We sat down with Tamika, the mind and soul behind Dial-An-Ancestor, a project that delves into the intricate ways human cultures connect, grow, and transform. Born in London but shaped by life in over 20 countries, Tamika channels her background as a cultural anthropologist into participatory, co-created experiences that challenge systems and inspire collective reflection. Rooted in a love for radical spaces like libraries and a deep connection to human stories, she uses people and behaviors as her medium to explore how we bridge the past, present, and future.

Listen to the interview

Audio transcript:

How would you describe yourself as an artist?

I am a cultural anthropologist first and foremost. I was a cultural anthropologist before I even knew what the discipline and practice was, I've always been really interested in understanding human cultures and how they've come to exist. Specifically from a social point of view. I think it's a really rich territory. Cultural anthropology has such a fraught history that is riddled with exploitation, violence, and white supremacy. And I think it's a discipline that is scared by its own potential, because it's about possibility, and understanding, and imagining new ways of being in a more anarchist frame set. There's so much latent possibility that comes from thinking about who we are, why we exist, and how we come to be in relation with each other. 

I think I have the soul of an artist. I don't have the formal skill set or discipline of a practicing artist, but it is deep within my spirit and my psyche and the way that I move through the world. 

I very much care about participatory art and art that is in public spaces. I'm always very kind to people, but I'm ruthless towards institutions, and I think that's the way artists should be. That's really difficult, especially if you have a materiality to your works—and I don't, I guess, in a very corny way. My medium or material is people and behavior, which is quite ethereal and hard for the art world to grasp its hands on quite purposefully.

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Would you like to share a bit about your background?

I was born in London, and have lived and worked in around 20 to 30 different countries since I was 19 years old. I've done a lot of co-created practice and process type insight work with people from all different walks of life and all different places. I grew up very working class without much access to cultural institutions and art, money was always a barrier. I've come from people who care about and revere knowledge, and knowledge production, and knowledge sharing. 

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in libraries. They're really radical spaces, free access to knowledge and knowledge exchange without financial barriers getting in the way. I don't come from a family or people of artist background, but I remember being 10 years old and being deeply moved by an exhibition that I must have seen, it was in the Oxo tower on London South Bank. It was a free exhibition, and it was called the Museum Of Me. It was the first time that I'd been in a cultural institution that allowed me to participate, play, and co-create the experience. And it was really powerful for me. It kind of asked questions of who I was and my life. There was this kind of non-hierarchy to whoever was in the space. Like me, as a 10 year old girl, was just as important as a 50 year old man who’s very different and has a very different life experience than me, but we were all kind of on the same level playing field within this exhibition. I think that really shaped my practice. A lot of my practice has to do very simply with who is asked to speak, and who is asked to listen, and why. 

There are a lot of artist kinfolk who I feel a deep connection with, some of those Felix Gonzalez Torres or Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art—here maintenance work, I think is so beautiful. I love Arthur Jafa, Guerilla Girls as well. Anyone that sits at an intersection between art, culture, creativity, and unpicking systems and putting them back together after critiquing them. Those are my people.

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Your project Dial-An-Ancestor is a hotline to the beyond, a way to leave messages for those who are no longer with us. Could you tell us how this came about?

Dial-An-Ancestor is a project that I will be working on for another 97 years! So it's very purposefully designed to exist beyond my lifetime. It is concerned with deep time humility. It is concerned with bastardising our notions of time. When people hear Dial-An-Ancestor, they often think of ancestry in the past, but I'm asking all of us to think of ancestry in the present. So we're the ancestors that I'm calling participation from. 

I guess in a way, Dial-An-Ancestor serves as an existential trigger, and when that invitation goes out to people on the street or a wheat paste in neighborhoods where I'd like people to speak, I'd like to give an invite for people to be a part of a wider canon, that invitation is asking us to consider our lineage and our role in bridging the past and the future. We are the only bridge between the past and the future. We are the present. So I'm asking people to think about their embodied knowledge: stories that exist within their hearts and their minds and their brains, that they think future generations might learn something from. This is about context. This is about what it means to be alive today and how we can complicate the narrative of what it means to be a person who is alive in this time of our lives. It isn't really for us, it's for future generations.

This project came from two places, primarily. 

The first one is very personal. I was pregnant for the first time in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, when I just moved to New York City. I also got news from back home that my dad was very ill, and I thought he was dying—I mean, we're all dying, but I thought he was dying pretty rapidly. So, in a very short period of time, I was contemplating what it meant for me to be in a lineage of people: my parent potentially passing away and what would leave with him, and then me potentially bringing new life into the world. I think that's where the kind of understanding, the deep, visceral understanding of us being the only vessels between the past and the present came from. In the end, I didn't have a baby and my dad didn't die. 

Secondly, it came from a peer learning group. There were eight of us that got together for four and a half months on Zoom twice a week, and contemplated one simple question: “What is your relationship to time, and how might we unravel that relationship to time?”. Some people thought about it through kind of a second puberty as they were coming into different gender expressions and identities within their lives. There were trans members of the community who were contemplating their relationship to time. There were people that were thinking about it from a labor and workplace point of view. There were other people that were thinking about it from a mysticism lens. It was fantastic! It was non hierarchical, and each person was responsible for providing and facilitating a workshop around the theme for everyone else. So that four and a half months was really, really crucial in me developing the concept for Dial-An-Ancestor.

Also—and I learned this later on—there was a series of hotlines in the late 1960s from a slew of different artists. And I think there are a lot of parallels between the time that we were living in 2020-2021 and 1968 onwards. It was a time where a lot of systems that people had taken to be true and tried and tested and here forever, were kind of collapsing in front of our eyes. It was a time of racial and class reckoning, and I hoped that the pandemic would inspire that for us and our generation in our time. I think it did, but we're living in really different circumstances than people were in the late 60s. This series of telephone lines was created by people as a way to archive and tell the stories at the time. The most successful one was from John Giorno “Dial a poem”. I had no idea that this existed until Dial-An-Ancestor was out in the world. And I think it just proves the point that there's really nothing new under the sun. There are challenges that each generation will face and I think we need to recognise that we don't have to start from scratch. We have blueprints that we can take and evolve and ameliorate to be off the times. So, it was a really beautiful surprise that this had existed way before I thought I imagined it up. We're a reflection of all of the people, and the ideas, and the cultures that have come before us, and it is our duty to remix those and make them relevant for the times that we live in. 

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Do you experience any resistance/fears when inviting audience engagement? If so, do you lean on any particular rituals or tools? 

There was so much fear with bringing out Dial-An-Ancestor, because it doesn't exist if people don't know about it, and it doesn't exist if people do not interact with it. So, it felt like quite an audacious move. I think if I put things in the world like I want them to be resonant and feel some sort of cultural need, and voice. It was kind of scary, because the only way to really see if Dial-An-Ancestor had legs was to put it out as an experiment. And luckily, there was traction, and there still is traction, and it's something that people are interacting with, which is fabulous! 

I have a mission that I will live by for my entire life, and it will take lots of different expressions, but I believe that I exist to create soft, malleable, irresistible blueprints for other people to fuck with. And it's the last bit that's really important. This is a surrender more than anything. I create the process and the container, but it's made out of very soft stuff that changes, and evolves, and lives, and breathes. So, I guess my relationship to audience engagement is knowing that this is a practice that is our practice, it doesn't belong to me. I steered it and I shaped the concept, and I'm very cognizant of the things that I feel very deeply about that shouldn't change. However this practice is alive and malleable: there’s potential for it to morph multiple times over through other people imagining what else it may become. I love hearing other people's ideas and expressions for Dial-An-Ancestor, as it only exists if it is copied, and pasted, and brought into new, new ways of existing that I can't do just by myself.

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As we move further towards automation, we risk leaving behind us important aspects of our heritage. Do you think tech can also help us reconnect us to our roots? 

Absolutely. Technology is imbued with the moral guidelines of the people that make it. And I think technology is absolutely a tool that can be utilised to bring us closer together and connect us. I think a lot of the big behemoth technology platforms, and companies, and people that are running them today have actively upheld the status quo that keeps power concentrated in their favor. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we ask better questions about what we're trying to head towards as a people, as a set of peoples, then we can ask how technology can aid in that process. So, if technology is the answer, what is the question that we're asking: “How can tech help us reconnect to ourselves and each other?”.

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How do you navigate algorithmic pressure when striving to stay authentic as a creator?

I refuse to play a part in algorithmic pressure. When it comes to Dial-An-Ancestor, it does not exist on Instagram. It doesn't have its own account. There are no metrics that are publicly available around Dial-An-Ancestor. I am actively against the hyper quantification of data and our existence as a way to legitimize who gets to speak, who gets to listen, who gets to have that work amplified, who gets to matter. I have very purposefully taken Dial-An-Ancestor out of the algorithm landscape. It means that it's harder for me to amplify the service and the message, which means that I wheat paste out in the streets, in the rain, and the snow, and the ice, and the cold, and the sweltering heat, and I ask my people to help me in those efforts. I'm very stubborn about that. That is the one thing that I'm really stubborn about, when it comes to Dial-An-Ancestor. I'm very loose with a lot, but I will not play into the algorithm pressure to create what the people think they want.

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What do you think your own ancestors might have to say about how we're all living now?

Excellent question. This year for me has been about re-remembering who I am, and not fighting who I am, but kind of dancing with that. I come from people on my mother's side who are radical socialists, and that is very much beaten through my blood, it's in my bones. I really, really care about class consciousness and how that intersects with race, with gender, with all of the things. I'm most concerned with humanity, so who gets to have their needs met, and why. None of my ideas are very radical at all. I was told in primary school to treat people how I'd like to be treated, and that's where I got radicalised. It's not any more complicated than that. I think on my dad's side, those people, the ones I know, are wildly creative and entrepreneurial, and also had a lot of complex relationships with Empire, and business and British colonialism. 

There are a lot of tensions within my history and my ancestral kind of roots—they're very complex. It's not a story that is all light and joy. No one’s is, of course. There's a lot of ness and shadow in there as well, which I think is really useful. I think there's a lot of creative fuel and power that comes from seizing some of those contradictions that live within our nervous systems. 

So, what do I think that they would say about the way that we're living now? I think they'd ask us to think about all of the things that are timeless that make us human. People have danced since the dawn of time. People have cooked and shared food since the dawn of time. People have sat around campfires and told stories since the dawn of time. People have danced in sync with each other since the dawn of time. I think they would be asking us how we would marry those very timeless drivers of being human with the more timely technological aspects of what we have at our fingertips available today? I think that is the question for each of us, and we all have a slightly different answer depending on our point of view and perspective.

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