Theophina: Visionary Strategist
M E E T T H E T E A M
🔡 name? theophina.
💼 position? visionary strategist
🎨 favourite colour? violet
🐙 which sea creature do you f/w the most?
It has to be stomatopods (mantis shrimps). As a self-professed colour enthusiast, 16 photoreceptors and 11 cones for sensing colour is mad. Humans only have three colour-sensing cones in comparison (RGB).
I’m obsessed with the concept of colours we can’t see and colour in general as a subjective human experience that happens in the mind and not the world but a silent language which we take for granted and trust so easily.
❣️what do you love about your role title?
The fact that the definitions sort of feel like someone put Raven-Symoné in a blender with a tech bro because the blend seems completely at odds with each other. I love it. I feel like it expresses my natural inclination towards strategising when it comes to imagining in such a succinct way. The latter half of my role title speaks of my natural tendency to immediately plot exciting daydreams into a distinct map of steps. I love a why as much as I love a how. My title holds space for both, my penchant for analysing situations and strategising them and my almost instinctual subconscious pull towards deep dreams and visions. (I saw the front cover of
I: DAWN in a daydream exactly a year before it was printed and when it was, it looked exactly like the daydream and it made me cry).
Envisioning for me is therefore not only a mental experience but a deeply meaningful landscape that I gain joy from marking and charting and creating routes to reach with distinct steps. I love the fact that Visionary encapsulates my tendency to dream very deeply (I dream a lot in the day and night, I am constantly zoning out from conversations and see things in flashes, events, songs, sentences, gatherings, and images. I love to sleep – not beating the Taurus allegations and am a vivid dreamer). What I love most about the title is that it blends my love of both the structural and abstract, which provides me with such a wonderful sense of balance. As an autistic poet, I have loved to live in this cross-section for a long time.
⚡️ black creative(s) grounding you right now?
Probably Audre Lorde (who I share my heritage island with, big up Carriacou! 🇬🇩) because of what she said about finding your arena in The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. That sentiment is honestly the only thing keeping me sane right now amidst the crush of everything happening.
As a disabled creative and strategist enthusiast it can be easy to fall into the pull of wanting to occupy many spaces and be everywhere at once suggesting all of the fixes/approaches I can see while beating myself up for not being able to do so. Audre’s arena model of organising is so realistic because it reminds me that it’s okay to do what I can do in the arenas I have vowed to myself and my work to deeply instead of widely. I don’t do well with spreading myself vastly over many arenas, although some people might. I prefer to buckle down in one and sustain as much impact in that arena as possible. Audre’s words remind me that eventually, if the work I’m carrying out in my arena is adequately aligned with subversions of power (and not r*form) it will naturally start linking up and affecting other arenas too, even the ones I am not actively working in (and that’s on trickle-down solidarity 💀 💅🏿.
🔮 describe the future of onyx in three words?
my circle gave me three words recently in messages they sent about onyx and I feel like they accurately describe our future:
Incendiary, (thank you, B) Joyful (thank you, T) and Antithetical (ty, A).
These role titles were formed using @theslowfactory’s ‘Collective Roles for Liberation’
as a template.
Illustration by Tosin Akinkunmi (@artbytosin)
📚 what’s your favourite point in onyx’s manifesto & why?
IV: WE LOVE CREATIVE WORK CRITICALLY. If I speak… 💀 The way the publishing industry is churning out a lot of [redacted] and there’s no actual engagement with thematics and it’s just a lot of buzz around titles and pub dates and prizes and clout attached to names without reflection and then…onto the next. It’s sales-oriented and neglectful consumerism at its worst, especially when nobody wants to say when something is kaka under the guise of ‘not supporting’ Black writers. It’s a disservice to the community and I hate it because it leads to the generating of Black creative work that is soggy for lack of a better word. We are literally gagging for more robust responses beyond ‘r*presentation!!’. onyx’s dedication to being a creative space that gets right to the root of the work thematically, critically and canonically to bolster Black creativity so it can communally flourish is so loving and liberational to me. It’s about time we escape this exoticised yt neoliberal fangirl echo chamber. 👁
🎧 hyperfocus song?
And1 - Athletic Progression has carried me through every single funding application bid and PDF doc compilation. I am a simple piano boy and easy to please; I get unreasonably happy over fast arpeggios. Every time I hear them I’m like ugh, yes give us LH/RH dexterity?! Everything melts away when I listen to this song and I love the way that’s reflected by the way it atmospherically ends. The hi-hat + bass drum triplets in 12/8 are also TOO good not to stim out to.