A Statement From SIREN
On Friday, Anu spoke out about the interactions SIREN had with her between 2016 and 2018.
To Anu, we are all deeply sorry for our behaviour and the pain that it caused you. You took the time and energy — and not for the first time — to make us aware of the serious harm our actions caused you. We recognise this was one of many attempts you made to let us know the meaning of our harmful actions towards you. You tried to educate us on the power that we had then as a majority white collective, and have now as an all white collective. We should have listened the first time you raised concerns, and acted upon them, and we did not. We recognise that the various ways we interacted with you were inadequate, arrogant and racist. We respect your decision not to want to open further dialogue with us.
Members of the collective treated you without respect, and other members were complicit in their silence. Collectively, we completely failed to communicate well amongst ourselves, and to hold each other accountable. We accept that any politicising statements we have made since were hypocritical and misappropriated, because we did not do enough work in practice. We had no business borrowing the language and optics of activism — not only as a now all-white collective, but also as individuals who hurt you without accountability. We failed to practice what we claimed to be best practice. There is no excuse for the way we treated you.
We realise we did not create a safe forum to discuss these issues with us. The fact that Anu was made to feel anxious and unable to attend events for fear that we would be there, means that we have done the opposite of providing a safer space on any dance floor. The language we often used to promote our projects and parties wasn’t inclusive, and made others in the community also feel unwelcome. We apologise not only to Anu but also to the whole music community for this, without any expectation of response or forgiveness.
Since the start of this year, we have been internally discussing the future of SIREN. By not publicly acknowledging these discussions sooner, we have continued to be complicit in gatekeeping in the music industry. We see now that the way we distributed opportunities from our platform allowed us to personally benefit from white privilege. We should not have self-appointed ourselves as allies on numerous occasions, and we accumulated cultural and social credit out of this place of harm.
As an acknowledgement of all of the harms described above, and the structural issues embedded in SIREN’s existence, we are ending SIREN. We acknowledge that a white collective causing harm as we have done, without being accountable, serves to dismantle nothing. We recognise that this is only the beginning of the work we must do.