For me her image, the triptych, became a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.

If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.

I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.

I don't know about forgiving, but it's an "I'm still here." And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes; let's be flawed differently.

Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.