How Can We Flourish? A Conversation Between Raveena and Annahstasia
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The world is still in a state of simultaneous flux and stagnancy. Everything is changing while everything also stays still. As identity politics are fiercely debated and political races come to a close, it’s harder for everyone to know what is in store for the end of 2020. Pulling apart the problems that come with being empathetic and creative at this time enters best friend duo Raveena and Annahstasia.
In the lengthy Facetime conversation detailed below, the pair explore their own creative practices, the roots of their artistic expressions and the issues in their industries as women of colour. Raveena Aurora is a singer and songwriter beloved by Tyler the Creator, who explores themes of diaspora, trauma and spirituality in her work. Annahstasia Enuke is a multimedia artist, model and music maker who similarly takes on ideas of identity and feminism in her creations. As friends, as creatives and as women, this interview is an intimate look on how to not just survive, but flourish in the face of adversity.
RAVEENA
Hey Stas! So we know each other pretty well, so I can just go in kind of deep. But for people who don't know us that well, I think maybe we should give them a little intro: I just want to ask you where you're from, and what your main artistic mediums are.
ANNAHSTASIA
I am from Los Angeles, but I was born in the Midwest in Wisconsin. And my main artistic mediums are music and photography / body movements, performance art. Those are my three means and I'ma throw it back to you - Where are you from? And what are your main mediums?
RAVEENA
I’m an East Coast girl, I grew up between New York and Connecticut. And my main mediums are music and I think directing is also a big one, becoming a big one. I also like to express myself a lot visually, like through drawing a lot more, although I consider that more of a hobby. I would say those are my main ones: visuals and music and overall creative direction.
When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?
ANNAHSTASIA
Hmm, I knew really early. I was I think 9 or 10… both my parents are fashion designers, and my dad had just had a show at LA Fashion Week back before the financial crash and I remember sitting front row of that show and just being in awe of all that he had created and after having seen my parents pull four consecutive all nighters…the passion that they had put into it and to see it all come to fruition…It just, seemed so idyllic and amazing to me that at the end of the show, after my dad did his walk with my mom at the end, I came up to him and I was like, 'Dad, I want to be like you when I grow up, I want to be a designer'
My dad straight up was like, 'Hell no, you're never going to be a designer. You have to be a doctor or a lawyer or something stable, you don't want to be an artist. Being an artist is really hard.'
When I was five or six, I had made this painting of a poinsettia flower…and my dad bought it from me for $, and he told me that any art that I made that he thought was really good he would buy from me. But then its a bit fucked up because he didn't buy any other art from me ever again… For a long time, I was just chasing his approval.
RAVEENA
He probably couldn’t afford it, Stas. It was like the price was too high, you could've charged 50K. The art children make is crazy, it's so pure.
ANNAHSTASIA
It's very pure and it's still one of my best pieces. It's hanging up in the kitchen. At the time when he said that to me, it was just this moment where I had realized that he was never going to buy another piece of my art.
And then also, when he said, 'it's really hard to be an artist', I understood what he meant, because I was already processing the rejection, and the lack of validation that sometimes comes with being an artist at that age. You're gonna go through these patches, where you just don't get any sort of validation from anyone from any side, and you have to fully believe in yourself… but I was too young to believe in myself then.
So for a long time, I just dismissed it as something that I wanted to do. And I threw myself into trying to get really into my academics. I really love science and I thought it was a really creative medium- I love solving problems and using logic and finding out how things worked and how things were deconstructed and engineered and built and how our bodies work specifically. I just loved biology.
Still, the whole time I was in every single arts program that my school had: I was in photography, I was in dance, I was in painting, I was in sculpture, I was in theater, I was in musical theater, I was in jazz… any free time I had outside of doing my AP classes, I was doing art because that was my passion. I left high school to go to a university for bioengineering and when I got there, I had this huge reckoning, where I realized that I really did not have the passion to struggle through what it took to be a doctor or a scientist.
RAVEENA
That is it’s own struggle.
ANNAHSTASIA
It is it’s own struggle! You really have to have passion for it, and I realized that I didn't have passion for it, and I think at that point, I also realized that I wanted to be an artist and that I had to stand in that decision. No one was going to tell me 'go and do that for yourself' or 'you should do it, you should do it.'
Like, no one in my family was going to say that to me, because they were all artists, and they all had to make that decision for themselves. It was a hard decision too, because both my parents had to leave their families in order to pursue that dream. So, I think my parents kind of left me to make that same decision for myself.
RAVEENA
It's been really beautiful to watch everything you've been making, even the last few months that, you know, maybe as a friend, I'm seeing more of it. I'm excited for a lot of it to get out into the world.
ANNAHSTASIA
Thank you. I appreciate that. So then I want to ask you, what drew you to music as a medium over other mediums? And how young were you when you felt drawn to it?
RAVEENA
Music was always such a big part of my household. My family is just bathroom singers, and I think the times that I associated with a lot of joy in my house was when there was music playing or one of my family members was singing.
I was also very sick as a child. I had these years when I was like eight or nine, where I just had an illness that had me staying home a lot more, not able to see my friends as much. That's where I really got drawn to music because it's such a good activity to do in isolation.
I was realizing this week too, that 9/11 happened when I was eight and there was so much racial trauma that I was experiencing as well. So I think I really just started using music as a refuge. I discovered I could sing and I would just lock myself in the bathroom and just sing for like four or five hours a day because it was such an amazing escape from everything going on, the illness stuff as well as the 9/11 backlash against Sikh and Muslim and South Asian people that was happening at the time.
Writing songs was a healing tool for me and I knew from a very young age that had to do this.
ANNAHSTASIA
It's a blessing.
RAVEENA
Yeah, it's a blessing and a curse to be an artist.
ANNAHSTASIA
You're just really sensitive to a lot of the movements of the universe in a way that’s really painful and euphoric to navigate all the time.
RAVEENA
It’s a mix of euphoria, but also just depression.
ANNAHSTASIA
Yeah, I think that being an artist is…I personally don't believe it's something that you're born with, or that you're not born with. I think that all humans have the capacity to be artists, but a lot of people are either conditioned to shut off that level of empathy and awareness in themselves, or they feel it as kids and then they socialize and learn to shut it off as they age because it's practical and the status quo, and you know, the best way to survive.
RAVEENA
Absolutely, the artist in most of us gets just shut off and ignored. How do you manage your energy and time as an artist and as a multimedia artist?
ANNAHSTASIA
I'm always stressed. I’m always doing way too much. Well, that's actually not true. Most of the time, I’d say like, 80% of the time, I'm doing absolutely nothing, in preparation to do the absolute most.
Because the other 20% of the time, I'm a manic mess, running around, doing literally five different mediums, even just this month, this month has just been a culmination of the last months of a creative hibernation. In that time I was developing new skills, I re-introduced myself to a lot of photographic processes that I hadn't touched since I was in college and high school. But then I got commissioned to do a show and so then I was starting to make my paper paintings and sculptures again. Following that, I finally decided to make that folk album. And I also decided to direct a video for my friend.
Before I knew it, I had agreed to all these things within my hiatus because I had been just gestating and processing for so long.
RAVEENA
Which is so important too, the rest is part of the work.
ANNAHSTASIA
The rest is definitely part of the work. As I get older, I understand that more deeply. I think the the biggest threat of being a multimedia artist is that because you're capable of all of these different mediums and different ways of seeing, it can be really easy to say yes to everything, without realizing that you're literally one body and that creativity takes a lot of energy that doesn't replenish in the way that other energies are replenished. You know, you can't just like take a nap and then expect to turn out genius.
RAVEENA
The way I needed to hear this. Oh my god, I feel like I'm being called out right now.
ANNAHSTASIA
But we do need to call ourselves out about that. I think that the media around artistry and the language around artists is as if we just go into these spaces, and we can just continue to pull from this endless well of intuition and innovation, but that's not how it works.
We're literally, as artists, tapped into a wellspring, deep within our human experience. And just like a well, sometimes the well runs dry and that has nothing to do with you. It just has to do with the season - it has to do with how much groundwater there is, how much free energy there is flowing in space and as an artist to put upon us the responsibility of always having access to those answers and to those questions, that's a heavy thing to hold on our shoulders.
I think when you're balancing multiple mediums, you have to be very gentle and gracious with yourself and understand that the reason that you're able to balance so many mediums is because you're tapping into your child self and your child self is still a child, you know, they get tired, and they need naps, and they need breaks, and they just want to play. And sometimes they don't want to play and they want to sit and be quiet, or just talk and have nonsense speak.
You kind of have to treat yourself in your creative process as if you yourself are a toddler. Like your adult self is watching over a toddler and asking a toddler to do these things.
RAVEENA
I love that. I was having that conversation, actually with one of my close friends last time in New York, and he was asking me like, 'what do you want out of yourself as an artist in the next few years', and I was like, ‘I just want to protect my inner child spirit’, because you're so right, that's where all the art is really coming from: That state of freedom and like boundlessness and imagination that children have. And you can't you can't put pressure on that child.
ANNAHSTASIA
Children don't do well with pressure. They don't understand it. I don't think children understand time in the way that we grow to understand time. The idea of pressure is just so foreign. It's even foreign, outside of that analogy, it's really foreign to our bodies. We created our constructs of time.
So to answer your question, I think balance is something that I'm still juggling and navigating with. I definitely don't have a healthy formula for how I balance everything, but when I get really hectic and overwhelming instead of beating myself up about it I begin to just say no to things that aren't coming easily. And I mean, as flaky as that may make me sometimes you have to protect your energy and also you shouldn't be putting out mediocre work just because you felt forced to do it.
RAVEENA
Exactly, because it's all about building your career as a long term artist and to be someone that is not about quick rewards. I don't think iconic artists that last for a long time have ever moved in that way.
ANNAHSTASIA
No, they haven't. I mean, there are some iconic artists who obviously had very short lives, just lived in these crazy prolific ways, but part of the reason they had short lives is because they were pressured into this point of self-destruction that was outside of their control. So, there's a trade off.
Going from there, I wanted to talk to you about how you're kind of an iconically soft person and I think there's a huge pressure in the music industry and in the entertainment industry in general to become very hard, especially as a woman in this industry in order to survive.
You have to take on this persona of being a bitch or being bossy and not letting your soft side show or your underbelly show. But I think you as a person always show up ready to be soft and ready to let everybody else be soft. I wonder how you found the strength to navigate the music industry in your softness and protect it, while also protecting yourself.
RAVEENA
In part it has always been my nature, but I went through a kind of transformation a couple years ago, where I realized that this is something I actively want to protect and nurture, and that I kind of realized that if I have to change who I fundamentally am for music, or like, make any decisions where I feel like compromised, or less free, or less kind or less giving, I don't want to do this anymore, because what's the point?
I want to be like, a healer and a good friend and, like, just a good human being, before any of that shit. If I'm not around people who don't nurture that and accept that I'm not going to work with them. If there's an interviewer that makes me feel uncomfortable, or is like, coming for that kind of side, I'm going to stop the interview.It’s all about boundaries.
I would also say I had a lot of privilege in the past few years. I read this thing, like, 'may you become soft from love', and I think that because I worked with my ex partner on everything, like during my come up phase, you know, I was softer from love. Obviously, every relationship has its complications and whatever, but I was able to, especially in a producer setting, nurture and keep that side of me because I was in a relationship with the person I made music with. And now I'm learning how to still protect that softness with like, all these new male producers, which is such a challenge. I'm witnessing like, okay, that was actually kind of a privilege that I had working in that manner, so I'm challenged by it now.
It's all been a lot of boundaries and really believing in the power of manifesting people that reflect the same energy or accept that energy. I'm very lucky that that's all happened, that I’m surrounded by people who nurture that.
But it's so hard and we talk about this all the time. It's so hard with the producers.
ANNAHSTASIA
Yeah - The music industry is a fucking mess with the predatory nature of producer artists relationships, especially between men and women.
RAVEENA
I think what makes every woman, every female or non-binary artists hardest is having to work with these egotistical or shitty people sometimes, whether it's a visual space or the music space because they are always there. That's a part that has really fucked with me, personally, and I know you've experienced it, too.
It never stops, no matter what phase of your career you get into. As a woman of color, like, you're just always fucked,
ANNAHSTASIA
Someone always comes out the woodwork with the audacity, the sheer audacity to try it. And as you get older, you're able to clock it easier and faster, but folks will still try, and that's the thing.
It's just messed up that we both always have to be on high alert for the switch up. We hope it’s not inevitable, we hope that the people that we're meeting are good people, but I don't think either of us are ever really surprised when somebody that we are working closely with comes out of nowhere to be a misogynistic asshole.
RAVEENA
Never a surprise but always a disappointment. We're about to get so good at just producing, directing, doing everything ourselves so we don't have to rely on any of these fools.
ANNAHSTASIA
It's all about autonomy, because autonomy is so terrifying to men in the music industry. I think this industry is one of the last vestiges where they've been able to preserve this idea that women can't be autonomous creators in this space, and in that way men have been gatekeepers of the music industry for the entire history of it.
RAVEENA
Especially behind the scenes: They definitely view us as, like, the face and the body to be the vehicle for all their ideas and fantasies.
ANNAHSTASIA
When you fully are able to realize outside of that space, independent of that input, it's so threatening that oftentimes, they'll just do their best to stomp it down or scoff at it or find some way to divert the attention or put you on a pedestal just so they can break you down, which happens to so many female artists and queer artists.
RAVEENA
It’s the same story we've heard a million times. I don't know a person who hasn't experienced this, if they're on the side of oppression, l just don't.
ANNAHSTASIA
That's the thing that's so wild to me is that every femme, or non-binary artist that I've met has a story like this, or has like, a particularly harrowing experience in the industry with men. It's just the fact that the industry hasn't been me-too'd and also can't really be me-too'd, because it is so overwhelmingly masculine.
RAVEENA
It can't even be me-too'd, because it's just every day, it's the culture of the industry. The culture is inherently so sexist and exploitative of our sexualities and our trauma. I've been thinking so much about how much trauma we have to give as femme or non-binary artists and they love that. That's what they want to hear from us.
ANNAHSTASIA
Yeah, martyr joy. And you see that, like what happened with Megan and getting shot by Tory Lanez, and how when she got shot, all of a sudden people were like, 'Oh, you deserve to get shot because you sing about your pussy and enjoying sex.' Like what? Huh?
Like to say that, literally to say that a woman deserves to be hurt and potentially killed because she is talking about something she enjoys fully, and ways in which she enjoys it instead of talking about her trauma and talking about the ways in which she's put down, then she deserves to die? Do y'all hear what you're saying?
RAVEENA
It's crazy, and honestly we have to also distinguish that this does not happen at the same rates to white women. I don't want to deny that they don't experience any kind of misogyny, because they absolutely do. But specifically, I think black femmes, black women, have it the worst in the way that they're just completely disrespected.
My last question is: what are the things that are keeping your joy alive this year?
ANNAHSTASIA
(Takes deep breath)
RAVEENA
Not the deep sigh! Oh my God.
ANNAHSTASIA
(Laughs). I just needed to breathe. This year for me has been really about accepting the things that always bring me joy as enough. If that makes sense. I think at the start of 2020, I was very much in this mindset of like, ‘Okay, this is gonna be my year, I'm gonna do this, this and this, I'm going to travel, I'm going to make this amount of money, I'm going to see these people, I'm going to reach this level of notoriety or get to this milestone.’ I was always looking forward and above myself for these markers of joy and fulfillment even though I was... I wasn't truly content.
I've always found a lot of joy from the day to day meditation of my space. I think I'm just a lot more sensitive than I ever want to admit, in the sense that if I just sit in my bedroom, and stare out my window and watch the tree sway in the wind, and the birds flying around, and the way that the light hits, the way my crystal's reflections hit my plants, I’ll just start crying. I'm gonna be like, ‘Wow… I can't believe that I exist.’
It just all becomes very overwhelming. And even right now, I'm sitting in our friend's grandma's house and all the little knickknacks and talking to her and realizing how much she reminds me of my grandma who passed in 2004.
It's so beautiful and the fact that I'm even here is because you know, 2020 slowed everything down and kind of marooned everyone in LA and like, then I was able to get closer to you and get closer to all of our friends and, like, finally build a community of queer women that I had been begging the universe for, and I thought that I had to leave LA to get it and that I had to travel the world to find these people and I was ready to go outside of my comfort zone to find that... But the beauty of the fact that it came to me, and also that I was in a space to let it happen…
Just those thoughts bring me so much joy every day and practicing love and gratitude on the most basic level. For example: I’m so thankful that I have a body that works, and eyes that see, and ears that hear, and a mind that thinks in the way that can understand, and a mouth that speaks, and a voice that sings… all of those things are such tremendous blessings. Of course, we all have dark days but it's hard to stay in those dark places for too long when, especially in a pandemic, you realize how fragile life is, you know?
RAVEENA
No, I completely agree. I completely feel everything you said. I think that this life that is demanded of us as artists, especially musicians who travel, and always seeing people and always giving your energy to people, and performing all the time, it's not conducive to a lot of our natural states of joy, which is just, like, community, cooking with people you love, dancing with people you love, taking time to have gratitude, taking time for nature, which I feel like a lot of our friend group has been doing and it's so beautiful.
I just hope we can find ways to come back to this space and remember the space when things get super busy again, and we're all traveling again, because I love it too, like this year has actually been so joyful and so meditative. Depressing and apocalyptic, but also joyful.
ANNAHSTASIA
Right? It's so fucked up that we're all here. It's not like this was inevitable, there are things that we could do as a human race to prevent these things and to take care of each other, but because of these systems, these capitalist systems that exist, these fascist systems that exist, we don't.
It's this weird game that we have to play, where we have to sit and be grateful that we get to survive, but the fact that we have to sit and be grateful when we get to survive as if that's not our right is what radicalizes me. But I feel joy in my radicalization - I don't feel fear, necessarily.
Words and Images: Raveena and Annahstasia
