vicuña, Charlotte Posenenske and Mierle Laderman Ukeles and ask them to share their experiences with interconnectedness through art and  the limits of art’s agency.

Finally, I would ask Cecilia Vicuña to read her poem Guante (The Glove) for us to sit with. Vicuña wrote the poem for her eponymous performance in 1966, and it goes as follows: “During a bus ride I would raise a hand gloved in a glove begloved. The glove is not a glove, but a primordial mythic being. (The bus, too, moves in primordial mythic time.) When a girl is born, her mother puts a spider in her hand, to teach her how to weave. Thread is the memory of the journey unraveling.”