We Want the Airwaves Indira Allegra

Nia: You grew up in Portland, Oregon?

Indira: It's true.
Nia: And, how long have you been in the Bay? What brought you here?
Indira: I moved down to the Bay the first time in 2005, to work as a sign language interpreter at Laney
College. I was working as an assistant to the director of interpreting services, who's Deaf-blind. As part
of my interpreting training, she was happy to have me come on board. I had known since I was very
little and my dad took us down here for a tripwe took the train down herethat I wanted to be in the
Bay Area. Then, when I turned 25, I actually had that opportunity, so I took it.
Nia: So you've been hereyou said you're turning 35, so10 years?
Indira: Mm-hmm. To give you some background: I did my interpreter training in Portland, Oregon and
I was the only Black interpreter working in the state, and one of three Native American interpreters
working in the state. So, needless to say, I wanted a different type of work environment. [laughter]
And, I really wanted to be able to work at interpreting in the college level, and do performance
interpreting, where I didn't have clients saying things to me like, You're too dark, I can't see your
hands.
Nia: Woah. . .
Indira: or being spit at at work, or having cartons of milk thrown at me to lighten me up. So, that's
the kind of environment that I grew up in. Racism here in the Bay looks very different. It's moreit's
well-manicured.
Nia: [laughter]
Indira: I interpreted for a while, and then it began to be more difficult for me. Interpreting is an
intensely intellectual process, and ASL interpreting is understandably a very physical process. You're
not transliterating word for word, but you're going for meaning, you're going for something that's going
to make sense culturally to the Deaf client and the hearing client. So there's often a lag time between
what you hear, your piecing together of meaning, and then the actual interpretation that happens, either
signed or spoken. I noticed that my lag time was increasing in certain environments, and that I was
becoming increasingly sensitive, or attuned to the facial cues of my hearing clients. And it was my
Deaf clients that tuned into it. I remember, I was interpreting a board meeting, and the Deaf client had
asked me, Are you lip reading them? and I said Oh, fuck! That's not what I'm getting paid to do.
So, I went to go get checked out.
Nia: What do you mean, checked out? What does that look like?
Indira: Oh, I went to get my hearing tested.
Nia: Oh!

Indira: Yeah, and I learned that I was losing my hearing in my right ear. And later, after sort of the
surface of many more symptoms and trips to many specialists and things like that, I was diagnosed with
Mnire's disease, which is a condition that affects the balance, which is located in the fluid in the inner
ear, and creates for me intense periods of vertigo that can last anywhere from 15 minutes to four or
more hours, where I literallyif I'm lucky, I'm at home when I get hit by an episode, and I'm gripping
the side of my bed to try not toit feels like I'm sliding off into space. Logically I know I'm laying in
bed or on the couch or something, or maybe on the floor. But there's this sense of boundlessness to it.
So, I had been using interpreting to bankroll other creative endeavors.
Nia: Does it pay fairly well?
Indira: Sign language interpreting pays less than spoken language interpreting, because I feel like our
clients are marginalized in a different way. Working freelance pays a lot better than working, say, for
the Peralta [school] system, but yes, it does pay well. And by that I would say, a living wage. So, north
of the $20 an hour mark.
Nia: Okay.
Indira: Though. . . who could argue that that's a living wage even in the Bay Area, but. . . whatever.
Nia: Yeah. [laughter] So, you were using your interpreting to bankroll your artistic endeavors.
Indira: Yeah. One of those endeavors at the time was working alongside Patty Berne and Leroy Moore
as part of the artistic core of Sins Invalid. You know, I decided after working with them in 2008, that I
really wanted to invest more time in my own creative projects. I had just made my first short film,
which was picked up by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center in Toronto, and was starting to
go on the film festival circuit
Nia: What was your first film about?
Indira: Blue Covers. So, I learned how to shoot and edit from a documentary filmmaker named Oriana
Bolden, and I storyboarded a poem that I had written about how surviving childhood sexual abuse
affects adult intimacy. I could picture so vividly in my mind, in a lot of my writing, I use that visual
sense, that visual attention or acuity as a resource, and I really wanted to see if there was another way
that the text could live, you know? Even though her, Oriana's way, of working was very different, we
were still both concerned with personal narrative, and yeahthat's how I learned editing on Final Cut,
and all of that. Since then, I've gone on to make other films of my own, and I feel grateful for that skill
set, because it gives me another way to really represent or illustrate meaning, or narrative. Poetry
doesn't have to just live on the page.
Nia: Is poetry what came first for you, in terms of all the different media that you work in?
Indira: Yeah. It's my, I would say my first medium. I mean, I played flute as a kid, and I have somea
modicum of dance training, but I would say writing is it. My first poems weren't necessarily
recognizable as taking any particular form or something like that. They were always included in letters
to others. It was a way of being able to get really really close to details, be they interactions that I had
had with people, or things that I had overheard, or instances that I just found ironic or painful or just

kind of unforgettable in their aesthetic, in their beauty, that I was able to convey through writing, and so
that's how I found my poetic voice, through free verse. Sometimes I experiment with using forms, but
notit's more like a thought exercise.
Nia: Were you an avid letter-writer as a teen?
Indira: Absolutely.
Nia: I'm sorry if this is insulting, but was this before theAOL and all that? Or is this after/alongside?
Indira: Yeah, I didn't grow up with a computer. So, I didn't haveyeah, at one point me and my dad
and my brother lived off of like 400 dollars a month in public housing. So, it really wasn'tlike, I
didn't have a cell phone until I was in my twenties, my first exposure to e-mail was as a senior in high
school, and it was really kind of like the black screen with theso, you know
Nia: DOS, is that what it was called?
Indira: Yeah, totally. It was a super-DOS situation, and I wasn't even super clear on how to use it. It
was something I experimented with at the local library. So, letter writing really was, for me, a lifeline.
Nia: Do you still write letters?
Indira: I write e-mail now. Yeah.
Nia: I'm a big letter-writer, that's why I asked.
Indira: Oh, okay. Word.
Nia: I feel like zinesters are sort of single-handedly keeping it alive. [laughter]
Indira: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.
Nia: Most of my pen pals are people that write zines. And how did your first ever film get picked up
for distribution in Canada?
Indira: I had screened Blue Covers at OutFest Fusion, which is the POC track.
Nia: OutFest is LA? LA queer film festival?
Indira: Yeah. It's in Hollywood proper.
Nia: It's like a big one, right? Cause it's LA? [laughter]
Indira: Yeah no, totally.
Nia: Like, industry.

Indira: It was totally at the Egyptian Theatre, there was a red carpet, and several open bars, and all
kinds of stuff.
Nia: Yeah. I've never been, but it just seems reallymost queer film festivals are not industry events,
and that one seems like it, because it's in LA, it's a big deal.
Indira: It was fancy. Yeah, totally.
Nia: [laughter]
Indira: I had a lot of fun. [laughter] It was a great weekend!
Nia: So, was it through your mentorship with this documentarian that you were able to access spaces
like that?
Indira: You know, she just was like, I submitted here, you might consider submitting here, and I
submitted. One of the things, obviously, it's easier about having distribution, is that I don't have to do
all the kind of
Nia: Promotion?
Indira: Yeah, totally. Which is another job in and of itself. So, I saw a film called Nikamowin (Song) at
OutFest, at Fusion rather, and was so taken by this. It's a short made by a First Nations Cree filmmaker,
and we're moving through visual landscape, from very rural open spaces to a densely populated urban
environment. Also moving from an auralA-U-R-A-Lenvironment, where Cree is the primary
language being spoken, to this more mixed state of being where English begins to come into play. But
everything is abstracted, and I thought that it was soI was crying, it was so beautiful.
And it felt necessary, and I feel like there's a lot of power in abstraction, and I felt like there were some
aesthetic choices that we were both makingrepresenting in different ways, butso, I went out on a
limb and I just sent him a copy of Blue Covers, and I said, you know, I am so moved by your work,
and I feel like we have some of the same concerns when thinking about body and sovereignty, and the
language of body, and how we recognize body. Maybe it's corporeal existences like you and I sitting
here, or maybe it's represented through landscape. And he happened to be the curator for Indigiqueer,
which is part of the Vancouver Film Festival.
Nia: Awesome.
Indira: Unbeknownst to me. [laughter] He said, I would love to include this in our program. I said
thank you.
Nia: [laughter]
Indira: [laughter] and it was there that the director of the CFMDC, the Canadian Filmmakers'
Distribution Center, saw my film, and I got an e-mail like a week later or something.
Nia: Wow! You were using your interpreting to support your artistic work. You made your first film,

and then what other creative work were you supporting through your interpreting? Or, was it mostly
film at that point?
Indira: Oh my God, everything was poured into the film. I was just sort of
Nia: Is it full-length or a short film?
Indira: It's short, I only do shorts at this point.
Nia: Yeah. Features are
Indira: Yeah, it's a different thing, you know? [laughter]
Nia: Like, a short film is a huge endeavor. A feature film is colossal. [laughter]
Indira: Yeah, yeah, and a lot of that is, films are collective endeavors. I feel like, to embark upon a
collective endeavor means that there has to be some kind of meaningful reciprocity with other people
who are on your teama.k.a. money.
Nia: Yeah. [laughter]
Indira: You know, with a short, there's a lot of things that I can do on my own. But, soyeah, it was
that, and Sins Invalid.
Nia: How did youwas disability justice always sort of part of your political framework, before you
started interpreting? What was your political progression around disability issues?
Indira: That's a good question. I learned a lot from the Deaf community in Portland, where I learned
how to sign. A woman named Jessica Duckworth was my first ASL teacher at Portland Community
College, it was great. I learned a lot about Deafness as a culture. I learned a lot about the demedicalization of ways of being like that. Where it's more about culture and language and organizing
around access to rights that everyone should have.
In terms of turning all of that, turning that lens on myself if you willa dear friend of mine, Lezlie
Fryeat the time she's finishing up her PhD at NYU right now. She's a disability studies scholar, and
she really was someone who was really helpful to me in understanding disability rights as a political
orientation.
Nia: And this was when you were still in Portland?
Indira: Yeah. I lived in Eugene for a short time too before coming down here. And that was helpful to
understand how, even though my experiences with disability were not visible, that my political
responsibility was the same. She's someone who has a physical disability that was very visible, walking
down the street people were always talking to her about it, and she introduced me to some theoretical
texts about the matter, and so I started reading Simi Linton and whatnot.
Nia: Sorry, what was that name?

Indira: Simi Linton. But really, I think we were allies to each other aroundshe teaching me about
disability justice, and me reflecting to her areas wherein she could more fully realize her responsibility
and role as a white ally.
Nia: We're talking about your transition from ASL interpreting to full-time art stuff, and it began with
Blue Covers and working with Sins Invalid?
Indira: Mmm-hmm.
Nia: And then, what was the progression from there?
Indira: The progression from there was working a lot of random retail jobs. [laughter] I managed a
yoga studio. At a certain point, it's kind of difficult to make a living wage, anyway. And it's really
difficult to make a living wage when everything seems to require a bachelor's degree. Or, where jobs
that really don't need any kind of degree. It's kind of like, depressing when you're applying for a coffee
or retail gig, and they're interested in where you went to school, and you're likereally? So, I decided
that I would finish my degree, because I had a two-year degree before, which, no one knows what that
is now.
Nia: And that was in ASL?
Indira: Yeah. ASL interpreting and Deaf Studies. And, my partner was able to find stable, nine-to-five
work, and I was able to get a lot of financial aid. So, I went to school.
Nia: And you started at CCA?
Indira: Mmm-hmm.
Nia: I can very much relate to that place of working retail jobs and being like, How am I ever going to
be able to move my life forward and advance in my career? and I think it's interesting that while
asking yourself those questions, you decided on art as the degree to get.
Indira: Mmm-hmm.
Nia: Can you talk a little bit about that? [laughter] I guess I mean financially, when people are seeking
out financial stability, art degrees are not usually the most practical or the first thing that they think of.
Indira: I don't think that getting a degree is the most practical way to advance your financial stability
at this point, when you think about the debt load that people take on. So, I honestly, I knew thatit was
kind of a weird catch-22, because everyone wants you to have graduated from some place, but then I
also had an acute understanding that it wouldn't necessarily guarantee me anything, but it was more just
kind of likeultimately, I think what's most important is, I just had to do it for myself.
Nia: Do what for yourself, pursue art education?
Indira: Just, finish my degree for myself. And I knew that being able to accesscause you go to
school not just to finish your degree, but you go to school for the networkthat I would encounter

folks, in essence be able to kind of hack into a space wherein I would have access to different types of
networks than I was able tothan I was already engaged in. So, to kind of get me out of, not out of a
creative bubble, but to broaden my understanding ofwhat types of residencies can I apply for? What
types of grants can I apply for? Who's going to write me letters of recommendation for certain places?
And I learnedI think particularly, growing up in a place wherein I represented 3% of the entire state
population, have an acute sense of howwhat some white folks think they are entitled tois really
different than anything that I could imagine. I think that also varies with class, too. So, if you grew up
living in public housing, or having to miss school because you're collecting bottles and cans for extra
cash, then what you might think you should have, or are entitled to have, is really different.
So, while I am often frustrated or maybe even offended by what I feel like some folks feel like they
have access to or should have access to, based on their class background, their gender, or their racial
backgroundit's also wonderful to study. So, I say ahhhh, okay, that's what you charge for xyz. Cool.
Didn't know I could do that, guess who's doing it now?
Nia: [laughter]
Indira: You know? [laughter] So, it becomes thisthere are many different layers to the learning that
happens.
Nia: What drew you to textiles?
Indira: I think of weaving in the same way that I think about editing video or writing. We kind of lay
in lines ofwe're laying in lines of narrative, laying in lines of meaning, and so whether that's working
between footage and audio, and kind of doing almost like tapestry weave, or I'm clipping something
here, I'm altering the color and I'm putting it over there. Or whether I'm writing a poem and stacking up
the stanzas. Yeah. Whether I'm actually working on the floor loom.
We were narrating through cloth long before anything was ever written down. So, I feel like it's
actuallyit's like this core technology that I just like to combine with Adobe Creative Suite [laughter]
which is like the show that you saw recently, Blackout. And in fact, if we're talking about weaving in
English, which is a Latin-based language, we're actually invoking the verb texere, which means to
weave. So, any time we're talking about text or writing, we're talking about a cloth-making process,
you know?
And even the Jacquard loomso I weave on both a computerized loom, a Jacquard loom, and what I
call an analog loom, which is just like a floor loom. With the Jacquard loom in particular, that is the
basis of how we think about computer technologies today. It's a binary code. Warps up, warps down.
Circuits open, circuits closed. And it's from, actually, that technology, that computers were innovated.
So, for me, it's all related, it's all storytelling.
Nia: There's something you said, like, We were narrating through
Indira: Cloth.
Nia: Cloth. Before any of the contemporary technologies. Could you explain a little bit more what you

mean by narrating through cloth?

Indira: Sure. I think that all of us haveand this is what's so coolis that all of us have ancestors who
benefited from someone who was weaving in their communities. And maybe they were weaving with
pattern, probably most often with pattern, and then even though it's abstract, pattern always means
something. Abstraction does not evacuate meaning from something, and so that's what I mean by it.
So, whether it's through the significance of certain types of dyes that were used to make fabric, the type
of pattern that was used, who gets to wear what type of fabric. All of that varies culture by culture, but
for as long as there have been naked bodies on the planet, there has been a need for weaving. And
human beings, being kind of silly as we are, and obsessed with creating drama and hierarchy, we often
like to delineate something about our family line, something about our culture, through the cloth. So,
yeah. Weavers have been doing that forever, I think it's awesome.
Nia: Let's talk about Blackout. Do you want to talk a little bit about the concept behind it?
Indira: Sure, sure. So, Blackout was a large-scale video installation. In doing the research for the
project, I actually went down to where the Oakland police department issues their uniforms for people
who are on the force.
Nia: How did you get access? Can you just walk in?
Indira: Yeah. Google. [laughter]
Nia: It's just like a storefront?
Indira: It is.
Nia: Okay.
Indira: But I mean, no one else would have a reason to go there, unless you'reyou're on the force.
Nia: A cop. [laughter]
Indira: Yeah, exactly. But I knew
Nia: So, this is where you hang out for fun?
Indira: Yeah, right, right. [laughter] I knew I had to do fabric studies. I wanted to see what kinds of
cloth were being used in the production of police uniforms. A lot of my work has to do with structure,
so this was the best way for thinking about structure, both literally and metaphorically. This was the
best way to kind of get that information first-hand. And, I went in there, and the art gods and goddesses
were looking out for me, and I was able to get what I needed to get done.
Nia: Which was what?
Indira: Get detailed images of these fabrics, and to be able to hold them in hand, and to be not
bothered while doing that.

Nia: They weren't like, What are you doing here, you're clearly not a cop?
Indira: I told them I was a fashion student. [laughter] And then they were like Oh, well, you're loopy
but that's fine. I left out the part where I was like, Well, I'm actually going to do a critique on police
violence, but. . . you know.
The type of fabric that's used is a three-one surge twill. When I say three-one I'm talking about the ratio
of warp to weft threads that are visible.
Nia: Warp goes one way and weft goes the other?
Indira: Yep. Warp goes up and down, weft goes left and right, and again, narrating through cloth,
depending on what kind of cultural context we come out of, we're either riding along the weft line or
we're riding along the warp line. I feel like we actually borrow from the architecture of weaving to
know how to tell a story.
So, I said Oh, that's interesting, and I looked up more qualities about the surge twill. And it's a big
go-to for uniform makers because it washes stains out easily. It's a big go-to because it keeps the crease,
you know, the crease in the pant leg? And it wears comfortably on the body. So, I always felt like
from my own personal experience with police harassmentcertainly in watching many hours of
footage over my lifetime of instances of police violence, how eerie it was that they look so freshly
pressed while doing what they were doing, while beating someone to death, that the crease remains in
the pant leg.
So, in looking at the drawdown for this particular kind of fabric, and when I say drawdown, I mean
that's what weavers useor weavers in some traditions useto plot out what the pattern will look like.
It's a black and white diagram that's drawn on graph paper. And the dark areas represent spaces where
the warp threads are visible, and the light areas represent spaces where the weft threads are visible.
And it immediately occurred to me that there's this redaction that was happening. With weaving as with
other kinds of storytelling, there's always something that's hidden for a while that resurfaces later,
right? So, you're never really seeing everything at once. I began to think about how this structure and
the structure that it clothes, this system of police violence acts as a redactive force, when trying to
access the statements of families who have lost loved ones to police violence.
The video installation was a way of representing visually the censorship of these families and the
struggle that they have to articulate their grief through this structure. And all of the text that appeared in
the show was taken directly either from news interviews or statements that were made at rallies and
other protests.
Nia: In the actual exhibition, there's a series of videos that, as you mentioned, include statements made
by families of victims of police violence, and those statements are sometimes scrolling, sometimes just
static, and then those statements are obscured by the pattern
Indira: Of the fabric, exactly.

Nia: And theI guess I'm trying to describe what the pattern looks like, and how it reveals some parts
and obscures other parts, and that's actuallyI'm trying to remember what you called it, the
Indira: Yeah, the drawdown.
Nia: The drawdown. Okay. I guess, I thinkfirst of all, for some reason, reading the description of the
show, I thought that there were going to be actual textiles. I didn't realize it was going to be video.
[laughter]
Indira: Oh, okay!
Nia: So, I was really surprised, and thenI had something pictured very different, I guess. You did a
video aboutit wasn't specifically about the death of Brandy Martell, but I think that was the part that
really stuck with meand you've done other things before that have to do with weaving and violence
and narrative and place. So, I guess I thought that it would be like the actual physical weaving of texts,
like strips of paper.
Indira: Oh, I see, yeah yeah. I've done that before, too. Yeah.
Nia: Yeah. Can we talk about the video? I can't remember what it's called, but the one that's about, it's
specifically about
Indira: A Woven Account.
Nia: Okay.
Indira: Yeah yeah yeah yeah. I thinkit's so funnyyou weren't alone in picturing the exhibition in a
different way, even though I saidI did actually say video installation in the tagline or whatever, if
you will, of the thingmany folks came expecting to see actual textiles.
Nia: Yeah. Oh no, justwhen you say textile, I think tactile. I think like, something you can physically
touch, and so it was interesting to see a different application. It's actually really broad, I think, what
textile can mean, what that term can be applied to.
Indira: Mmm-hmm, yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to, for me, to think about weaving as a
methodology, not necessarily something that always results in a tactile cloth. And in fact, all of the
images that were projected in the space are actual digital representations of weaveable cloths. So, I
could turn those into what's called a bitmap file, and take it to a computerized loom, and actually weave
up a cloth. But what was more interesting to me in that moment was to have something that more
closely approximated the way in which we encounter these traumatic texts online and through our
social media feedshence the scrolling, the unending scrolling of the text.
Nia: And the violence.
Indira: Yes, absolutely. Woven Account was made in response to an experience I'd had of being bashed
in the Panhandle back in 2011. I, as part of my own process, became really interested in what types of
stories make the news and what doesn't, and what other reported instances of hate crimes had been

reported here in the Bay Area, which is typically thought of a place where, you knowOh, that
doesn't really happen here, where it's kind of open, accepting, andyou know, as I said to you earlier
before the interview, I don't believe that racism has a zip code where it likes to hang out. If it were that
easy that would be great.
Nia: Let's just all not go there!
Indira: Yeah, totally! [laughter] Totally. I feel the same way about homophobia, or queerphobic
violence. It's reallyanyway, I began a process of looking through lots of newspaper archives, and
finding those stories, and where I could, actually getting my hands on the actual newsprint, spinning
that by hand. When we think about violence, we think about something that's coarse, we think about
something that's chaotic. There arent usually logical reasons around why violence happens. We can
certainly kind of categorize it and say, Well, this is racist. Or, This is homophobic or transphobic.
But, when I think about working with something like that, for me, as a weaver, and again thinking
about textile production as a methodology, I say okay. When working with something that is coarse and
chaotic, what do you do? You spin it, to create order. Or to begin to try and make sense of it. And so I
taught myself how to spin paper.
Nia: Which seems incredibly difficult in and of itself. Like, newsprint is not built to last, so how do
you weave it without it falling apart?
Indira: [laughter] I mean, it's a time-based work in that way. The color of it continues to change, as
we know that newsprint does. Yeah, it's a precarious material in the same way that I feel like our
narratives of violence, or survival or not, are [precarious]. So, it's just kind of, again, thinking both
materially and metaphorically, it's all really kind of delicate stuff.
Yeah, I taught myself how to spin paper. It took a long time. And then I actually wove
Nia: How is spinning different from weaving? What does that mean, to spin paper?
Indira: Oh, sure. When you're spinningspinning is the way in which thread is created, that you can
then use to weave something.
Nia: So, does that mean you turn the paper into thread?
Indira: Mmm-hmm.
Nia: How is that possible?
Indira: By spinning. [laughter] So, I mean, everyone kind ofI mean, many people have seen a
spinning wheel before, even if it's just like in fairy tales or something.
Nia: Yeah.
Indira: I was using something called a drop spindle, or also called a distaff, for people who are into
like, goddess lore and woo, you can just kind of look it up on Google. It's something that's often

associated with deities that are associated with weaving, are often associated with language as well.
These two have been working in tandem for a long time. If this were a television program, I could do a
demo, but it's difficult to explain. [laughter]
But I'll just say that you hold yourwhatever material that you want to turn into thread in one hand,
and then you hold the distaff, which creates enough weight on that material to literally create a round
thread with which to weave with. I wove a shroud to actually go to each of the places that had been
detailed in the newsprint, to mark these sites where some folks had survived and many folks had not.
And so that wasyeah, that's the video performance that is Woven Account. So, again, using weaving
as a way to be able to create my own record, and to include myself and my own experience in that
record. And I've been blessed that other folks have shared their stories with me as well.