black erotics; black surrealism; black technologies - what inspires me…
Black study, erotics, technologies and philosophies are pillars of my practice, and its conspirators are conversational companions I often reach out to for consolation, wisdom, building on theory within practice, yet also inspiration. My performance making practice emerges as a daily confrontation to the colonization of emotion and our capacity to feel we often struggle with, in which I recognize in Fred Moten’s articulation of, or, “an imagining of a kind of rematerialization of sentiment” as a way of thinking, where he finds to be essential in black literature. I find this articulation echoing in the erotic musings of feeling in my practice as resistance against what I call colonial ghostings - truths, knowledge, practices, culture, land and peoples that have been erased, decimated, concealed and that are now specters - I find in my histories and that of my people. I am interested in stories and histories that haunt as a way of releasing them from a colonial purgatory of disappearance. I seek to articulate this much more clearly in boundless and transgressive ways within an afrosurrealist aesthetic in my work.
A work that reflects this black erotics of feeling that I desire to echo in my own work is Arthur Jafa’s Aghadra, a CGI animated video piece I got the pleasure to see at Louisiana Museum in North Zealand in Denmark; a sea of hardened stone that moves majestically with grandeur and potency in a metaverse existence. Originating from a printed photo dated 1863 of an enslaved black man in the south of the United States named Gordon, whose back has been wiped brutally by their master, the wiped scared and bloody back of that man and its torso, arms and face have been made into a sculpture in stone. The scars of his back in the stone then transposed into a CGI animation became an amalgamation and multiplication of moving rock in forever breaking waves. Sometimes you could isolate the scars of this body in a particular wave within this everlasting moving sea. I was deeply moved by this sea of pain being transformed into something so sublime, so poetic, yet, still charged with centuries of historical violence, imprinted, embodied, in motion. My being cried inside as I was hypnotized by this sea, completely engulfed by its erotics. I left transformed by that sea.
sculpture “Aghdra”
CGI video still RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON OGR Torino
Lastly, one of my favorite thinkers and artists, Denise Ferreira da Silva has developed a theory of racial capitalism in what she called fractal thinking. What creates a fractal is an interruption informed by our volition to render ourselves fugitive of, and in constant refusal of coloniality/modernity, and our commitment to ‘going down’ or put differently, a commitment to the end of life (as we know it, namely, its violence). This informs my practice within what I call glitch retracing (also called glitch_choreographies) based on fractals/glitches of our histories on earth as black queer colonized (hijacked) bodies within a long duree type of event; that is decomposed, atemporal, out of space, and in dialogue with the lives of our ancestors and their ghostings in the past, present and future. Glitch retracing asks us to move backwards, to retrace memory, failure, and map sensation zones, desire, the erotic, and to invite (dis)possession. By the latter, I mean an invitation to step into unknown, multidimensional, astral travel, and possessive states embodied by concealed ghosts.
This practice-protocol is also informed by Legacy Russell’s writings on Glitch Feminism Manifesto in which the author takes the power of glitch as a black queering disruptive force, in a “collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad” of discursive identity elements such as race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, etc... The glitch disturbs, and recognizes the disturbance inherent in the absurd existence of the intersection of categories of marginality.
REFERENCES
FERREIRA DA SILVA, Denise (2017) ”1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) =
∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value”, published in Journal #79” in e-flux journal no. 79
MCGOUGH, Amanda and MOTEN, Fred (2015), In Conversation with Fred Moten, Haunt Journal of Art, retrieved from
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9638m2nx
RUSSELL, Legacy, (2020) Glitch Feminism, Verso Books
This text was produced in part for an application for the black study series at the art academy Stockholm in 2024
